Interesting provocations undermined by some lines apparently written more for their alignment to what gets you published in certain newspapers than basis in fact. For instance:
(1) "....The crazy thing is they don’t even protect nature very well. Many of Britain’s key environmental indicators are flashing red." is a nice turn of phrase but based on a fundamentally false proposition. After all, it can't be true that nothing's being built but the rules on building things are determining the headline indicators on the state of the environment. Those indicators are flashing red because of the way land and water are being managed across the country, not because of flaws in the regs on development control that apply to a tiny fraction of that territory in any particular year.
(2) "Few would disagree that economic benefits should always come first over nature." Empirically this is false. The evolution of laws - voted on by the representatives of the people - on environmental protection and development rights over more than a century, here and elsewhere on the planet, has been a process of determining how to make such judgements in a more balanced way, taking into account considerations such as economic benefits to who, the real costs of loss of nature, the scarcity / replaceability of what is to be lost, and the need to maintain functioning ecosystems. If economic benefits should always come first why have any constraints at all?
And then the underlying proposition that it's feasible to take a 'copy/paste' approach to complex ecosystems, as if an ancient woodland (to take an example) can be replicated over there because it's inconvenient for a project I'd like to progress over here.
The system needs reform, but that's best tackled with smart approaches that deliver better environmental and economic outcomes - approaches that move us forward, not back.
"This approach has been dubbed by anti-development campaigners as ‘cash to trash’. Yet, as the philosopher Homer (Simpson) once pointed out: money can be exchanged for goods and services. And when you are addressing threats to nature at a strategic level (rather than site-specific level), your money can stretch a lot further. "
Two things can be true at the same time. It is cash to trash. The whole message from the govt is for developers to stop delays. The P&I Bill literally states that if a developer pays a levy then they are no longer bound by the environmental protections to species like dormice, badgers, otters, barn owls. So let's say a developer pays the levy, gets planning permission, starts work on site and finds some breeding barn owls. What should they do? If they delay until they're gone that goes against the spirit of the Bill and the govt's messaging. They've also been told that there's no issues if they kill/injure those animals. So, a developer under pressure is going to get rid of them one way or another. It is cash to trash and you can't escape that.
The comment amount addressing nature at a strategic level sounds good, but currently in practice it just isn't workable. In a large part because there's no requirement for a developer to do on-site surveys before development. So there's no way of knowing what you're losing, and no way of knowing if what's being gained through the regional strategic strategies outweighs that being lost at a site level. In addition, those strategic gains will take years if not decades to achieve, whereas the site losses are instant. It's a highly risky strategy. Also right now a developer generally pays more if they have a bigger impact on biodiversity, whereas what's being proposed is a blanket fee regardless of what they do, so there's no incentive to reduce their impact at a site level.
Also the Peninsula SSSI was not for a spider and the notification for the SSSI literally says that SSSIs aren't designated for individual inverts, rather they look at the assemblage. Also the SSSI was protected not just for inverts but for the range of birds it supports, rare plant species and geology.
Please if you're going to try and influence govt policy could you do some basic reading.
It seems the text has been edited by the author - go back to the original as distributed by email and you will find reference to 'disagree' and the quote as I provided it. Whatever the reason, it looks like progress
I've been following your work for a while- ever since you wrote the Regulatory Red Teams essay, which I thought was genius. Like you, I welcome some of the changes Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Here's my request- when appropriate, can you spend a couple of paragraphs on the Maths of economic impacts? I for one would like to know what the percentage costs added would be for EDPs.
As I'm sure you're aware, there is a good deal of difference between affordable homes and housing affordability, the latter of which is a good idea, with the former being a pipe dream (at scale), given competing priorities. My question is this: if a project to build 1,300 homes incurs a requirement for an EDP, how much cost would this add to each individual home?
I also think it's worth attacking the ideological basis for biodiversity, beyond habitat protection. The whole premise of the UK being the most biodiversity depleted country in the world contains an implicit presumption that people should want to return to an idyllic pre-industrial myth, which was in reality a litany of gruelling hard labour, despair, malnutrition and early death, for anyone unfortunate enough to exist in the period. The past was not Lark Rise to Candleford.
For a lot of people, there is no ideological basis behind protecting biodiversity. They instead want it nurturing because they; 1. Value access to a biodiverse space, and 2. Understand that ecosystems provide services like pollination and decomposition, and biodiversity improves the resilience of those systems.
There are ideologues who think they prefer the romanticised idea of a world with fewer people and more of everything else, but they do not speak for every person who values biodiversity.
Sure, but I was making the point that the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people- if one considers benchmarks for past biodiversity an aim, which many do. Personally, I would be all in favour of one of the EDP solutions being an alternate funding mechanism for the Countryside Stewardship and ELMS, as well as hedgerows where possible. 60% of 70% of farmers are somewhat positive, and when they aren’t it’s usually because of frustrating policy changes without consultation or delayed/disrupted payments.
But that’s a world of difference from blocking major economic and housing developments purely on the basis of some obscure beetle which nobody sees and is only of scientific interest. It’s about trade-offs. For the most part, the current system is weighted in favour of the environmental groups.
To be fair, it’s not the only reason why planning is denied. My aunt has friends who bought a barn which they converted, and land, which they hoped to build houses on. The land didn’t require any additional roads (vital, given that roads are a bigger surface area problem than housing), it has access to existing infrastructure. There were no biodiversity issues. The planning was denied because the local authority claimed they wanted new housing to be built in or near the city, because then when the residents got older, it would be easier for the government as a service provider- and it’s exactly this type of attitude which has caused the housing crisis.
There will never be enough capacity to meet demand from brown belt, grey belt, and city redevelopment land. Cities are the worst example, because twin studies have shown that access to green spaces is vital for cognitive development for urban kids, with a 3 point IQ difference found in the twins which didn’t have access to green spaces, when other multivariate factors were removed. And green spaces are exactly where many local boroughs are contemplating siting new housing.
A local farmer was featured in the local newspaper. He and others had been working with the local university and a local wildlife trust to utilise insect and bird maps in planning their crops. I’m all for sensible schemes, but that’s not what’s happening in the UK.
The big volume producers who have the most intensive farming methods won’t be hit by the changes to inheritance taxes for farms. They’ve long since corporatized with the family wealth shielded by offshore holding companies. According to my research, the farms which will be hit will be value farmers, those supplying niche quality goods in the organic, heritage and value types of farming, and those who are most likely NOT to have switched to the intensive model.
The loss of all those higher quality meats, cheeses and crops will be devastating to most higher quality restaurants in the UK who thrive on quality ingredients and sourcing locally. Bizarrely rich bankers who have bought nice rural halls, with attached lands for the exemption, will still be able to claim the farm inheritance tax by leasing their land to be farmed by the local corporatized farming magnate. The lands involved simply aren’t sufficient for any form of tenancy farming agreement.
I agree that biodiversity needs to be protected. My point would be that we aren’t doing it in a particularly intelligent fashion. One of the more worrying developments is the push towards plant-based. I’m a pescatarian, but it’s a personal choice. Sure, intensive cattle operations are harmful. If one looks at ocean deadzones globally they are all near intensive feedlot operation. Grass fed are another matter entirely, as are UK dairy. Recent research has shown that manure locks in nitrogen- which is low to begin with because UK cattle are mainly fed low crude protein diets.
The problem with many of these areas is Solution Aversion. Smart people find it particularly difficult to abandon their preferred narrative when they’ve reached a conclusion on a particular topic, and are better at finding ways to dismiss new evidence when they should really update their existing model of the world.
"Sure, but I was making the point that the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people"
Has anyone ever actually called for this? Please provide 1 example
"Sure, but I was making the point that the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people"
Has anyone ever actually called for this? Please provide 1 example
Sure, it’s a little hyperbolic- but statistical hyperbole is far worse, because by measuring current biodiversity against past biodiversity a justification for stupid and irrational public policy is made. After all, £120 million on a bat tunnel which only theoretically protected a local bat population, at the cost of £330,000 per bat is hardly a wise public investment given the dire straits of the UK. Equally, although the plan never went forward- significant expenses were incurred for the underwater disco planned for fish in the waters around HInkley C- all to prevent the occasional fish from swimming up an outlet pipe (zero safety risk) and meeting a grisly end.
There are smart ways to improve biodiversity. Protecting ancient woodlands is a good idea, but an entire industry employed writing 12,000 page biodiversity reports (400 pages on bats), and which nobody reads, for minor developments like a new supermarket is simply insane.
To give you an idea of the scale of the issue, I ran an AI analysis of European and US agriculture. People tend to focus on the subsidies, but my analysis showed that regulatory costs gave the rest of the world a 20% to 100% cost advantage in terms of costs to produce food. If Europe and the US removed both the subsidy and those regulations not necessary for food safety (and genuine biodiversity loss issues), then the rest of the world simply wouldn’t be able to compete with our agriculture.
One particular issue is synthetic fertilisers. It’s a misconception that fertiliser usage increased with the introduction of Green Revolution farming in the West (although Green Revolution is generally terrible for pollinators, which should be remedied by a redirection of subsidy (break/cover crops is the other key areas which is rational)). In Europe, fertiliser usage has declined significantly since 1961, whilst maintaining yields. In America, fertiliser usage remained steady, whilst substantially increasing yields. Most increased synthetic fertiliser usage globally since 1961 has occurred in the world’s least economically developed countries.
Two-thirds of global synthetic fertiliser usage now occurs in the least economically developed countries. One aspect of this relates to eutrophication. Basically, if one looks at the problem globally one quickly sees that regions which have heavier synthetic fertiliser usage, but don’t have significant intensive feedlot operations have far fewer problems with eutrophication. It’s intensive feedlot operations which are causing the problems with nitrogen, primarily so that the high crude proteins in feedlot can bring the animal to market 4 to 6 months earlier.
One wouldn’t associate the Baltic and Northern Europe with feedlot, but it is. Denmark, Germany and Poland all have extensive feedlot operations. In Denmark, 60% of coastal N loads stem from intensive feedlot operations (and bear in mind that they also produce nitrogen from non-farming sources). Grass fed is the exact opposite. Crude proteins are low. Manure actually helps sequester carbon and nitrogen through grass fed operations. Manure or other organic matter actually changes the microbial composition of the soil, making it a nitrogen absorber. In Point Reyes California they decided to drive the ranchers off the land, to make it more ‘pristine’. Now they’ve decided to pay an NGO to graze cattle to maintain the ecosystem.
My main objection is a lack of scientific and economic literacy on the part of policy makers and bureaucrats- what E.O. Wilson termed Consilience. They’ve watched a few bad Netflix documentaries, and seen the Kate Winslet documentary and nothing can shake them from their deluded motivational biases when they go out and commission expert consultants whose work exactly mirrors their ill-informed preconceptions. I imagine that many don’t even know that methane naturally breaks down in the atmosphere within 12 to 15 years. Some doubtless believe the permafrost Black Swan event- when a group of scientists recently came together to emphatically state that although methane hydrates and permafrost melt are important amplification feedbacks, there is little to no possibility of a runaway model through permafrost melt.
I’m absolutely sure that none of them know that the effects of added CO2 are logarithmic- raising CO2 from 560 to 1120 has the same effect as raising CO2 from 280 to 560. Put another way, the 280–420 ppm increase accounts for 58.5% of the radiative forcing from 280 to 560 ppm, while the 420–560 ppm increase accounts for 41.5%.
My big problem is that the people who run Western countries are incapable of correcting and adapting their grand narratives about the world, climate change and biodiversity when new information becomes available. We now have nitrogen zones in the UK (and the Dutch farmers are facing similar problems) to address an overall European commitment to a 25% reduction with nitrogen runoff which is mainly due to the Danish, the Germans and the Polish and their stupid intensive feedlot operations!
Anyway, I’ll give you a link to the Ocean Cleanup Interceptor launch. The data-driven analysis at the start is exactly the type of objective empirical approach I passionately believe in. Plus, it made me quite emotional, in a happy and optimistic sort of way. I hope you find it just as inspirational.
"what the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people- if one considers benchmarks for past biodiversity an aim, which many do."
There's hyperbole and there's specific claims about what people are aiming for. All the stuff about fertiliser and CO2 is kind of irrelevant to the fact that you're putting words in peoples' mouths. And the cost per bat figure is a sign that I don't need to engage with the rest of what you're saying.
Ok. That’s fair enough. I thought a fair bit about your point last night, and I am perfectly willingly admit that the comment was hyperbolic. I’ve been thinking a bit about the way people on the Left have been reacting to the DOGE cuts, and it’s clear that the cuts mean more to people on the Left than the jobs. To many its about the destruction of a means of fulfilling a vision for society.
About five years ago a Medium article by a researcher called Mark Ledwich was published on algorithmic radicalisation which was contrary to the mainstream narrative. It’s still available and shows that generally the direction of travel was decidedly towards the American corporate centre Left. It intentionally steered consumers away from both the Right and the progressive Left, and also penalised independent content creators in favour of legacy media outlets like Fox, CNN and MSNBC.
But what the management at YouTube failed to account for was the far stronger steering mechanism of personal interest. People interested in politics and society basically fell into two groups- those who saw the problems of the world as primarily economic problems, and those who instead chose to focus upon social issues and climate. Four years prior to that I had watched both and was a Lib Dem in the UK, but a deep dive into economics pushed me to the realisation that there were fundamental problems with the government’s role on issues like housing and the economy, as well as a too close relationship with the finance sector and financial interests.
Anyway to cut a long story short, in many ways I know sometimes find myself in a position somewhat analogous to the old angry conservatives who always seemed so angry about the dissolution of the family. Having researched issues like social mobility and life outcomes (Dr Raj Chetty), it’s not as though they didn’t have a point- but the problem was they weren’t doing a very good job of articulating the eleven steps of evidence and logic which led to the conclusion that the West was trapped in a social doom loop because of family decline and which made them seem so angrily deluded.
My point would be this- many don’t recognise just how frail the systems are which create a reasonable living standard in the West. And it’s important to everybody’s interests because a lack of resources removes the ability to achieve any broadly positive social or economic goals. To give you an example of this you will probably remember that the Delayed Recovery from COVID scenario put the world 2 to 4 years behind on its transition goals.
And our global system is really, really frail. When one accounts for inflation, risk and taxes, the return on capital for the last two hundred years has been about 6%. There was brief period in the eighties and nineties which bucked the curve with supernormal profits, but it was an economic anomaly. People think that we could just tax the rich (billionaires), but if we eliminated their assets and redistributed their wealth it would keep government running for approximately six months.
Spending on biodiversity in the UK is actually significantly below what it should be, but where the problems emerge are through the external costs the process creates for those who build houses or operate in other areas of the economy. And it not just costs as expenditures, but also in terms of lost opportunity costs. If we were smart we would actually spend more on investing in biodiversity, but make it a proviso of a more intentionally streamlined system that for every £1 spent, £2 needs to be reclaimed from external costs imposed or through reclaiming lost opportunity costs.
And I will admit I was making mountains out of molehills- but any climate engineer who is worth his salt will tell you that in order to stand any chance at all of achieving full non-fossil electrification of our existing grid we need to build out nuclear to 40% of total electrical energy consumption as a bare minimum, because energy system require base load energy and the costs of energy storage and increased energy infrastructure are prohibitively expensive. We’re in the process of building the most expensive nuclear power plant in history, and this is before one considers that 80% of our current energy consumption is non-electrical- transport and heating homes. If we really want to electrify our economy we’re going to need a lot more nuclear energy.
And energy matters as a resource. It has the highest correlation with living standards of any resource. Sure, rich people consumer a lot of energy resources, but a reduction in energy consumption per person is always going to drastically reduce the living standards of the bottom 90%- it’s already begun. Since 2008, living standards in the UK have declined 40% in pure economic terms (from our previous trajectory). According to the OBR, Brexit caused one tenth of the decline (4%).
Interesting provocations undermined by some lines apparently written more for their alignment to what gets you published in certain newspapers than basis in fact. For instance:
(1) "....The crazy thing is they don’t even protect nature very well. Many of Britain’s key environmental indicators are flashing red." is a nice turn of phrase but based on a fundamentally false proposition. After all, it can't be true that nothing's being built but the rules on building things are determining the headline indicators on the state of the environment. Those indicators are flashing red because of the way land and water are being managed across the country, not because of flaws in the regs on development control that apply to a tiny fraction of that territory in any particular year.
(2) "Few would disagree that economic benefits should always come first over nature." Empirically this is false. The evolution of laws - voted on by the representatives of the people - on environmental protection and development rights over more than a century, here and elsewhere on the planet, has been a process of determining how to make such judgements in a more balanced way, taking into account considerations such as economic benefits to who, the real costs of loss of nature, the scarcity / replaceability of what is to be lost, and the need to maintain functioning ecosystems. If economic benefits should always come first why have any constraints at all?
And then the underlying proposition that it's feasible to take a 'copy/paste' approach to complex ecosystems, as if an ancient woodland (to take an example) can be replicated over there because it's inconvenient for a project I'd like to progress over here.
The system needs reform, but that's best tackled with smart approaches that deliver better environmental and economic outcomes - approaches that move us forward, not back.
"This approach has been dubbed by anti-development campaigners as ‘cash to trash’. Yet, as the philosopher Homer (Simpson) once pointed out: money can be exchanged for goods and services. And when you are addressing threats to nature at a strategic level (rather than site-specific level), your money can stretch a lot further. "
Two things can be true at the same time. It is cash to trash. The whole message from the govt is for developers to stop delays. The P&I Bill literally states that if a developer pays a levy then they are no longer bound by the environmental protections to species like dormice, badgers, otters, barn owls. So let's say a developer pays the levy, gets planning permission, starts work on site and finds some breeding barn owls. What should they do? If they delay until they're gone that goes against the spirit of the Bill and the govt's messaging. They've also been told that there's no issues if they kill/injure those animals. So, a developer under pressure is going to get rid of them one way or another. It is cash to trash and you can't escape that.
The comment amount addressing nature at a strategic level sounds good, but currently in practice it just isn't workable. In a large part because there's no requirement for a developer to do on-site surveys before development. So there's no way of knowing what you're losing, and no way of knowing if what's being gained through the regional strategic strategies outweighs that being lost at a site level. In addition, those strategic gains will take years if not decades to achieve, whereas the site losses are instant. It's a highly risky strategy. Also right now a developer generally pays more if they have a bigger impact on biodiversity, whereas what's being proposed is a blanket fee regardless of what they do, so there's no incentive to reduce their impact at a site level.
Also the Peninsula SSSI was not for a spider and the notification for the SSSI literally says that SSSIs aren't designated for individual inverts, rather they look at the assemblage. Also the SSSI was protected not just for inverts but for the range of birds it supports, rare plant species and geology.
Please if you're going to try and influence govt policy could you do some basic reading.
Any British citizen can buy a land anywhere in UK and build a house on it. No need for permission. That's how it should work.
"Few would argue that economic benefits should always come first over nature."
Oops!!
It seems the text has been edited by the author - go back to the original as distributed by email and you will find reference to 'disagree' and the quote as I provided it. Whatever the reason, it looks like progress
I've been following your work for a while- ever since you wrote the Regulatory Red Teams essay, which I thought was genius. Like you, I welcome some of the changes Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Here's my request- when appropriate, can you spend a couple of paragraphs on the Maths of economic impacts? I for one would like to know what the percentage costs added would be for EDPs.
As I'm sure you're aware, there is a good deal of difference between affordable homes and housing affordability, the latter of which is a good idea, with the former being a pipe dream (at scale), given competing priorities. My question is this: if a project to build 1,300 homes incurs a requirement for an EDP, how much cost would this add to each individual home?
I also think it's worth attacking the ideological basis for biodiversity, beyond habitat protection. The whole premise of the UK being the most biodiversity depleted country in the world contains an implicit presumption that people should want to return to an idyllic pre-industrial myth, which was in reality a litany of gruelling hard labour, despair, malnutrition and early death, for anyone unfortunate enough to exist in the period. The past was not Lark Rise to Candleford.
For a lot of people, there is no ideological basis behind protecting biodiversity. They instead want it nurturing because they; 1. Value access to a biodiverse space, and 2. Understand that ecosystems provide services like pollination and decomposition, and biodiversity improves the resilience of those systems.
There are ideologues who think they prefer the romanticised idea of a world with fewer people and more of everything else, but they do not speak for every person who values biodiversity.
Sure, but I was making the point that the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people- if one considers benchmarks for past biodiversity an aim, which many do. Personally, I would be all in favour of one of the EDP solutions being an alternate funding mechanism for the Countryside Stewardship and ELMS, as well as hedgerows where possible. 60% of 70% of farmers are somewhat positive, and when they aren’t it’s usually because of frustrating policy changes without consultation or delayed/disrupted payments.
But that’s a world of difference from blocking major economic and housing developments purely on the basis of some obscure beetle which nobody sees and is only of scientific interest. It’s about trade-offs. For the most part, the current system is weighted in favour of the environmental groups.
To be fair, it’s not the only reason why planning is denied. My aunt has friends who bought a barn which they converted, and land, which they hoped to build houses on. The land didn’t require any additional roads (vital, given that roads are a bigger surface area problem than housing), it has access to existing infrastructure. There were no biodiversity issues. The planning was denied because the local authority claimed they wanted new housing to be built in or near the city, because then when the residents got older, it would be easier for the government as a service provider- and it’s exactly this type of attitude which has caused the housing crisis.
There will never be enough capacity to meet demand from brown belt, grey belt, and city redevelopment land. Cities are the worst example, because twin studies have shown that access to green spaces is vital for cognitive development for urban kids, with a 3 point IQ difference found in the twins which didn’t have access to green spaces, when other multivariate factors were removed. And green spaces are exactly where many local boroughs are contemplating siting new housing.
A local farmer was featured in the local newspaper. He and others had been working with the local university and a local wildlife trust to utilise insect and bird maps in planning their crops. I’m all for sensible schemes, but that’s not what’s happening in the UK.
The big volume producers who have the most intensive farming methods won’t be hit by the changes to inheritance taxes for farms. They’ve long since corporatized with the family wealth shielded by offshore holding companies. According to my research, the farms which will be hit will be value farmers, those supplying niche quality goods in the organic, heritage and value types of farming, and those who are most likely NOT to have switched to the intensive model.
The loss of all those higher quality meats, cheeses and crops will be devastating to most higher quality restaurants in the UK who thrive on quality ingredients and sourcing locally. Bizarrely rich bankers who have bought nice rural halls, with attached lands for the exemption, will still be able to claim the farm inheritance tax by leasing their land to be farmed by the local corporatized farming magnate. The lands involved simply aren’t sufficient for any form of tenancy farming agreement.
I agree that biodiversity needs to be protected. My point would be that we aren’t doing it in a particularly intelligent fashion. One of the more worrying developments is the push towards plant-based. I’m a pescatarian, but it’s a personal choice. Sure, intensive cattle operations are harmful. If one looks at ocean deadzones globally they are all near intensive feedlot operation. Grass fed are another matter entirely, as are UK dairy. Recent research has shown that manure locks in nitrogen- which is low to begin with because UK cattle are mainly fed low crude protein diets.
The problem with many of these areas is Solution Aversion. Smart people find it particularly difficult to abandon their preferred narrative when they’ve reached a conclusion on a particular topic, and are better at finding ways to dismiss new evidence when they should really update their existing model of the world.
https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/no-laughing-matter-nitrous-oxide-emissions-are-higher-soils-lacking-organic-matter
"Sure, but I was making the point that the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people"
Has anyone ever actually called for this? Please provide 1 example
"Sure, but I was making the point that the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people"
Has anyone ever actually called for this? Please provide 1 example
Sure, it’s a little hyperbolic- but statistical hyperbole is far worse, because by measuring current biodiversity against past biodiversity a justification for stupid and irrational public policy is made. After all, £120 million on a bat tunnel which only theoretically protected a local bat population, at the cost of £330,000 per bat is hardly a wise public investment given the dire straits of the UK. Equally, although the plan never went forward- significant expenses were incurred for the underwater disco planned for fish in the waters around HInkley C- all to prevent the occasional fish from swimming up an outlet pipe (zero safety risk) and meeting a grisly end.
There are smart ways to improve biodiversity. Protecting ancient woodlands is a good idea, but an entire industry employed writing 12,000 page biodiversity reports (400 pages on bats), and which nobody reads, for minor developments like a new supermarket is simply insane.
To give you an idea of the scale of the issue, I ran an AI analysis of European and US agriculture. People tend to focus on the subsidies, but my analysis showed that regulatory costs gave the rest of the world a 20% to 100% cost advantage in terms of costs to produce food. If Europe and the US removed both the subsidy and those regulations not necessary for food safety (and genuine biodiversity loss issues), then the rest of the world simply wouldn’t be able to compete with our agriculture.
One particular issue is synthetic fertilisers. It’s a misconception that fertiliser usage increased with the introduction of Green Revolution farming in the West (although Green Revolution is generally terrible for pollinators, which should be remedied by a redirection of subsidy (break/cover crops is the other key areas which is rational)). In Europe, fertiliser usage has declined significantly since 1961, whilst maintaining yields. In America, fertiliser usage remained steady, whilst substantially increasing yields. Most increased synthetic fertiliser usage globally since 1961 has occurred in the world’s least economically developed countries.
Two-thirds of global synthetic fertiliser usage now occurs in the least economically developed countries. One aspect of this relates to eutrophication. Basically, if one looks at the problem globally one quickly sees that regions which have heavier synthetic fertiliser usage, but don’t have significant intensive feedlot operations have far fewer problems with eutrophication. It’s intensive feedlot operations which are causing the problems with nitrogen, primarily so that the high crude proteins in feedlot can bring the animal to market 4 to 6 months earlier.
One wouldn’t associate the Baltic and Northern Europe with feedlot, but it is. Denmark, Germany and Poland all have extensive feedlot operations. In Denmark, 60% of coastal N loads stem from intensive feedlot operations (and bear in mind that they also produce nitrogen from non-farming sources). Grass fed is the exact opposite. Crude proteins are low. Manure actually helps sequester carbon and nitrogen through grass fed operations. Manure or other organic matter actually changes the microbial composition of the soil, making it a nitrogen absorber. In Point Reyes California they decided to drive the ranchers off the land, to make it more ‘pristine’. Now they’ve decided to pay an NGO to graze cattle to maintain the ecosystem.
My main objection is a lack of scientific and economic literacy on the part of policy makers and bureaucrats- what E.O. Wilson termed Consilience. They’ve watched a few bad Netflix documentaries, and seen the Kate Winslet documentary and nothing can shake them from their deluded motivational biases when they go out and commission expert consultants whose work exactly mirrors their ill-informed preconceptions. I imagine that many don’t even know that methane naturally breaks down in the atmosphere within 12 to 15 years. Some doubtless believe the permafrost Black Swan event- when a group of scientists recently came together to emphatically state that although methane hydrates and permafrost melt are important amplification feedbacks, there is little to no possibility of a runaway model through permafrost melt.
I’m absolutely sure that none of them know that the effects of added CO2 are logarithmic- raising CO2 from 560 to 1120 has the same effect as raising CO2 from 280 to 560. Put another way, the 280–420 ppm increase accounts for 58.5% of the radiative forcing from 280 to 560 ppm, while the 420–560 ppm increase accounts for 41.5%.
My big problem is that the people who run Western countries are incapable of correcting and adapting their grand narratives about the world, climate change and biodiversity when new information becomes available. We now have nitrogen zones in the UK (and the Dutch farmers are facing similar problems) to address an overall European commitment to a 25% reduction with nitrogen runoff which is mainly due to the Danish, the Germans and the Polish and their stupid intensive feedlot operations!
Anyway, I’ll give you a link to the Ocean Cleanup Interceptor launch. The data-driven analysis at the start is exactly the type of objective empirical approach I passionately believe in. Plus, it made me quite emotional, in a happy and optimistic sort of way. I hope you find it just as inspirational.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZArQMFhQ4&t=5s
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-consumption-usda?country=OWID_WRL~OWID_EUR~USA~Least+developed+countries
"what the ideologues aim for a pre-industrial level of biodiversity, when the population of the UK was around 10.5 million people- if one considers benchmarks for past biodiversity an aim, which many do."
There's hyperbole and there's specific claims about what people are aiming for. All the stuff about fertiliser and CO2 is kind of irrelevant to the fact that you're putting words in peoples' mouths. And the cost per bat figure is a sign that I don't need to engage with the rest of what you're saying.
Ok. That’s fair enough. I thought a fair bit about your point last night, and I am perfectly willingly admit that the comment was hyperbolic. I’ve been thinking a bit about the way people on the Left have been reacting to the DOGE cuts, and it’s clear that the cuts mean more to people on the Left than the jobs. To many its about the destruction of a means of fulfilling a vision for society.
About five years ago a Medium article by a researcher called Mark Ledwich was published on algorithmic radicalisation which was contrary to the mainstream narrative. It’s still available and shows that generally the direction of travel was decidedly towards the American corporate centre Left. It intentionally steered consumers away from both the Right and the progressive Left, and also penalised independent content creators in favour of legacy media outlets like Fox, CNN and MSNBC.
But what the management at YouTube failed to account for was the far stronger steering mechanism of personal interest. People interested in politics and society basically fell into two groups- those who saw the problems of the world as primarily economic problems, and those who instead chose to focus upon social issues and climate. Four years prior to that I had watched both and was a Lib Dem in the UK, but a deep dive into economics pushed me to the realisation that there were fundamental problems with the government’s role on issues like housing and the economy, as well as a too close relationship with the finance sector and financial interests.
Anyway to cut a long story short, in many ways I know sometimes find myself in a position somewhat analogous to the old angry conservatives who always seemed so angry about the dissolution of the family. Having researched issues like social mobility and life outcomes (Dr Raj Chetty), it’s not as though they didn’t have a point- but the problem was they weren’t doing a very good job of articulating the eleven steps of evidence and logic which led to the conclusion that the West was trapped in a social doom loop because of family decline and which made them seem so angrily deluded.
My point would be this- many don’t recognise just how frail the systems are which create a reasonable living standard in the West. And it’s important to everybody’s interests because a lack of resources removes the ability to achieve any broadly positive social or economic goals. To give you an example of this you will probably remember that the Delayed Recovery from COVID scenario put the world 2 to 4 years behind on its transition goals.
And our global system is really, really frail. When one accounts for inflation, risk and taxes, the return on capital for the last two hundred years has been about 6%. There was brief period in the eighties and nineties which bucked the curve with supernormal profits, but it was an economic anomaly. People think that we could just tax the rich (billionaires), but if we eliminated their assets and redistributed their wealth it would keep government running for approximately six months.
Spending on biodiversity in the UK is actually significantly below what it should be, but where the problems emerge are through the external costs the process creates for those who build houses or operate in other areas of the economy. And it not just costs as expenditures, but also in terms of lost opportunity costs. If we were smart we would actually spend more on investing in biodiversity, but make it a proviso of a more intentionally streamlined system that for every £1 spent, £2 needs to be reclaimed from external costs imposed or through reclaiming lost opportunity costs.
And I will admit I was making mountains out of molehills- but any climate engineer who is worth his salt will tell you that in order to stand any chance at all of achieving full non-fossil electrification of our existing grid we need to build out nuclear to 40% of total electrical energy consumption as a bare minimum, because energy system require base load energy and the costs of energy storage and increased energy infrastructure are prohibitively expensive. We’re in the process of building the most expensive nuclear power plant in history, and this is before one considers that 80% of our current energy consumption is non-electrical- transport and heating homes. If we really want to electrify our economy we’re going to need a lot more nuclear energy.
And energy matters as a resource. It has the highest correlation with living standards of any resource. Sure, rich people consumer a lot of energy resources, but a reduction in energy consumption per person is always going to drastically reduce the living standards of the bottom 90%- it’s already begun. Since 2008, living standards in the UK have declined 40% in pure economic terms (from our previous trajectory). According to the OBR, Brexit caused one tenth of the decline (4%).