While the high-tech schemes for reducing climate change might grab many of the media headlines, ideas like this show the environmental movement at its most radical. As I’ve noted before, there are various ways in which we can hope to intervene to reduce the climate dangers inherent in our current level of economic activity. One way is to reduce the carbon emissions required for energy production, through renewable energy; another is to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions, through carbon sinks, harvesters, or, yes, giant space mirrors. These areas are where the science-fiction stuff generally comes in.

But there’s a whole other area of intervention - reducing the actual amount of economic activity involved in modern life. This is the school of thought from which ideas like the one above - from TV pundit Penney Poyzer - stem. Modern life, the argument goes, is just too modern. We have too much stuff, travel too much, do too much. We need to return to simpler times - growing our own food, sourcing goods locally, re-using instead of replacing.

Why is this apparently backward-gazing viewpoint so radical? Because it disputes the central idea of economic and political thought in the last 200 years - the beneficence of material progress and economic growth. Having ever-more, the argument goes - more choice, more gadgets, more convenience - is costing the earth.

Ideas such as these reject principles that form the very foundations of modern economic growth. First, there’s specialisation. This is the idea that, if everyone produces the products they are best suited to provide, and exchanges with others, the result will be more efficient and allow a greater quantity and variety of goods than if everyone caters to their own needs. It began the first time farmers whose land was suited to crops first traded with farmers whose land was suited to tending cattle. Now, it’s the logic that sees goods, from electronics to fruit, shipped from across the world and sold more cheaply than those made locally.

The problem, of course, is that specialisation only increases economic efficiency. A company will build its factories in China, even for goods to be sold in the West, because it’s cheaper to do so. The savings gradually get passed onto consumers, and the standard of living increases. But such arrangements aren’t generally energy efficient, or carbon efficient. Indeed, because of the high CO2 emissions associated with shipping and aviation, they’re often environmentally disastrous. Instead, the argument goes, we must rediscover the merits of doing things ourselves, and doing things locally. “Eating apples from New Zealand, wrapped in clingfilm on a polystyrene tray, when it is apples season in England is crazy,” notes an activist in the report.

The same, the argument applies, goes for the other core principle of modern economics - ever-expanding consumption. For the more than 200 years since the industrial revolution began, if not before, economic growth has been driven primarily by the pursuit, by individuals and families, of ever more complex, useful, attractive or effective devices, tools and accoutrements. Our rising living standards have been driven by this process, but the ecological cost has been vast. As a result, it has become a credo amongst many environmentalists that the paradigm of non-stop material progress is inherently flawed. Writer Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff neatly makes the point, arguing the constant pursuit of newer, cooler stuff is leading us up an ecological dead-end. Endless material progress, argues this view, is an impossible fantasy - and its pursuit has become slow-motion suicide. We must relearn to repair broken goods, consume less food, get through fewer clothes, share cars, make do with fewer shiny gadgets.

Together, these views add up to a wholesale rejection of the foundations of modern economic thinking as a response to climate change. This viewpoint is clear - implicitly or, often, explicitly - in much modern writing on the environment and climate change. “The old economics is dead,” declared the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott - a liberal, but hardly radical economist - in 2006, identifying “the impending clash between economic orthodoxy and environmental sustainability.”

Stores now sell jeans at below $10 a pair… According to the present model of economics, this is progress, just as it is to be welcomed that flights costing as little as $4 make possible stag and hen weekends in Tallinn or Prague.

But are these developments really positive? Orthodox economics says they are, because they raise the real incomes of consumers. But, according to [environmental] analysis, they are potentially very bad indeed.

It’s presented as a given that our current level of consumption is simply incompatible with the long-term health of the environment. It’s taken as read that the predicament we’re in makes a nonsense of the idea of ever-greater consumption, enabled by specialisation and trade, as the driver of progress. It’s a compelling argument. But it may be completely wrong.

Think back to a hundred and fifty years ago. City-dwellers were enjoying an unprecedented level of communication and mobility, thanks to the widespread availability of a hugely effective means of personal urban transport - the horse. There was just one problem - shit. Horse shit was piling up everywhere, making already overcrowded and unsanitary cities even more dangerous. Illness spread. Wise men stroked their chins, dwelling on how to solve the problem. Some sort of restrictions were surely necessary. The convenience of easy travel had a terrible cost to the environment. Surely, this was a convenience we couldn’t afford. No doubt, in a Victorian precursor to modern-day SUV-bashing, drivers of two-horse carts were singled out for blame.

But ultimately, of course, horses weren’t banned - they were superseded. By the tram, the tube, the bus and, ultimately, the car. Far from having to sacrifice convenience because of its nasty side-effects, city-dwellers simply found even more convenient systems that didn’t have the same problems. Technology won out.¹

The same may be possible now. As my previous article notes, in order to avoid dangerous climate change, our task is to lower our global carbon emissions to half their current rate. This may sound quite achievable; but bear in mind that, thanks to rapid improvements in standards of living in developing countries, the average level of economic activity per person is likely to quadruple over the next fifty years. Add to that a likely swelling of the planet’s population, from the current six billion to nine billion, and you’re looking at a six-fold increase in economic activity.

The anti-growth position states that this is simply too much. As the world’s poor countries improve their living standards, it argues, we must meet them halfway, lowering ours to a level more commensurate with the planet’s fragile state.

But remember the horse shit. Few would have imagined, as it piled up in the gutters, a mode of transport that could move people around in comfort without depositing faeces onto the street. Are we really so sure that technology doesn’t have the potential, now, to let us keep our current lifestyle while slashing our carbon emissions?

It may sound cavalier. But think about the maths. A six-fold increase in economic activity, and a halving of overall emissions, means we need to slash the carbon cost of a unit of economic activity by one-twelve. Doesn’t that sound plausible?

There are so many different stages at which technology can intervene. Energy efficiency - insulating buildings, energy-saving bulbs; clean energy; carbon capture. Some estimates suggest renewable energy could ultimately provide 100% of our energy needs, and that’s before you even consider nuclear. The transition to low-carbon energy production, and to greater energy efficiency, will be painful and expensive. But it’s by no means certain that the essentials of our current standard of living can’t be maintained, and improved, and extended to more of the world, without busting the carbon budget. To assume otherwise - to declare, without having properly invested in technological solutions, that we must crawl back down the developmental ladder - smacks of hair-shirt wearing martyrdom.

Take for example aviation. It’s become a standard villain of the environmental movement,as demonstrated by the ongoing protests over the expansion of Heathrow. And, in the short term, reducing the number of flights we take would be a quick way to make some impressive carbon emission reductions. But it’s going too far to conclude, as some have, that flying is simply a luxury we will have to learn to live without. Aeronautic technology advanced, in less than 70 years, from putting the Wright brothers in the air to putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Do we really believe, with a similar level of commitment, that low-carbon flight is beyond our power?

Indeed, in general, the end-of-growth environmental school is based on a fallacy - that because technological innovation got us into this mess, further innovation can only make things worse. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Every year, technology brings us new ways to generate clean energy and reduce our need for energy, all without significantly impairing our lifestyles; from energy saving light bulbs to the IT revolution, from hybrid cars to videoconferencing, which is slashing the need for business travel.

Of course, there are excesses in our modern lifestyle - in packaging, for example, and lazy waste disposal - that we should curb, and help developing countries avoid from the start. But the view that climate change requires the end of material progress, and a return to some imagined “natural” past, is one based less on a detailed understanding of the science and more on a general disdain for all things modern. Indeed, its proponents tend to resort to other arguments as well as the environmental - that modern life is making us miserable, stressed, sick and lonely. Fair enough: its proponents may have a point, although I doubt it. But climate change is too important to be used as an argument for the latest lifestyle fad.

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I got a posh new phone last week. It plays music, it does email, and it takes pictures, just like iPhone. But because it can play software made by other companies, it can do lots more besides, like play recorded TV or tell me where the traffic jams are. It can even tell me all 99 names of Allah!

Apple’s iPhone won’t do any of this, because it only runs the software Apple provides for it. Unlike other phones, it’ll only work on one network. And it looks like it’s going to be extremely expensive. And yet, it’ll fly off the shelves. After all, look at the iPod. It can’t play songs downloaded from some of the most popular music stores, only from Apple’s, and it costs far more than many rivals. But still, a whopping 70% of the mp3 players sold worldwide are iPods. Why? Because it’s so easy to use, your granny would love one.

Business is supposed to be all about choice. More ranges. More options. And the Government has got in on the act, saying that letting us choose our hospital will help fix the NHS.

But choice just makes things complicated. Apple’s products are easy to use precisely because they don’t give you a choice of software, or music store. It all works together because it’s all made by one company. Just ask Apple’s arch-rival Microsoft – after spending years making software that works with the biggest range of mp3 players possible, now they’ve given up and made a device of their own.

The more choice you have, the more confusing life becomes. Remember when, to call directory enquiries, you just picked up the phone and dialled? Now, you have to choose from hundreds of competing services, each with different charges and gimmicks. Now, fewer people use directory enquiries than ever before.

So, before the government thrusts any more “choice” down our throats, they should take a lesson from Apple. Make it simple, make it a pleasure to use, and we don’t give a damn about choice. If it works for phones, why not for the NHS?

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We think of the internet mostly as consumers - we read sites, use them, buy from them. But the internet started off as a community. The first websites were bulletin boards, designed to let academics share information. They didn’t have staff or managers, and they certainly wouldn’t get sold for millions of dollars. They belonged to the people who use them: they were democratic.

Wikipedia is the biggest democracy on the internet. It’s the 15th most-visited site on the web, and every one of its millions of users can take part in its decisions. Not only can anyone edit pages, but anyone can vote – or stand – in elections to its managing boards. One American academic thinks it might even be “the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration the world has ever known.”

But as Iraq is finding out, it isn’t easy maintaining order in a democracy of equals. Wikipedia has its own insurgents: vandals. It suffers thousands of vandal attacks every day – entries are deleted, defaced, or altered for political or personal reasons. “George W. Bush” is its most frequently edited pages. Politicians have admitted having campaign staff edit their pages to cover up criticism. And workers campaigning for better conditions have been known to alter their employer’s entries to put their points across.

In the early years of the project, such insurgencies plunged Wikipedia into civil war – between its co-founder and “chief organizer,” Larry Sanger, and a mysterious anarchist called “The Cunctator.” Sanger wanted a certain amount of authority to ensure the site’s quality; “Cunc” was in favour of total equality. After months of deleting each other’s edits to pages and sparring in the sites’ talk pages, the war ended with Sanger leaving the project.

Since then, Wikipedia’s reputation has been tested by the consequences of its democratic approach. In 2005, the American journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. laid into the site, calling it “a flawed and irresponsible research tool,” after taking objection to a paragraph of his biography on the site, that said he had briefly been linked to the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. Siegenthaler almost certainly overreacted - who hasn’t been linked to the Kennedy murders? - but a chorus of political and media concern blew up, alleging that Wikipedia was riddled with errors and unsafe. A study in the Journal Nature later in the year found that Wikipedia’s scientific articles were nearly as accurate as those in the professionally-edited Encyclopaedia Britannica, but Britannica hit back, calling the study “so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” (Nature’s response)

Is Wikipedia laden with errors and lies? It’s hard to tell, but Larry Sanger thinks it might be. And he’s proposing an alternative, Citizendium - a carbon-copy of Wikipedia’s database, but with expert editors who will have some authority to override regular users’ changes. Editors will appoint themselves, but be required to meet certain standards of expertise. And vandals and troublemakers will be barred from the site by “constables.” The aim, Sanger says, is to create a site that “John Siegenthaler could be comfortable with… not only enormous and free, but reliable.”

Sanger’s announcement has generated a mixture of delight and horror, with some Wikipedia users calling it “treason” (hey, if you thought Wikipedia was part of “the emergence of a new kind of person,” you’d take it pretty seriously too). But lovers of Wikipedia’s democratic ethos shouldn’t worry - this is a natural process for democracies to go through. In fact, it’s striking how internet history is mirroring real-world history when it comes to the development of democracy. After all, the first democracies - in Ancient Greece - were small city-states where every citizen - at least, every free male citizen - had a direct say in the affairs of state - not unlike Wikipedia’s founding all-are-equal ethos. As democracies have grown from cities to nations, populations have become too large for direct votes on every issue, and representative democracy has developed, with elected leaders making most decisions. Wikipedia has begun the same process - just like in growing democracies, pressure of numbers of participants has made ways of arbitrating disagreements essential.

As democracies have grown and the issues facing them have become more complex, their governments have needed to find ways to understand their tasks. But if the people won’t always vote for the most expert people, what to do? All democracies create ways of appointing experts to advise and even shape government, even if they’re not elected. In Britain, it’s the House of Lords. Of course, as Government gets further away from the people, the chance increases of people feeling free to disobey its laws. So democracies developed police forces, who are granted authority by the community to act against members of the community in ways regular members can’t.

So with its experts and constables, Citizendium, too, is just responding to the pressures of growth as many democracies have. In time, these safeguards may well see it overtake Wikipedia in popularity. But will self-appointing experts be reliable? Or will Citizendium have its own Cunctator, its own insurgents? There’s also a lot of fuzziness in Wikipedia’s system, with articles “generally recognized” to be reliable or neutral. Will Citizendium develop more specific processes? Will it need to? In real-world democracies, such fuzzy ideas tend to get sharpened by being tested in courts of law - think of phrases such as “cruel and unusual punishment,” incredibly vague at first, but gradually refined by the courts. Will our twin web democracies be forced to go through a similar process, in order to clarify their own procedures?

It’s too soon to tell, of course. But Citizendium needs to be recognised for what it is - not a threat to Wikipedia’s principles of democracy, but a refinement of them, just as real-world democracy has been refined over thousands of years. These kind of changes aren’t a sign of weakness, but of the flexibility needed to survive. Democracy was never easy, after all. Just ask the people of Iraq.

A nice backgrounder to the Wikipedia debate

Citizendium founding essay

UPDATE: eBay is undergoing a similar process.

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