Dan Kieran

by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)

  But perhaps there’s nothing to worry about. Perhaps the world’s politicians have everything in hand and are already preparing to switch over to the new energy economy (not to mention an alternative water supply) but they just haven’t told us. When it comes to ending our dependence on cheap oil, the one major stumbling block these politicians face is that a more sustainable way of living would mean opposing large corporate interests that want to make as much money as possible from oil while they still can. To maintain short-term profits, every last drop of money must be squeezed from the cheap oil economy. OPEC countries are lobbying governments to oppose anything that might damage the profitability of oil in the short term - such as preparations for a new energy economy. This is from The End of Oil again: ‘The Saudis ... have gone so far as to file complaints with the World Trade Organization claiming that European programs to cut C02 emissions unfairly constrain the Saudi oil trade. “We are against any policy that unfairly discriminates against oil,” one top Saudi oil official told me bluntly. “We want to keep oil the fuel of choice.”’ Given the power corporate interests have in Whitehall, we can be forgiven for being pessimistic about our leaders having the courage to lead us into a more sustainable and peaceful future.

  In my view, whether our leaders manage the transition or not will have no impact on the way our lives will have to change in the end. All they can control is how smoothly this transition occurs. When we move over to a new energy economy we will be forced to move away from the ever-expanding economy with its working mindset; we will have to start thinking about our use of energy and listen to a simple, sustainable, common-sense mindset instead. The one bonus of living in a sustainable way is that it will actually give us lives based around living rather than the ones we currently have which are based around overworking and over-consuming.

  When the price of oil begins its inevitable rise transportation will increasingly become a luxury few will be able to afford on a daily basis. That doesn’t mean we won’t be able to afford to use cars or heat our homes, but we will have to start paying a realistic price for our energy use. Where energy is concerned, the two basic factors are supply and demand. With increased prices, demand will hopefully begin to reach more sustainable levels. The electricity meter will probably move out of some dark corner of your home and be put on the wall by your kitchen clock instead so you can keep an eye on what you’re spending. The car will be taken out only a few times a month on special occasions. To save money, people will begin to think more about energy efficiency and adopt a more responsible attitude towards an issue we have been complacent about for far too long. There are even suggestions that in the future taxation could move away from your income and become entirely based on your use of energy instead. Whichever way you look at it, things are set to radically change.

  This new world isn’t something to fear, providing we force our government to take action to prepare for it now. But that involves hard choices the large energy companies won’t like. Britain is unusual for having nuclear energy in private hands, which is the primary reason why we should be highly suspicious of it as the answer to the situation we face. Any expert will tell you that nuclear power is absurdly expensive. In every country where it is used extensively it has massive public subsidies. According to one energy expert I spoke to, nuclear is at best ‘a sticking plaster on the broken leg of our energy crisis’. It does have one thing going for it in the eyes of private industry though: it’s very profitable, whereas other renewable options are less so. But the government has to start thinking beyond the needs of shareholders.

  We do have one energy resource we can rely on, one we can guarantee will always be there, come what may, twelve months, six years, eighty years from now, and it’s wind. Some people don’t like the idea of having wind farms all around our coastline or in picturesque parts of the country, but they simply have not grasped the seriousness of our predicament, or they think they will be dead when disaster strikes so they don’t care. Once you’ve bought wind turbines and the infrastructure they require, your only costs are maintenance. You don’t have to decommission a wind turbine, or worry about terrorists flying planes into them to cause a national catastrophe.

  The biggest danger nuclear power poses to our future energy security is the effcct putting so much public faith in it will have on our renewable energy options. People in the City will not invest substantial amounts of money in any alternative energy resource unless the government safeguards their profits, so all the money the government has for our future energy security will go to nuclear if that is the choice they make. Wind and other renewable resources desperately need that subsidy in order to develop because while we still have relatively cheap oil they will never be competitive. As the oil crisis bites they will become so, but only if they are already in place. Any large-scale transition from one energy resource to another will be hugely difficult to perform; one without long-term planning would spell economic and political disaster. If, however, the transition to wind was given the funding and time it required we could combine the extensive use of wind power with a smaller amount of LNG and then we would be far more self-sufficient than we are today, which would make us more secure and less reliant on countries like Russia and Iran for our energy. If you accept that we have no choice but to change the way we live then you have to have an alternative energy source that is effective but, above all, secure. There’s no use lurching from one energy crisis to another when we can solve the problem once and for all now. We have our own wind, and it’s free. We don’t have, or are rapidly running out of, our own oil and gas.

  Perhaps the biggest fear when it comes to living sustainably, though, is the notion that we will be forccd to regress into a black-and-white world where rationing blights our daily lives. The truth will be the opposite. Everything will improve if our attitude to energy begins to change. We will not be staring at an apocalyptic vision if we have the courage to win the energy battle by doing what is necessary now and stop allowing ourselves to be hamstrung by a fear of change and the desire of those with stocks-and-shares portfolios to stick with the status quo. If transportation costs skyrocket and you can’t get around the country as freely as you used to, then the ‘break-up’ of family life may start to reverse as families relocate nearer to each other than they are today in order to see each other more easily. The social benefits of that are incalculable. Massive out-of-town shopping malls and supermarkets will find it hard to survive if the costs of their products increase and people begin to tighten their belts. Enormous corporations rely on the low production costs of overseas goods to drive prices down and eliminate any opposition that can’t compete with the sheer scale of their buying power. If we begin to source more locally produced food and clothes, because they’ll be cheaper than foreign imports on account of not having to be moved around the globe to get here, not only will local entrepreneurs begin to thrive but our high streets will probably start to shed their ubiquitous branding and become more individual too. And in that kind of environment people will have a much more realistic chance of changing the way they work. People will become far more entrepreneurial. We might even become a nation of shopkeepers again. If the big corporations begin to collapse, our economy won’t fall apart even if the stock market does because people will fill the gaps with their own small-scale, high-quality operations. It’s still business, but it’s the kind of business that builds communities and retains profits in the local area.

  Even in our current economic situation, my small family has found that an ‘idle’ life based on two part-time wages provides enough money to live on very comfortably if you don’t have debt and you don’t gorge yourself on buying things you don’t need. We don’t wear rags, eat lentils, forgo deodorant or act all smug and self-satisfied, we just buy things we can afford instead of things we can’t (sec Appendix: The Seven Steps to the Idle Life for more information). But there is no blueprint or ‘expert’ who can tell you how things will have to change for you and your family. Y
ou’ll have to work out how you can live in a different way by looking at your own circumstances and thinking about it yourself. Of course, some people’s jobs are so badly paid that they can barely survive on two fulltime salaries let alone one, but that is something the government needs to sort out with their friends in the boardrooms and tax havens of the world rather than evidence of the supposed impracticality of living in a more sustainable way.

  When I was young I listened to stories from my grandparents and great uncles and aunts about the sacrifices their generation was prepared to make during the wars to safeguard their children’s future. Sacrifice isn’t a word you hear very often today. As I write this, my eighteen-month-old son Wilf is sitting on the other side of our kitchen table gradually falling asleep while eating his lunch. He’s just starting to drink out of a normal cup and I’m very, very excited about that. Life to him is all about enquiry and wonder. He has no conception of the state of the world he lives in but he trusts Rachel and me to look out for him and protect him. He’s not even aware that he expects that of us. He takes it for granted, and so he should. His generation should also be able to take for granted that we will look after this country for them. It’s time we took the responsibility our grandparents and great-grandparents were prepared to take for us in the battle we are facing.

  If we don’t start thinking about our way of life soon our children will be left in the kind of nightmare we can barely imagine. The good news, if you can call it that, is that whichever way you look at it we are soon going to be forced into living in a more sustainable and self-sufficient way. I don’t mean we’ll all be living like Richard Briers in The Good Life, although that will appeal to some, but as a nation we will all have to pull together to find a new way of life for the future. And it could be a very bright future: a highly advanced technological country running on clean, renewable energy where family and community ties are gradually being restored and where the economy is based on small-scale businesses that feed their profits back into the communities in which they operate. Now, lots of people will start throwing in practical questions like, ‘Who’s going to pay for schools and hospitals in this small-scale utopian future?’ I don’t have the answer to that because I don’t know what the future holds. The question for them to answer, though, is what their alternative is, because our current way of life will be far from viable. If we’re going to get the opportunity to reorganize things then let’s start designing the future we want now rather than allowing our fear to push us into the unknown completely unprepared.

  It would certainly make sense to set up a few test-case ‘future communities’ with the kinds of parameters imposed on them we could expect in an expensive energy future. We could try to model what the future is likely to hold in terms of energy supplies and pricing, and ban large corporations so that new small-business initiatives could grow and give us some idea of how viable part-time, energy-conscious working communities could be. I’m certain there would be no shortage of volunteers to go and live in a place with values like those. If these communities flourished we could roll out more, gradually, in time for our energy transition. If they didn’t work we’d have time to go back to the drawing board and come up with some different ideas.

  None of this changes the global implications of an energy crisis, but you can only change the way you live and hope others follow your example. If we were seen to be doing something radical, others would take notice. After all, Britain started the world off on the road of shareholders and an ever-expanding economy with the Industrial Revolution so perhaps it’s also our responsibility to lead the world out of this mess. It would be better to assume that role in the world than the one we currently hold. Success would inspire others, and who knows where that could lead.

  If things do become more decentralized then power will have to become decentralized in many ways too. To make that happen we will need to find a political party committed to giving power away the moment it gets into office, and that, we have to accept, is not hugely likely. To persuade our leaders that they need to take a different approach to the way government and this country is politically organized will require the kind of sea-change in political opinion that eradicated slavery in the days of Empire, and apartheid in 1990s South Africa. The way we waste our time and energy today will one day be viewed with as much disdain. It won’t be easy, and it will require a great deal of public protest and unprecedented demonstrations of public support if it is to have any hope of success. The simple fact is that we could be talking about preparing for a different way of life in thirty years’ time. Every person in any position of political or corporate power is over fifty, so we have to persuade them to act against their own interests, whether it’s their company’s share price or the lifespan of their careers, for the sake of a future they will probably not live to see. Clearly it will take something extraordinary for that to occur.

  Worryingly, as we have seen, our civil liberties are now in a perilous state, giving us less and less control over the political process and removing our ability to question or complain without fear of arrest. If the energy crisis does take hold of the world in the way Jim the energy expert, Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil, and many other experts and amateurs I’ve spoken to seem to think, then we will have least control over our lives at a time when we’ll be most in need of it.

  Of course I’m no expert. One thing is certain, though: a period of economic instability is not very far off. The stock market cannot keep rising, as it has historically, if our cheap energy supplies begin to drain away, and then trusting one’s long-term financial security to the stock exchange will not make economic sense. Those over forty who still believe in retirement on account of the amount of money they have already saved in pension plans will have to find somewhere else to invest their money, but that will involve a fight with the government too. It’s impossible to believe that the wholesale withdrawal of the money currently in the nation’s pension funds will not impact severely on the profitability of the stock market, and the government simply won’t allow that to happen. If we could unshackle ourselves from the stock exchange, however, we would be less dependent on a financial system that fails us and tears our communities apart.

  If the prices of daily goods begin to rise because of increased transportation costs and a stock market fall causes the economy to falter as we all start tightening our belts, then we’ll be in a situation called ‘stagflation’ where costs and unemployment rise while incomes fall. At that point debt will becomc the biggest problem in all our lives. Bankruptcies will snowball and business leaders will start to lobby the government to tighten restrictions as more and more people decide that in a future of no cheap energy and decentralized power things like credit ratings - and all other aspects of our global economic structure, like insurance — seem rather pointless, and they default on all their loans. If faith in our economic system falls away to any large degree then life is likely to get rather unstable.

  If things were to get that unstable then civil rights might well suddenly become far more valuable than they seem to be to us today. Those in the future who recall Maya Evans being arrested for reading out the names of dead soldiers by the Cenotaph may also recall the words of Winston Churchill with horror: ‘If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.’51 After all, if the government is capable of going to war without telling its population the truth, what other decisions might it make ‘for our own good’ in a time of real crisis? In a country in the grip of that scenario, having to carry an ID card may begin to feel a little more oppressive than it would today. The police would certainly want to use every form of control in their armoury to maintain publi
c order, even if the public want them to do the opposite. All of a sudden a constitution to safeguard basic principles of freedom of expression, protest, privacy, and no detention without trial becomes something we all actually need to rely on again, for the first time since 1215. We certainly owe it to future generations, who may rely on these civil liberties, not to allow those in power to take them from us today. The fact that we are in a position to have high standards at all makes us even more obliged not to allow them to be arbitrarily removed.

  The people in power and the members of the CBI stalking the corridors in Whitehall will laugh heartily at this and say how preposterous it is to suggest there will be such a crisis and how ‘unrealistic’ it is to live in such a radical (i.e. fulfilling) way. They’ll be quite content to carry on as they are, like King Canute commanding the tide not to come in. But it isn’t written in stone that things have to be the way they are. There is no law of humanity that says our current way of life is the only way of doing things. Just because no-one else has had the time to come up with any workable alternatives doesn’t mean they don’t exist.