In 1865 an economist called Stanley Jevons put forward what seemed to him an obvious and quite simple assertion and critique of the wonders of steam engines and the emerging industrial revolution. Jevons argued that as costs of production fall, profits rise, prices fall and sales increase. Therefore he suggested that energy inputs in total (not per unit of production) will rise. This can be applied to an individual (direct) or an economy as a whole (indirect). It can also be used to critique the idea that ‘green consumerism’ is going to solve climate change. So for example if you buy a Prius, you will spend less on fuel, you will have more spare money in your pocket and will book another holiday abroad thus emitting as much or maybe more carbon. This became known as the Jevons Paradox.

More recently the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate has said that in fact much of our green ‘efficiency’ policy is ineffective or even counter-productive. The problem is that economists, politicians and policy-makers are mostly rebound-blind, assuming it out of their calculations (its too inconvenient). There is an assumption made by these economists and politicians that as consumers reach ‘saturation’ of energy use etc they will stop spending the spare cash in their pockets. How likely is that? And with billions around the world very poor and only 1 billion having the luxury to feel the onset of ‘affluenza’, how soon should we expect this spending to stop? In time to avert climate chaos?

Clearly efficiency is good. Its great for cutting production costs, for higher profits, for wealth and economic growth, for getting the most utility out of a given amount of energy and for heightening political acceptance for caps and high taxes. But as rebound approaches 100%, it becomes less environmentally effective, and rationing or taxes are better policy. Evidence of the lack of ‘decoupling’ of absolute carbon emissions and energy use from economic growth is now mounting. It is becoming more and more impossible for economists and policy-makers to ignore the reality. And more and more clear that politicaly leadership on taxes and absolute caps can be the only solution.

Now a study by the Cambridge Centre for Climate Mitigation Research has shown that the climate change policy recommended by many Governments could lead to between 30% and 52% rebound. That means over 50% of any efficiency will simply be offset by more usage elsewhere. So the much-vaunted Green New Deal economy-stimulus packages will be far less effective at reducing emissions than suggested by some. They rely greatly on energy-efficiency but take no account of the likely effect of rebound in their carbon reduction calculations. And if the rebound effect in developed countries is upwards of 50% then in developing countries it will be far higher, where relatively small improvements in disposable income can lead to big changes in consumption.

And its not just economists and politicians who need to tune in to reboundology. How about Tesco ‘turn lights into flights’ campaign offering free airmiles when you purchase energy-efficient lightbulbs! What this reinforces for me is that fact that technofix alone cannot get anywhere near solving things like climate change. We need audacious leadership from politicians on strong tax and rationing to create absolute reductions. And we need to tap into the wealth of abundant energy within ourselves and seek new ways to find flourishing and psycho-spiritual kicks. In short we need to shift from being and thinking of ourselves as consumers to citizens.

Ben Okri has said pointed to this need for a change in ourselves not our technology by saying that our “only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years”. And Vaclav Havel has echoed this saying “It is my deep conviction that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It’s not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behaviour and a new set of values for the planet”.

Transition towards a Civic Republic

Jeff Immelt, addressing the Global Leadership Summit at the London Business School last week, spoke passionately about those companies who sit at “the front seat of history”. An hour later, Stephen Hester, in between fielding the obvious questions surrounding his alleged £9.6 million bonus scheme, said a stark choice now lay between “a recidivist borrowing binge and an unstable world”.

World instability has become something of an under-statement. Amid the splendour of the Regents Park marquee, there was much talk about the role of business and its relationship with government; about the shift from West to East (“the West has lost its moral authority” to quote BIS Minister, Lord Davies); about encroaching regulation; and, inevitably, about the role of the markets as a possible catalyst for change. Citizens were of course misappropriated as consumers and the shadow of Sir Terry Leahy, often quoted but not there, stalked the room. “Consumers”, one business leader opined, “will force the tipping point in the minds of politics and business” – as though only market forces can lead us into some sort of promised land. Good business leaders must “embrace this uncertainty”, concluded Immelt. Yet no-one offered anything approaching a comprehensive, workable solution.

Britain, for sure, is trapped in a seemingly circular paralysis. Endless chatter among the great and the good of both Business and Politics is leading us nowhere. Cute soundbites are used as poor substitutes for active leadership. At the LBS Summit, the business glitterati effectively admitted that their heads were best kept below the parapet (“what advantage is there in doing otherwise?” asked one). Politicians meanwhile continue to shore up their base and jockey for electoral position a year hence, in apparent denial of the urgency of the situation. Neither man is brave to act on Principled Conscience.

In a country where, by best estimates, unemployment might still rise by a further 30% and ‘Others’ constitute the second largest political force, growing discontent and popular disenfranchisement could easily lead to civil unrest on a scale unseen in Britain for the best part of a hundred years – the Miners’ Strike and Poll Tax Riots mere precursors of what is yet to come, as warming intensifies, food security weakens, energy poverty escalates, debt grows and infrastructures crumble. At a time when trust in the great institutions of the modern state have reached an historic low, there is in fact no clear leadership of which a nation should be proud. No courage – moral or otherwise. The absence of both is in danger of creating a vacuum to be filled instead by prejudice and poison.

Viewed from the East, as Professor Kishore Mahbubani, Dean and Professor at the National University of Singapore argued, Western business leaders offer little more than “incestuous, self-referential and self-congratulatory dialogue”, ignorant of shifting trade corridors and the fact that 88% of the world’s business population does not live in the west anyway. The imbalanced fact that 25,000 cotton farmers in the US can de-rail an initiative that could help 6.8 billion people improve their quality of life is a powerful metaphor for global societal paralysis and contradiction – as well as a shout-out to immediately address the issues of Doha and the weakened failings of our supra-national institutions. This is not the world of wellbeing we want or need.

Change needs to start somewhere, however, and change can start at home. The issue has become one of catalysts and consequences – who and what can unlock this state of vested interests and paralysed authority? Who blinks first?

Perhaps now, perversely, is the time for the monarchy to step forward and lead Britain once again. Now is the time for the crown to do what we are always promised it could and should do – take urgent, rectitudinal action for the benefit of the people in times of constitutional crisis. Make no mistake, this should be the monarchy’s final, graceful act – overseeing the transition from a nation of subjects to a society of citizens – rooted in a properly open, democratic and participative system that bravely faces and shapes the future and admits to, and reconciles, the failings of its past. Charles has always been looking for a genuine cause – and the cause of the citizen knows no equal. He should talk to his mum.

The cause of the UK citizen invokes certain immediate demands: Britain needs a written constitution. Britain needs electoral reform. Britain needs an elected Upper Chamber that safeguards society’s interests and not those of a ruling party, let alone elite. Britain needs a new framework of responsibility. Britain needs a secular society and not an established Church, one that recognises and positively embraces multi-culturalism and inclusion, while allowing healthy moral debate but stripping religious morality of political power. Britain needs a programme of radical reform that can help wellbeing flourish but not at the expense of environmental responsibility. Britain needs courage and leadership.

The monarch still has the power to summon Prime Ministers and to dissolve Parliaments; to force unlikely coalitions and to demand legislation in her name. The benign authority of an 80+ year-old monarch (and her apparently reforming son) could thus be put to dramatic effect, working with the last Privy Council to create an environment and a roadmap for rapid national renewal – the final act of which will be to reform and re-shape the monarchy itself: to render herself and the institution of monarchy unemployed and to enshrine, within a proper constitutional framework, the true planetary and environmental responsibilities of Britain’s new civic republic.

Across the centuries, many great Empires – including, latterly, those of business – have fallen by failing to read the signs and to understand the rising temperature and angry sentiment. The popular thirst for national and global renewal exists in Britain today. The time has now come for urgent and radical action. And, bizarrely perhaps, the hitherto beleaguered monarchy could step centre stage in this final, properly altruistic act – as the ministers of the Crown and of her loyal Majesty’s opposition have failed to do. We could of course wait for business to step forward to lead, but one suspects that their heads will remain shielded by the parapets for some time yet.

This is the ultimate irony, for sure – whereby the absolute symbol of anachronistic authority is called upon to unlock and empower the citizen society of the twenty-first century state. But someone needs to sit at the front seat of history. Someone needs to address the uncertainty and instability of which we are all acutely conscious and ultimately fearful. Someone needs to blink first and to catalyse change. We should all believe that this will come from the reforming power of the citizen. But if someone can bring about the transition to citizen power faster and with fewer negative consequences, then we should consider that option, too.

Make no mistake: a constitutional crisis beckons and a constitutional correction is inevitable, either way. We have been brought up with decades of belief and doctrine that a constitutional monarchy exists primarily to resolve a constitutional crisis. Maybe that time of crisis is now. A clear transition plan would work well for us all.

Last night I saw the most wonderful production of Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart at the ever-reliable Theatre Royal Bath. The play depicts a world in which business runs the show, the country lurches from crisis to crisis and the politicians are a dilatory, squabbling rabble unable to organise their way out of a paper bag. Sounds familiar?

What is striking though is that this play is not written about 2009 but was penned by the socialist firebrand in 1929 – in the early stages of our last major Depression. Shaw illustrates the crisis and breakdown in Trust in his times through razor sharp wit and observation. We witness the failure of democracy and trust (see this earlier post on Trust), the apathy of the voter-citizen, the distortion of information by the press and even MPs expenses claims!

When I was first writing Citizen Renaissance I came across this brilliant quote from The Apple Cart “What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car.” As it happens I never used the quote but I now wish I had. It sums up so well the deal-with-the-devil that our current feckless leaders have made over motoring and aviation, thus as ever championing the consumer rather than the citizen side in us all.

In the preface to the play Shaw says “Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present.” This reminds me of the importance of the innovative Wellbeing teaching currently being led by Anthony Seldon at Wellington school.

Before the play last night the Director Sir Peter Hall commented that it is such a shame that most theatres now don’t ask what he would like to put on but simply ‘who can you get’. Sir Peter thanked the Theatre Royal for being one of the few remaining quality theatres more interested in art than celebrity. It seems that consumerisation has eaten into our arts as well as so many other facets of life. Hopefully the play will go to play in London as its a must-see.

American historian Jaques Barzun said of Shaw that he “remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.” This reminds us all that the future is in our hands. Its time we the citizens took the lead – our politicians are clearly unable to.

Shaw is of course as quotable as his fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde so I will leave you with a few more apposite quotes. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

Why is it we are so fixated on short-term, transitory satisfaction – be it in consumption or politics – at the expense of longer-term security and flourishing? Are we not as clever as we like to think? Why do we worry so much about how much our politicians are fiddling their expenses and yet not get worked up about the impending climate chaos and peaking of oil and food? Are we just not very well informed or indeed misinformed by the media?

Yes its certainly the case that the media are not very good at making clear the relative importance of global issues. But it seems there are other more fundamental reasons why we do not act as rationally as our current economic assumptions would like to think we do.

Evidence from the work of Drew Westen and Paul Slovic and others shows just how irrational the human brain is and how we are really bad at judging risks. It seems that this is the cause of our evolution. Our brains are still hard-wired for pretty basic fight-or-flight responses to stimuli. So we are great at looking out for risks or opportunities, sabre-tooth tigers or gazelles. But we just don’t have the hardware for responding to dangers which require forethought.

This can be tested by wiring up the brain to monitors and introducing stimuli. Introduce a snake and our brains light up big time. Introduce the risk of climate change and the light go out. So maybe its not so surprising that we are spending so much time on worrying about MPs expenses and whether our car is as big as our neighbours and so little focusing on impending climate chaos. ‘Visceral’ works – our brains will ,light up and get to work. ‘Cerebral’ doesn’t have anything like the same effect. Climate change is complex and full of trade-offs which we are hard-pressed to make our way through – its too cerebral.

We need to make climate change visceral. And less complex. That’s why I like the ‘bathtub effect’ language. But (to answer the comment from Toby in that last post) I agree that its not just about language. The right language will help. But making things less cerebral and more visceral is crucial to tap into our primitive brains and illicit responses to match the scale of the challenges we face.

Harvard psychologist Professor Daniel Gilbert tells us to think about four key features to make threats trigger attention and action in our primitive brains. Make threats personal, make them clearly immoral, make them clearly imminent and fourth if possible show the instantaneous rather than gradual nature of these threats. I would suggest that most of those features can apply to climate change without too much thought and effort. Even the ‘instantaneous rather than gradual’ aspect of CC is easier to communicate. Look for instance at the almost daily news of faster and faster build up to climate chaos.

We need to learn the lessons of this new understanding of neuro-science and psychology. Its already being applied to behavioural economics, political science and cognitive behaviour change in many areas. We need to get with the program and apply it to the challenge of the citizen renaissance and use it to build responses to threats like climate change.

I heard philosopher A C Grayling quoted this weekend as saying that our current breakdown in trust in politics and capitalism 1.0 is “as if there is no longer any interchange between Bank and Monument.”

What he means by this London Underground analogy is that the link between society/the citizen and that of ‘the system’, or corporate-consumer-capitalism, has broken down. Of course this is just what we are saying in Citizen Renaissance (see for instance this on Trust) but its fascinating how many people are saying the same thing in slightly different ways.

Another interesting piece by Grayling in the New Scientist in February discussed the need to learn from commercial marketing and to find a new language for framing and communicating climate change. Grayling discusses MIT risk-perception specialist John Sterman and his idea of communicating not about ‘climate change’ but ‘the bathtub effect’. Like the Greenhouse Effect, it has a ring to it. And the way it uses the analogy of a bath with the taps running twice as fast as the bath can drain to describe the way we are overpowering the planets atmospheric balance is I think clever.

We badly need a new way to get through to people just how serious climate change is. As George Lakoff and Drew Westen illustrate so well, facts bounce off bullet-proof ‘frames’ no matter how many you fire off. Most people put ‘green’ and ‘environmentalist’ into a part of their brain which says ‘thats not me’ and so those who communicate about such issues will continue to be perceived as a fringe, special-interest obsessed out-group.

So I am going to think about using and promoting the ‘bathtub effect’ as well as other frames such as security, stability, safety, quality-of-life etc in the hope that we can engage and empower the citizens. Only then will politicians have the guts to do their job and reframe markets and norms to ensure we transition rapidly to a sustainable way of living.

One could not help but be underwhelmed by Ed Milliband’s lacklustre performance last night on Newsnight where he gave a very poor explanation as to why the UK should be so much more proud of its climate change performance than the US. John Podesta – Obama’s joint head of Transition – made the valid point that the US are coming from a standing start and a very low level of engagement after ten years of Bush.

The UK has no such excuse. We have had almost as many years of Blair’s rhetoric and – Climate Act aside – are not looking so rosy ourselves. Joss Garman of Greenpeace gave a Texan Republican Congressman a good talking to on Newsnight about morals – I don’t think the Congressman gave a hoot. He was proud to say he drove Prius not for green reason but because it made him feel superior. Unfortunately there are a few of his type lurking in the bowels of Westminster as well.

This week the US’s top climate scientist, James Hansen of NASA, has been arrested for CC direct action along with actress Daryl Hannah, and 94 year-old former West Virginia Congressman Ken Hechler. As he was arrested Hansen told onlookers “I am not a politician; I am a scientist and a citizen.” Hansen’s arrest came in spite of the fact that Obama had promised to act on CC through a lens of science not politics. And this week in the UK one of our top climate scientists, Professor Kevin Anderson, has told Parliament that the UK Government’s CC policies are “dangerously optimistic” and would have a “50-50 chance” of keeping us below the magic 2 degrees celcius beyond which CC is most certain to plunge us into unstoppable runaway climate-chaos.

Anderson and many others are calling for an end to political posturing AND a fessing-up to the reality of the science which tells us that we need to enter Copenhagen’s negotiations with far more ambitious targets in place. Only then can we hope to get rapidly developing countries like China to talk seriously about their own cuts. With the US targets so battered by corporate lobbying and Congress still dragging its feet so badly it will take all the rest of the developed world to show real leadership if Copenhagen is to work.

Anderson says “No one I talk to thinks there is going to be anything significant to come out of Copenhagen.” This will embarrass Ed Milliband as he prepares to launch his Road to Copenhagen paper this week. He’ll also be embarrassed that Anderson has said Milliband’s Department is like “a yapping dog” at the heels of Lord Mandelson’s Department.

Ed, just a quick reminder, there is no road to Copenhagen, you’ll need to go by boat… but I am sure you and all your minions will fly…

I was listening to Professor Lord Anthony Giddens talk about his new book The Politics Of Climate Change today and one thing in particular struck a cord. Giddens pooh-poohed Fukuyama’s concepts of The End of History pointing out that if anything, climate change and the new politics it requires of the mankind-project calls for an urgent and radical continued evolution of history and society.

We urgently need new futures and for history and culture to move ahead to more fertile philosophies and values. Only through such a radical updating of our currently badly failing operating systems can we hope to halt or slow the onset of unstoppable runaway climate change. Only through transitioning out of boom-bust, autistic, growth-obsessed economics, out of left-right swinging sclerotic politics and out of the myths of CSR and our valueless hyper-consumer affluenza can we hope to survive, let alone flourish.

So it’s more like The end of the End of History. Time to stand up and be counted. And who will lead the way into this new history-in-the-making? Politics seems all but dead and valueless. Business often-times looks like a rabbit in the headlights, asked now not only to make short-term shareholder returns but also make the world a better place, but finding it hard to do either. Our best hope lies in ourselves the citizens.

The poet and novelist Ben Okri summed it up so very well recently, when he said that ‘The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years’.

And how might we do that? Personally, I’m with Vaclav Havel who believes ‘that the only option is a change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience. It’s not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth. Only by making such a fundamental shift will we be able to create new models of behaviour and a new set of values for the planet.’

Exciting times we live in. We are history in the making…