Crunch or climate?

Will the environment suffer thanks to the global Credit Crunch? That's the question on every Green's lips at the moment:

• The chair of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Yvo de Boer, expressed his fear that the financial crisis might undermine international action on climate change;
  
• Italy and Poland have attempted to wriggle out of their 2020 emissions targets using the credit crunch as an excuse;
  
• Professor Ross Garnaut, author of Australia's recent Garnaut Review of climate change economics, warned recently that it "would be a really serious mistake if we saw the financial crisis as a reason for going slow'' in tackling global warming.

History doesn't appear to bode well for Greens. At times like these, when the going gets tough, society usually ditches its concern for the environment.

Take 1992, for example. The world had just thrown its biggest-ever green get-together at Rio de Janeiro, inaugurating both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN climate process. The media had spent the last three years lavishing ever more column inches on exciting new ideas like 'the greenhouse effect' and 'the ozone layer'. What Jonathan Porritt had predicted in 1988 - 'the coming of the greens' - seemed to be coming to pass.

And then... along came Black Wednesday. The UK, forced to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, lost an estimated £3.4bn. Public attention shifted away from environmental concerns and refocused on cold, hard cash. Even the left-liberal Guardian cut down on its environment coverage after 1992, as the graph below shows (click on it for a larger image):

Or look back to the 1970s. The early years of the decade - when the economy remained strong and Keynesianism reigned supreme - saw huge public and political attention devoted to environmenal issues. Earth Day 1970 drew millions of students from across the US to demonstrate about pollution and species loss. The first Greenpeace protests against nuclear tests in the Pacific generated headlines around the world. But all this was eclipsed by the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, the 1973-4 stock market crash, and the resultant onset of 'stagflation' and rising unemployment levels. Environmental activism of course persisted; but it sank beneath the public radar, and no longer preoccupied politicians like it once had.

So is the climate movement headed the same way now - destined to be buried under what some predict will be the worst recession for a generation? Will history repeat itself yet again?

My answer is a cautious 'no', for several reasons. One, because history rarely repeats itself. It can contain some striking parallels; it can show that people are forever people and, as such, follow general patterns of behaviour. But history should also show us that the context in which social movements operate changes all the time. Our society's concern for the environment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s was, compared to now, relatively fragile. We lacked most of the environmental regulations that are now in place, and the levels of public awareness were generally at a lower level overall than they are today. There's now an 'institutional momentum' around many environmental issues, and around climate change most of all. In other words, it will be pretty difficult to derail the political processes already set in motion.

Let's be clear: there will be casualties. The squeeze on people's wallets from higher fuel and food prices has already cut short the meteoric ascent of Organic produce, with UK sales peaking at £2bn last year, only to flatline and start falling in 2008. A similar thing may happen to other premium green products. But the flip side of people economising is conservation: sales of fuel-efficient cars are up, whilst 4x4s are languishing, and the manufacturers of gas-guzzlers - like General Motors in the US - are in dire financial straits. (Toyota, maker of the Prius, is meanwhile doing very well.)



And conservation may have a larger economy-wide impact on our carbon emissions, with some industry analysts predicting that EU emissions will fall by 100m tonnes in 2009 compared to 2007. This obviously isn't much of a long term solution - it's about as helpful as China's ploy to clear the air during the Olympics by shutting down factories around Beijing - but considering that the breakneck economic growth of the past eight years has seen emissions climb higher than even the IPCC predicted in its worse scenarios, a slight slowdown could buy us some more years. As a precedent for this, after the 1970s oil shocks, Western nations were kicked into improving the efficiency of their industries and transport systems to the extent that GDP growth started to decouple from energy use.

However, it's not this economising that makes me optimistic despite the Credit Crunch. Rather, it's the many signs that this time, at last, concern for the environment is high enough to weather a financial storm. Finally, the three planks of the triple bottom line (economy, society and environment) are starting to share an equal footing.

Where's my evidence? I call to witness the facts:

• Despite the attempted mutiny of Poland and Italy last week, European leaders did reaffirm their commitment to their 2020 emissions targets;
  
• In the same week, the Minister of the new UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, said in his inaugural address to the Commons: "Mr Speaker, in tough economic times, some people will ask whether we should retreat from our climate change objectives. In our view, it would be quite wrong to row back, and those who say we should misunderstand the relationship between the economic and environmental tasks we face." At the same time, he announced that he would introduce a new feed-in tariff, a radical piece of policy that will give British renewable microgeneration the support that it needs;


• In the US Presidential debates, both Obama and McCain have continued to refer to the need to deal with the energy crisis as well as the financial crisis (with Obama's energy plan looking particularly hopeful: plenty of new investment in renewables and a commitment to firm emissions targets).

Some observers (like John Vidal in the Guardian) have drawn attention to the amounts being spent on the bail-out of the banks, and questioned why this level of spending hasn't already been lavished on decarbonising our economies. It's a fair point. But it's worth remembering also that the $700bn US bail-out package contained $17bn in tax rebates for the renewables industry and Carbon Capture & Storage technologies. And whilst the recent calls from the British Left for a windfall tax on the utility companies (to scrape a little off their profits from record fuel prices and invest it in social and environmental causes) have not yet been taken up by the government, the proposal remains on the agenda.

Perhaps the most promising development of all has been the way the environmental movement has responded to the Credit Crunch. Rather than simply keep on repeating, in leaden tones, how important climate change is, there have been real moves to weld such messages to policies that will rebuild the economy. In July 2008, a coalition of groups calling themselves the Green New Deal came together to call for a package of new policies, modelled on Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, to address the 'triple crunch' of financial crisis, climate change, and skyrocketing energy prices. The group, including Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation, Larry Elliott, economics editor of the Guardian, and Jeremy Leggett of SolarCentury, proposes, amongst other things:

• Green investment and green jobs - the training of a 'carbon army' of workers for a vast environmental reconstruction programme (echoing Roosevelt's public works programme, which included a Civilian Conservation Corps);


• Making 'every building a power station', through support for microgeneration (such as a feed-in tariff);


• A windfall tax on the profits of the utilities companies;


• Much tighter regulation of finance, including demergers of banks, more stringent rules around lending, and the breaking apart of retail banking from merchant banking and securities dealing.

In the US, Thomas Friedman - NY Times columnist and author of Hot, Flat and Crowded - has been making similar calls for regenerating the US economy through massive green investment.

The folks over at sustainability recruitment agency Bright Green Talent have got the right idea when they say: "As the financial crisis clearly demonstrates, it doesn't pay to panic. Instead, we need to commit, daily, to greening the world in which we live as we grow our companies and economies; some even see this as the solution for getting us out of this mess."

The green blogosphere has also been writing about the credit crisis - such as this blog by social entrepenuer Jamie Andrews - showing a willingness to propose solutions to economic problems that greens have, in the past, tended to view as outside their remit.

Most promisingly of all, the UN has become a champion for 'green jobs', with a major recent report from UNEP and the ILO forecasting that millions of new 'green collar' posts could be created with the rise of the renewables and energy efficiency industries.

The UN report picks up on the idea of 'Just Transition' that's been doing the rounds in the US coal-mining and rustbelt states, and now has found its way into the UK anti-coal debate. The concept in a nutshell says that the decarbonisation of our economies must be done with sensitivity for the jobs it makes defunct - such as fossil fuel recovery - and offer reskilling and replacement jobs. It's been good to see greens get to grips with these knotty problems at the most recent Climate Camp at Kingsnorth in Kent - a community whose inhabitants will not take kindly to their power station being closed, if it means no more jobs.

How does all this debate shape up against past green performances in the face of economic downturns? Immeasurably better, in my opinion. In previous recessions, environmentalists have done little to make themselves relevant to the economic pains being felt by most people. As a result, they have frequently been sidelined until times get better. To take one example, in 1973 - the year of the OPEC oil crisis - a brilliant economist, EF Schumacher, published the classic green text, Small is Beautiful. His notion of 'Buddhist Economics' has inspired generations of greens and remains an elegant, alluring idea. But to the man on the street in the crisis-hit mid-Seventies, Schumacher's book must have seemed not merely obscure, but irrelevant. It contains few practical suggestions for how to build a green economy, and offers little succour to those most affected by the failings of markets. In hard times, we need plans, not philosophy.

Bill Clinton's pearl of wisdom about what voters really care about in elections - 'It's the economy, stupid' - looks set to hold true in the US in 2008, with support for Barack Obama surging after the deepening of the credit crisis in September. Climate change has not received anything like the attention that Wall Street has on the campaign trail. But despite this, both politicians and public, I believe, now realise the underlying significance of saving the climate, as well as the economy. This time round, it's also the ecology, stupid.