The following letter is in the Guardian this morning. I am one of its authors. A fuller statement is available here:
Simon Jenkins is right to call for quantitative easing to be used to boost economic activity (We should cash-bomb the people, not the banks, 27 November), but wrong to suggest it should be spread to everyone indiscriminately. What is instead required is a well targeted “green infrastructure QE” which would stimulate the economy, boost employment and tackle climate change countrywide.
This would be achieved by working towards making the UK's 30m buildings super-energy-efficient, dramatically reducing energy bills, fuel poverty and greenhouse gas emissions. The programme would tackle the housing crisis by building affordable, highly insulated new homes, predominantly on brown field sites. It would require finance of the order of £50bn a year. If this seems ambitious, recall that between 2009 and 2012 the Bank of England e-printed £375bn of QE, the equivalent of over £6,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. This huge sum mostly benefited banks and investors by inflating house prices, stocks and commodities. It had little impact in terms of generating real economic activity on the ground.
The form of QE we propose by contrast would provide job security and local business opportunities and rebalance the economy, since its infrastructure improvements would take place in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK. In turn this could provide the impetus to unlock massive private co-funding from pension and insurance companies through to individual savers.
The “jobs in every constituency” inherent in green infrastructure QE means that it should become a political imperative for all parties in the run-up to next May's election.
Caroline Lucas MP
Green party, Brighton Pavillion
John Sauven
Director, Greenpeace
Neal Lawson
Chair, Compass
Dr Richard Dixon
Director, Friends of the Earth Scotland
Lord Teverson
Liberal Democrat
Richard Murphy
Director, Tax Research UK
Ann Pettifor
Director, Policy Research in Macroeconomics
Jeremy Leggett
Founder and chair, SolarAid
Tony Greenham
Head of finance and business, New Economics Foundation
Jonathon Porritt
Andrew Warren
Chair, British Energy Efficiency Federation
Joanne Wade
Director, Association for the Conservation of Energy
Catherine Howarth
Director, ShareAction
Colin Hines
Convenor, Green New Deal Group
Susie Parsons
Director, Lasting Transformation Ltd
Tony Juniper
Charles Secrett
Founder, The ACT! Alliance
Andrew Simms
Fellow, New Economics Foundation
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Jonathon Porrit showed up here in the Forest of Dean asking if the best option was on the table:
“We know that in the Forest of Dean and Cinderford the need for economic development is critical and local people who stand up and argue passionately for economic development in their community have every right to do so.
“When we can find ways of bringing that kind of development into an area like this it’s good.
“But — and it’s a big but — is this really the best way of meeting those objectives to improve the economic livelihoods and the social wellbeing of people in this part of Gloucestershire?
“Is it the best possible option on the table to do all that?”
The bigger problem is getting to the table, in my experience:
http://www.p-ced.com/1/node/362
This is a great idea Richard and I would support it all the way, but it does not go far enough. We need is to invest in green manufacturing. We should recover from Asia the manufacturing industries we have passed over to them in the last thirty years and start making these products ourselves again. After all we invented most of them.
We should redesign them to be long lasting and repairable instead of throw away, and use renewable energy and renewable materials and recycled materials as far as possible in the manufacture
This is the only long term solution to a sustainable prosperous life style us us all.
It would create lots of skilled jobs, cut our import costs and reduce the huge pollution problem being caused by shipping goods ten thousand miles form Asia
I would expect a Green Investment Bank to want to fund such things with Green QE capital
Or do it in collaboration, not competition, with the “Asians”, who have the expertise in the manufacture and logistics these days, and who need to make as big a contribution, ultimately, to de-carbonisation in a future sustainable world economy, as everyone else.
International transportation of mass-produced goods will certainly be impossibly expensive in the future; but that won’t have a necessarily enormous effect on, say, China, if its population increases its demand. So the demand can only be met there, and here, with long-lasting goods, made from recycled materials as you say – and most waste takes place in manufacturing, with only about 3% derived from “end-users”. So we need to democratise mass-production – profitability is a ludicrous criterion in the end-game of the profits-first civilisation.
We can’t “save” the planet – it doesn’t care if we survive or not, and it’ll react as it will to the changes we effect. But as far as human life is concerned, if we can’t plan it, just won’t stay on the planet; not organising ourselves as we do today.
Bob Drysdale
This is so true. We are actually encouraging the importation of machines that have a plug that cannot, safely, be entered. Why?
Well, you can’t change the fuse can you? Oncee it blows you throw the whole radio/toaster/microwave away & buy another one, rather than just replacing the fuse.
Its like that silly Ms Klass – £2m won’t buy you a garage in London these days.
We, I mean humanity, are doing & thinking things that are completely insane. We vilify those that consume little & sanctify those that are ruining us. We pay lip-service to religion but treat God’s creation like an ash-tray. Whilst the deserts of Africa & India are full of starving people, we’re lifting mo-fuggas onto hospital trolleys here because they’re eating themselves to death – on filth, Mc Ds, KFC, Pizzahut ..all you can eat.
I swear to God man, we’ve gone f****g mad.