30 months and counting



In many areas of life there are clear early warnings if you are about to do something stupid or self-destructive. One of my favourites is the unambiguous sign that reads ‘Danger of death’.

You’ll find it on fences surrounding electricity substations, attached to the feet of pylons and slightly mysterious doors on the London Underground. Successful signage changes behaviour. Today we’re left in no doubt that if you smoke you will rot from within and be cursed by your children. Drink drive and you will be compulsorily transported back in time to the 1970s. Some warnings can however seem redundant. Such as when you buy a hot tea or coffee and the cup alerts you to the fact that the liquid it contains may be hot.

But where, for example in the midst of Britain’s much hyped oil shale and gas boom, is the sign hung on the economy that reads: "Continued belief in the possibility of indefinite fossil-fuel-powered economic growth will wreck civilisation?"

Its conspicuous absence means vital decisions get debated in a vacuum. It was bad enough that Heathrow airport announced its climate busting expansion plans on the day the world learned of the likely inevitable break-up of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Debating aviation growth without addressing climate change is a bit like jumping out of a plane and forgetting about gravity.

As a result, over time, the map of the world will be rewritten and vast coastal populations be forced to relocate (many of the world’s mega-cities from New York to Mumbai are by the sea). Worse was that we were warned of that likelihood back in 1978 by J Mercer and chose to ignore it. Now it seems that without some extraordinary turnaround, the ice will groan for years in lamentation like nature’s Greek chorus at our folly and hubris.

But even when the writing on the wall does get read, there’s no guarantee that someone won’t bang our heads against it. Shell produced a briefing in a tortuous attempt to convince its shareholders that the company faced no threat from having a huge chunk of its fossil fuel reserves branded unusable – or as "stranded assets".

The very real challenge comes because climate science tells us that about 80% of known reserves must remain in the ground. Cleverly Shell manages to acknowledge the generally accepted (if too conservative) 2C target as a danger threshold for warming in the same sentence that it dismisses it, positioning itself as one of many who see no chance of it being met. In which case, of course, their reasoning flows with perfect self-fulfilling prophecy, what would be the point of acting to ensure that it could be met?

As further justification to read but dismiss the writing on the wall, it cites the International Energy Agency’s projections for a massive increase in fossil fuel use. It conveniently omits that these scenarios all put the world on course for climate catastrophe. Their argument is that the global economy will need oil because it fuels development. They don’t mention the endemic corruption and environmental destruction that mark the sector and which leaves countries more cursed than developed.

The former mayor of Bogota, Enrique Peñalosa, captured perhaps a better vision of development when he said that progress was not when the poor had cars, but when the rich used public transport. Another case in which warnings were so unwelcome that the wall practically fell on the writer was the historic $19bn (£11bn) ruling against Chevron over liability for decades of damage in Ecuador. Speaking recently at the Hay Festival a key lawyer involved in bringing the case, Steven Donziger, described how, not only had the oil company fought with countless lawyers and PR firms, to avoid paying (successfully so far), but also aggressively pursued many of the people who helped the case come to court.

That’s an extreme counter-signal: dare to do the right thing and you will be punished. But there are plenty of others creating a confusion of signs worthy of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus. The flip side is: do the wrong thing and you will be rewarded. In May, the man once in charge of BP, Tony Hayward, who implied that the Deepwater Horizon disaster was just a drop in the ocean of the Gulf of Mexico, saw his career advance by being made chairman of the mining and commodities corporate giant Glencore Xstrata.

There’s a more difficult category in which signs are seen, yet considered not to matter, or other fantastical ones come into view which eclipse reality altogether. Interviewed about renewed interest in rising inequality since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital, the neo-liberal economist Andrew Lilico responded on the BBC Today Programme that inequality simply "didn’t matter". In a subsequent social media exchange he went on to make the exotic claim that material resources were effectively "infinite", before promptly vanishing from Twitter.

Perhaps the most trusted gambit relied on when all the signs point toward the overwhelming need for change in your sector is the economic equivalent of flipping the bird: threaten to leave the country. Bankers do it constantly, still. And the lack of financial re-regulation in the UK suggests that, however hollow, it works.

Rent seeking is the best term in economics to describe the economy of recent years and the rise of the ‘1%.’ It is obtaining gain without reciprocal benefits to broader society. Private landlords gave us the phrase and, with new controls proposed over literal and metaphorical rent seeking, they have also started to threaten an exodus.

Most recently this threat-of-choice has been used by Cuadrilla, the company pushing development of shale gas in Britain. As The Times neatly put it, Cuadrilla has, "threatened to pull out unless the law is changed to allow it to drill under people’s homes without their permission."



Recent estimates suggest that as little as 1% of some stated shale oil reserves and only 10% of gas may be recoverable. But, unintentionally, Cuadrilla may just have sent the best and clearest sign yet for a rather different change of energy policy that every householder in Britain can understand and cannot ignore.