Ending poverty needn’t cost the Earth

For the most part both newspapers and the blogosphere spend their time arguing small, specific questions, as is good and proper. But now and then you read a headline that seems to ask one of The Big Questions. Rarely, though, does the piece that follows offer a convincing answer. A notable exception appears on the Guardian website (and possibly also in the paper, I don’t know) today, where George Monbiot asks: Is protecting the environment incompatible with social justice?

This is, obviously, an important question. Indeed, it’s really the essential question facing mankind in the 21st century: can we, against the odds, finish the job of raising all of humanity to a decent standard of living while simultaneously slashing carbon emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change?

The answer is often assumed to be ‘no’. Monbiot refers to right-wingers who suddenly become champions of the world’s poor when it gives them an excuse to criticise green policies. (Exhibit A.) But greens, too, often express ambivalence about development. The stereotypical traditionalist green view, with its love of home-grown food, reuse of manufactured items and a general rejection of materialism, essentially amounts to a call for rich countries to return to a pre-development lifestyle. Conversations about climate change talk (quite understandably) about China and India’s rapid economic growth as an ecological catastrophe in the making – never mind the fact that it’s lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

There’s a real problem here – in terms of China and India’s rising carbon emissions, in terms of overpopulation, and so on. But as Monbiot – quoting from a new Oxfam discussion paper – goes on to explain, meeting the basic needs of the world’s poor actually carries with it a very small environmental cost:

providing enough food for the 13% of the world’s people who suffer from hunger means raising world supplies by just 1%.

Providing electricity to the 19% of people who currently have none would raise global carbon emissions by just 1%.

Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.

Of course, it’s not quite this simple. Raising up the extremely poor is not the same process as increasing the size of the world’s middle class, but it also can’t be totally separated from that process. Bitterly poor subsistence farmers in Africa, given access to decent roads and education and healthcare, will gradually rise into the middle class and consume more. Given electricity, they’ll gradually drive the need for more power stations. So there’s not not a problem here.

But as Monbiot goes on to argue, to potential consumption of the world’s poor is nothing in comparison to the actual consumption of the world’s rich. (That’s us.)

it is not the needs of the poor that threaten the biosphere, but the demands of the rich. Raworth points out that half the world’s carbon emissions are produced by just 11% of its people, while, with grim symmetry, 50% of the world’s people produce just 11% of its emissions. Animal feed used in the EU alone, which accounts for just 7% of the world’s people, uses up 33% of the planet’s sustainable nitrogen budget. “Excessive resource use by the world’s richest 10% of consumers,” [Oxfam] notes, “crowds out much-needed resource use by billions of other people.”

No-one knows by what proportion the carbon emissions of the world’s poorer few billion people will increase this century, and therefore, by exactly what proportion the richer billion will need to decrease to meet global emissions reduction targets.

But we in the global North are already vastly over-consuming; we have to make steep reductions, whatever happens. To focus on the environmental risks of raising up the poor is not only morally abhorrent, but it’s to run around trying to swat a fly when there’s an angry bear in the room.

But let’s flip that round and put it another, more optimistic way: we can end extreme poverty, worldwide, without significantly increasing the likelihood of (or extent of) catastrophic climate change. The best-case scenario for 2100 – a world that’s no more than 2°C hotter than now, with atmospheric carbon stabilised, global population stabilised, and extreme poverty a thing of the past – is possible. So there, something cheerful to think about when you’re chewing over your locally-sourced, organic Valentine’s Day dinner.

“Compared to what’s needed, a failure; compared to what’s possible, decent”

It gets a bit tedious writing about climate policy, since every single development warrants some variant of the same verdict: compared to what’s needed, a failure; compared to what’s possible, decent. And so it is with Durban.

Grist’s David Roberts hits the nail on the head, but still goes on to offer a great evaluation of the agreement reached at the UN climate conference in Durban last week. To summarise the summary:

• the policies agreed so far still leave us set for 3.5 degrees C climate change by 2100, far more than the 2C figure labelled (problematically) ‘safe’;
• the agreement on working towards a successor to Kyoto is vague and fuzzy, but still more of an agreement than was predicted after the collapse of talks in Copenhagen last year;
• Useful  breakthroughs were made on more technical issues like deforestation.

What a difference 2246 miles makes

The no-byline approach of The Economist has the effect of presenting all the various viewpoints put forward by its writers as the voice of a single, all-wise hive mind. On occasion, though, the splits become more obvious, as with this week’s two pieces on the likely victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian elections. A leader, likely written in London, argues:

Are the sceptics who said that Arabs could not handle democracy—and would inevitably elect nasty people who would never surrender power—being proved horribly right?

The answer is no. Until the Brothers actually take power, it is hard to say with certainty where the dominant mainstream of political Islam stands. But most of the signs are that it is a long way from both its intolerant caricature and the tenets promoted by some of the Brothers’ predecessors a generation ago. Indeed, the most striking feature of the Arab spring remains the complete failure of violently radical Islam. Al-Qaeda, the murderous perversion of Islam responsible for felling the Twin Towers and for countless other atrocities against Muslims as well as Christians and Jews, has entirely failed to make its presence felt. As peaceful political Islam advances, al-Qaeda and its violent jihadi friends have retreated to the remotest patches of Yemen, Somalia and the Sahara desert.

The piece acknowledges the risk that the Brotherhood could team up with the Salafists, the conservative Islamist – but not jihadist – party that seems set to come second.

That would be small comfort for liberal Egyptians if the Brotherhood teamed up with the Salafists and then claimed a democratic right to expunge secularists from government—and from most of Egypt’s institutions. But that does not seem likely. The Brothers have repeatedly insisted that they will uphold the rights of women and religious minorities and respect the verdict of the polls, even if it goes against them. They say they will not enforce the veil or immediately ban alcohol. As in Tunisia and Morocco, they will seek to rule in coalition with secularists. As in Turkey, they want the generals who used to rule and persecute them to go back to their barracks. They will be keener to support the Palestinians than Hosni Mubarak was, but do not want to tear up the peace treaty with Israel.

Cheering stuff. But now look at this piece, from the same edition, but filed from Jerusalem, assessing the Israeli reaction to the Egyptian result.

Even if Egypt’s Islamists refrain from scrapping the peace treaty, Israel fears they will seek to amend the clauses that provide for Sinai’s demilitarisation. They might even put the treaty to a referendum. The Salafists, though declaring themselves non-violent at present, could yet—Israelis fear—turn jihadist…

If the Islamists end up ruling Egypt, might they seek to engage with Israel? Precedent is not encouraging. When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and then asserted sole control over Gaza the following year, Israel opted for boycott and siege unless Hamas recognised Israel, among other things. After President Hosni Mubarak’s fall in February, Israeli diplomats in Cairo suggested making overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to be told from on high to desist.

See how evidence of Israeli resistance to Hamas and the Brotherhood – the former is described in the same article, oversimplistically, as the latter’s ‘Palestinian branch’ – is presented as evidence of the Brotherhood’s resistance towards peace with Israel? The Economist’s Jerusalem correspondent may have gone a little native. My suspicion is that the perspective of the first, more optimistic piece is closer to the truth. If not, Israel can take heart in the knowledge that Egypt’s generals seem not much closer to allowing proper civilian government anyway.

Labour’s Euro problem

Dan Hodges in his new home at the Telegraph:

[Cameron's] brilliant failure in Brussels also represents a bitter blow to Ed Miliband and the Labour party. Over the past few months Miliband, Douglas Alexander and Ed Balls have rightly been manoeuvring themselves into a position of greater Euroscepticism, from which they hoped to exploit growing Tory divisions on Europe. But they moved too late.

Cameron has again outflanked Labour, who are now left in a European no man’s land. Despite Ed Milband’s condemnation of the Prime Minister’s handling of the negotiations, he has already confirmed he wouldn’t have signed the treaty either. Cameron has the clarity of prefect isolation. Miliband’s efforts to place himself pragmatically equidistant between Britain and the continent have left him stranded in the middle of the English channel.

Hodges is a famous Ed-hater, but on this I think he’s probably right. How can you criticise Cameron for his hardnosed determination to ‘protect’ the City from new EU regulations, when Ed Balls recently slammed Cameron for failing to ‘protect’ Britain from having to make increased contributions to the IMF to cover the Euro crisis?

Given that the splits within the Coalition are more than damaging enough for Cameron, Labour should probably aim to move the conversation away from the Eurozone and back towards the miserable economic picture here as quickly as possible. There’s frankly no gain for Labour in discussing what is (in the public’s view at least) primarily a story of excessive debt, when they’re starting to make some progress arguing that the UK economic story is primarily one of excessive debt reduction.

Twisted logic

Louise Armistead in the Telegraph:

It ain’t Cameron you should be praising or blaming, but Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy. The truth is, Cameron hasn’t stood-up for Britain or quit the eurozone debate: Britain has been kicked out.

Cameron loudly declared he would put a stop to the threat to the City – even if it meant torpedoing Mer-kozy’s vital Brussels summit. But the German and French leaders didn’t need to wait that long: they leapt at the chance last Wednesday.

Their open letter to Herman Van Rompuy setting out their lofty aims for the summit: beef up the European Stability Mechanism; use the IMF for extra liquidity and fiscal unification. But there, bold as brass, was a commitment to a “creation of a financial transaction tax.”

Merkel and Sarkozy wrote that they wanted the measures to be “enshrined in the European Treaties” but quickly added that they’d be just as happy to go ahead with agreement from the 17.

That letter was the writing on the wall for Cameron: he either had to agree to an FTT (unthinkable) or use Britain’s veto.

This, in a nutshell, has been the eurosceptic response to Cameron’s use of the veto on Thursday: that France and Germany’s ‘outlandish demands’ left ‘us’ ‘no choice.’

What drivel.

Britannia contra mundum or, the myth of ‘outer Europe’

In the words of Bagehot of the Economist: ‘What a Mess.’ Last night’s dramatic events in Brussels – not a sentence one gets to write every day – have left Britain more isolated in the EU than at least any time since the bad old days of wrangling over the Maastricht treaty.

Much is unclear about the exact reasoning that led Cameron to his position. To recap, Cameron went to Brussels saying that he would only support the plan to amend the Lisbon treaty to allow for deeper fiscal union between the Eurozone countries if the EU agreed to protect the City of London against any new financial services regulations. (Feel free to read that sentence several times, perhaps aloud, until you feel you understand it.) If they didn’t agree, he’d veto any alteration to the Lisbon treaty. They didn’t, and he did, meaning closer ties between Eurozone countries will have to be negotiated separately by those countries.

Now, Cameron’s position must surely have always been a pose. France made it abundantly clear it wouldn’t agree to any exemption for London, meaning the scene was set for a showdown before the ministers sat down to dinner last night. In practice, Cameron chose a diplomatically acceptable basis on which to prevent the Lisbon route to Eurozone fiscal union.

Which begs the question: what did he expect to happen instead?

What was supposed to happen instead, of course, was ‘two-speed Europe.’ As recently as last week, the assumption was that the Eurozone countries would arrange their own treaty, deepening fiscal union between them, without any changes to the relationship between EU countries generally. This was considered pretty much acceptable to many Eurosceptics. After all, an ‘outer core’ of the ten non-Euro EU countries could become an organised force for moderation and liberal economics in the EU. With France and Germany happily ensconced in the dream of ever-closer union in the Euro Club of 17, this outer Europe could probably even negotiate the loosening of EU ties, moving the larger club of 27 back towards its common-market origins.

As the Spectator’s leader yesterday argued:

British Europhiles have long scorned the concept of a ‘two-speed Europe’, but that is, by default, what is likely to emerge from the mess. We will have a first tier bound by fiscal as well as monetary union, smaller than the current eurozone, and a second tier which will be increasingly divorced from the Franco-German power axis. Ideally, the second tier should impose minimal regulations, and resemble the free trade area we signed up to in 1975.

David Cameron is losing an opportunity to assert himself as leader of a wider European alliance. It could be an appealing place: promoting the free movement of goods, people and capital, but with each country retaining sovereignty and the power to set its taxes, prepare its budgets and retain a veto over rules which will be harmful to its national interest.

The Prime Minister is in a position of great strength, if he would only realise it… there are already ten EU nations outside the eurozone who will play no part in any fiscal union. It is a constituency begging for direction — if only David Cameron would seize his opportunity.

(Credit to Bagehot for drawing my attention to this.)

And it was easy to see how this could happen. It had the broad support of Nicolas Sarkozy, who kick-started the current frenzy of activity by speaking openly about a  two-speed Europe last week. (While not a Eurosceptic by any means, Sarkozy has always been suspicious of the newer EU members, and likes the idea of a system which leaves them and Britain somewhat marginalised.) And the idea of Britain and the new EU entrants forming a second, looser grouping within the EU seemed feasible: remember in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the ‘new Europe’ proved more Atlanticist than expected and sided with Britain and the US?

Had Cameron wielded his veto and subsequently the 17 Euro countries had agreed to negotiate deeper fiscal union on their own, he could have come home looking, if not triumphant, at least satisfied. Let the Eurozone do what it likes, he could have said: the EU as an institution goes this far and no further. He was arguing this point last night, by all accounts, at one point quibbling over whether a Euro club established under a separate treaty could use the facilities of the EU’s institutions.

But something happened that was never supposed to happen. The other non-Euro countries didn’t play ball.

Why email hasn’t died

Atos CEO Thierry Breton has given an interview to the BBC’s website about his much-ballyhooed intention to do away with internal email. It contains some unsurprising stuff about his rationale – most internal email being unnecessary, essentially – but I would have liked to hear more about the tools he plans to use to replace email for day-to-day communication.

Why has email become such a tyranny? Because it’s too damn flexible. It’s delivered instantly, so you can use it for real-time communication, which makes a high volume of emails likely. But it’s also persistent – an email stays in your inbox till you reply – meaning unread emails become another form of task to sift through. The combination of the two creates a large flow of emails that you find yourself having to block out time to read.

(An example: a friend of mine was complaining at the weekend that an editor he freelances for doesn’t reply to say ‘thanks’ when he sends in a completed piece. I explained that, personally, I hate ‘thanks’ emails; it’s just another email I have to read that serves no purpose. And I only receive 5-15 emails a day, not counting newsletters; imagine if I were a typical Atos employee, receiving 100 or more.)

Email is also too flexible because it’s both one-to-one and one-to-many. When I’ve worked in organisations where I was receiving 50 or more emails a day, the majority of them were usually widely-circulated newsletters with information I barely needed to see. And unlike with a corporate newsletter, there’s usually no way to click ‘unsubscribe’ on a mailing list set up internally.

So what’s the answer? For Atos, it seems to be to replace email with a bevy of competing technologies: “a cloud computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, micro blogging, document sharing [and] knowledge community,” as Breton explains. That sounds rather vague to me. He repeatedly talks about how young graduates he employs have long eschewed email for Facebook; that’s true. But Facebook’s messaging system, though it has some strengths – like the way it displays messages as chats if you’re online – wouldn’t be well suited to a corporate environment. There’s no way to add a subject to a message, for example.

And of course, Google Wave was supposed to replace email, but was too complex and confusing to use.

Actually, though, it’s not too hard to picture what an effective post-email communications setup would look like.

1. Simple instant messaging, with the capacity for group chats, can take care of most basic requests for information etc.
2. A system for assigning and sending tasks, with a manageable ‘inbox’. Requests for information that can’t be instantly answered – the kind of email we all ‘mark as unread’ and leave for days – could be sent as a task.
3. RSS and Twitter-like tools for the dissemination of newsletter-like information. Ideally, a system would have the capacity to both automatically subscribe users to some information (an all-hands feed, department feeds, etc) and allow them to manually follow others (the feeds of other departments they’re collaborating with, for example.) Users could have Twitter-like personal feeds to share simple information and could also add information to group feeds.

Spot the issue? All of these services already exist, and have for some time. There are too many instant messaging solutions to count; email services like Outlook already allow the assigning of tasks, and newer systems like Basecamp elevate the approach to a fine art. And SharePoint and StatusNet can pretty much take care of the rest.

The tools have been in place for several years to enable companies to carry out all the different kinds of communication email is used for, in more efficient ways. The problem is cultural resistance. In a sense, therefore, Breton’s impending no-email regime is a sign of failure: the failure of organisations to successfully wean employees off email and onto these superior tools without forcing them.

There are exceptions: small tech companies, in particular, seem to be run entirely by instant messaging these days (typically these companies use Google Apps for email, and use the built-in Talk service for IM). The blog company Automattic, makers of WordPress, say they use a special Twitter-like blog format called P2 for most internal communication.

For the most part, though, companies haven’t moved away from email, and it’s simply because they haven’t tried hard enough to push employees onto other ways of working. Breton’s outright ban may be disruptive, but it might be what’s necessary to make the shift.

No haircuts here

The Eurozone reforms agreed by France and Germany seem, for the most part, straightforwardly sensible. The Eurozone’s rules on government borrowing will be enshrined in national laws, and will actually be enforced through automatic sanctions. But one aspect struck me as more problematic:

In a major concession from Merkel in what was otherwise a German-inspired package, the leaders agreed that private investors in eurozone debt would not be forced to accept losses in the event of a default, with the exception of the case of Greece, where “haircuts” for the banks and private investors in Greek debt were agreed last July.

Wait, what?

To most people, the idea that European taxpayers should be forced to refund every penny owed to creditors by overspent European nations seems both bonkers and rather immoral. Lenders take a risk with any loan: just because Greece or Italy is too big to fail, doesn’t mean its creditors shouldn’t share some of the pain.

But according to the FT’s Ralph Atkins yesterday, this clause stems from a widespread view that forcing Greece’s creditors to lose money as part of the bailout has reduced market confidence in lending to Eurozone countries.

European Central Bank policymakers have become more outspoken in attacking “private sector involvement” in Greece’s bail-out. The plan to persuade banks to take a “haircut” on their Greek bonds was “a terrible mistake,” according to Athanasios Orphanides, Cyprus’s central bank governor and ECB governing council member.

“By forcing the impairment of any state bond we have triggered concern internationally of all state bonds in the eurozone and that’s one of the key reasons we have a problem,” he told his country’s parliament.

I have noted before the ECB’s strong opposition to PSI generally and in Greece’s case specifically. The view from Frankfurt is that it simply undermines investor confidence in the whole eurozone. In other words, if Greece’s difficulties had been better managed earlier, Italy and Spain would not have been caught up in the contagion and the eurozone would not now be facing an existential crisis.

It is the polar opposite view of many economists outside the eurozone -that the crisis has erupted because of a dogged refusal by eurozone policymakers to accept at a Greek debt restructuring is inevitable and to get on with putting Greece’s finance back on a sustainable basis.

I’m not an economist, but I find the ECB’s position – that to force creditors to take any losses at all on state bonds is to undermine the attractiveness of all government debt – hard to swallow. Hopefully this will all prove moot, as the punitive sanctions for excessive borrowing envisioned by Merkel and Sarkozy will make future bailouts unnecessary.

Rowntree Foundation: “Coalition poverty efforts failing young adults”

One would have hardly expected the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, one of the UK’s leading anti-poverty thinktanks, to express glowing praise of the coalition’s programme – given that both the government’s austerity measures and its planned welfare reforms have met steady opposition from civil society groups from day one. But the vociferousness of Rowntree’s attack in a new report is striking. As the Guardian reports, Rowntree acknowledge the Government’s focus on children and pensioners but point out the dire situation facing poor young adults – and state the coalition’s reforms may make it worse.

The coalition is ignoring the high level of poverty among young adults, almost a third of whom are in poverty, the foundation says. Ministers have also not focused on working-age adults without dependent children; the number in poverty has risen by 1 million in the last decade, it says. During the same period, the number of pensioners in poverty fell by 1 million.

The working poor are also a matter of pressing concern, the foundation says…

The foundation says that under-employment has risen by 50% since 2004, to 6 million people, the highest number since 1993.

There is no plan, says the report, to address problems associated with badly paid, insecure and “dead-end” jobs. Without solving these problems, poverty can never properly be tackled – more than half of all children in poverty are living with a parent who already does paid work, it says.

The foundation also questions the government’s universal credit policy, which aims to make work a better-paid alternative for those on benefits.

At present people in work and receiving tax credits face a tax rate of 73% on extra earnings, worse than under Labour, who had set the rate at 69%. However, when universal credit comes in, this rate will rise to 76%.

The situation described by Rowntree is, in part, a measure of Labour’s failure as well as the coalition’s. Those young adults now struggling to find even a dead-end low-paid job are the very children who formed the focus of Labour’s poverty efforts, which mostly consisted of supplementing low wages for parents with direct government support through Working Families’ Tax Credit and other related benefits. This approach ensures children eat and maybe even stay in school, but doesn’t ensure there are decent jobs for them when they complete education.

Nevertheless, Rowntree argue convincingly that the coalition’s focus on welfare reform, while it may shift a few thousand people into work, can’t significantly reduce the overall levels of un- and under-employment at a time when there simply isn’t enough work to go round. “A conservative estimate is that the country lacks at least 4m paid jobs. In this situation, reforms aimed at improving incentives to enter work will increase the number scrambling for vacancies while doing next to nothing to reduce poverty,” report co-author Tom MacInnes tells the Guardian.

The reason why the coalition appears to be ignoring un- and under-employment, of course, is that it’s extraordinarily hard to fix. Child and pensioner poverty can be addressed to a certain extent by throwing money at the problem; it’s an approach that worked for Labour, which managed to reduce the number of both children and pensioners in poverty largely through benefits. Of course, similar benefits for under-employed young people, and significantly more generous unemployment benefit to balance out stricter job-seeking requirements, would help address the poverty of young people too; but it’s likely that Iain Duncan Smith and his department would see this as creating a hopeless moral hazard and discouraging work. So the only option the coalition’s own logic leaves it with is to hold on tight and pray for jobs. I suspect we won’t see a significant improvement in this depressing picture until 2013-4 at the earliest.

The fall and rise of the electric boat

It’s one of the first things children learn in science class – electricity and water don’t mix. But while all-electric cars have been long promised but never made it onto our roads in significant numbers, electrically powered boats have been ferrying people around lakes and rivers for over a century – and are now taking to the seas.

See that? That is the passenger ferry “Watzmann,” one of a fleet of 21 ferries that daily traverse Lake Königssee in Bavaria. It’s an ordinary passenger ferry that seats 90 passengers. Ordinary except for one thing – it’s runs entirely on electric power. All waterborne traffic on the lake has been electric since 1909, when petrol engines were banned to preserve the lake’s crystal-clear water.

In fact, electric boats have a long and varied history that predates the internal combustion engine. As early as 1886 electrically-powered boats had crossed the English Channel, and in 1893 the use of electric boats on the River Thames was common enough for several bankside charging stations to be installed. That same year, at the World’s Fair in Chicago, over one million passengers rode on one of a fleet of 55 electric ferries.

Electric boats became less common in the first half of the 20^th Century as petrol-powered engines became cheaper and lighter. But in the recent decades electric boats have undergone a renaissance. The most popular manufacturer of electric leisure boats, California’s Duffy Electric Boat Company, began mass production of electric boats in 1968, and it has produced over 10,000 to date. In a bid to encourage the use of electric boats, the UK’s Environment Agency has installed several new charging points along the Thames, over a century on from the first heyday of electric river boats.

“Burma’s New Hope”

There’s a fascinating article in the current Time about the thaw going on in Burma. You probably know that after twenty years of house arrest, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was freed last year in the leadup to the country’s first elections in decades. But you may also know that Suu Kyi’s party decided to boycott the elections, expecting them to be a sham. Change, then, but apparently only symbolic.

But it turns out that the 2010 elections, despite being won by cronies of the military junta, have made a real difference.

In March, a nominally civilian government replaced the ruling junta. Despite vote rigging for the military-linked party in last year’s elections and a leadership stacked with retired generals, the new government is starting to do something the previous regime failed to do: consider the needs of some 50 million Burmese. Economic reforms — from privatization to the creation of labor unions — are beginning to mend a tattered economy in which one-quarter of the country’s budget is spent on the army. Some of the hundreds of political prisoners crowding Burma’s notorious jails have been released. Once muzzled newspapers are loosening up, and the country’s censorship czar has said that his bureau should be abolished. Even the country’s flag and anthem were abruptly changed late last year (brighter colors, catchier tune), as if the regime wanted a visual and aural break from its disgraceful past….

The reporter, Hannah Beech, makes it pretty clear that the NLD, Suu Kyi’s party, was right to boycott the elections.

Africa’s growth miracle: in numbers

The Economist’s leader this week on growth in Africa is, as with most Economist leaders, worth reading and packed with solid analysis, combined with a few policy recommendations of mixed wisdom.

But this article is particularly interesting because it provides a great primer on Africa’s astonishing economic and technological progress in recent years – a story which still doesn’t get enough press. So since we’re all busy, here are the most impressive stats from the story in easy bullet-point form:

• Over the past decade 6 of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African.
• In 8 of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan.
• Foreign investment has soared around 10x in the past decade.
• Africa has more than 600 million mobile-phone users – more than America or Europe.
• 1/2 of the increase in world population over the next 40 years will be in Africa.
• Around 60 million Africans have an income of $3,000 a year. 100m will in 2015.
• African countries ejected a government in peaceful elections 0 times in the first three decades since the end of colonialism, but have done so 30 times since 1991.

I’d put all this into a snazzy visualisation, but I don’t know how… any volunteers out there?

Also of interest this week

The New York Times reports on the African Union’s emergence as a credible military force in Somalia;

The world’s most well-meaning but dull columnist produces what may be the world’s most well-meaning but dull column title;

Eyewitness reporting from ‘Revolution II’ in Cairo’s Tahrir Square;

Should the UN’s Human Development Index be replaced with a ‘Human Sustainable Development Index’ that incorporates carbon emissions? (Answer: yes, but it won’t be);

Bush is set to return to Africa where he will hopefully call on slacking countries to step AIDS commitments;

A good introduction to the key issues at the Busan summit on aid effectiveness next week.

“Length, frequency and/or intensity” or, climate change’s language problem

The Guardian reports on the new IPCC, er, report into extreme weather effects from climate change:

Scientific models also show that it is “very likely” – a term that denotes, in IPCC parlance, a 90% to 100% probability – that the “length, frequency and/or intensity of warm spells or heat waves will increase over most land areas”. This means that record hot days, which previously could be expected once in 20 years, are now likely every other year. This could have a serious impact on old people and the very young in particular, who are more vulnerable to changes in temperature.

The report said: “It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st century over many areas of the globe. This is particularly the case in the high latitudes and tropical regions, and in winter in the northern mid-latitudes. Heavy rainfalls associated with tropical cyclones are likely to increase with continued warming.” This means that cloudbursts that could have been expected once in 20 years will now become a one-in-five-year occurrence.

So that’s Heatwave Italy and flooded Norfolk, yes?

I understand why the IPCC needs to couch things in technical language, but I find every time I read something like this I struggle to match the calm scientific prose up with the warnings of disaster campaigners usually respond with. I’m sure that apparent gap spurs a lot of people towards climate scepticism. I’m not sure what the answer is – probably more campaigning organisations taking the time to really ‘translate’ these documents in detail into possible eye-catching outcomes. It’d be better still if it came from journalists without an axe to grind, but I doubt many have the expertise or resources.

William Easterly’s aid conversion

American academic William Easterly came perilously close to aid abolitionism in the middle of the last decade, as he became the poster child for the anti-Jeffrey Sachs/Gleneagles backlash. But in the last couple of years he’s taken a deep breath and moved to a more nuanced position. His new piece for the Guardian, while full of over-the-top rhetoric, argues a valid point, that large chunks of the additional aid provided by the US in recent years has been sucked up in support of defence projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, with often wasteful results.

Two steps now could salvage the future of US aid. First, protect the aid that has been working against cuts, which should come instead from the areas not working. The current House proposal doesn’t get this elementary principle – aid to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq would be cut by 13%, but everything else would be cut by 23%. Second, recognise what the last decade taught us: there is actually a great divide separating development and defence. Announce that henceforward aid is for poverty relief and only for poverty relief, not for supporting military operations. Build a firewall between USAid and the defence department. Let defence run its programmes or counter-insurgency, but don’t be misled that this has anything to do with aid. American aid should concentrate on areas with a better track record – health, education, infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation – operating in societies where war, repression and corruption do not make it pointless for aid to operate.

It’s striking to see this argument being made in the wake of a review of UK aid which weighted it more heavily towards conflict zones. The chances of Easterly’s proposals being carried out are, of course, near zero: the more pressure there is on the aid budget, the harder it is to argue against it being used in the (supposed) service of national security interests.

The “Mrs Jones test”

Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, is in a combative mood in a new interview with the Huffington Post UK (which, incidentally, seems to be getting nicely into its stride):

“The problem with Gordon’s approach is that he didn’t focus enough on results. There was a lot of focus on huge headlines with huge sums of money. The key thing is that the results are delivered on the ground. “Going on a day trip to Maputo to announce half a billion dollars on education was something completely loved by Labour. But what’s much more important is the outputs of that. That’s the big difference between the coalition government and Gordon Brown…

“Britain is piloting results-based aid in Ethiopia, where we’re saying you get additional support if you get a girl into school over a boy, in a very difficult part of the country. You get more support if a child sits an exam and you get even more support if a child passes that exam.

“If you talk to any of my officials they’ll tell you that the Secretary of State is obsessed by results, and he insists that we pass the Mrs. Jones test. Mrs. Jones is a constituent in Sutton Coldfield, who is an aid-sceptic and she wants to know why and how this money is being spent. I must be able to account to her.”

I strongly suspect, though I don’t know for sure, that Mr. Mitchell is overemphasising the lack of impact assessment in Labour’s DFID. In theory, though, the current situation – a government filled with aid sceptics which is nonetheless committed to the 0.7% GDP promise – could be the best of both worlds, with the money forthcoming but no well-meaning waste tolerated. But we all know that demonstrating results in development, especially in the short term, is more complicated than it sounds. Is the danger of the “Mrs Jones approach” that money will be diverted from complex, long-term projects towards those where impact can be easily and quickly measured?

Tribal people: development’s victims?

Stephen Corry, director of the indigenous people’s organisation Survival International, has a striking and slightly bizarre piece on the Guardian website today.

What should development mean for those who are largely self-sufficient, getting their own food and building their dwellings where the water is still clean – like many of the world’s 150 million tribal people? Has development got anything helpful for them, or has it simply got it in for them?

It’s easy to see where it has led. Leaving aside the millions who succumbed to the colonial invasion, in some of the world’s most “developed” countries (Australia, Canada and the US) development has turned most of the survivors into dispossessed paupers. Take any measure of what it ought to mean: high income, longevity, employment, health; low rates of addiction, suicide, imprisonment and domestic violence, and you find that indigenous people in the US, Canada and Australia are by far the worst off on every count – but no one seems to heed the lesson…

Colonialism set out to take away their self-sufficiency, on their own territory, and lead them to glorious productivity, as menials, on someone else’s. There’s little point in calling for retroactive apologies for this because it’s not confined to the past: most development schemes foisted on tribal peoples today point in exactly the same direction. [My emphasis]

I realise that it may seem a handy rhetorical device to compare the effects of modern development schemes on tribal people with the effect of colonialism. But to bring in the treatment of indigenous peoples in North America and Australia seems wildly over-the-top. Does Corry really believe that African governments hold their tribal peoples in as much contempt as the American settlers held native Americans, who they saw as sub-human?

There’s no doubt that that modernisation schemes have often been forced onto unwilling tribal peoples, but Corry’s stated examples – the ban on thatched roofs in Rwanda, and a general tendency towards ‘integrationist’ boarding-school education – hardly warrant comparisons to the American near-genocide. Survival is a good organisation ensuring that an important voice is heard, and there are interesting debates to be had about how to raise living standards for the overwhelming majority of African’s poor who aren’t committed to a subsistence lifestyle with the minority who are. But I can’t see how this kind of attention-seeking argument helps move that debate forward at all.

Stephen L. Carter: Ending Charity Tax Break Will Hurt Poor Most

The novelist and Yale Law professor uses his Bloomberg column today to hit out at the growing Congressional consensus for reducing the tax breaks on charitable giving:

Opponents of the charitable deduction argue that it is regressive because it benefits those in high brackets more than those in low ones. This is trivially true, as it is of all tax deductions. An earner in the 35 percent tax bracket who gives $1,000 receives, in effect, a $350 subsidy. The earner in the 15 percent bracket who gives the same amount receives a subsidy of only $150.

But the argument once more misunderstands the purpose and function of the deduction. Its principal beneficiaries are not those who give, but those who receive. If I donate money directly to a local soup kitchen rather than requiring it to wade through the layers of paperwork and volumes of regulation required for obtaining even the mere chance of a direct government subsidy, everyone is better off — especially those who eat there.

This is certainly true, if the beneficiary is a soup kitchen. It’s less convincing if the beneficiary is an elite private school, orchestra or gallery – the common category of giving which Warren Buffet’s sister Doris calls ‘S.O.B’ – symphonies, opera and ballet.

So perhaps a compromise: find some way of classifying charitable activities into categories, depending on how much they actually benefit the poorest – and save the government money – and adjust the tax break accordingly for each category? In both the US and the UK, charitable status has been a ‘yes or no’ thing since time immemorial; is it time we recognised that some charitable activities are more truly charitable than others?

Obesity has upsides

Medical News Today reports:

People who are under or on the slightly lighter side of normal weight appear to have a higher risk of death in the 30 days following surgery than people who are on the heavier side of normal or overweight, according to a new study published online this week in the Archives of Surgery journal.

I doubt the effect outweighs the overall disadvantages of being overweight, health-wise, but it’s nice to hear something on the ‘pro’ side of the ledger.

AIDS deaths down, but so is funding

The Guardian:

There are now 6.6 million people on Aids drugs in low and middle-income countries, says the report, published on Monday, thanks to a dramatic 20% increase between 2009 and 2010. Some 34 million people are living with HIV. Deaths have dropped to 1.8 million a year, down from 2.2 million in the mid-2000s. About 2.5 million deaths have been averted in poor countries by the treatment roll-out. The report, published ahead of World Aids Day on 1 December, celebrates the progress against the virus and the possibility on the horizon of what US secretary of state Hillary Clinton recently called “an Aids-free generation”.

The news is mostly good. The figure of 34 million living with HIV may sound alarmingly high, but it’s more a measure of people with HIV living longer than of rising infections. Although the number of new infections is frustratingly high, the rate of annual infections has fallen 21% since 1997. As Hillary Clinton recently pointed out, retroviral drugs designed to treat HIV sufferers have also turned out to be effective at preventing transmission, helping slow the rate of new infections. (There’s a healthy debate about how much behaviour change, including abstinence, has helped as well.)

But what’s this?

But funding, which is now dropping for the first time since Aids appeared in New York and San Francisco 30 years ago, will be critical to maintaining progress, say experts. The UN estimates that $22bn is needed, but this year only $16bn was forthcoming from donors.

Good grief. The Guardian also recently reported that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria has effectively cancelled its latest round of grant-giving in response to the slowdown in funding. Those already receiving treatment should keep getting it, but expansion of programmes looks frozen till 2013.

The Arab Spring and the Arab-Israeli conflict: an optimistic interpretation

For all the excitement generated over the course of this year by the Arab Spring, there has been a general consensus that it is bad news for Israel. There has been much fretting – and glee in some quarters – that post-Arab Spring regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and hopefully ultimately Yemen and Syria will be less moderate in their relationships with Israel, and more aggressively pro-Palestinian, than their US-supported predecessors.

In the New York Times last week, however, Chatham House fellow Nadim Shehadi offered a different, more optimistic take. To Shahadi, the Arab Spring simply leaves the battle over Palestine looking like a conflict from the past.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is over, a thing of the past. It has been overtaken by the events and has lost its fizz — what is going on is far more exciting, but there is more to it than that…

For the young people driving change in the region, the conflict must seem so 20th century. It is what the Franco-Prussian War was for people like them in the 1920s. It is what their parents and grandparents were obsessed with, what the dictators whom they are revolting against derived their legitimacy from. Three generations of Arabs had their lives confiscated and their freedoms curtailed. They were told that no voice rises above the sound of the battle for Palestine. Any demands for reform or opposition to the regimes amounted to collaboration with the enemy in a perpetual war. Constitutions were suspended, emergency laws lasted 40 years and the conflict was always the excuse. The regimes used the “question of Palestine” to consolidate their own power, suppress all opposition and install an authoritarian structure that seemed immovable as long as there was an enemy to either fight or make peace with.

The Arab Spring is about freedom, justice and dignity everywhere, including Palestine, but the significant difference is that the protesters also want to move on from a situation where perpetuating the conflict was an end in itself. Old tricks do not work anymore. When dictators like the Mubaraks or Assads of this world tried to regain lost ground or divert attention from the revolts by clinging to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it simply did not pass muster. During those protests, American and Israeli flags were not burned. This was deliberate because the protesters wanted to show that the rules had changed. Palestine is no longer the hot potato, freedom is. Even the recent attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo was seen by many as a diversion from the continuing protests in Tahrir Square.

Shehadi is surely overstating his case a bit to make an impact, and he brushes away the occupation of the Embassy a little too easily. But this nonetheless seems like a more realistic measure of the attitude toward Israel of the young people driving the Arab Spring. Middle-class, educated, internet-connected young people are going to be well aware of the realities of the situation in the Occupied Territories, but also to have a proper sense of its importance in the context of change across the whole Middle East.

However, what Shehadi ignores is that just because it’s these educated middle-class young people who are leading the protests across the region doesn’t mean the governments that eventually emerge will reflect their view of things. So those who fear – or anticipate – that the emerging regimes could be colder towards Israel could still be proven right.

The battle for a plan B: diagrammed*

There seems to be an increasing recognition that some sort of adjustment needs to be made to tax and spending plans, both in the UK and US, in response to the alarmingly sluggish pace of economic recovery. There’s some discussion about ‘supply-side’ remedies, like further rounds of quantitative easing, but there’s considerable pessimism about their potential given that interest rates have already been so low for so long.

So some sort of change seems likely – inevitable in the US, following the deal over the debt ceiling. The question is what form the change will take. There are several big questions: is a short-term stimulus needed, or just a slowdown in austerity measures? If stimulus is needed, should it take the form of a reduction in taxes or a slowdown in spending cuts? If it’s tax cuts, should priority go to the rich, supposedly boosting business, or to the poor, increasing demand for goods?

Rather than attempt to answer any of these questions from a position of utter inexpertise, I thought I’d try to clarify who stands where. This diagram (click for a full-size version) is the result.

At present, pending the result of a treasury investigation into the effectiveness of the 50p top rate of tax, George Osborne’s position is essentially all deficit reduction, all the time. But he’s coming under pressure from senior Tories, Norman Lamont being the most public if not the most senior of them, to cut the top rate of tax quickly to enhance Britain’s competitiveness. In the US, the Republican party is united in its commitment to spending cuts and opposition to tax rises, but the stars of the party right now, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry, have both spoken in favour of further tax cuts, albeit on corporation tax rather than income tax. (Seriously, though, they’re similar things. When Mitt Romney says that corporations are people, let’s be honest, he means rich people.) Meanwhile, billionaire Warren Buffet delighted liberals this week with a call for higher taxes on America’s richest.

Vince Cable is committed, at least in public, to the Government’s spending reduction programme. He’s sympathetic to the need for a tax cut, but strongly believes it should benefit the poor and middle classes before the rich. His approach of preference is raising the personal income tax allowance to 10,000. A formal proposal of a ‘mansion tax’, which Cable is reported to favour, would shift him up and to the left, towards Buffet.

All of this leaves Labour, represented here by Ed Balls, in a fairly unique position – favouring slowing spending cuts rather than cutting taxes as their method of stimulus. The Labour left, represented (very lazily on my part) by Tony Benn, are in the Buffet camp – though given that the UK’s taxes on the rich are already higher than the US’ by some margin, it’s ‘more left-wing’ to hold that position in the UK than it is in the US.

A few observations:

• The box under Vince Cable says ‘reduce taxes on poor,’ but ‘reduce taxes on poor and middle class’ would be a better phrase. Lack of space, you know how it is.
• If nothing else, I hope this helps illustrate that the formulation ‘deficit reduction = right -wing, less deficit reduction = left-wing’ – which has been used to frame the debate, particularly in the UK – is hopelessly oversimplistic. Vince Cable’s and Norman Lamont’s tax changes would both slow the pace of deficit reduction, but it would be absurd to call Lamont’s call ‘left-wing.’
• If Labour wants to win the next election, it should keep doing what it’s doing, which is opposing the spending cuts. If it wants to save the economy, perhaps it should consider changing tack, and attempting to team up with the Liberals to prioritise tax cuts that benefit the poor over those that benefit the rich. (They might have a chance at splitting the coalition into the bargain.)
• You may well be thinking: where is Obama? To which the answer is: I wish I knew. In fact, putting this together emphasised for me just how fuzzy the President’s leadership of this debate in the US has been. Reports suggest he’s likely to propose extending the payroll tax cut from last year, which puts him in the Vince Cable position; and he opposed extending the Bush tax cuts on the rich, which puts him in the Buffet position. But his tendency towards deal-making (not entirely his own choice, of course) means that to a remarkable extent, he’s not associated with any particular economic policy.

I’m sure there are things about this which aren’t quite right, faces which could be helpfully added, and policy options missing. So please, suggest alterations below, and I’ll try to make a revised version incorporating them tomorrow.

*(Diagrammed? Diagram’d?)

 

Is 50p a failure?

Something close to a concensus is emerging: the 50p top rate of income tax doesn’t work. As The Guardian reports today, “A review into the rate is expected to confirm suspicions it does not bring in much revenue but serves to deter international business from locating in the UK at a time when the chancellor is seeking to encourage inward investment and spur growth.”

This is one of those issues where what ought to be a simple factual dispute descends into right and left interpretation. Is the 50p top rate – which was raised from 40p for those earning above £150,000 a year in 2009 – bringing in significant extra tax revenue, or isn’t it?

On the surface of it, the answer should be an obvious ‘yes’. You tax more, you get more revenue. But of course, it’s not that simple. The idea of the ‘Laffer curve,’ popularised in the 1970s, posits that increasing taxes raises revenue up to a point – but above a certain level, further tax increases actually reduce revenue by encouraging tax avoidance and discouraging entrepreneurship that leads to economic growth.

In the case of the 50p rate, it’s believed that it brings in little revenue largely because the rich are so adept at avoiding it. As economist Howard Reed explained earlier this year on the TUC’s Touchstone blog, there are multiple ways to do this: reclassifying income as capital gains, setting up a company, or leaving the country for lower-tax climes.

The problem is that it’s extremely hard to assess how much of this is taking place. And as Reed points out, some of the ‘analyses’ of the effect of the 50p tax rate make absurd assumptions about the way the rich respond to tax rises. A report by the Adam Smith Institute, published in March, estimated that the 50p rate could lead to £35bn lost tax revenue each year by spurring the rich to leave the country. But its figures, drawn from a survey of accountants, are ridiculous: the report assumes that between 12% and 23% of higher-rate taxpayers – those earning over £50,000 and paying 40% or 50% – will leave the country over the next ten years. Paul Daniels was bluffing, and clearly so are many of those surveyed.

Evidence from since the 50p rate was introduced suggests it’s actually bringing in substantial revenue. As economist and blogger Duncan Weldon explained in the Guardian in February,

The latest public sector borrowing figures have revealed an unexpectedly large surplus for January 2011. The Treasury repaid £3.7bn last month, surpassing expectations and representing the strongest month since July 2008 for the public finances.

The data shows that income tax receipts in January came in at £2.38bn – up by 17.8% on the year before. However receipts from national insurance contributions (NICs), which one would expect to move with income tax, rose by only 4.2% over the same period.

Last week’s labour market statistics showed that there had been no improvement in the overall labour market with the percentage of people aged 16 to 64 in work being static at 70.5% between December 2009 and December 2010. The same report said that average weekly earnings had grown by only 1.1% over the past year.

So we have a mystery – the number of people in work is fairly constant, earnings have only increased by 1.1% and NICs are only up by 4.4% and yet income tax revenues are up by nearly 18%.

The most likely explanation is that higher income tax receipts partially represent the new 50p rate kicking in and rasing [sic] revenue.

Of course, this is a rather rough-and-ready analysis. It’s perfectly possible that the Treasury’s investigation will reveal that the 50p top rate has, in fact, brought in very little revenue. But how much is ‘very little’? Would £1 billion a year extra revenue be sufficient? £2 billion?

It’s likely that the decision to cut the top rate has already been made, and the multiple leaks suggesting it isn’t working are merely an attempt to prepare the public for a cut. Hopefully the Government, which likes to trumpet its (admittedly seemingly genuine) commitment to openness, will release the relevant data in detail for experts to pore over.

If the evidence really does show that the 50p top rate hasn’t worked, it will delight Conservative voters and be extraordinarily hard for Labour supporters to swallow. New Labour’s failure to raise the top rate of tax provoked almost as much annoyance amongst the party rank and file as Iraq or tuition fees.

But the real question, of course, is how the Liberal Democrats will respond. Danny Alexander, after all, said just two weeks ago that those urging a cut in the top rate were in “cloud cuckoo land.”

World poverty falling at fastest-ever rate

The UN has just released its latest annual progress report on the Millennium Development Goals and, with just four years to go, the news is surprisingly good. But there are weak points, too.

The good news: The world is on track to beat the most important goal, a halving of the number of people living in extreme poverty (on less than the equivalent of $1.25 a day) from 1990 levels by 2015. The target required the proportion of people in the world living in extreme poverty to fall to 23%. It’s already there, and is expected to fall below 15% by 2015, with less than 900 million people living in extreme poverty.

This impressive progress is down largely to rapid economic growht and poverty reduction in East Asia, particulary China. 30 years ago, according to development expert Laurence Chandy, 84% of China’s population lived below the poverty line; by 2005, that had fallen to 16%. According to the UN, by 2015 it’s expected to be less than 5%. China’s decision to open itself up to international trade in 1978 has driven the most rapid poverty reduction in the history of mankind. India, which has also opened itself heavily up to trade since 1990, has reduced its rate from 51% to a projected 22% in 2015. Between them, India and China will have seen almost a billion people leaving poverty between 1990 and 2015.

And now, here’s the bad news: Outside East Asia, the picture is much less impressive. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the region of the world most afflicted by poverty, the poverty rate in 2015 is projected to be around 36%. That’s slightly better than expected, but still leaves hundreds of millions in extreme poverty. What’s more, while poverty is declining, hunger isn’t: after reducing throughout the 1990s, the proportion of people in developing countries who are undernourished has been stuck at 16% since 2000, thanks to rising food prices. In Several African countries more than 35% of the population is undernourished.

The report also notes that aid from rich countries, while at record highs, isn’t matching up to the promises made in 2005 at the Gleneagles G8 summit after the Make Poverty History campaign and Live 8 concerts. Aid donations were $128.7bn last year, $19bn short of the Gleneagles agreements, with Africa particularly suffering as it’s the most dependent on aid, the Guardian reports.

All Headline News identifies some other striking facts, which give a similarly mixed picture. The use of anti-malarial mosquito nets, one of the classic examples of a low-cost, effective aid intervention, has increased substantially in recent years, with 75% of at-risk people in Africa now covered. (I suspect that’s down to the work of bodies like the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria). On the other hand, funding for family planning – crucial to help reduce child mortality and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS – has declined over the last decade.

Overall, it seems the developed world is going to ‘get away with’ the MDGs without really deserving to. Enough MDGs are likely to be met that ‘victory’ will be declared, when outside India and China progress has been spotty, slow – and under-funded. When the MDGs are over in 2015, there’s a strong case for the next set of development targets to be more focused on particular regions that have furthest to go, especially Africa. Furthermore, as development progresses, more thought will have to be given to ensuring it doesn’t come at the cost of rapid increases in carbon emissions.

Still, let’s not dwell on the negative. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990, and that’s a great thing.

A milestone reached: energy from renewables overtakes nuclear in US

The amount of energy being supplied from renewable sources in the US has overtaken the amount being supplied from nuclear stations for the first time, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

In its latest Monthly Energy Review, the EIA noted that in the first quarter of 2011 renewable sources generated 11.73% of total US energy production, well more than the 6.1% provided by nuclear power. Renewable production was up 11% from the same time in 2010, and 25% from the same time in 2009.

There’s something of a catch, though: we’re not just talking wind and solar power here. 48% of the renewable energy came from biomass and biofuels; some campaigners question whether these are really renewable, and they have historically benefited from heavy subsidies that are expected to be removed in the next few years. Hydropower accounted for a striking 35.4%; wind, 13%, geothermal 2.5% and solar a mere 1%.

It’s also worth noting that this is as a proportion of total energy production, rather than just electricity production; the proportion of electricity production that was from renewables is slightly higher, 13%, less than the roughly 20% provided by nuclear.

Nevertheless, we’re not going to grumble about this small, but significant, turning milestone.

How astronaut wee could save lives on Earth

When the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches for the final shuttle mission later today, it will be packed with all sorts of high-tech gadgetry. But one simple new tool could have the potential to one day save millions of lives back on Earth. And it involves piss.

NASA has perfected a new, lightweight tool to turn astronaut wee into safe, drinkable liquid. Urine recycling has always been done in space, but previous systems required electricity to function. The new system uses a simple syringe to pull urine through the special filter, leaving a potable, if apparently rather sugary, water drink.

This is great for astronauts, as it reduces the weight of the shuttle. But it could also have huge potential in areas of drought. A low-cost way to safely recycle urine could help keep people alive where water is scarce.

Three striking new British energy efficiency initiatives

NewNet reports on two interesting new energy-efficiency initiatives being pioneered in the UK, both involving public-sector bodies outsourcing energy reduction tasks to the private sector.

First, the UK Government is extending a scheme to contract out ‘energy management’ in Government buildings to power company British Gas Business and public-service contractor Amey. Under the contract, BGB and Amey will manage the energy use for 90% of the buildings used by the Home Office, a large government department. The contractors will be responsible for upgrading systems and encouraging energy conservation, with a view to saving the Home Office £1.3m and shrinking its carbon footprint by 15%. An eight-month trial run has reportedly saved the Home Office £212,000.

Second, a National Health Service body, Taunton and Somerset Foundation Trust, has entered a partnership with Schneider Electric to reduce their hospital’s energy consumption by up to 40%, saving up to £17m over 20 years. Schneider will invest £7.2m into the scheme to cover startup costs, including setting up a ‘consumption management system’ and standard energy-efficiency measures. The project will be funded entirely from savings on energy costs.

At a time when the UK government is cutting back substantially on public spending, it seems financial pressures are pushing public sector bodies to deepen energy efficiency efforts, which is great news.

But the private sector is getting in on the act, too. BusinessGreen reports that under a new scheme proposed by the public-private partnership Low-Carbon London, 30 large London businesses will sign contracts rewarding them for reducing electricity use during peak hours. Primarily, this is intended to reduce the need for expensive upgrades to London’s electricity grid. But spreading-out of demand is an important adaptation we need to make for to reduce the overall level of power we need to generate.

All these schemes are new and somewhat experimental. But of all the steps needed to curb emissions, energy efficiency steps are often the simplest and most cost-effective – indeed, they save money. Hopefully this sort of innovation will become more commonplace.

And they’d have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for that pesky Prince

A nice detail about the phone-hacking saga is pointed out in the Telegraph today:

It was two tiny, innocuous stories tucked away on an inside page that began the chain of events that destroyed the newspaper.

In November 2005, Clive Goodman, the paper’s royal editor, wrote a brief story revealing that Prince William had strained a tendon in his knee and sought medical advice. A week later, he revealed that the prince had borrowed some broadcasting equipment from his friend Tom Bradby, an ITV journalist.

The stories baffled Royal officials, since so few people knew about them. In a conversation between Bradby and the prince, the two established that the information could only have come from voicemails they had left one another.

Those suspicions led to a police inquiry. In January 2007, Goodman was jailed for four months for intercepting mobile phone messages.

He was not alone in the dock. With him was Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who had worked extensively for the News of the World…

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Tunisia to invest $2bn in solar exports

One of fondest hopes of renewable-energy advocates is that solar power in North Africa could meet much of the world’s energy needs. Indeed, there’s some evidence a Saraha covered with solar panels could power the entire world (though there are lots of issues with power storage and transmission to be sorted out).

But there’s been very little actual development of solar in North Africa. Hopefully, that’s about to change. Tunisia plans to invest $2bn in new solar projects in the next few years, Bloomberg reports. Most of the power generated would be sold to Europe, providing a great new revenue stream for Tunisia and helping the EU meet its carbon reduction targets.

Two new breakthroughs in solar nanotechnology

And pleasingly, they’re both by British scientists. The first, by teams from Cambridge and Sheffield (go Sheffield!), involves nano-scale solar cells made of polymers which could be printed on substances quickly and cheaply, raising the possibility of ubiqitous low-cost solar panels on everyday objects.

Dr Andrew Parnell of the University of Sheffield says that this could provide an economical alternative to current solar cell production methods: “Rather than using complex and expensive fabrication methods to create a specific semiconductor nanostructure, high volume printing could be used to produce nano-scale (60 nanometers) films of solar cells that are over a thousand times thinner than the width of a human hair. These films could then be used to make cost-effective, light and easily transportable plastic solar cell devices such as solar panels.”

The second isn’t about solar electricity at all, but solar fuels. Researchers from the Universities of East Anglia, York, Nottingham and Manchester are experimenting with using tiny light-absorbing semiconductors to power chemical reactions.

The consortium has already found a way to produce hydrogen from water using the ‘solar-nano’ device, which has potentially revolutionary applications in the green car market. Now they are looking at how to use the same technology to create alternatives for other fuels and feedstock chemicals, including turning methane into liquid methanol and carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide.

“Our sun provides far more energy than we will ever need, but we use it really inefficiently,” said Professor Wendy Flavell, from The University of Manchester’s Photon Science Institute. “To make better use of the fantastic resource we have in our sun, we need to find out how to create solar fuel that can be stored and shipped to where it is needed and used on demand.”

Both projects are years away from commercial use, but they’re a reminder that the renewable energy technologies we see now could look radically different – and better – in ten years’ time.