Did you know people in Haiti, Burma and Armenia are all better off than in Britain? And the Congo is happier than the USA? That’s what the London think-tank New Economic Foundation reckons in its second “Happy Planet” rankings. But even NEF admits that its “happiness” rating or HPI doesn’t really measure human happiness, and that it’s sacrificing truthiness for the publicity its reports can generate.

Like the notorious Carbon Calculator, the Happy Planet Index is an advocacy tool for limiting, rather than promoting, human health and happiness, and it too is based on the idea of an ecological “footprint”. This Neo-Malthusian concept was developed by population-control advocate William Rees, a professor at British Columbia University, and his splendidly-named pupil Mathis Wackernagel. The latter has since turned it into a successful consultancy business.

NEF uses older surveys where people expressed happiness, multiplies it by life expectancy, and divides it by the “footprint”. Factors such as crime, freedom, or infant mortality rates are not considered.

So not surprisingly, given this skew, the “Happiness Index” produces some very odd results. The last survey was topped by the Republic of Vanautu. The south sea nation has a population of just over 200,000 and an infant mortality rate of one in 20 – about 10 times that of the UK.

The authors urge industrialised economies urgently need to become more like the underdeveloped. In human terms, that would mean over 300,000 unnecessary child deaths in the UK each year. Such is the price of happiness, NEF argues.

NEF also frowns on India and China for improving the material welfare of their people. Accompanying the report is a spreadsheet which hindcasts the NEF “happiness” figure retrospectively. It tells us that since 1990, China and India’s “HPI rating” has fallen.

In the latest survey Costa Rica tops the poll, and Vanautu has dropped out completely. Jamaica ranks third, Columbia is at six, Bhutan (with 74 deaths per 1,000 live births) and Laos (89 per 1,000) is in the Top 20 – far higher than any OECD country.

It’s too bizarre even for some anti-capitalist environmentalists. Writing on his blog, the activist Derek Wall, author of Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-capitalist, Anti-globalist and Radical Green Movements observes that:

“Colombia comes in at number six on the index out of 143 countries… yet death squads commonly clear peasants from the land for biofuels. Doesn’t sound that good a place to me.”

“But maybe I am just one of those old fashioned left greens who worries about little things like human rights and the environment?”

Meet the Carbon Cult, Derek.

The footprint idea, its originators, say is based on “the planet’s capacity to regenerate”. From this piece of anthropomorphism, a number of extrapolations then follow. Every human activity is translated into its equivalent “land use”, with this available land being a fixed quantity. It’s by using this calculation that footprint advocates come to the conclusion that certain kinds of human activity must be curtailed.

As we revealed here, however, there are seriously problems with “footprints” – and it leads to some gross distortions. Biomass that absorbs CO2, such as a field of wheat, is counted only as a resource depletion.

Primarily however, footprint thinking fails for the same reason Thomas Malthus’ original sums failed in the 19th century: Things Change. The planet isn’t an organism, or a person, as a human resource it doesn’t matter whether it needs time to “regenerate”, or not.

For example, peat “regenerates” at 1mm a year. Do we sit around and wait for it to grow back, or find a better fuel, such as coal, or uranium? It’s human inventiveness that does the generation (or regeneration), as we find new resources to replace the older ones, and become ever more productive. Famines were commonplace on the Indian subcontinent until the Green Revolution – painstaking germination research, technology and irrigation – tripled wheat production.

There’s a backhanded acknowledgement of this by the NEF authors, who admit the human “footprint” has fallen from 2.1 hectares and 1.8 hectares. The accompanying spreadsheet also shows that environmental impact falls as countries develop. A cause for celebration? Of course not – that would be admitting that economic growth is good, and things are getting better… which dooms the report, and the philosophy behind it.

NEF also fails to account for human organisation, and repeats the Easter Island Fallacy. Civilisation didn’t collapse because the selfish natives cut down their last tree – the trees had disappeared several hundred years previously. It was disease and slavery that depopulated Rapa Nui.

(Unfortunately the junk science of doom is being peddled in schools. “If they get the sustainability bug when they are young, they could be converts for life,” suggests Green Future magazine, after examining a school that uses NEF’s Index.)

In their last report, NEF admitted loading the dice, and that their Happiness Index wasn’t a measure of happiness at all.

“We don’t claim that the index measures happiness (we emphasise several times, in fact, that it doesn’t),” Sam Thompson wrote in response to one analysis.

“To an extent we asked for this kind of (mis)interpretation by using the word ‘happy’ in the title of the report – we have wondered, with hindsight, whether this was such a good idea.”

And was it?

“The trade off is that we got a huge (and 95 per cent positive) press hit – and that’s all part of the game too.”

Statistical Footnotes

Statisticians will note the liberties taken by NEF. In the first survey, they had to make much of the ‘happiness’ data up, because it didn’t exist. “A considerable amount of modelling was required to fill in the gaps for those countries where no life satisfaction data were available at all,” they admit. This time they make less stuff up, but pick and mix from two different ‘happiness’ surveys.

A linear regression was conducted and 19 further factors thrown in, allowing NEF to predict answers in countries were the question was never asked. A co-efficient is added to the final equation – without it, NEF admits, the figure would be completely dominated by the ‘footprint’.

Roger Pielke Jr is a professor at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and a visiting professor at University of Oxford’s Said Business School who has accepted the case for cutting carbon emissions. However, in a new journal article he says the Act is unrealistic, setting symbolic and therefore meaningless targets instead of practical policy.

A projected UK population of 82 million by 2050 would produce 80 per cent more than the CC Act’s target. Assuming modest growth of 1.3 per cent over the period, the goal becomes even more unrealistic.

“This level of growth would add another 440 Mt of carbon dioxide to the 2050 total, for a total of about 1,200 Mt – ten times the 2050 target. And in 2022 this rate of growth would add about another 135 Mt of carbon dioxide emissions, for a total of 738 Mt, approaching twice the 2022 target.” Pielke writes.

Pielke criticises the great and the good who served on the Climate Change Committee, which advised Parliament and effectively “wrote” the act, for not doing the sums.

Rapid “decarbonisation” is possible, but not as rapidly as the Act demands. For example, the UK’s emissions measured in equivalent economic output (in tonnes of CO2 per $1k of GDP) fell from 0.85 tonnes of CO2 to around 0.42 tonnes in 2007 – largely due to the closure of most coal mining. That’s around the global average, and the lowest figure out of five major economies, including China, the USA, Germany and Japan. However, two to three times that rate will need to be sustained in the years through to 2050, if the pledge is to be kept.

“There is no recent precedent among developed countries with large economies for the sustained rapid rates of decarbonisation implied by the Climate Change Act. Such rates necessarily must be several times greater than observed in the UK in recent decades, and based on different contributors as the sectoral shift away from manufacturing has its limits.”

With its reliance on nuclear power, France has a lower figure of 0.30 tonnes per $1,000/GDP – but Pielke points out it took 20 years to fall from present UK levels to where it is now. Pielke has suggested 30 new nuclear power stations by 2015 would achieve the goal.

How was the figure of 80 per cent agreed? You may recall the Government proposed 60 per cent, but political grandstanding by the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives – each keen to be seen to be Greener Than Thou – forced the government to raise the target.

As we noted at the time, the unrealistic target was criticised by Greenpeace member and Labour MP Rob Marris, “The public will ask ‘why should we bother doing anything at all?”, he noted.

The Commons passed the legislation by 463 votes to 3, and with similar unanimity in the upper chamber, where former Chancellor Lord Lawson called it “the most absurd Bill that this House and Parliament as a whole has ever had to examine.”

The Sir Humphreys are clearly sensitive about the impact of the legislation. A recalculation of the costs and benefits saw £1bn shaved off the cost of the Act recently, in a written answer left in the Commons library without any announcement.

Bootnote

You may be wondering why, if more people means greater emissions, Pielke doesn’t advocate population control in the UK – the solution favoured by vole stranglers, bedroom Strangelove fantasists, and our upper crust ecologists. He doesn’t address that here, but did in a talk at Aston University last year, Ben Pile reported here. It’s because population reductions take too long to have any meaningful effect on CO2 emissions. So there.

Speaking at the British Association’s Science Week, King will say that the Greenies’ anti-science superstitions are causing unnecessary suffering in Africa. King blames “anti-poverty” campaigners, aid agencies and environmental activists for keeping modern farming techniques and bio-technology out of Africa. King tells the Times today:

“The suffering within [Africa], I believe, is largely driven by attitudes developed in the West which are somewhat anti-science, anti-technology – attitudes that lead towards organic farming, for example, attitudes that lead against the use of genetic technology for crops that could deal with increased salinity in the water, that can deal with flooding for rice crops, that can deal with drought resistance.”

King wonders why recent productivity revolutions in agriculture, which have been such a success in Asia and India, have not been implemented in Africa on the same scale. He concludes that the blame lies not with Africans, but with Western “do-gooders” who prefer Africans to remain picturesque and dirt poor.

An example he cites is the attempts of eco-campaigners Friends of the Earth to keep drought-resistant crops out of Africa.

He has a point.

“Where once there were ambitions for people in the third world to enjoy Western standards of living, now the voice of the voiceless instead celebrates the primitive lifestyles that the world’s poorest people suffer,” wrote Ben Pile and Stuart Blackman recently in a scathing critique of the charity Oxfam, called Backwards to the future.

Indeed, and the same middle-class superstitions that endeavour to keep Wi-Fi out of schools are used to justify keeping biotechnology out of Africa.

For example, Friends of the Earth continues to argue that modern seed technologies should not be used to make agriculture easier and more productive for poor farmers – even when this causes more ecological damage than the new technology. FoE’s most recent campaign against biotech means that subsistence farmers must continue to use seeds that require more fertiliser than GM varieties, and which need environmentally-destructive tilling.

Whatever it is that motivates these self-styled “Greens”, it isn’t a concern for the environment. Nor, despite claims to the contrary, is there any valid concern of “over-population”. The UN estimates global population growth to peak in the 2040s at 7.87bn, then decline, assuming modest development is permitted to continue. Not only does economic development mean fewer people, but it means less suffering: those fewer people are much happier.

Clearly, we can easily generate enough food to feed everyone on the planet and we have the means to ensure there’s less human suffering. Some people want that to happen – and some don’t. You’ll find many nursing their Malthusian or Eugenics prejudices under the banner of Greenery in the former camp – but it’s a refreshing surprise to find King in the latter camp, or at least edging away from the Greens’ death cult.

©Situation Publishing 2008.

Demanding strict state-controlled energy rationing, Pullman says in a new book:

“This is a crisis as big as war and you couldn’t trade your ration book in the wartime. You were allowed three ounces of butter a week, or whatever, and that was it. And this is what it should be like with carbon. None of this carbon trading. We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year.”

Sounds fun. But then Pullman reveals why he’s wearing a rose-tinted spyglass:

“My childhood was formed during the austerity years after the war. So I still feel influenced by that. Curious, isn’t it, how we were much healthier as a nation after the war when the rationing was on?”

Ah, yes. Those glory days when tuberculosis and syphilis were rampant, penicillin was rare, very few males over the age of 30 still had their own teeth, and life expectancy was ten years shorter than it is today!

Preventing people from turning their own heaters on in cold weather would result in the needless deaths of the old and vulnerable. But that isn’t grim enough for Pullman, who wishes a new menace upon us: killer carnivores.

“If the polar bears leapt from the pages of my fiction into reality and saw what was happening, they’d eat us. Eat as many of us as quickly as they possibly could. And good luck to them.”

Pullman’s nasty brand of misanthropy is all in the name of saving us from “global warming”, of course. His interview appears in a grim new book called Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?, a collection of interviews with wealthy B-list and C-list celebs. It’s a sort of 21st century “Duck and Cover“, but instead of singing our way through a nuclear apocalypse, this show us ways of enduring self-inflicted carbon austerity. It’s co-authored by policy wonk Andrew Simms, who has done much to encourage the idea that we’re in a wartime situation, which (naturally) calls for wartime state controls and general all-round misery.

Pullman prides himself on his rationality, but there are a few facts that stand between him and a coherent argument.

Firstly, polar bears are really doing fine – proving their resilience as a species. According to the World Wildlife Fund, amongst 14 of the 20 polar bear populations worldwide it surveyed, ten populations are stable, two are increasing, and two are decreasing. One of the two diminishing populations, in Baffin Bay, is declining because the air is getting colder – not warmer. Polar bears do face threats from pollution (which the carbon cultists have shoved off the environmental agenda), but they seem to take warming in their loping stride.

Secondly, even NASA is reluctant to attribute a warmer Arctic to “Global Warming”. It’s a local, regional phenomenon, with the current favourite theory being changes in the circulation of ocean currents. A peer-reviewed study expectedly shortly explains the “dramatic” (15 per cent) ice loss this summer to the fact that the Arctic had around 15 per cent less cloud cover this summer. So much for that panic, then.

The prominence of polar bears in the news doesn’t tell us much about global warming – but rather more about a news media that’s given up trying to understand the world, and prefers to fantasise about it (and scare us) instead.

As David Whitehouse explained recently, the Earth’s temperatures have been stable for the past decade:

“It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased,” he wrote.

Thirdly, there’s Pullman’s insistence that the idea of human-induced climate catastrophe is somehow the voice of radical dissent. But it’s not, since anthropogenic global warming is the well-funded mainstream view today (as advocates never cease of reminding us). Pullman compares the climate scaremongers to Old Testament prophets… “and the struggle that the climate-change prophets have had to undertake to get their message heard”.

Some struggle. The doomsday view has huge institutional backing – the UN and NASA, for example – and the top-down science budgets follow. Greenpeace alone has spent $2bn on lobbying in the past decade, yet still presents itself as a ragtag outsider outfit.

You’re left wondering why this professional atheist has spent so much time constructing a religion for himself – it’s quite medieval. And how weird that an author of epic fantasy novels has constructed his greatest fantasy to use in everyday life.

Footnote: The Sunday Telegraph, which has an excerpt of “Shiver And Perish” here, bills Pullman’s worldview as championing “a new brand of environmentalism that offers us all hope”.

Proof that even on posh newspapers, sometimes sub-editors don’t read the stories.