Monthly Archives: January 2015

Energy Plan

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Energy and climate change will be one of the main themes of this blog. I considered starting with a piece arguing the reality of climate change but this seems to be increasingly accepted, with nearly nine out of ten Britons saying that climate change is real. Instead I’m going to begin with my first thoughts on a 1,000ish-word energy plan. Overwhelmed, I’m sure.

In general, I think media analysis of the various methods for meeting our energy requirements within a low-carbon framework is very good. There is a regular flow of articles discussing the regulatory, environmental and scientific/engineering merits or otherwise of options such as wind power, solar energy, nuclear and fracking. What I miss, and I’m quite prepared to concede that this is my fault, is the regular summary of how the various options might fit in an overall energy plan for the UK.

My intention is to write a series of posts that each consider one energy option, and I want to be able to detail the realistic contribution of that option within an overall energy plan. A concise outline that shows our energy requirements, our consumption.  The basis for my plan is the excellent book Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air by David MacKay, Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and former Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.  As I discuss the relative merits of each energy option, I’ll update and reference this rolling energy plan. I’m keen to keep the document concise, so discussion of both energy consumption and supply will be necessarily simplified. My only hope is that the numbers, and the plan, are roughly right. Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

Current energy consumption in the UK

According to Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air, current energy consumption in the UK is around 125kWh per person per day. That’s total daily energy consumption divided by our population. We can split that number into three categories: transport, heating and electrical devices.

Transport: 40kWh per person per day. The three main elements of transport are cars, planes and freight. 40kWh is about one third of the 125kWh total. This is a reminder that the ‘use the car less and walk or ride more’ is an important message in the effort to lower our energy consumption and ease the pressure on climate change. Rethinking our transport habits has orders of magnitude more impact than worrying about mobile phone chargers or TVs on standby. There are significant potential savings here through the electrification of our transport system, with companies such as Tesla leading the way.

Heating: 40kWh per person per day. Another third of our 125kWh total. Improved home building regulations plus encouragement to insulate our existing homes together with smarter temperature control all offer hope of lowering this figure.

Electrical devices plus electrical conversion losses: 45kWh per person per day. The final third. Much of our existing power generation does not make electricity directly and the losses in the required conversion amount to over half this figure (around 27kWh per person per day). This would largely disappear if we used power sources that generated electricity directly, such as most renewable options.

So there we are, three simplified categories of consumption, each amounting to about a third of our 125kWh per person per day total. Before discussing how we service this requirement in a low carbon way, can we get this number down?

Future energy consumption in the UK, 2050

A key strategy in creating a low carbon economy is improving energy efficiency and simply using less through educational campaigns. Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air is optimistic that we can achieve a significant reduction in the 125kWh per person per day figure by 2050. It sees our transport requirement halving to 20kWh, our heating by 25% to 30kWh and the electrical device number, wholly through the avoidance of conversion losses, reducing from 45kWh to 18kWh. A total of 68kWh per person per day rather than the current 125. Quite a saving.

If you trace through the arguments for each of these reductions, they seem sound. They don’t ignore the extra demands arising from economic growth over the period. My own optimism is somewhat tempered, however, by a note in Mark Lynas’ book Nuclear 2.0, which reminds us that despite significant improvements in energy efficiency during the 20th Century, our energy consumption didn’t fall. We simply used more. I will set out what I think is both achievable and likely in my next blog within the energy and climate change theme.

Low carbon energy supply plan for 2050

With the 2050 energy consumption forecast established, my intention, as mentioned, is to write a series of posts on each of my preferred energy supply options. Within each post I will estimate a realistic contribution from that particular source, and update the energy plan. The plan assumes Britain should be entirely self-sufficient, so the contribution from the various domestic sources discussed has to match the total forecast consumption for 2050. I’m not completely set against some importing of our energy needs but, given the example of Saudi Arabia and oil, I want this to be at the margin. I want to avoid Britain being beholden to anyone for energy.

I will start with the greenest, renewable sources and attempt to maximise contribution from these. To keep things simple, I won’t discuss contributions from what I think are essentially fringe options. I’m not against the development of a broad portfolio of renewable sources but unless they can contribute significantly, I don’t plan to discuss them here. I start from the position of seeking to incorporate all renewable sources that can really do some heavy lifting.

Once I’ve published posts on both the potential efficiency savings and the greenest methods of meeting the 2050 energy forecast, I intend to always include a hyperlink to this concise energy plan within blog posts that discuss existing or new methods of meeting our energy requirements whilst averting climate change. All advocacy, or rejection, of efficiency improvements or energy supply options has to fit the plan.

The A&E crisis

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The recent apogee of the Accident and Emergency crisis saw up to 15 hospitals declare a significant or major incident. Before the crisis this winter there were a record number of patients attending A&E over the summer, with many failing the ‘95% within 4 hours’ treatment target. Amid the rightful outrage and consternation over this outcome, did government and the media miss an opportunity to push back just a little bit on those of us who aren’t frail, elderly or disabled yet who use the service when not truly in a state of accident and emergency? Put bluntly, are too many of us using A&E as an appointments-free GP surgery?

This article from the 5th December issue of the HSJ (Health Services Journal) ‘Solve the A&E puzzle for smarter patient care’ carries an important survey of A&E patients between April 2012 and March 2013. 80,000 people were interviewed on the reasons for their visit. The results are revealing. ‘A&E is viewed as a quick, efficient and reliable way of receiving treatment.’ And, unlike a GP surgery, you don’t need to book. Further, there is a seemingly widespread belief that A&E staff are more qualified than GPs.

Importantly, the majority of people said they attended A&E to gain reassurance. Reassurance that their ailment is not something serious. As a gold card-carrying member of Hypochondriacs Anonymous I can empathise with this view. But within the existing NHS framework, even if it is sometimes difficult to get a GP appointment or if there are a significant number of inappropriate A&E referrals from NHS 111, there was an opportunity to resolve the crisis at the margin and in the short-term through a clear message from the media and from leading politicians along the lines of: please think hard before resorting to A&E for minor, non-urgent conditions. There is also scope for pharmacists to help with minor ailments. Only 22% of those surveyed thought their condition was an emergency.

Hopelessly naive? Would A&E queues dissolve overnight? No. But at the margin, appealing to all of us on a crisis displacing the elderly, frail and disabled could work. Spirit of ’45. And as the survey points out, it’s not just patients that are using the service inappropriately, doctors’ receptionists (and NHS 111) are seemingly too often deciding that patients need to go to A&E rather than get a GP appointment. A clear message would reach them too.

In an age of outrage, the failure of our Accident and Emergency service on this scale is a subject worthy of our anger. But with any service that is free at the point of demand, we also need to ask to what degree any failure is down to the service or its funding and to what degree it’s down to how we are using it. Though the media did a reasonable job of explaining that it was pressure in other parts of the health and social care service that helped create the crisis, the overall tone was: vent on the NHS. That doesn’t give anyone outside of the NHS pause for thought, the idea that their actions count too. Admittedly, it would be a brave politician who took a line that might be construed as ‘oh, it’s OUR fault is it?’, but I suspect that, providing it was supported with evidence that the service was being misused, many of us would accept that the quickest way to solve the crisis would be for us all to think hard about how we use that service. That brave politician might get some respect.

I attended Andy Burnham’s speech at the King’s Fund on Tuesday. Despite growing up in a family where I’m the only one who doesn’t work in the NHS, I’m still in the foothills of knowledge of the health service. Nonetheless, my short take on Labour’s plan is that I can see that the integration of health and social care would ultimately improve the quality of service, but it’s not obvious to me how it would result in significant cost savings. This overview from the Guardian seems right. With that speech and Liz Kendall’s talk at the Fabian New Year Conference, be in no doubt that the Labour team have an excellent command of the detail. It’s obvious that they have put in a huge amount of time on the ground and voters should be reassured that Labour would manage the quality of care well. There’s just a bit more work to do to convince on the finances.

Book review: Half the Sky

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‘The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labour and talent but – even worse – to undermine the achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such ways that half of them think themselves superior by biology without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment. In general the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women.’

Gender equality and women’s rights will be one of the main themes of this blog and the quote, from David Landes in his The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and reprinted in Half the Sky, helps to explain why. There’s an evident fairness argument for gender equality but there’s also a less obvious and, for men, more self-interested angle: men benefit too. If Half the Sky is right, women hold the key to the growth and development potential for society as a whole. They also determine something further down our hierarchy of needs: security, stability and the absence of war, because there’s a clear correlation with war and conflict and societies with a disproportionately high number of young men or where women are repressed. Trumping all of this is the catalogue of human rights abuses against women detailed in the book.

Half the Sky is a wonderful book from the minds of husband and wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Nicholas Kristof is a well-known American op-ed columnist and author, dubbed the ‘Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists’ for his remarkably wide travels and ability to uncover human rights abuses and social injustices around the world. Sheryl WuDunn is an American business executive, writer and lecturer. She was the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer and has worked as both a business editor and foreign correspondent at the New York Times.

A key part of why the book is so compelling in highlighting the plight of women around the world is that it mixes data and statistics with real-life stories of extraordinary women. The early chapters deal with the prevalence of forced prostitution and the enslavement of around three million women and girls as sex workers. We tend to forget that modern slavery is very much alive and the numbers are shocking. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are currently 12.3 million people in forced labour of all kinds.

It is difficult to escape the view that it is the societal attitude to women that allows forced prostitution and enslavement to flourish. More specifically, there appears to be a correlation with sexual conservatism, with India, Pakistan and Iran having disproportionately high numbers of forced prostitutes. Young men sleep with prostitutes rather than their girlfriends in order to preserve the latter’s ‘virtue’ for marriage. Brothel-keepers seem to get away with extraordinarily brutal tactics such as removing prostitute’s babies to both stop them lactating or running away. Given that local police officers are regular customers, there is little hope of support from the authorities. It is hardly surprising that girls soon give up and accept their fate. A life of forced prostitution is unpleasant enough, but the prevalence of AIDs means it is often a death sentence.

Having explored the scope of human rights abuses through individual stories, the book is also good at offering hope by discussing initiatives and aid programmes, again using individual case stories, often of women. In the case of forced prostitution and enslavement, it describes two broad solutions – government crackdowns or legalize-and-regulate. It uses the examples of Sweden and the Netherlands to compare and contrast the effectiveness of the methods but the authors also draw on their own significant observations and discussions, saying that they have moved from a legalize-and-regulate view towards enforcement of law. Though the book is realistic about the prospects of completely eradicating forced prostitution, the line ‘when a social problem is difficult to solve entirely, it is still worth mitigating’ seems wise.

The middle chapters deal with the harrowing subjects of ‘rule by rape’ and honour killings. As discussed, sexual conservatism and the corresponding enormous shame of failing these strict rules seems a common factor. The horror of rape for an individual becomes a punishment for an entire family, with suicides not uncommon. There are thought to be approximately 5,000 honour killings per year, all within Muslim communities. What is perhaps surprising is that women seem to acquire the society’s misogynistic values and exalted codes. Mothers-in-law can be just as deadly as men. As the book points out, laws are important but the key is to try to overturn values and thinking.

Half the Sky reminds us that childbirth is far from routine in the developing world. The idea of the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is explored, and shows how our single digit number of deaths per 100,000 births compares with 900 in sub-Saharan Africa and an extraordinary 2,100 in Sierra Leone. And these are ‘per childbirth’ statistics, risks that multiply in areas with restricted family planning. There appears to be a strong correlation between a society’s marginalisation of women and a high MMR.

This empathy gap has been addressed in quite an interesting way by the Huichol tribe in Mexico. Women in labour can hold on to a string tied to their husband’s testicles. Each contraction gets a tug. I would guess that universal adoption of this method might focus minds. That aside, the example of Sri Lanka in dealing with maternal mortality is inspiring. Since the 1930s, Sri Lanka has reduced its MMR from 550 deaths /100,000 births to 58, despite ranking 117th in the world for GDP. As the book quotes ‘Looking at maternal mortality is a great way to look at a health system as a whole, because it requires you to do lots of things. You need family planning, hospitals, etc.’ Britain (and Norway) has a good record on aid here, incidentally.

Given the risks of childbirth in these areas, family planning is particularly important. Contraception in the form of condoms also has a big impact on HIV/AIDS. Religion seems to play an important part of policy in this area and therefore sympathetic religious leadership and guidance is vital. To give an idea of the challenge, however, the Catholic Church in El Salvador persuaded lawmakers that condoms should carry a warning that they didn’t protect against AIDS.

Chapter 9 asks the direct question ‘Is Islam Misogynistic’. ‘Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honour killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominantly Muslim.’ In a 2008 WEF ranking of countries according to the status of women, 8 of the bottom 10 were majority Muslim. The book reminds us that the early history of Islam was quite progressive for women’s rights, ahead of other major religions. It suggests, however that Islam hasn’t moved on much in this regard from this early period in the way that other religions have.

Given the activities of the Islamic State – which arose after the publication of the book – the passage ‘A society that has more men than women, particularly young men, is often associated with crime or violence’ seems apposite, given that this imbalance can also occur through the marginalisation of women. ‘The status of women more than other factors that predominate in Western thinking about religious systems and politics links Islam and the democracy deficit.’ The book also uses the example of pre-war America – which had an excess of males – as an example of a violent society.

To return to the opening quote, David Landes, an eminent Harvard historian, has suggested that openness to ideas, best measured by how a country treats its women, was the key reason that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe rather than Asia or the Middle East.

Investing in education. The book is clear that educating girls is one of the best ways of reducing poverty and it is also key in allowing women and girls to be assertive in demanding equality. Higher education is also correlated with better family planning. It concedes, however, that it’s a difficult area to prove statistically.

Though the most obvious route for improving education is to build more schools and train more teachers, less direct (and cheaper) measures also help such as de-worming (a big increase in attentiveness) , feminine hygiene and iodizing salt to counter iodine deficiency have a significant impact. It is estimated that iodine deficiencies reduce humanity’s IQ by around one billion points.

Key to female emancipation is access to credit and control of finances and here the revolution in microcredit in the developing world is helping a significant number of women escape poverty. Access to finance has historically been difficult in conservative areas like Pakistan but husbands seem to accept profitable initiatives. True in all parts of the world, when women control finance, child health and nutrition improve. Inheritance law also needs to be reformed – women own just 1% of the world’s land.

Beyond finance, when women gained the vote in the US, child mortality declined by 8-15%, a staggering reduction of 20,000 deaths per year at the time. The political system had quickly adapted to women’s priorities with improved healthcare.

China’s economic success is cited as an example of the benefits of empowering women and the book also cautions against the media being too harsh on sweatshops. The fact is that many east Asian women regard sweatshops as a step up from the fields and they have allowed women to participate in the workplace, earn money and have some degree of control over finances.

An interesting, if extremely sad, example of the benefits of female equality is Rwanda. Following the 1994 genocide the population mix became 70% women. Not only out of necessity – men were widely reviled for their role in the genocide – women took roles in both the workplace and in parliament. The first country with a majority of female legislators – 55% in the lower house – Rwanda is now one of the least corrupt, fastest-growing and best governed countries in Africa.

The penultimate chapter is arguably the most disturbing one, on female genital mutilation. Worldwide, 130 million women have suffered this procedure, with an ongoing 3 million per year in Africa alone. Since news broke about the scale of it in the UK, I have tried to fathom how any belief system could have got to this. The book is clear, the aim is to minimise sexual pleasure to reduce the likelihood of promiscuity. For me, it is a tangible measure of misogyny. We will know attitudes towards women have changed when this sort of activity stops.

The final chapter is a call to arms, ‘What you can do’. The book concludes with multiple examples of how groups and societies with more women function better. In encouraging all of us to get involved it references an interesting thought on happiness. Studies of happiness suggest that if you’re hit by a truck and end up a paraplegic or, alternatively, win the lottery, your happiness after about a year remains pretty much unchanged. You adapt to your new circumstances. The only way to move the dial is to ‘connect with something larger’ – a greater cause or humanitarian purpose, normally fulfilled by a religious belief system. We seem to be wired for altruism.

Migration: a campaigning issue

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Ed Miliband fielded a question from hell at last Saturday’s Fabian New Year Conference. ‘Could it be true that London regional has instructed activists not to talk about the economy because it’s not one of our strong points?’ asked a delegate. Ed didn’t blink, but his body language betrayed the fact that the latest regeneration of Malcolm Tucker would shortly be dispatched to monster some overzealous strategist at the Brewer’s Green HQ.

True or not, the micromanagement of election campaigning fits with an increasing perception that all of our political parties are obsessed with PR, polls and focus groups. Tail wags dog doesn’t do it justice. Weirdly disembodied tail is more like it. If you want to understand the issue of mass disengagement with politics this ‘weather vane not signpost’ charge is perhaps not a bad place to start.

Whistling past the economy is one thing, but it’s important that the main parties don’t rein in activists on the subject of immigration just because it doesn’t poll well. Politics can’t leave it to the Pub Landlord to call time on Ukip.

First, some numbers. According to David Charter’s book Europe: In or Out, an average of 170,000 long-term migrants from the new EU member states came to the UK each year between 2004 and 2011. Expectations, based on independent research, were for between 5,000 and 13,000 per year. So that’s 20 or so years’ worth of forecast migration occurring every year. For a number of years. All of the arguments about the benefits of migration are at least challenged in the short term with that volume of people arriving. It’s not racist to be concerned about this.

There are, however, examples of the successful integration of this level of migration, notably Israel’s accommodation of over 700,000 Russian émigrés during the 1990s. Unemployment for native Israelis fell over this time.

As Philippe Legrain points out in his excellent book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, in an increasingly service-oriented economy it’s not unreasonable to think of the pool of relatively low-skilled, low cost EU labour as of much of a boon to rich economies as the lower cost goods that a free trade area provides. This augments the benefits of diversity arguments – look at the success of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Premiership football teams, for example – and answers the ‘what have immigrants ever done for us?’ question.

To see what happens to the service economy when you avoid migration or restrict it to high-skill workers, go out for a meal in Japan and look at the bill. Japan has long closed its borders to immigration yet is hardly a poster child for a successful economy, in recent decades at least.

To illustrate some of the benefits of immigration let’s look at a real life example: employment at an Amazon fulfilment centre. I hesitate to use Amazon because it gets a lot of hackles up over its tax and working practices but it’s a fast growing, large employer and it’s difficult to deny that, from a consumer perspective, it delivers goods at lower cost. Lower costs are just as much a part of our standard of living equation as higher wages.

From a British-born worker’s perspective, Amazon offers tough jobs at around the living wage. Its growth means that it generates a decent number of jobs for both British workers and EU and other migrants, so the ‘coming over here, taking our jobs’ argument (a subject that requires its own blog) is not so easy at Amazon. From an EU migrant perspective, Amazon offers tough jobs at around three times the minimum wage in eastern European countries. Working hard for £8 per hour is one thing. Working hard for a domestic equivalent of £19.50 per hour (3 times our minimum wage) is another. EU workers obviously have to pay UK living costs while working here but live frugally, do some overtime and live near Easyjet airport links to eastern Europe and it suddenly becomes a good deal. Lots of EU migrants seem to agree. We get Amazon-level pricing to factor into our cost of living – something that will become even more important when they move into essential goods like food – and migrants get a deal that’s difficult to match back home.

A key question is whether Amazon could meet its hiring requirements exclusively from British-born workers. The demanding productivity targets – that translate into lower consumer costs – mean that the relative attractiveness of the wage is important. In practice, Amazon relies heavily on migrant workers. Spend a day as a shift manager at Amazon and you’ll find it difficult to cast migrants as lazy benefit tourists.

As for benefit tourism, I have to say that I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it in the sense that I doubt that a significant proportion of migrants come to the UK with the ambition of living off benefits forever. Relocating to another country is a daunting prospect. You need va va voom, ambition, to want a better life. The real advantage to a migrant moving from a low income area comes at the margin, when they earn enough to put some money aside. That means hurdling higher UK living costs.

The Amazon example illustrates that low-skilled migrant workers offer an opportunity to tackle one side of the cost-of-living crisis – costs – through jobs that migrants themselves regard as far from exploitative. The further benefits of belonging to the EU lives to fight another blog but immigration via open borders and the pros and cons of EU membership are obviously entwined.

Another consideration is that an abundant source of low-skilled, low-cost workers is an important factor in freeing women to work and encouraging gender equality in the workplace. This symbiosis of low-skilled and higher-skilled jobs applies more broadly too. There is obviously a debate to be had though, over the fairness of usually female migrant au pairs and nannies supporting their richer counterparts. I’ll start to address this theme in my Saturday blog this week, a review of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky.

Thursday, 22nd January 2015