by Alex Evans | Aug 8, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity
I’ve just been having another look at FAO’s seminal 2006 report about the environmental impact of meat consumption, Livestock’s Long Shadow. I figured I knew most of the stats about meat’s massive contribution to scarcity issues – but nope, I found myself astonished once again by the report’s headline stats. Livestock:
- Uses 26% of the ice-free terrestrial surface for grazing, and 33% of the planet’s arable area for feedstock – in total, 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the land surface of the planet;
- Accounts for 70% of previously forested land in the Amazon (and that’s just the pasture – feedcrops are another big chunk again);
- Are responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide equivalent – that’s larger than transport – and for 37% of methane emissions (23 times as potent as CO2 in its warming effect);
- Uses 8% of global human water use, mostly in irrigation for feedcrops, and is probably the single largest sectoral source of water pollution;
- Accounts for 20% of total terrestrial animal biomass – squeezing out space for other species and hence contributing massively to biodiversity loss, mainly through destroying habitats (30% of the land surface of the planet, remember)?
I love eating meat, but since I wrote The Feeding of the Nine Billion, I’ve been aiming to cut it out for 3 days a week. Having re-read FAO’s report, I’m going to up that to four or five – as ways of reducing your carbon footprint and wider environmental impact go, this is a very low hassle,high impact option (especially if you have Sophie Grigson on your shelf).
Also, if you haven’t seen coverage of Tristram Stuart’s new book on food waste, then take a look…
by Alex Evans | Aug 7, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Back in February, I figured that the pre-G20 “Jobs, Justice, Climate” NGO campaign was probably the “pointless NGO campaign of the year”, naively arguing that,
Yes, it’s only February, but it seems pretty unlikely that anything will top this for sheer pointlessness and banality.
Alas, would that it were so. With 121 days to go until December’s critical UN climate summit, it’s clear that Jobs, Justice, Climate was merely a prototype, a limbering up for the road to Copenhagen.
And so to “tcktcktck.org“, who profess themselves to be building “the world’s biggest mandate for change”. They’re determined to “show our leaders people are ready for bold climate action, now”. So you might suppose that with that end in mind, they’d have some kind of idea of what constitutes sufficiently “bold climate action, now”. But you’d be wrong. Here’s their full policy platform, in glorious technicolour:
“An ambitious, fair and binding climate change agreement.”
That’s it. I tweeted tcktcktck HQ to ask if there was any more than this, and the reply I got said “Bear with us” – this from a campaign whose entire brand is built on the “there’s not a second to lose” vibe.
Not that this lack of specificity has stopped tcktcktck from fanning out in pursuit of its fabulously vague objectives – oh no. Thus for example their “adopt a negotiator” platform:
…as we really want all of our countries to agree to a safe and fair Climate Change treaty in December, we decided to do something about it. That’s why we thought we would Adopt a Negotiator, and follow them through the many meetings, conference and events that they will take part in from now to December…
I asked an actual negotiator whether they had been adopted. The reply: “Oh yes, them! They seem very nice, but I’m not sure what they actually want.”
Sigh. Welcome to NGO campaigning in 2009 – where it doesn’t matter whether you have anything to say, as long as you’re getting the donations, attention, members and airtime.
Update (28 August) – TckTckTck have just emailed to say:
Thanks for your blog post looking at TckTckTck. We’d been waiting for our site to officially launch so that we could point you and your readers to a resource that specifically addresses your questions. The site launched earlier this week, and we’ve put this page together for that purpose:
http://tcktcktck.org/about/the-deal-we-need
by Jules Evans | Aug 6, 2009 | Economics and development
The Bank of England today decided to inject another £50bn into its asset purchase facility. Since February, it has already spent £125bn buying bonds from UK investment banks to try and support the credit markets.
Thanks to this and other quantitative easing by the Fed (spending $1.25tn on MBS alone), the ECB (won’t say how much its spending) and other central banks, this has been the best six months ever for investment banks’ fixed income teams.
JP Morgan, for example, made $2.2bn in investment banking fees in the second quarter, which is a record on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs made about $6bn in fixed income trading in the first six months. Barclays Capital made £1bn in profit in the second quarter. Its head of investment banking, who I interviewed a few weeks ago, told me ‘It’s been a phenomenal six months for fixed income.’ HSBC also made the most its ever made in investment banking, making $6.3bn in profit in the first six months. Happy days are here again.
So our present economic system is quite simple really: central banks print money, then give it to private investment banks.
And no one criticizes this enormous free lunch. No one is really even aware it’s going on. Evan Davis on the Today show this morning discussed the BoE’s asset purchase facility, and his two interviewees were a person from the British Chamber of Commerce, and the UK economist of Goldman Sachs. Both were in support of the programme, surprisingly enough. At no point did Davis suggest the facility was a huge free lunch for investment banks. Instead, he concluded ‘it doesn’t seem to do any harm’.
In fact, the only criticism I can find of the asset purchase facility comes from the unlikely source of the head of fixed income research at Schroders, Jamie Stuttard, who says in passing that one of the unintended consequences of the facility will be:
New sellside profits as a direct result of government policy (riddle me this: what will happen to bonuses of RBS traders linked to trading book performance when those traders should be making very neat turns out of the gilt & corporate bond programs ??)
Quite.
