Energy transition, the Royal Society of Medicine, and DEEPA

I attended a conference yesterday called "Prosperity challenged: Energy transition & public health (there is a blog of it here, posted by Medsin-UK), hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine, founded in the 18th century, in London. I attended it electronically, using software called Jabber.

I was the first invited speaker, and had intended to travel in person. Circumstances stopped that; it's a shame I couldn't interact more with the people at the meeting, including Prof Kevin Anderson, but at least I didn't have to spend days on a plane, and my carbon generation is a bit less. Instead, I recorded my slides a few day ago. My slides (with recorded voice) are now posted on slideshare; maybe also on You-Tube if I can figure it out. Note, that to hear the voice you need to download the file, which is almost 80 megabytes.
 

We need a transition to clean energy urgently, in order to (a) prevent dangerous climate change; (b) improve air pollution, especially in Asia, and (c) because, pretty soon, fossil fuel is going to be generally unaffordable. If we factored in the negative "externalities" of fossil fuel we'd already find them too expensive, as Christine Legarde, of the IMF has pointed out. 

Optimists think ingenuity will solve scarcity. It may (largely) – including by recognizing limits. Triumphalists don’t seem to admit that reduced energy use, solar, education for girls, wider human rights, indeed environmental rights etc etc are forms of applied ingenuity. But market forces, even though rigged by an increasingly desperate fossil fuel industry (as pointed out by Prof Sharon Beder), are now working in favour of renewables.

Later I had an interesting "conversation" with Dr David McCoy, current president of MedAct, UK, who also attended the conference. In that correspondence, I was reminded of my proposal, made in 1988, for a global coalition of doctors and their friends, which I suggested, perhaps romantically, be called "DEEPA", an acronym for “Doctors for Earth, Environment, Peace and Action”. DEEPA in English, is of course a pun on "deeper" .. but it also means “light” (or "lamp") in Sanskrit. Deepawali, usually shortened to Diwali, is the Hindu Festival of Light. It's probably an ancient harvest festival, held in October or November.

DEEPA remains an idea, but soon after Susan and I did found the NGO BODHI (Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health and Insight). BODHI is also a Sanskrit word, meaning "enlightenment", or "awakening." "Bodhicitta" can be translated as the mind of enlightenment, and also of compassion. BODHI, whose patron is His Holiness the Dalai Lama, marks its 25th anniversary in July 2014.

Susan and I first met during Diwali in Delhi, in 1985. On the next night I left Delhi to travel by train for three days to West Bengal. I still vividly recall my emotion as I passed through what seemed miles lit by thousands of candles, with no electric light anywhere.

In November, 1990, the International Society of Doctors for the Environment (ISDE) was founded, a sister organisation to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. One of ISDE's affiliates is Doctors for the Environment Australia (of which I am a founding board member). Since 2011 I have been DEA's representative to ISDE.

Perhaps doctors can develop even more coalitions trying to protect planetary health in order to protect human health. There is a chapter on the general topic of health and medical activism, co-authored with Dr Sue Wareham, in my forthcoming edited book Climate Change and Global Health (CABI). Both the Lancet and BMJ have recently had relevant articles (in the Lancet's case a manifesto that anyone can sign) on the need for health workers to also think about planetary well-being. In fact, the author of the BMJ piece is Dr Eric Chivian, who co-founded IPPNW in 1980. Dr Chivian also founded the Center for Health and the Global Environment, later associated with Dr Paul Epstein, to whom my book is dedicated.

 

 

 

The FAO and the other “Rome Consensus”

Publicity and acclaim have accompanied the release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by French economist Thomas Piketty. Irrespective of the details of Piketty’s argument, there is broad agreement that inequality has risen - at least in the Anglosphere - since the ascendancy of marketism (neoliberalism), under the influence of the economist Friedman, US President Reagan and others at the end of the 1970s, when norms inhibiting the flaunting of wealth since the Great Depression weakened.

Reviewing Piketty’s book, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman ruminated that the US political class may be actively working to restore a hereditary gilded age. Discussion of Piketty’s book does not mention global inequality, but while the trend of this is similar to that in Western countries, it is much higher in absolute terms. 

A manifestation and cause of this global inequality is extreme deprivation, including of access to food and adequate nutrition, which is essential for brain development, health, and the capacity to work. These attributes are needed not only to escape poverty through labour and education, but to agitate and organize for political reform. However, just as most dominant economists ignore (or even celebrate) inequality (following the “Washington Consensus” proclaimed, by its influential supporters including the Bretton Woods institutions, as ostensibly, the easiest path to economic growth and progress), so too, most agricultural economists support what I am calling (at least for the moment) the other “Rome consensus”. (There are other versions of the Rome Consensus which have nothing to do with food security).

The influence of market forces on academic careers and related publication bias is very strong; thus "group think" also extends to downplaying the risk from climate change and, more broadly,  civilization’s collapse. I suggest it infects a good fraction of academics, including the Rome Consensus. Paul Ehrlich argues similarly.

Central to the Rome consensus is the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, (FAO), headquartered in Rome. The FAO, from its inception, has (albeit probably always leavened by some people who are more concerned with reducing root causes) been opposed to policies that prioritise the redistribution of either food or the economic and political power identified by Amartya Sen and others as ultimately determining hunger. Indeed, nascent neoliberalism ensured that the FAO's first director general, Dr Boyd Orr, was appointed for only two years. Orr was regarded by the US government and its supporters as an excessively strong advocate for the poor.

The FAO often lament that at least 800 million of the global population (over 7.2 billion in 2014) are macronutrient deficient (ie short of energy (calories) and/or protein (essential amino acids). In this, the FAO has numerous supporters, both in agri-business and among academics, including most agricultural economists.

But, how sincere are the claims made by the Rome Consensus? When I first wrote this draft I suggested the Rome consensus has become accustomed to the idea that the current number of hungry people in the world (however defined) is not that bad, and that the policies it supports (including substantial use of fossil fuels) are the best way to gradually reduce hunger and poverty. Two years later (April 2015) I am a less adamant; perhaps forces for reform are becoming dominant. My paper on this topic has just been published in the journal Global Food Security. However, one reviewer of it  wrote that all traces of criticism of the FAO must be expunged - making me wonder if the FAO is really seen as perfect, as some see the other great Roman institution, the Vatican.

Here are eight examples of FAO-supported policies and practices which concerned me in 2013:

1.   Its persistent focus on food production rather than genuine support for the redistribution of the determinants of food entitlement. This is tacit support for the Pareto Principle,[ii] (developed by Mussolini’s favourite economist). This might be changing?

2.   Implicit denial of limits to growth, whether from climate change, rising energy costs, the opportunity costs of biofuels from edible plants, the emerging scarcity of phosphorus, or the flattening of crop yield growth.

3.  Ignorance and even suppression of discussion of the determinants of population growth, including ignorance or dismissal of the economic harm of rapid population growth in low-income settings.

4.  Collective dismissal (or at least oversight) of the science behind the World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity (WSWH) (1992) which led to its wildly optimistic World Food Summit hunger target set in 1996 at the lavish World Food Summit meeting. Note that Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug (“father” of the Green Revolution), who favoured family planning was a signatory of the WSWH.

5.  FAO’s delay, suggestive of complacency, to consider climate change and food security as important until 2003, when the literature raised this as serious since at least 1994.

6.  In SOFI 2012 the FAO re-defined the MDG target associated with hunger. This reflects poor scholarship and oversight, rather than ideology, as the error is extremely embarrassing (or should be!) In SOFI 2013, the FAO reverted to the original (correct) MDG definition, without explanation, admission of error, nor apology.

7. Changing the way the FAO measures hunger in ways to make the MDG target look less out of reach. However -- perhaps -- the new method is an improvement.

8. Support for agricultural intensification as a partial solution, with insufficient recognition of its numerous hazards (not to mention the cruelty of CAFOs).

If a theatre is in fire the observer has a duty to raise the alarm. The world today already has 700-900 million people undernourished in macronutrient terms, with the well-being of billions more at threat. Agreeing with the Rome Consensus will not help those people; loud complaining might yet do some good.

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[i] Defined by WHO as policies the US government and international financial institutions based in Washington DC believed countries should follow to increase economic growth (as conventionally defined) 
[ii] Essentially, that redistribution should always be avoided by growth, so that a bigger pie is shared, so that the poor are assisted without reducing the wealth of the rich.