It's time for tree-based economics

 

Will Hatchett wonders how long it will be before value is directly linked to carbon impact. He argues that this concept could be the basis of a global currency – the tree

 

It used to be tie-dyed and counter cultural. But, in the past fifty years, a slightly heavy-seeming guest has joined the environmental movement. Blame Star Trek and Dr Spock. A pointy-headed person with a puzzled expression is now lounging on the beanbags at the save-the-world party – an economist.

 

It is becoming increasingly clear that to stave off destruction of planetary ecosystems, we will need to quantify the elements of nature. Carbon was the first candidate. Carbon is being chased down and measured everywhere, as companies pursue the desirable and investment-friendly goal of net zero – not just as direct emissions from burning fossil fuels, but the carbon ‘embodied’ in the making and moving of things.

 

Sophisticated data capture, using AI, and venture capital investment are driving this process. Financial technology (or fintech), which led to a welcome DIY culture in the investment world, has spawned cleantech and proptech and other yet-to-be named disciplines. Some of this, of course, is PR hype. But some of it isn’t. Surprise, surprise, some investors don’t just want to be rich – but to be ‘nice rich’. This can be interpreted as self-interest – if the planet dies, we all die. Even if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos get to Mars, in their home-made rocket ships, most people expect that it won’t go well for them.

 

The Gaia hypothesis, popularised by the English scientist and futurist James Lovelock in the 1970s, was backed by some serious-looking maths, but it was basically a simple concept – the planet and everything upon it as an interconnected network of linked and self-regulating systems, forming a single entity. This touchy-feely notion was perfect for its time.

 

Society is less polychrome now. The atmosphere at the save-the-world party is serious. The walls are grey. We’re protecting the biosphere here guys! Everybody has a laptop. Compared to the 1970s, humans have access to vast computational power. But all save-the-world scenarios need a wild-haired genius, scribbling forests of runic equations on the wall. Today, they would probably be an economist.

 

The reason? Financial markets and capital flows, albeit guided by political jurisdictions, have sculpted and formed the damaged world that we are living in, since the first industrial revolution – the agri-deserts that stretch to the horizon, the plastic-souped oceans with their eutrophic dead zones. Ergo it is markets than can save us.

 

Investments and capital flows are shaped by measurement. Measurement facilitates comparison. But we’ve been doing it wrong, bro. Money, as a medium of exchange forms one ecosystem interacting with that of commodities being moved around and made into other things. Other than by the simple law of supply and demand the relationship between the two ecosystems is non-contingent. What if they were more directly connected?

 

Rise of natural capital

 

It’s hard to reliably measure the benefits of more sustainable activities, in a way that allows meaningful comparison. That’s why nature is now being evaluated for its ‘ecosystem services’ and as ‘natural capital’ and converted into currency value. In 2020, the asset value of UK natural capital was estimated by Defra at £1.8trn ¹. This can be a useful exercise, for example, in calculating the environmental impact of a new project, and it is being used for this purpose – but it can be accused of subjectivity.

 

Perhaps this methodology is a transitional one. Damage to the biosphere, associated with climate change and mass global extinctions, has been caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. We need to reduce carbon from energy generation, travel, manufacturing and farming and we know that low carbon activities are socially beneficial and that they heal earth and water and their resources.

 

Technology is close to being able to generate a carbon impact number (CIN) for all products and services. This could serve as parallel unit of value for consumers and would greatly influence markets – the demand for fast fashion, for example, which is responsible for a tenth of the world’s ghg emissions ², would significantly fall. But we could move beyond this. Here’s my idea. The average amount of carbon sequestered by an average mature tree in one year, could form one unit of carbon currency – the tree.

 

Some people see crypto currency as a universal, neo-utopian means of exchange, arguing that it can serve as a global reserve currency and is accessible to those with no access to conventional financial services, such as bank accounts. There is another candidate for a non-fungible exchange token – the tree.

 

Trees wrap up a load of environmental benefits. They absorb carbon. They look good. They produce food and many other valuable products. They can be integrated with sustainable arable farming systems and animal husbandry. Humans have always lived amidst trees. But we started to clear them on a landscape-changing scale in the Neolithic era, long before the first industrial revolution.

 

A tree is a quantum – the smallest and most holistic practicable unit of natural goodness that we have – perfect as a unit of exchange and as a symbol of good intent. And trees are already being traded to provide carbon credits in carbon offsetting markets.

 

We may have missed out on delivering of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. We had actually made significant progress on many of them before the Covid pandemic and the Ukraine War. I would argue that the adoption of carbonaceous economics could be a key development on the path to a better world. It’s like taking the building blocks of capitalism, scattering them across the ground and setting them up again. What would Marx have thought?

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He has written for the Guardian and the New Statesman and was editor of a weekly, then monthly magazine, Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own

1 UK naturalcapital accounts: 2022

 

 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/bulletins/uknaturalcapitalaccounts/2022

 

 2 Can fashionever be sustainable?

 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200310-sustainable-fashion-how-to-buy-clothes-good-for-the-climate

On sugar, salt and school dinners

In an obesogenic society, we need the state to help make our lives more healthy

 

Was anyone else listening to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in the early hours of the morning on the 27th of December? Improbably, I was. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver used his guest-editing slot to highlight the issue of how state intervention could improve children’s health.

 

His stimulating reflections and interviews set me thinking how old-fashioned the notion of the state intervening to improve diet and lifestyle, has now become. Oliver’s first TV series on the nutritional failings of school meals was aired on Channel 4 in 2005. Its invective against chicken nuggets led to a playground rebellion, possibly from parents more than children. But, over time, it struck a chord and has been extremely successful.

 

In today’s world, campaigns to steer adults and children towards healthier lifestyles and diets, as they once did, might seem utopian and fanciful. Which is where Jamie Oliver and premiership footballer Marcus Rashford – another celebrity food campaigner – come in.

 

A lot of good ideas seem utopian until they are promoted by an influential champion. Shouldn’t school meals be free in all UK primary schools as they are in Scotland? Shouldn’t the sugary drinks tax, whose future is now uncertain, be extended to non-sugary unhealthy foods. Shouldn’t we prevent the pre-watershed advertising of junk food on television?

 

These were Jamie Oliver’s proposals. He argued that such measures will help children do better at school, to the benefit of the economy, and save the NHS money, pointing out that we are spending huge sums on a reactive health service that is mopping up the consequence of binge drinking and unhealthy eating.

 

Lifestyle politics

 

National policies which advocating moving health spending upstream to prevent people from becoming ill because of their diets and lack of exercise and, later, specific campaigns to reducing smoking prevalence and obesity were the hallmarks of New Labour from 1997 – it was called ‘lifestyle politics’.

 

The approach continued, in a reduced form, in the party’s second term, from 2001. During New Labour’s third term, in 2007, following a sustained campaign from the environmental health profession, smoking in public enclosed places was banned – the measure was vigorously opposed across the media at the time and portrayed as draconian, but, in practice, it has proved extremely popular with the public.

 

A common argument of the political right and some parts of the left is to say that it’s not the state’s business to intervene in diet or lifestyle, that ‘sin taxes’, for example on unhealthy foods and alcohol, are ‘nanny state’ measures and that they have an undue financial impact those on low incomes. However, to the consternation of right-wing commentators, the coalition government, from 2010, continued to pursue, albeit in a watered -down form, some of the policies of New Labour.

 

It introduced a ‘voluntary public health responsibility deal’, in 2011, through which businesses signed up to promoting healthier diets and physical activity. In 2012, the coalition published an alcohol strategy, including the concept of minimum unit pricing, now successfully introduced in Wales and Scotland – but not England. Public Health England (PHE,) created in 2013, was given a specific mandate to reduce health equality.

 

PHE's first CEO, Duncan Selbie, talked a lot about the need to cut obesity, smoking prevalence and excessive drinking as a means to improve the nation's health. Unhealthy lifestyles, as he often pointed out, are the largest contributory factors to diabetes and cardiovascular disease – change them and we could save the NHS billions. Public Health England was abolished in 2020 after a mere seven years. It had ruffled feathers by being ‘too political’.

 

Sugar and salt taxes on hold

 

As coalition chancellor, George Osborne, who was interviewed on Jamie Oliver’s Today programme, was happy to use fiscal levers to nudge people towards health. It was Osborne who introduced a sugary drinks tax in his March 2016 budget. Later that year, the Brexit referendum precipitously removed the coalition from power. The huge drain on public finance of Covid-19 now appears to rule out large-scale upstream public heath investment. And a political shift to the right has made further restrictions of TV junk food advertising and legislation to make food formulations less sugary and salty far less likely.

 

In local government, environmental health departments are being forced to fire fight as budgets continue to shrink, so that only a technical remit remains. In a different, less austere, world, EHPs would play a greater role in promoting healthier eating in homes, restaurants and school canteens, as well as in preventing contamination and infectious disease.

 

Perhaps the tide is turning. Liz Truss’s prescription, in her brief tenure as UK prime minister last year (it lasted for less than two months), that it is misplaced for the state to protect its poorest and most vulnerable members through progressive taxation was roundly rejected. And Jamie is banging on again about school dinners. That, surely, has to be a good thing.

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of a weekly, then monthly magazine, Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own

 

This blog was posted on the RHEGlobal website