“The UK’s fixed term parliaments could see politicians failing to prioritise climate change, veteran naturalist Sir David Attenborough has suggested,” BBC news report, 26 January 2020

Politicians and decision makers focus on current accounts: income and expenditure over a recent period such as the last year. Not capital accounts. We see it in the behaviour of traders and investors; in the government’s obsession with the national deficit (around £40 billion in 2018/19 according to the Office of National Statistics) instead of the national debt (around £2000 billion, or fifty times as much); and in the public dialogue on climate breakdown.

Current account thinking. I don’t know whether fixed term parliaments are to blame, but it is everywhere.

Take, for instance, government data on our greenhouse gas emissions. The headline number for the UK, as published by BEIS and consistent with the Climate Change Act, is under 500 MtCO2e for 2018. If you rummage around, you can find on the ONS website no fewer than five different measures of our national emissions. The government quotes the lowest number naturally, which omits imported emissions, international shipping and aviation, and has favourable assumptions regarding biomass and crown territories. Arguably the most honest of the measures, called ‘Footprint’, is close to 800 MtCO2e, with most of the difference vis-à-vis the CCA number explained by the emissions embodied in imported goods.

And yet, even the Footprint is on a current account basis in two ways. Firstly, and obviously, it is an annual figure. The trouble with annual figures is that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, just as debt accumulates, though unlike debt it can never be written off in extremis. So arguably we should be looking at cumulative emissions over a period of time, say the period of 140 years since Thomas Edison invented his lightbulb. This can be done – and it shows the United Kingdom in second place, behind the United States in first place, in terms of overall greenhouse damage done per head of population by each of the nations on earth. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising given that Britain started the Industrial Revolution – and perhaps we shouldn’t be held accountable for the lives of our forebears – but it is nonetheless startling, especially to anyone who has been exposed to government statistics and China-bashing.

Current account thinking goes beyond government and infects independent bodies such as the Committee on Climate Change. In their technical report published in May 2019, the CCC comment on the importance of avoiding carbon leakage in the future. The irony is that their starting point, 503 MtCO2e in 2017, is on a production basis that ignores (or, rather, sets to zero) all of the carbon leakage that had already occurred up to that point from closure of British manufacturing industry and consequent reliance on imports. It’s a little bit like hosting a party and at some point in the evening – after most people have left – announcing that you’ve thought of a good game to stop people from going. And the unfortunate corollary of the CCC’s definition of ‘net zero’, combined with the latest scientific assessment of what is genuinely sustainable, is that we could hit our target in 2050 and still be living unsustainably unless the exporting nations make substantial reductions themselves to help us out.

Current account thinking also affects individual attitudes, in particular to ‘green purchases’. As an example, some of us are under the impression that buying a new electric vehicle is good for the environment. Of course it’s bad for the environment due to the emissions embodied in its manufacture, especially of the battery. Whether it’s worse than persisting with an existing petrol vehicle depends on the carbon intensity of electricity, future usage, ongoing maintenance and relative efficiency; but as a rule of thumb a new EV, unless it’s an essential replacement, has a ‘payback period’ of a few years, or longer if you buy a Tesla.

It would help us all if a system of labelling could be developed to provide a systematic measure of the trade-off between embodied emissions and ongoing emission savings for something like a new electric vehicle.

Diet and Neolithic Britain

Further up, I mentioned that there are two ways in which the ONS Footprint is on a current account basis. The second of these is more complex: none of the ONS measures take account of land opportunity costs. Which, according to a number of recent studies, are enormous.

Focussing on the UK, 70% (roughly) of our land surface is used for agriculture; and 50%, i.e. half of our land surface, is pasture and grassland for sheep and cattle. By comparison, all of our cities, towns and villages, houses and roads, take up less than 10% in aggregate.

Recently, the BBC published a short video of land changes since William the Conqueror. Apparently in 1066 the proportion of our country that was wooded was similar to today (15% then, 13% now). The implication is that somehow it is ‘natural’ for Britain to be largely grassland; and indeed that is what many of us think (and farmers argue). But this just shows how long the human footprint has been stamped on both the country and our collective imagination. We have to go back to Neolithic times to discover a land that was mostly woodland, before the introduction of agriculture. And what was true then is still true today: the truly natural state of Britain – in the sense of what it would look like if human beings hadn’t changed its appearance, and would return to if we let it – is a land covered (mainly) by trees.

What happened in Britain in the mists of time has been happening more recently in other parts of the world: forest, including rainforest, is being removed in order to create space for human animals. Globally, 40% of the Earth’s land area is now devoted to livestock. Given the (very) low energy efficiency and nutritional efficiency of eating animals that eat plants, it has been estimated by Joseph Poore and his colleagues at Oxford University in 2018, and by Searchinger et al at Princeton, that if we were to largely eliminate consumption of meat and dairy, and rewild the reclaimed land, humanity could change the earth’s appearance from space. Or, rather, reverse the change in appearance that has been taking place in recent centuries and decades. Poore estimates we could reclaim an area the size of the United States, Europe, Australia and China combined.

On the other hand, if we don’t change our diet, and the preponderance of the world’s population that lives in Asia ‘catches up’ with western diets, then we will have to denude the planet further to the point where it is debatable whether we will be able to feed ourselves, quite apart from bringing on catastrophic global heating.

In the CCC’s report from May 2019, agriculture is identified as contributing 9% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. This is based on the ‘status quo’, i.e. on the national usage of land to which we’ve been accustomed since before William the Conqueror. It is current account thinking, because it accepts the status quo of land use and ignores the potential to rewild a large chunk of Britain in an optimal manner. In the same way traditional statistics, that suggest agriculture globally accounts for around 25% of greenhouse emissions, bear the signs of current account thinking: they do not quantify optimal land use (optimal from the perspective of the climate); if they did, then agriculture would appear to be as important as energy consumption.

The impact of current account thinking is most striking with respect to diet, but is evident also in the whole energy debate. To move away from it requires imagination, an ability to think ‘outside the box’ and not be blinkered by the status quo. Whether we as individuals, and our politicians, can manage such a thought transition is questionable, but it’s no exaggeration to suggest that our survival is dependent upon it.