by Alex Evans | Nov 17, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, UK
Alex Barker at the FT Westminster blog has the details:
The plans are not quite finalised. But it looks like the Strategy Unit — which is staffed by a few dozen civil servants — will broadly be split in two.
Some staff will join Steve Hilton and Polly Mackenzie in the Policy Unit, which is mainly staffed by special advisers in Downing Street. The remainder will be joining Nick Clegg’s small but growing cadre of wonks. The Office of Civil Society, meanwhile, is to be beefed up to become The Big Office of Civil Society*. Gareth Davies, the current head of the strategy unit, will be its new director general.
Shifting policy specialists from a Strategy Unit to a Policy Unit will only set pulses racing of the most devoted Whitehall-ogist. But there is a genuine point to be made. These two teams were set up to do very different things…
New Labour wanted the Strategy Unit, staffed by civil servants, to instil a culture of long-term evidence based policymaking in Whitehall. Given the heavy day-to-day firefighting in government, Geoff Mulgan and others wanted to make sure that somebody, somewhere had a strategic overview of policy.
Over at the Institute for Government blog, Jill Rutter echoes the point, recalling her time in the Number 10 Policy Unit under John Major:
What became clear then was that it was too small to do anything other than get drawn into day-to-day fire fighting on behalf of the Prime Minister. Eight of us – a mix of civil servants and advisers – shadowed the whole domestic policy agenda. The Cabinet Office played its traditional coordinating and brokering role – but did nothing to move departments from their entrenched positions and look for positive solutions that cut across departmental boundaries.
A meeting on policy on lone parents chaired by the Cabinet Office, full of Grade 7s briefed not to concede an inch of departmental turf, was one of the most dispiriting two hours I ever spent in government. The Prime Minister – and the government – lacked a capacity to develop forward looking policies and to do the hardest of all things – renew itself in office.
It is there that the ability of the Strategy Unit to take a fresh look at issues (particularly those not on the immediate political radar and that do not sit neatly in departmental boundaries) and its ability to both challenge but also work with departments will be missed.
Barker and Rutter are both absolutely right in their analysis. Admittedly, many observers thought that the PMSU’s fortunes had waned in recent years since its glory days under Geoff Mulgan. But room for improvement doesn’t constitute a case for abolition.
The strategic deficit on global risks and foreign policy looks especially bad. Combined with a Foreign Office that’s now almost wholly focused on ‘winning business for Britain’, a new National Security Council apparatus that is (as predicted) having to focus almost all of its energy on firefighting, and DFID apparently being pulled away from its global thought leadership role in favour of an approach more along ‘aid administration’ lines, the question would seem to be less where the long-term strategic thinking on global risks is happening in Whitehall, than whether the new government wants any to happen at all.*
*All the more reason why we need a National Intelligence Council along the lines of the US model, as I’ve argued here before.
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
Tullett Prebon, if you haven’t heard of them, describe themselves as:
…an intermediary in wholesale financial markets facilitating the trading activities of its clients, in particular commercial and investment banks [in] seven major product groups: Volatility, Rates, Non Banking, Treasury, Energy and Commodities, Credit and Equities.
They are, in other words, not all that hard to tell apart from Friends of the Earth. So you might be forgiven a small double take when you read the contents of their latest report to clients:
The global economy is in the grip of a forest of dangerous financial and non-financial exponentials. A series of key indicators – including population growth, energy consumption, cumulative inflation and the money supply – all appear to have turned into exponential ‘hockey-stick’ curves.
Amongst the non-financial indicators, there are reasons to fear that exponential trends in population growth and energy consumption may not be sustainable, because both may be heading for practicality constraints. Meanwhile, the intrinsic values of the principal currencies (including the dollar, the euro and sterling) may be threatened by escalating debt, by dangerously rapid expansion in the money supply, and by continuing deteriorations in purchasing power.
We conclude that the ‘forest of exponentials’ is indeed highly dangerous, particularly because it is neither properly understood, effectively calibrated or coherently managed. In particular, we identify an urgent need to foster an understanding of energy returns on energy invested (EROEI), and to develop a universal system of measurement and calibration.
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
…you may be wondering just how bad it’s going to be on climate change. Here’s a clue:
Last year, when John Boehner, of Ohio, the incoming House Speaker, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about his party’s plans to address climate change, he had this to say: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen … is almost comical.”
Indeed it is, John. All this and more over at the New Yorker.
by Alex Evans | Nov 15, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
The International Energy Agency published this year’s magnum opus a week or so ago – here’s the Executive Summary (pdf). Key points:
– The Outlook sets out three scenarios that look ahead to 2035: a Current Policies Scenario, which assumes no change on policies as at mid-2010; a New Policies Scenario, which takes account of recently announced pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies (which are “assumed to be implemented in a relatively cautious manner, reflecting their non-binding character”); and a 450 Scenario, which sets out an energy pathway consistent with 2 degrees.
– In the New Policies Scenario, energy demand rises 36% from 2008 to 2035 – that’s 1.2% a year on average, compared to 2% a year over the previous 27 years and 1.4% in the Current Policies Scenario. In the 450 scenario, by contrast, demand rises by only 0.7% a year.
– For the first time, the WEO has a whole section on peak oil, which notes that in the New Policies Scenario, “crude oil reaches an undulating plateau of 68-69 mb/d by 2020, but never regains its all-time high of 70 mb/d reached in 2006”. But they also note that “production of natural gas liquids and unconventional oil grows strongly”. Their conclusion: “clearly, global oil production will peak one day, but that peak will be determined by factors affecting both demand and supply”. See here for what the peak oilers have to say about all this. Remember that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with unconventional oil are far higher than for conventional.
– Lots of discussion about natural gas, with the phrase “golden age” getting a look-in. Key take-away: “the glut of global gas-supply capacity that has emerged as a result of the economic crisis (which depressed has demand), the boom in US unconventional gas production and a surge in liquefied natural gas (LNG) capacity, could persist for longer than many expect”. The glut was 130bcm in 2009 – next year, it will rise to 200bcm before starting to decline again.
– Biofuels are expected to expand rapidly – from 1 mb/d today to 4.4 mb/d in 2035 under the New Policies Scenario. Advanced biofuels aren’t expected to enter the market until around 2020. Total government support for biofuels came to $20 billion in 2009, mostly in the US and EU; between 2010 and 2020, that’s expected to rise to about $45 billion a year. Hard to find much to cheer about on the food security front here.
– Copenhagen was a “step forward” [like every other weak climate summit ever] but still “fell a very long way short of what is required to set us on a path to a sustainable energy system”. 2 degrees C isn’t definitively out of reach – yet – but the weak summit outcome means that much stronger efforts, costing considerably more, will be needed after 2020″, and “the speed of the energy transformation that would need to occur after 2020 is such as to raise serious misgivings about the practical achievability of cutting emissions sufficiently”.
Limiting warming to 2 degrees is “all but impossible” under the New Policies Scenario, in which emissions rise to 34 gigatonnes in 2020 and 35 Gt in 2035, from 29 Gt in 2008 – an increase of 21% by 2020, all of which is accounted for by non-OECD countries. Instead, we put ourselves on track for stabilisation at over 650 ppm of CO2e, and a likely temperature rise of over 3.5 degrees C. So what would a scenario look like in which we don’t screw ourselves? Answer after the jump.
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by Alex Evans | Nov 14, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbb7g1HT0YA[/youtube]
