People don’t trust politicians or business. They need to feel sustainability is not a con or a game

Issues don’t come much bigger than the future of the planet and the survival of humanity. David Kester interviews leaders from industry and design about the challenge of building a more sustainable future

It’s perfectly clear what is at stake as humanity seeks to avert a global environmental meltdown. How we avoid the apocalypse – and what that will cost us – is much less clear. So DCM hosted a breakfast at the Design Council to discuss the way forward with CBI boss Richard Lambert, Design Council chief executive David Kester and design thinker John Thackara. The first question was obvious...

How would you define sustainability?

Thackara: It is a way of organising the various activities human beings carry out in our economy and society so they are roughly in balance with the biosphere’s capacity to support life.

Lambert: The concept has been given new sharpness by concern about climate change, the part of the sustainability agenda that can be most easily measured and imagined.

Thackara: [Sir Nicholas] Stern measures it – he says the social cost of CO2 is £44 a ton. Sustainability, for most people, includes social equity, fair trading and fair dealing. There is an argument that if you don’t have justice very broadly understood, you can never share the capacity of the planet equally.

Kester: In his report, Stern talks about a £255bn green market to be tapped. Is that market real?

Lambert: It’s not real now. Who knows what the number will be? Stern’s point was that the way business is done must change radically in the next 50 years. That will throw up opportunities and risks. A lot of the impact will be marginal: investigations up the supply chain to the concept and design, and down again. There will be carbon capture and large sums of money will be invested in storage, but it’s early days.

Thackara: People who are fanatical about carbon sequestration, biofuel advocates, all have projections of how enormous their industry will be. But the bigger picture is how are we going to reorganise life so we don’t live so wastefully?

Kester: If we do need to reorganise, what will drive that: consumers, business or legislation?

Lambert: Consumer power will not be enough, there will need to be regulation, legislation and market incentives. An essential requirement is arriving at a meaningful price for carbon that impacts on the behaviour of government, business and the public. You can do that by a carbon tax or creating a market system that works. The European Emission Trading Scheme is a start, but it needs a lot doing to it.

Kester: Do you think people recognise that?

Lambert: I don’t know the public has come to terms with the idea that there will be a price to be paid. European governments have and businesses are thinking about it in their investment decisions.

Thackara: Stern sets the stage for things that have been called external costs for 200 years – the value provided to industry by natural resources – to become internal costs. When these are brought into the calculation, Richard is saying prices of all sorts of things will go up.

Kester: We’ve had some legislative changes already, such as the WEEE directive on waste electronic goods. Would you say these initiatives are joined up?

Lambert: I remember a motor-car manufacturer getting very cross about the fact that the regulations on the way automobiles have to be recycled clash with other rules. I don’t think policy makers recognise the scale of what they’re talking about. The climate change bill sets very demanding targets for 2060, including a 60% reduction in carbon emissions. That means we’ll have to be twice as energy efficient as we are now, using energy that has half the carbon content. We can make radical changes without too much pain. We’re so grotesquely inefficient that the grotesqueries can be taken out. After that it gets harder.

Thackara: There is an institutional problem. We need ways to act across disciplines and silos, at all levels of government, from the global to the local, because you have people doing transport or schools or food or health doing their own thing. Until that is co-ordinated effectively, we will never make the progress needed to reorganise daily life.

What designers can do, with others, is imagine futures that improve the quality of life but use less carbon

Who will pay for all these changes?

Lambert: In the end, we’re all citizens and tax payers, so we’ll be paying. But economic self interest means you can save money. If you’re running a modern airline with modern aircraft, you’re emitting much less carbon than an old airline. That’s not a cost, that’s a gain. Further down the road there will be, as Stern said, a price to be paid by everybody, but the cost of acting now is much lower than the cost – and consequences – of not acting.

Have you seen any good examples of companies or governments acting?

Lambert: British companies are looking up their supply chains through lenses they weren’t wearing before. When Walkers Crisps put a carbon footprint on their packaging, that obliged them to look up the supply chain. It turned out that farmers, just before they dug up their potatoes, shoved them full of water to make them weigh a lot, and then, when they came to the crisp factory, they had to be dried, heated and dried again. So if you knock out the water and the drying, your carbon footprint goes down a few percentage points. A trivial example, but companies are thinking like that now.

Thackara: I went to a meeting of a major hub airport where they said, ‘Well, what would it mean if we stopped having aeroplanes coming to our airport?’ And a logistics company wondered, ‘Could we survive and still not ship packages around the world in our fleet of aeroplanes?’

There is, though, a paradox between the way we calibrate productivity in economic terms and some of the new targets we need to set. People have been saying for 20 years that we don’t measure what matters. In the health system, vast numbers of hours are spent by people looking after each other. This doesn’t register as an activity in the economy. But without them, the economy would come to an abrupt halt. If you could put wellbeing into the balance sheet, an economy could be doing better than when you measure it according to our current, very narrow, parameters. North-east England is a good example. It comes bottom on many indicators of productivity and traditional growth, but if you measured these broader social assets, the story would be much healthier.

Kester: As someone who’s sat on the monetary policy committee, and as an economist, do you think, Richard, the Treasury is measuring the right things?

Lambert: I’m sure it’s not. The GDP measure was devised in a different world, for a totally different set of circumstances. That will have to change. A point I would make – which is a bit tangential so I apologise – is that I do get irritated by policy makers focusing on targets, so that the whole debate around the climate change bill is should it be 60% or 80%. It’s easy if you’re a politician to say, ‘I’m out-greening Mr Miliband’. They want a goal, and they’ll be dead by the time they’ve missed it so it’s fine.

After 2025, we’ll need a radical approach to product design and development. We may have gone as far as we can with the combustion engine and turbine

In the US, the electricity industry is campaigning for federal regulation because it’s frightened of a piecemeal approach where California has one set of laws, Utah another. Isn’t it important, whatever legislation or institutions we have, that we have a level playing field across Europe?

Lambert: It’s a great opportunity for the European Union, and they’re playing it quite well. The big picture goals they have, of carbon emission reductions over a period, and making judgements that would make the programme more demanding if they can secure engagement from other parts of the world, that’s all good and sensible. The European Union is of a scale to make a difference to the world, and it has moral and political leadership in a way that the only other player in town, the United States, hasn’t.

Thackara: If you don’t have some kind of a dial going green and red, people assume the worst. We can make a lot of progress, but if it’s not measured in a way everybody agrees is reasonably accurate, we will suspect the worst. And if we don’t have a bar that we have to jump over, lots of people, like politicians, will say we’re greener than they are, even if it’s just 1% greener, so we need to know.

Lambert: I agree. What I’m saying is I wished they talked about things other than targets. What really matters is policies that are going to change.

Thackara: Maybe they keep talking about it so they don’t actually have to set them.

Lambert: That’s what I think.

Thackara: If it’s couched so targets mean, ‘I will have less of what I enjoy now’, everybody will be turned off. We have to frame the changes as improvements to our quality of life. The thing designers can do, with others, is to imagine near futures which are better quality, but less wasteful of carbon.

Kester: I was going to ask you about this, John, because obviously you’ve been looking at the role design could play within this mix in the north east.

Thackara: Paul Hawken, who wrote a book called Natural Capitalism, reckons there are a million grassroots organisations in the world trying to improve their local environmental situation. So when I say, ‘What can designers do?’, we can help people do things they’re already doing, we don’t have to start from a blank sheet of paper. In the north east we said, ‘Let’s do a project on making a street 60% more energy efficient ’, and found over 50 separate organisations, programmes and activities already doing it. They couldn’t get citizens to buy into these schemes because they were all top down, complicated and hard to understand. We’ve been able, using design skills, to make some propositions easier to understand, we’ve worked with citizens on how they’d like to reorganise a house or street, and how this would improve their quality of life, rather than being a kind of tax or monastic burden.

Kester: That’s a very challenging view of where design fits into this. One fact that I picked up is that the EU recognises that 80% of a product’s environmental cost is determined at the concept and design phase, so design is very, very key.

Lambert: Simple changes in production processes and design and much improved communication will get us to where we need to be by 2025. Beyond that, you will need a much more radical approach to product design and development. Perhaps we’ll have gone as far as we can with the combustion engine or turbine jet, and we’ll need things that are hard for us to imagine now.

Thackara: It’s not just the artefacts we use, it’s the way they’re used. Some 90% of vehicles in the north east sit idle most of the time. The ones that are moving are normally nearly empty. You have a fantastic unused capacity of vehicles. Even if you didn’t design one single thing to do with the combustion engine, but exploited the existing capacity through IT and service design, you could get a massive reduction in carbon emissions.

Kester: Do you think the public actually realise the scale of the changes that are going to be required?

Lambert: The messages are quite confusing and depressing. Take air transport. Mr Brown put on airline passenger duty and said, ‘This is a green tax’. It’s not a green tax, and it makes no difference to people’s behaviour, it’s just a way of raising money. And then the Tories say, ‘Oh well, we’re going to have a Leninist system, whereby you can only take one short-haul flight a year’, or whatever it was, and everybody’s thinking, ‘What the hell is all this about?’ I read a survey saying that people distrust business and politicians on sustainability. That needs to be addressed. People want to do things, they think they’d like to do things, but getting that push to change behaviour will be critical, and it’s going to have to be done in a way people trust and feel is not a con trick or a political game.

Thackara: People, rightly, suspect that their freedom to become green is severely constrained by the way their lives are organised. If where you live and where you work and where your children go to school are miles apart, you’re likely to drive round in an ungreen way. People are very suspicious about being told it’s all about personal choice and changing patterns of behaviour, because people are very constrained. That’s where a lot of the resistance – the hostility – comes from.

If you have a clapped out boiler and have to bring in a new one, which would, along with insulation, make a big difference, it will cost thousands of pounds. How people pay for that is a challenge. That’s not strictly a design responsibility but in the street where we were trying to cut emissions, we said, ‘You must all have new boilers’. And they said, ‘Thank you very much, who’ll pay for them?’ So we asked finance companies and building societies and co-operative loan banks to make a green mortgage.

Kester: Are we moving fast enough?

Thackara: We have 10, 20 years to get the machine rolling. Once we change things for the better, and people connect the fact that their quality of life goes up and the environmental benefit goes up, change can accelerate. I’m not saying we won’t hit a wall in 20 years time when big infrastructure problems arise, but we can get a lot of momentum going.

With all these apocalyptic change scenarios, there’s survivalist-type stuff. Books with blood-curdling titles like Crisis Preparedness are selling well

The avalanche of weighty reports like Stern’s almost induces a feeling of hopelessness where people don’t believe small changes will make a difference to a problem that seems so massive.

Kester: Funnily enough, I was wondering earlier whether we ought to have a sort of year of insulation, where we decide 2008 is the year we’ll sort insulation – not that we don’t do the other things – but in 2009, we’re all going to focus on packaging.

Thackara: The other worry about all these apocalyptic climate change scenarios – climate porn – is that there’s a lot of almost survivalist stuff coming out. Books with blood-curdling titles such as The Party’s Over, Powerdown and Crisis Preparedness are selling amazingly well on Amazon.

Finally, how do you think China and India will respond to lectures from the West about their environmental responsibility?

Lambert: China has made it perfectly clear that its idea of parity with the US is when they match America’s CO2 emissions per head. China and India both recognise the need to act but they’re not going to listen to any lectures from us.

Thackara: China is much more aware of the sustainability and climate change challenge. We were part of a conference in Beijing last year, where Chinese politics and design leaders all said that climate change was their number one preoccupation. That just is not true in India but lots of people in India are beginning to think about it.

The panel

Richard Lambert

Director-general of the CBI

Before taking up his post at the CBI in July last year, Richard Lambert had been a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. He had previously spent a decade as editor of the Financial Times.

David Kester

Chief executive of the Design Council

David Kester became chief executive of the Design Council in 2003. Prior to this he was chief executive at D&AD. A council member of the Royal College of Art, he sits on a number of industry and government committees.

John Thackara

Director of Doors of Perception

Formerly the first director of the Netherlands Design Institute, John Thackara became renowned for his work as the director of the design innovation network Doors of Perception. He is the author of 12 books.

The back story

A layman’s guide to carbon

One way to cut global warming is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by a process known as carbon sequestration.

Capturing CO2 from its source of release and storing it to stop it escaping into the atmosphere is one way of doing this, known as CCS (carbon capture and storage).

While technology has been developed to capture CO2 from large emitters such as power plants, storage is not as advanced. An effective CCS system could reduce emissions by 80-90%, although implementation could increase a plant’s fuel needs by 10-40% and raise the cost of energy from the plant by 30-60%.

Once captured, carbon could be stored in oceans or underground geological formations, or as mineral carbonates.

The sustainability debate