I’m writing this on Eurostar as it races over the flat and featureless plains of northern France (scenery made for speed, if ever there was), en route to Brussels. It’s costing me around £70 more to go overland than it would by air. So am I a typically smug eco-angel, selflessly forking out the extra dosh to keep my green halo intact?

Am I hell.

I’m travelling like this for two reasons: i) it’s simpler, calmer and a lot more comfortable; and ii) I get more work done.

At first glance, that last statement looks odd. Surely the plane would get there faster, so I’d have more time to work?

Not as such. Factor in the hours it takes to get to the airport, add in the endless crawl through security, the wait for the luggage at the other end, followed by the long journey into town. Then consider the fact that the flight is so short there’s hardly time to open the laptop before you’re briskly reminded that “all electronic devices must be switched off during take off and landing”. (Which is probably just as well, considering the near certainty that at some point your neighbour’s elbow will propel his cheap red wine and complimentary nuts all over your meticulously-compiled but unsaved spreadsheet…).

Add it all up, and you have several hours of tedium laced with occasional stress.

By comparison, trains are a mobile oasis of peace and productivity, especially if you opt for the quiet carriage, leave your dongle in your bag – and resist the urge to text hourly proof of your continued existence to colleagues and friends.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

‘They’ being the likes of Tesco, BAA and E.ON, all members of the 18-strong Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (CLG). Their call for government action to achieve “deep and rapid” carbon cuts was promptly denounced by Greenpeace as “hypocrisy of a previously unknown magnitude”.

How dare companies intent on expanding airports and coal power have the gall to say such things, thundered the activists. In the words of a Greenpeace spokesman: “it makes an environmentalist’s jaw drop.”

Dispensing moral outrage on cue is part of Greenpeace’s job description, of course, but in this case it might just be a knee jerk too far. Because all the CLG is doing, in effect, is echoing campaigners’ demands for tough government action.

Even some of the vocabulary is the same, with dire warnings against putting your faith in “incremental change”.

So what are these companies supposed to do? Pretend their activities have no impact? Put out a tide of greenwash? Defy their fiduciary duty by cutting out every shred of unsustainable business and then piously go bust? Get real…

In some ways they look less like hypocrites, more like a queue of turkeys at a polling station, eagerly waiting to cast their ballot in favour of an early Christmas. At the very least, they’re showing a touching faith in their ability to reinvent their businesses as completely climate-friendly – should the government actually wake up and respond to their call. (A cynic could be forgiven for thinking that the chances of it doing this are so slight that the chief exec of BAA could march up and down Whitehall with a banner saying “Flying: It’s Plane Stupid!”, for all the harm it would do him…)

But the truly striking aspect of the CLG statement is that, to all intents and purpose, they’re finally admitting what the likes of Greenpeace have said for years: that voluntary action will never be enough, and that business needs the firm hand of government to force it to do the right thing.

In effect, these companies are asking the politicians to save them from themselves.

It’s not the first time any business has issued such a call, but it’s still pretty jaw-dropping stuff. Just not for the reasons that Greenpeace says it is…

There aren’t many subjects on which I prefer Harry S Truman’s words to those of Oscar Wilde. But the former US president’s prosaic definitions – “a pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities, while an optimist makes opportunities of his difficulties” seem more helpful in these crunch times than the poet’s cry, “the basis of optimism is pure terror”.

Much of this issue of Green Futures focuses on that gloomiest of topics, economic recession. But you’ll note a recurring strain of optimism (Truman style) in the analysis of what a worsening crisis might open up for the sustainability agenda. Martin Wright has canvassed the views and expectations of a wide range of ‘thinkers and doers’ for our cover feature ‘Into the red, out with the green’. None of them could be accused of ‘blind optimism’ – their attitudes are based on evidence, backed by well reasoned argument. All of them consider the balance of threats and opportunities, while looking for a path forward rather than a place to hide.

This positive spirit does not lead everyone to the same conclusions. Indeed, optimism is one of the few common ingredients in such radically divergent perspectives as Lester Brown’s conviction that a great leap forward for cleantech means coal is dead in America, and Yorkshire Forward’s aim of boosting regional revival by investing big-time in carbon capture and storage. You couldn’t accuse Green Futures of closing its mind to debate.

Nor is this magazine all about recession. Far from it. In fact, it’s full of people and the many and varied things that matter to them – from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the founder of Passion for the Planet and that enigmatically named train travel guru, the Man in Seat 61. There are serious pieces on tough policy issues too, in our regular Whitehall Watch, and Rebecca Willis’s critique of shadow carbon pricing. Not to mention a full dose of solutions-focused news in the Briefings section – and much else besides.

If all this prompts you to action, or reflection, or just helps boost your level of creative optimism, then Green Futures will be worth the (carefully chosen) paper it’s printed on. Don’t forget that there will be more news, views and features on our regularly updated website to keep you going over the summer until you next see us back in print again. And remember, too, that we value your feedback and your contributions to the debate – by letter, email, or (easiest of all?) by adding your comments to what you read online.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Roger East
roger@greenfutures.org.uk

Are we in danger of a ‘perfect storm’ – where tough economic times combine with a surge in populist denial of global warming, and so throw the hard-won consensus on the need to tackle climate change into doubt?

That was the first thought that struck me on seeing how gleefully some of the press picked up, exaggerated and wildly misinterpreted a study by scientists on shifts in ocean circulation. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, in Kiel, suggested these could lead to lower temperatures, offsetting the effects of global warming for a few years.

The Telegraph’s headline, “Global warming may stop, scientists predict”, epitomised the laziness of a media desperate for any ammunition which might dent the solidity of the evidence on climate change.

I should point out, in fairness to its environment editor Charles Clover, that the article which followed concluded with a decent, balanced account of a complex issue – but how many of the paper’s readers would bother to get that far once their prejudices had been confirmed? Precious few, to judge by the surge in posts to the paper’s ‘Have Your Say’ slot, citing the new study as yet more evidence of “the biggest con-trick ever played on the human race”, as one particularly splenetic correspondent put it.

Small wonder, perhaps, that polls already show growing scepticism on climate change. In Britain at least, that’s been fuelled by last year’s atrocious summer, and an uncertain start to this one. As the latest study emphasises, climate change is a long-term threat. Its impacts will almost certainly dwarf the worst that any conceviableconceivable recession can throw at us - but while most of those impacts most of them remain on the distant horizon, they can seem small and inconsequential by comparison.

Which makes it all the harder for politicians to justify anything approaching ‘green’ taxes. And therefore all the more vital that anyone wanting to engage the wider public in the fight against climate change should stress the many ‘win-wins’ on offer, through strategies such as improving energy efficiency, generating local energy and enjoying local food. Strategies which make life sweeter and safer in the here and now, in other words.

It might be tempting to keep banging on about the looming apocalypse, but it’s likely to be self-defeating – like crying wolf when all seems quiet.. If the vast majority of climate scientists are right – and there’s no reason to doubt them – then global warming will soon be back on the front pages, whether we like it or not.

Martin Wright 

If you wanted a persuasive advert for 'Slow Travel', you could do worse than compile a clip of outraged interviewees in the queues at Terminal Five.

My personal favourite was the woman en route to Glasgow, who’d been waiting for 24 hours for her flight. In that time, she could have made the journey by train at least five times – and without having to haul herself to and from the cities’ outskirts in the process.
 
Fortuitously, news of the T5 chaos broke on the morning of a debate I was chairing at the RSA. The topic: whether, in this carbon-constrained world, Slow Travel was morally the only way to go.

It’s certainly impressive how quickly the phrase has caught on. If you said ‘Slow Travel’ to someone a year or so ago, they’d have assumed you were describing a particularly gruesome crawl into Paddington.

Now the Sunday supplements, which were full of frenetic features on how to get the most out of 48 hours in Cairo or Cuba, are falling over themselves to extol the joys of the Slow Train to Provence.

Like its Slow Food cousin, Slow Travel comes imbued with a sense of quality, of luxury even. It’s an alluring concept, neatly equating a more sustainable life with a more leisured, pleasurable one.

None of which has escaped the attention of the upmarket tour companies, who’ve fast cottoned on to the fact that they can charge a lot more for a slow week in France than a fast fortnight in Bali.

It’s partly down to demographics, of course. Slow often goes with cultural, restful, retreat-ish holidays – very much the preference of the more ‘mature’ traveller, whose wallet can expand to fit.

Small wonder, perhaps, that everyone’s tripping over themselves in a race to go slow.

And not before time. There are no hydrogen-powered, zero-carbon planes taxi-ing down the crowded runways, nor are there likely to be in the foreseeable future. Sooner or later, we may simply not have the luxury of choice. It’ll be go slow, or don’t go at all.

For a society accustomed to dirt-cheap getaways, that will mean quite a shift in culture.
That’s why Forum for the Future has launched its Overland Heaven project – exploring ways of making low-carbon travel both more effective and more desirable.

But even if it were possible to have carbon-free speed, is it speed itself that’s the essence of the problem?

Maybe in rediscovering the ‘essential slowness’ of travel, we can also have a chance to reacquaint ourselves with the lost virtues of contemplation and reflection. A chance to appreciate the subtle differences in geography, of culture, which can come into focus through the windows of a train, say, rather than passing in a blur between depature lounge and carousel.

Is this really about taking the slow route to the soul?

Or is it actually a bit of a middle-class fad? Another excuse to look down our noses at the hoi-polloi, jetting off on their Ryanair stag breaks to Reykjavík, while we enlightened few feel all smug and insulated on that Slow Train to Provence…

The answer, I suspect, is all of the above. It won’t be the first time that an element of aspiration, if not downright snobbery, has helped drive behaviour change in a more sustainable direction: it happened with organic food, it happened with fair trade, and it could well happen with green energy, too.

If Slow really is, as someone memorably described it, the new Merc, that can only add to its appeal. That, and a few days’ cringe-making chaos at Terminal Five.

Meanwhile, a couple of impromptu audience surveys at the RSA suggested that it’s going to be a long journey to real slowness.

First, I asked all those who’d be prepared to give up all long-haul holiday flights to show their hands. A scattering of palms were raised – maybe 1 in 10, at most. And that, remember, was flying for pleasure alone – not work. Second, how many people would find it easier to give up their car than give up flying. The room was a sea of raised hands…

A podcast of the RSA debate, featuring Martin Wright, Ed Gillespie and John Adams, will shortly be available at www.rsa.org.uk/audio

The scooter lay on its side in the dust when I got there, its front wheel still spinning. The mother was scrambling to her feet, shouting at her son as he careered down the roadside chasing after the chicken. The father struggled to set the machine upright, while his little girl sat on the ground, bawling her eyes out, but apparently unscathed.

You can’t travel for long on India’s crowded roads without stumbling – in my case, almost literally – on a crash of some sort.

This Lucknow family just lost a chicken. Around 90,000 Indians lose their lives on the roads every year – and only 5% of them are in cars.

Hence the appeal of the Tata Nano. At around £1,200, it promises relatively safe motoring for tens of millions of Indian families, not to mention their chickens.

It also brings the prospect of a surge in vehicle pollution, catapulting India into the premier league of carbon emitters.

So are environmentalists howling with outrage? If you scan a few Indian bulletin boards, you’d think that was the case. Since Tata announced the Nano, they’ve been bursting with comments lambasting ‘cosseted Westerners’ for daring to suggest this was anything other than excellent news for India’s poor. How can the rich world presume to deny Indians the right to travel safely? How dare they heap praise on Toyota’s Prius (average mpg 46) while denigrating the Nano (average mpg 54)? And so on, and so on...

In actual fact, few Western environmentalists have dared to put their heads over the parapet on this one. Most of the meaningful criticism has come from Indian activists such as Sunita Narain and Malini Mehra.

But all this does serve to flag up one classic dilemma of sustainable development: namely, what happens when an initiative aimed at meeting people’s aspirations and improving their quality of life runs slap bang into environmental limits? When the social and economic pillars of sustainability, in other words, come crashing down onto the environmental one?

Because there’s no doubting the fact that the Nano’s doing exactly that. Once you start to factor in the climate cost, there’s no such thing as a cheap car. Some of the very same people who’ll benefit from Tata’s new baby will also lose out, potentially devastatingly, as climate change wreaks havoc on India’s agriculture.

The Nano’s apparent affordability looks all the more illusory when you factor in the subsidies which keep petrol so cheap at the pump. According to the Asian Development Bank, Indian fuel subsidies account for a hefty US$17.5 billion a year – and rising, as the government, wary of political fallout, battles to avoid passing on to the electorate the recent surge in crude oil prices. (If you factored in a carbon cost as well, the Nano would begin to look distinctly dear.)

So does safer, smoother travel for middle-income Indian families have to come at the price of the planet?

Not necessarily. First, the Nano might actually speed the arrival of a global carbon market. If it helps pump millions more tonnes of carbon into India’s air (and make no mistake, where Tata leads, others will surely follow), it will make it increasingly hard for the Indian government to maintain that it’s a mere victim of climate change, rather than an increasingly powerful driver of it.

India as a whole – even including its Nano drivers – would for a time at least profit from worldwide carbon trading, as per capita emissions are way below those of the West. So if its government could just grasp this particular nettle, it might find the process less painful than it feared.

Second, with a bit of imagination, the arrival of the Nano could actually spur India to develop a more sustainable transport policy. There’s nothing like sitting gridlocked for hours in the Delhi sprawl to convince even the most sceptical minister that there has to be an alternative.

If a swarm of Nanos slows the pace of the capital’s traffic from sluggish to stationary, then our jam-packed minister may decide it really is time for some brave moves– like congestion charges or subsidy reductions, with the revenue hypothecated for improved bus and metro links, maybe.

And it doesn’t have to stop there. If anywhere is crying out for the sort of ‘car clubs’ springing up in European cities [see our recent article ‘Zip through London’], it’s India. So what about a state-sponsored Tata Car Club – run on specially adapted electrically powered, zero-emission Nanos?

Good PR for India, good PR for Tata, and a small step towards squaring the circle of sustainable development.

Returning from swimming this sunny Sunday morning with breakfast on my mind, I pedal along the path towards the new cycle bridge (for this is Cambridge). Turning down to pass Tesco, I am stopped in my tracks by the sight of a long line of bike racks, bustling with newly arriving lock-wielding users of every age, shape and size (for this is opening time).

An upsurge of communal feeling makes me join them. What’s not to like, one might well feel (if one keeps one’s back to the massive sprawl of asphalt carpark), in this orderly bike-and-family-friendly planned urban scene? And through the doors we go, welcomed by appetising smells from the strategically sited in-store bakery.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Pre-wrapped enticements to obesity gang up to sabotage the last vestige of New Year’s healthy eating aspirations. Neighbouring aisles flaunt the cut-price output of every electronic, textile and cookware manufacturing sweatshop in China. It takes iron resolve and single-minded focus – not easy qualities to muster on a sunny Sunday morning – to make it through to the ten-items-or-less till with its uncorrected grammar (though this is Cambridge). But I manage to leave the store with nothing I neither need nor want, and even a relatively modest score on the food miles front (apart from some half-price Chilean cherries, a favourite fruit which our farmers' market just never seems to stock at this time of year).

My sleeping partner seems curiously unmoved by my tales of heroic self-restraint in the temple of Mammon. She has passed on this morning’s swim, having only returned a few hours ago from her day-late women-only Burns-night revelling (for this is indeed Cambridge). But the cherries go down just fine.

It’s always a bit dangerous, opening those sumptuous clothes catalogues from the likes of Toast and Howies. Buying into the wholesome organic life of beachcombing and dog walking shown in the pictures isn’t cheap. So far, the few treasures I own bearing those coveted labels are either hand-me-downs or they were going cheap in the sales.

So when I got an email telling me about a £125 pair of organic Cornish woollen socks from James Purdey & Sons, I very nearly sent it straight to the trash can. Scrolling down, I couldn’t even afford the hand warmers at £115.

Yes, very eco-chic, very cottage industry, I thought, as I read the story behind the socks: they started life on National Trust and Duchy Original farms in Cornwall, were knitted within the county itself, the farmers were “paid properly for their fleece”, and the rustic hues of ecru, charcoal and green came from vegetable dyes… If only we could all afford to support this pastoral idyll.

What stood out, though, was a quirky little detail in the label - the date the sheep was sheared. The company is calling it the “first fully traceable organic wool”. Certainly makes a change from your average clothes label, which usually has something to hide. ‘Made in Turkey’, it says, tight-lipped. ‘And we’re not telling you how.’ What a luxury to be able to pull on a pair of socks without blanking out those sweatshop images, and to picture the warm May day they came into existence.

While the shearing date might not be an essential piece of information (unlike a use-by-date, for example), I like the way it connects a shopper to the world behind the product. We’re starting to see it on food packets – the name and picture, even, of the farmer who grew your Waitrose carrots, of the family who picked your Fruit Passion orange juice. Unlike the slightly gnomic carbon labels on packets of Walkers crisps, this isn’t just a number (that’s probably more helpful to the company doing the audit than it is to the customer) but a story.

You might think it’s verging on the ridiculous. Next thing we’ll be told is that our milk came from Daisy, a Friesian born on 25th October. But if that’s the way to appeal to us middle class ethical consumers, who like earning Brownie points through shopping, why not?

I’m not sure I’ll ever be needing a pair of ‘shooting socks and garters’ for £190, but perhaps one day all my woollens will come with a ‘sheared on’ label.

When ‘The Sun says…’ do it, we environmentalists always get excited.

Back in 2002, the newspaper wrote what was probably climate change’s most grabbing headline: ‘Where have all the tits gone?’ This week it’s engineering the biggest ever giveaway of energy saving lightbulbs – the largest single order in the history of this much-misunderstood eco-product.

Tomorrow morning, several million Sun readers will come back from the newsagents with not only their staple reading under their arm, but a twin-pack of low-energy bulbs. “No vouchers, no fuss,” the man on the end of the customer helpline told me.

The 4.5 million they’re distributing certainly promise much quicker results on the big lightbulb switch than the government’s gradual, voluntary phase out of incandescents by 2011.

Of course giveaways don't guarantee a complete turnaround in people’s habits – readers who enjoy a good freebie might not actually buy an energy-saving bulb next time round. To take an analogy, Brits can get their hands on no end of free condoms, yet that hasn’t stamped out teenage pregnancies.

But you’ve got to hand it to whoever came up with this idea – some bright spark at Southern Electric, who is providing the goods, I imagine – for actually getting these gadgets under people’s noses and showing the sceptics that they can light a room properly. The Sun itself ran a scare story on the health risks of these bulbs just two weeks ago, so boy, nothing less is needed to bring the masses round.

I know that getting them into people’s shopping baskets is only half the battle, and you might ask if anyone will bother to fit them. I mean, do we know how many Sun readers it takes to change a lightbulb?

Luckily, the organisers have got a pretty good idea, and have slipped in a bit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-style magic to the story: just ten special bulbs will glow green when switched on, meaning you’ve won a holiday or a Toyota Prius.

I can already picture them stacked up behind the counters at WHSmith and Tesco ready for the morning (the shop assistants must be dead pleased about that). Let’s only hope the bulbs go down as well as those chocolate bars did.

At last we know the score, officially, on nuclear power policy. Or do we?

We do know that the climate has changed in the last five years, so the government is now openly supportive of nuclear new-build. Supportive, that is, without actually offering overt financial support.

That said, the juicy prospect of a government-guaranteed and steadily rising carbon price should simplify the sums for prospective investors (in renewables as well as nukes).

It’s unclear, though, how far the taxpayer will be the unpaid insurer of last resort if anything goes wrong. History does tell us, after all, that something might. So goodness knows what can justify the government’s apparent confidence that there’ll be neither accidents nor bankruptcies. Or its extraordinary insouciance about something that is actually inevitable. Namely, that a batch of new nuclear power stations will mean, eventually, more radioactive waste for long-term ‘disposal’.

The official line on this boils down to: (i) we’ve already got a waste problem so the government will be building a bunker anyway (guesstimated cost £20 billion); (ii) the industry will pay to lease space in it, so it’s not a hidden subsidy; (iii) the new ‘third generation’ reactors will actually produce much less radioactive waste than the old ones; and (iv) if need be, the industry can just pay for an extension to the bunker.

Sorry, but which bunker is this, precisely? This is tantamount to sharing out slices of pie in the sky (or its indigestible equivalent). It was only last week that Defra announced the results of a consultation favouring geological disposal, which in practice means entombing high-level nuclear waste several hundred metres underground, having first encased it in glass and put it in thick metal canisters. At the moment, this stuff is just piling up in ‘intermediate storage’ at Sellafield. We’re promised a White Paper later this year – but so far we haven’t even formally begun the process of choosing a final burial site.

It’s the kind of decision politicians don’t exactly relish. Even the French – who, you’ll have noticed, are getting great press at present as the shining lights of the nuclear power world – are still havering between granite or clay as the geology of choice, and they reckon it’ll be 20 years from deciding, to accepting the first consignment for storage.

The Finns are a bit further down the track – they’ve actually picked a site. But the leaders in the field are the Americans. So let’s learn from the leaders. It’s a salutary lesson.

Deep inside a geological formation in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, there’s a repository already holding intermediate-level nuclear waste from the military programme. The federal government’s plan – refined over decades of studies – is to open a further facility there, for long-term storage of high-level waste from nuclear power plants. Right now there’s a fair old political battle on about getting a license for this from the US nuclear regulator. Congress is far more hostile than in 2002, when it approved the project in broad terms. Nevada senator Harry Reid, a firm opponent, is now Senate majority leader, and neither of the leading Democratic presidential candidates is prepared to give their backing.

In an earlier age of innocence (or complicity?), however, the US government had actually promised to have somewhere ready to take spent nuclear fuel by 1998. Yes, 1998. Since then, the US taxpayer has been racking up a hefty liability to the nuclear power plant operators, whose payments into a special fund entitle them to storage space.

Wait – it gets worse. The “best possible construction schedule” at Yucca Mountain envisages a repository opening in 2017 – if all the permissions go through smoothly and there are no “litigation-related delays”. Some hope. But, almost unbelievably, the government is locked in to delivering this ‘best possible’ schedule, or paying out truly huge penalties. Here’s Ward Sproat, testifying to Congress as director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management: “For each year beyond 2017 that the repository’s opening is delayed, the Department (of Energy) estimates that US taxpayers’ potential liability to contract holders who have paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund will increase by approximately $500 million… in addition to the estimated current potential liability of approximately $7.0 billion due to the Department’s not beginning removal of spent nuclear fuel in 1998."

HM Treasury would never get caught out like that, now would it?