Fundamental questions that ecological economics still needs to address – governance and the media

Paper for presentation at ISEE 2000 Conference People and Nature: Operationalising Ecological Economics, Australian National University, Canberra, 5-8 July 2000.

1. Some background

The form that my title takes is intended to make a point of some local historical interest, and thereby to lead into what is the main, general, point of the paper. In the same year, 1988, as the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was founded, there started in the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES) here at the Australian National University the Fundamental Questions Programme (FQP). The FQP was set up by Stephen Boyden, then Professorial Fellow in Human Ecology in CRES. The motivation for the FQP was very like that for ISEE. It derived from

an appreciation of the fact that the biosphere, as a system capable of supporting humankind, will not tolerate indefinitely the present pattern of resource and energy use and of waste production of our modern society

being concerned with

the interplay between human society and natural systems, especially as this interplay affects the functioning and health of ecosystems and of human populations

and with its name deriving from the observation that

An analysis of the human situation in these terms clearly raises some fundamental questions about the future of our economy and social organisation (emphasis added)[1]

In ISEE terminology, the FQP was about sustainability.

The FQP also shared with ISEE the conviction that the sustainability problem required an inter-disciplinary approach. Originally a veterinarian, Stephen Boyden started his academic career in the field of medical science and moved to human ecology in the early1970's, and to CRES in 1976. The disciplinary backgrounds of others involved in the FQP included: ecology, economics ( myself among others), psychology, physics, medicine, architecture, philosophy, sociology, public health and anthropology. Some division of labour was intended, with the plan for the FQP involving three phases. Phase 1 was intended to set out the fundamental questions, this being mainly, but not exclusively, the work of ecologists. The main published outcome of this phase was Our Biosphere Under Threat (Boyden et al 1990). Phase 2 was where inter-disciplinarity really kicked in, the idea being to get individuals from a range of disciplines to jointly and separately consider responses to the fundamental questions. One published outcome of this phase was Sustainability and Policy (Common 1995). Then in phase 3, intended to be strongly inter-disciplinary and to involve individuals from the policy process as well as academia, questions and responses would be brought to bear upon policy issues.

The FQP differed from the ISEE enterprise in a number of ways. It was mainly intended to be a programme of finite duration (in fact it terminated in 1994) with some specific and focussed outcomes of direct (Australian) policy relevance, as well as basic research outcomes. As regards human systems the FQP was less focussed on economics. Whereas ecological economics sets out its stall in terms of the interdependence of ecological and economic systems, the FQP, as noted above, talked in terms of 'human society and natural systems'. The publication that most fully sets out the intellectual framework that informed the design of the FQP is Stephen Boyden's Western Civilization in Biological Perspective: Patterns in Biohistory (Boyden 1987), a book which in my view should be required reading for all ecological economists, but which, in fact appears little known to them. 'Biohistory' is the 'study of human situations in terms of the interplay between natural and cultural systems' (Boyden 1987 p 1).

The main, general, point of this paper is that ecological economics needs to broaden its focus in the direction taken by the FQP, to look at 'human society' including culture, rather than just the 'economic system', as that which co-evolves with natural systems.

2. Introduction

I take it that the fundamental problem of ecological economics is sustainability. I also take it that ecological economics is a normative study, in that it is concerned not just to understand the problem but also to see understanding used to address threats to sustainability. The problem is multi-faceted, complex and characterised by uncertainty. However, we do know quite a lot about the problem. It is essentially global, and the principal systemic threats are climate change and biodiversity loss, which are driven by human population growth and increasing per capita material consumption. Addressing the threats requires cooperation between nation states, which in turn, given present inequalities, requires a readiness on the part of rich nations to see, in relative terms at least, some re-distribution of material consumption in favour of poor nations. As well as cooperating one with another, nations, especially the rich ones, need to re-structure the incentives, especially the relative prices, that their citizens face when making production and consumption decisions so as to make those activities less material and energy, and especially less fossil fuel, intensive.

Many people, myself included, judge that the pace at which the rich nations are moving to address threats to sustainability is much too slow, in regard to both re-distribution and incentive re-structuring. I imagine that most ecological economists would share this judgement. This prompts the first and general fundamental question for ecological economics - 'why are the rich nations doing so little?'. Looking at ecological economics as reflected in publications in Ecological Economics, one might infer the answer that the problem is mainly to do with a lack of knowledge about 'ecology' and 'economics' and their applications to threats to sustainability.[2] That does not seem to me to be a convincing sort of answer. While there is more to know about these things, there are limits to what we can know, and, as indicated above, in broad terms enough is already known. As ‘ecologists’ we may not know by how much the fossil fuel intensity of rich economies needs to be reduced, but we do know that it needs to be reduced a lot, and we also know that the risk of reducing by too much is very small. As ‘economists’ we may have disagreements about the relative merits of taxes and tradable permits as instruments for reducing fossil fuel use, but it seems implausible that it is such lack of consensus that inhibits the use of either.

I do not want to suggest ecological economics should be complacent about where it is at in terms of basic understanding. On the contrary, as far as what I can claim to know something about - economics - goes, I think that there are quite basic problems about the approach to understanding economic behaviour that it has imported, largely un-modified, from mainstream economics. My point is rather that those problems are not the answer to the question as to why ecological economics has had little impact on actual events in the rich nations. While it is true, for example, that the economic model of human behaviour is deficient, it is also true that we know that, in fact, individuals do respond to changes in relative prices.

Attempts to attach values to ecosystem services, exemplified by the Science article in 1997 (Costanza et al 1997) which was the basis for a special issue of Ecological Economics in 1998, can be seen as supplying an implicit answer to the question 'why is so little getting done'. The answer there is 'because we are not getting the message across to the people who matter'. The lesson drawn from this answer is to get the message across by putting it in terms of prices, it being understood that 'the people who matter', decision makers, will understand and be influenced by a story told in terms of $s. I happen to think that the lesson drawn is wrong, but I agree that the problem is more about the message not getting across to the people who matter, than it is about not knowing what the message that needs to be got across is. I shall argue that ecological economics needs, if it has aspirations to influence events, to consider two fundamental questions about how 'messages get across' and who are 'the people who matter'. These are:

Is universal suffrage elective democracy the form of nation state governance that best promotes sustainability?

Given universal suffrage elective democracy, can information provision for voters be left as a, largely un-regulated, part of the entertainment industry?

As with many of the questions that the sustainability problem generates, these have wider resonance than the problem itself. Even if there were not serious threats to the sustainability of global systems, there would be cause for serious concern about the implications for the functioning of democratic systems of the informational base on which many voters operate.

In the next section of the paper, 3, I briefly describe and comment on some recent developments in policy formulation in the UK. It was looking into these, for the purposes of teaching, that was proximately responsible for the formulation of the two questions above. Section 4 considers the conceptualisation of the sustainability problem in terms of interdependent systems. Sections 5 and 6 look at governance and the role of the 'media' in informing voters. The final section, 7, offers some concluding remarks.

To anticipate. The conclusion is that we should be paying as much attention to the regulation of activities which determine information flows as we do to the regulation of activities which impact directly on environmental systems. The argument to this conclusion is that sustainability promoting actions in the rich nations require that their governments have regard to the interests of future and foreign people. Given that these nations are democracies, this requires that the voters there have such regard, which in turn requires that they have information about the state of foreign people and the prospects for future people. The voters get the information through the media, and a strong case can be made that, for many of them, the way the media currently operates does not provide enough relevant information.

The argument is not that the media provision of voter information is the only problem. In 'The Policy-Making Process', Lindblom and Woodhouse (1993) pose the question 'Why are humans not more effective in solving social problems?' (p1), among which they include environmental problems and the problem of poverty. The question is considered in the context of a modern democratic system of government. Their answers fall into three broad categories – the limited capacity of humans for solving complex problems, the role of special interest groups, and socio-economic and political inequality. As regards the first, they distinguish between innate and socially caused impairments to problem solving capabilities, and locate the social impairments in the education system and the media as information system for voters. In focussing on the last sub-category I do not seek to deny the importance of any of the others, with which it interacts. Given that the sustainability problem is complex and uncertain, it does make special demands on our limited capacities. As Lindblom and Woodhouse put it: 'There is a deep and persistent unwillingness in Western culture to acknowledge the difficulties arising from the world's complexity and humans' modest cognitive abilities' (p5). The problems of decision making for complex and uncertain systems have been considered in the ecological economics literature, and it is clear that they have some part in answering my question.[3] I do not discuss them because they have been given attention in that literature, and because the problems involved are, in democracies, greatly exacerbated by the problem that I choose to focus on – the provision of voter information by the mass media.

3. An illustrative story from recent UK policy making

Documentation, with references, for the account of policy development sketched in this section can be found in Appendix 1.

At Kyoto the UK made a commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5% on a 1990 base by 2008-12. It has also made a unilateral commitment to reduce CO₂ emissions by 20% on a 1990 base by 2010. In March of this year the UK government published (DETR 2000) its Climate Change Programme, setting out the policies, in place and to be adopted, intended to deliver on these commitments. The programme classifies policies according to the directly affected sectors – Business, Transport, Domestic, Agriculture Forestry and Fishing, and the Public Sector. With the exception of the Business sector, the new policies are a mix of aspiration, regulation and moral suasion (involving some government expenditure). For the Business sector there will be a ‘Climate Change Levy’ (CCL), a new tax intended to reduce CO₂ emissions.

Given the policy objective, this sounds like a ‘carbon tax’, something that environmental and ecological economists should applaud enthusiastically. While some might prefer tradable permits over taxation, almost all have been arguing for many years for the superiority of either, price incentives, over regulation and other widely used policy instruments. In fact, the tax to be adopted as the CCL deserves, at best, only very modest applause. While it may do something in pursuit of the CO₂ policy target, it is a complete mess that flies in the face of the most elementary principles of the design of a carbon tax, and which seriously compromises future prospects for sensible policy development.

The basic principles for the design of a national carbon tax are simple, straightforward and widely agreed. Fossil fuel extraction and importation should be taxed at rates across the fossil fuels reflecting their carbon contents. With the adoption of such an 'upstream' approach all energy users would face changed relative prices sending, in terms of the policy objective, appropriate signals. Extractors and importers of fossil fuel primary energy would raise their selling prices according to carbon content. Those prices would be paid by primary energy purchasers, including producers of secondary energy fuels such as electricity, who would reflect them in their selling prices, and so on and so on. The way in which such upstream carbon taxation would cascade through the economy to affect all prices, given the use of energy in production indirectly as well as directly, is well documented in numerous input-output and applied general equilibrium modelling exercises. For those who are sceptical about modelling, the experience of the 1970s and 80s showed how higher primary energy prices do actually cascade through the economy, and affect behaviour.

The CCL is not an upstream tax, and in fact it is not even a carbon tax. The tax will be paid by energy users, but collected by energy suppliers – it is a ‘downstream’ tax. It will be paid by the users of gas, coal, liquid petroleum gas and electricity, but not by users of oil. Users in the Transport and Domestic sectors will not pay the tax. The tax base is energy, kwh, and does not reflect carbon content. Gas and coal will be taxed at the same rate per kwh, liquid petroleum gas at a lower rate, and electricity at a higher rate intended to reflect average thermal efficiency in its generation. Unlike upstream fossil fuel taxation at carbon content reflecting rates, this CCL provides no incentive to the electricity generating industry to switch away from fossil fuel inputs. Hence the proposed legislation will ‘exempt’ electricity from ‘new’ renewable sources (except large scale hydro) and ‘good quality’ Combined Heat and Power. The difficulties of managing such exemptions are obvious. The legislation will allow for 80% reductions in the levy where there are negotiated agreements about energy conservation targets, and is intended to allow firms/sectors in negotiated agreements to trade ‘emissions’. It would seem obvious that grafting a trading system onto the structure adopted for the levy would be difficult, and so it has proved.

As compared with what is the consensus among interested economists on the design of a national carbon tax, the CCL will be relatively ineffective and administratively complex. For the purposes of this paper, the question about the CCL is not so much ‘will it work?’ as ‘why such a bizarre system?’. Were the designers incompetent and/or ignorant? Did they not seek advice from economists who had spent some time thinking about carbon taxation? Is there some legal impediment to doing the obvious? The answers to these questions are ‘no’.On the basis of study of the publicly available documents charting the development of the CCL, it is clear that what emerged at the end of the process was essentially determined by the original design brief supplied by the government. The key feature of this was that the CCL should not have any impact on the Domestic sector.[4] Acceptance of this is what lead the designers to go for ‘downstream’ taxation, and once that is done the other features necessarily follow.

Why did the government include this requirement in the design brief? The answer that it publicly provides is in terms of ‘social policy reasons’, ie of not adding to the problem of ‘fuel poverty’. While this was no doubt a consideration, it can hardly be the whole story. It is well known that regressivity of higher secondary energy prices consequent on carbon taxation can be addressed and dealt with by appropriate use of the revenue arising, with targeted changes to the welfare benefits system.[5] Indeed, the UK government has recently announced that persons over 60 years of age can receive £150 per annum toward their fuel costs, while at the same time resisting calls to increase the state retirement pension other than by the increase in the retail price index. The whole story clearly involves electoral politics, and the media.

Briefly, the current Labour government came to power in 1997 after spending 18 years in opposition. Its leaders have made it very clear that their major political objectives require at least two terms of office, and that a major consideration in policy making is to secure a second term, ie to be re-elected sometime in the next two years. One of the reasons that the Labour Party lost 4 successive elections is held to be that it was seen, especially by the highly significant part of the electorate that is movable between parties rather than attached by custom to one of them, to be the party of high taxation. The Labour Party went into the 1997 election with a commitment not to raise taxes. Since then there has been much dispute, most of it largely meaningless, about whether this commitment has been honoured. It is a matter of public record that income taxation has not, in terms of rates, increased. The claim from the opposition is that while this is true, the total tax burden has increased as a result of ‘stealth taxes’. This claim is regularly taken up by the newspapers, especially by two with large circulations and thought to be much read by ‘swinging voters’. It also receives coverage in the broadcast media news and current affairs programmes, which seem frequently to follow an agenda largely set by the print media. The government is very sensitive on the issue of ‘stealth taxes’. Clearly, a tax on primary fuel inputs passed on to the Domestic sector as higher secondary fuel prices would be very easily portrayed as a ‘stealth tax’.

In fact, and as recognised in the documents describing the development of the CCL, it will involve rises in the prices facing the Domestic sector. Given that energy is used indirectly as well as directly in the production of all commodities, any tax paid by energy users will increase the prices paid by final consumers for all commodities. Some work that I did in the 1980s for the UK, using input-output methods, showed that of the total impact on the cost of living arising from higher primary energy prices, only 50% arose through the effects on the prices to households of non-transport fuels.[6] The impact of higher energy prices was found to be regressive when indirect as well as direct effects were accounted for, but substantially less so than only the direct effects were considered. Most commentary on fuel poverty and the regressive effects of energy taxation considers only the direct effects. Further, the regressive effect arising via the effect on food prices to households was approximately the same size as that due to the effect on the prices paid for non-transport fuels. While the precise numbers will have changed since then, this general picture will not have changed. Given that the CCL was, as noted above, developed in the light of an awareness of this general picture, and that there are no proposals to deal with the regressive impact it will still involve, it can be inferred that this path from the CCL to the Domestic sector was taken to be sufficiently stealthy to escape notice. As far as I am aware, this has been the case to date.

A final point here. One reason for choosing this story to illustrate the role of electoral politics in policy making is that the complexity/uncertainty dimension is absent. In this case the target had been adopted, and the problem was simply to select and design an instrument for that target.

4. Interdependent natural and human systems

I, among many others, have said that ecological economics is concerned with the interdependence of economic and environmental systems, which is the origin of the sustainability problem. Figure 1 is a simplified version of conceptual framework that informs much of the work in the field to date – the economy exchanges matter and energy with ‘the environment’, which exchanges energy with its environment. The sustainability problem arises because the economy is not so organised that these exchanges are controlled so as to be consistent with the long term health of the economy. Policy analysis focuses on the running of the economy.

Figure 1 Economy Environment Interdependence

	ENERGY

	ENERGY AND MATTER

There have, of course, always been those, including some happy to be labelled as ecological economists, who have argued that sustainability is about more than ecology and economics, and especially that the analysis of human activity in the biosphere should not be studied from an exclusively economic standpoint. I now think that the simple conceptual framework of Figure 1 should be replaced as the starting point for thinking about sustainability by something like Figure 2.[7] Human activity is seen as involving three inter-connected systems – economic, governance and cultural. Figure 2 is, of course, a gross simplification of what is really needed. It should, for example, in regard to human systems show many inter-connected economic, cultural and governance systems.

Figure 2. Natural and Human Systems

				ENERGY AND MATTER ERERIRALS
					ENERGY
					INFORMATION
						POWER

The economic system is where production and (private) consumption are located, and is the human system that exchanges energy and matter with the environment. It supports the human cultural and governance systems with inputs of transformed energy and matter, and it is convenient to treat those systems as returning their wastes to the environment via the economic system.

‘Culture’ is a word that has been given many meanings in several literatures. What I mean here by the ‘cultural system’ is captured in Stephen Boyden’s definition of culture as

that set of phenomena and processes which are characteristic of human societies and which involve the acquisition and accumulation of information and its transmission by non-genetic means, mainly through the use of learned symbols, from one human to another, from one society to another, and from one generation to another. Culture includes language, beliefs, knowledge, ideas, art as well as learned patterns and ways of doing things: it thus includes technology – that is, knowledge of techniques for modifying the environment. (Boyden 1987, p11)

In similar vein, Boyd and Richerson (1985) state that the essential feature of culture is ‘social learning, the nongenetic transfer of patterns of skill, thought and feeling from individual to individual in a population or society’ (p34). The energetic and material infrastructure for the operation of the cultural system is provided by the economic system.

What I mean by the ‘governance system’ is the set of processes that exercise the legislative, executive and judicial functions generally seen as characterising government. The legislature makes the laws which reflect policy choices; the executive carries out and enforces the laws: the judiciary pronounces on violations of the laws and disputes concerning them. These 'functions' are sometimes called 'powers', and in Figure 2 I have shown uni-directional arrows from the governance system to the economic and cultural systems which are labelled 'power'. This is to emphasise that governance is a matter of the exercise of power, in the sense that the government sets and enforces rules according to which the economic and cultural systems operate. The governance system operates on the basis of information exchanges with those systems. The energetic and material infrastructure for the operation of the governance system is provided by the economic system.

In Figure 2 information about the environment's natural systems is shown as flowing into each human system, but there is no information flow from human systems to natural systems. The impact of human systems on natural systems is solely in terms of extractions and insertions of matter and energy by the economic system. The three human systems co-evolve with one another, and with natural systems. But, evolution proceeds differently in the human and natural systems. In the latter, the processes involved are physical, chemical and biological. In the former, the dominant processes are now cultural. It is now generally accepted that biological evolution is Darwinian in nature, in that acquired characteristics are not genetically transmitted across generations. Cultural evolution is Lamarckian, in the sense that acquired characteristics are transmitted across generations.[8] In overly simple and general, but relevant terms, this means that cultural evolution has the potential to proceed more quickly than biological evolution. As pointed out by Stephen Boyden, this is both the origin of threats to sustainability and the location of the prospect of addressing those threats. It is cultural evolution that has driven economic activity to levels that threaten the integrity and resilience of natural systems. It is to cultural evolution that we must look for the emergence of behaviours that address those threats.

In Boyden (1987) there are distinguished ‘four basic prerequisites for successful cultural adaptation’ (p313) to threats to sustainability. These are:

1. Recognition that an undesirable state exists

2. Knowledge of the cause of the threat, or of how to meet it

3. Knowledge of, and availability of, the means to deal with the threat

4. Motivation, ‘on the part of those in society who make the relevant decisions’, to take appropriate action

In terms of Figure 2, and again greatly oversimplifying, I would argue that, for serious and systemic threats to sustainability, 1 2 and 3 here are matters concerning the cultural system and its informational connections with the governance system, and that 4 is a matter concerning the governance system, to be implemented via its power over the economic system. As indicated in Figure 2, the governance system is itself influenced by the cultural system, and by the economic system. In section 2 above, I claimed, in effect, that the explanation for the lack of action on threats to sustainability is not to be found at 1, 2, or 3, which leaves the explanation at 4 with the governance system. Actually, as discussed in the next two sections, this is, of course, another major oversimplification. Given the governance systems prevalent in the rich developed nations, ‘on the part of those in society who make the relevant decisions’ begs many questions. Prerequisites 1, 2 are about, and 3 is largely about, information. Given the prevalent governance systems, an important matter is the extent of the dissemination of information in respect of 1, 2 and 3. This involves the functioning of the cultural system, and raises questions about the exercise over it of the governance system’s power.

Boyd and Richerson (1985) argue that natural selection plays essentially the same role in cultural evolution as in genetic evolution, and consequently, and unlike many interested in cultural processes, they ‘attempt to discover the causes of the large-scale and long-term patterns of society in terms of events in the lives of individuals’ (p23). They argue that cultural inheritance is, in many circumstances, adaptive because it avoids the costs to the organism involved in individual, trial and error, learning:

Cultural inheritance is adaptive because it is such a shortcut. If the locally adaptive behaviour is more common than other behaviours, imitation provides an inexpensive way to acquire it. If the environment is not too variable, modest amounts of individual learning combined with cultural transmission lead to forces of guided variation and bias that are strong enough to cause available models generally to have adaptive skills. In this way, a cultural population can adapt to local conditions with a much smaller investment in learning than an acultural population. (p14-15)

They note that whereas in genetic evolution an individual inherits from at most two other individuals, in cultural evolution there is a much wider range of potential ‘models’ to inherit from, or imitate – as well as parents there are all of the other individuals with whom the individual comes into contact. In a modern society it is increasingly the case that many of the situations of potential model imitation do not involve direct contact with other individuals. Rather, they involve models presented via the print and broadcast media, which also transmit the information about the adaptive skills of the models. And, the models are not necessarily real people – fiction as well as fact can provide models through which cultural inheritance is mediated. At the same time, in modern societies, most individuals have little direct sense experience of the natural environment. Adaptation to it is, at the individual level, irrelevant.

The idea that all human systems work fundamentally in terms of processes operating at the individual level is compelling. However, understanding the processes and their consequences for system behaviour is clearly a difficult matter. The intellectual jewel in the crown of mainstream economics –general equilibrium theory - 'solves' the problem by making very special assumptions about individuals and the environment in which they operate. Its explanatory and predictive power is very limited. Clearly, understanding the interactions of the three human systems distinguished in Figure 2, and of them with natural systems, in terms of processes operating at the level of individuals is going to be very difficult indeed. Any given individual is simultaneously a participant in each human system, and all individuals will have dual roles in at least one of the systems. Pathological cases aside, in the cultural system all individuals are both information transmitters and receivers. In the economic system, all are consumers and many are producers. In the system of governance, all are governed, and the number who are also in some way involved as governors varies with the particulars of the system – in universal suffrage elective democracy all of the adult governed are able to have representation as governors.

One, relatively new, way of seeking insight into the ways in which processes operating at the level of individuals generate system level behaviour is agent based, or multi agent, simulation modelling. This methodology can model cultural evolution, as well as genetic evolution, and the co-evolution of human and natural systems. While there is a session on it at this conference, it seems to have had little impact to date on ecological economics – as far as I am aware only one paper using this methodology has appeared in Ecological Economics, Janssen and de Vries (1998). A paper by Common and Neumann using the methodology to look at irreversibility and precautionary behaviour is being presented in the Complex Adaptive session at this conference, and can be accessed at http://homepages.strath.ac.uk/~98101.

5. Governance and sustainability

Each year the public service radio system in the UK, the BBC, runs a series of 6 lectures called 'the Reith lectures' in memory of the first head of that system. In the context of this paper it is of interest that Reith is celebrated for his management of the BBC on the basis of the strongly held view that there should be a well funded independent public broadcasting service with a mission to inform and educate, as well as to entertain. In the UK 'Reithian' is now an adjective used to indicate such a view – usually it is used pejoratively in the sense of indicating a patronising and authoritarian approach to the role of the media. The topic of this year's series, BBC (2000), was Sustainable Development and the first lecture was by Chris Patten on 'Governance'.[9]

Patten came down in favour of democracy as the form of governance that best promotes sustainable development. He is, however, somewhat equivocal. One the one hand Patten says that ' Dictators are rarely friends of the earth' and that ' Some concede that democracy may be the most sustainable form of government, not least because it contains self-correcting mechanisms, and that it may be the least worst way of protecting the environment'. But, he follows the first of these remarks with

But even those democratic leaders who espouse environmentalism sometimes appear fatally constrained by a prevailing public mood or a powerful private lobby. In some cultural manifestations of environmental concern, the United States leads the world. Yet its contribution to the global struggle against climate change is hamstrung by the seeming political imperative of keeping energy prices low.

and after the second he says of democracy that some

question whether even at its most sophisticated we can really depend on it to take uncomfortable decisions for the unverifiable benefit of future generations

Patten does not explicitly discuss what he means by democracy. By etymology, democracy is people power. Thomas (2000) quotes a definition, 'that few would dispute', by May, according to which democracy entails a

necessary correspondence between acts of governance and the wishes with respect to those acts of the persons who are affected (p177)

According to Thomas this is the 'responsive rule' formulation of what democracy is. He notes that the point of the 'necessary' qualification is to rule out benevolent dictatorship, and that for many commentators May's definition concerns only the central element of democracy, which needs to be supported by freedom of speech, association and assembly, and by regular free elections.

For present purposes, it will be useful to distinguish two types of democracy and two sorts of argument for democracy.

In a direct democracy the governed participate in the acts of governance. In a representative democracy the governed choose, elect, those who participate in the acts of governance. Thomas categorises deliberative, or discursive, democracy as a variant of direct democracy in that in addition to the criterion of directness it involves a requirement for social interaction, by means of which preferences are discovered, subject to the constraints of public reason. The only widely cited example of direct democracy is that of Athens in the 5th century BC, where only non-slave adult males could be citizens and participate in governance. In modern parlance, 'democracy' is synonymous with 'representative democracy', and in the rich nations anyway the choosing of the representatives is done by all adults. Deliberative democracy is an ideal rather than something yet observed.

The arguments for democracy can be categorised, following Thomas, as either intrinsic or instrumental. The intrinsic arguments are based on ideas about the autonomy or equality of individuals. The extent to which extant examples of representative democracy satisfy the requirements of either of these sorts of argument is often questioned. Instrumental arguments come in two kinds, but both claim better outcomes under democracy than alternative systems of governance. The utilitarian argument is the political analogue of the case for a market system of economic organisation - citizens' preferences are taken as given, and the representatives mirror those preferences, so that the majority of citizens get what they want. Again, questions are raised about how this works in practice. What I shall call the process argument is that in a complicated world where individuals are in possession of incomplete knowledge, deliberation by the many stands a better chance of getting things right than deliberation by the few. This argument would apply most directly in the case of direct, and especially deliberative, democracy, but can be applied to representative democracy in so far as the representatives, who may be relatively few, are chosen by many – in modern rich countries by all adults. There has, of course, been a compelling practical argument for representation over direct participation – the logistics of organising participation in all but the smallest political units. Some would argue that technology has the capacity to reduce the force of this argument.

What does all this have to do with the environment and sustainability? Does a commitment to democracy necessarily entail a concern for the environment and a commitment to sustainability? Does a commitment to sustainability entail a commitment to democracy? There is a growing literature – see, for examples, Doherty and de Geus (1996), Lafferty and Meadowcroft (1996) and Jacobs (1997) - exploring these questions, where a range of answers, mostly based on a priori reasoning, may be found.[10] According to Dobson (1996a):

The dominant opinion at present, it seems, is that there is no necessary connection between the two to the extent that green processes need to be democratic processes (p132)

However, few now seem to be prepared to argue that environmental protection and sustainability require the abandonment of democracy, as apparently some where in 70s. Rather, in so far as the extant form, representative democracy, is found wanting in regard to the environment and sustainability, the dominant reaction seems to be to argue for its movement in the direction of direct deliberative, participative, democracy.

I noted above that the utilitarian argument for democracy is the political analogue of the utilitarian argument for the market system. In regard the latter, many economists appear to believe that correcting 'market failure' is the same as attaining sustainability. This belief is wrong. In the absence of market failure, the market system will produce outcomes that satisfy the requirements of allocative efficiency, which requirements reflect the preferences of individuals. Those preferences may be inconsistent with sustainability.[11] Saward (1996) makes the analogous point in regard to democracy:

I have argued that democracy should be understood as meaning responsive rule. On the face of this definition, there is little to comfort environmentalists. If governments, to be democratic, must respond to the felt wishes of a majority of citizens, then greens have little comeback if a majority does not want green outcomes. (p93)

One strand of the arguments advanced for the congruence of participative democracy and green concerns appears to be that under it we could expect that 'the felt wishes of a majority of citizens' would been consistent with green concerns. This is a consequentialist argument for participative democracy as congruent with green concerns. According to Dobson (1996a), a stronger argument for congruence is to be found in the deontological approach, taken by for example Eckersley, according to which both democracy and green concerns are founded in, intrinsic, respect for the principle of autonomy. It seems to me that potentially the strongest argument, at this level of abstraction, for congruence between sustainability and democracy could be based on what I called above the process argument for democracy. The sustainability problem is characterised by uncertainty and ignorance, to the extent that it is not clear that it is so much a state to be attained as an on-going process of avoiding disaster, and, the argument would be, the management of such a process will be best handled by deliberative democratic system of governance.

As noted above, this literature is predominantly in the form of a priori, and abstract, reasoning – often to the extent that one feels that one is reading the results of examination questions in applied philosophy rather the outcomes of serious engagement with the substantive issues.[12] Another, possibly related, problem with this much of this literature is that it takes 'concern for sustainability', 'concern for the environment', and 'green concerns' as synonymous, which they are not. Many individuals have a concern about local environmental problems, urban air pollution for example, which are not threats to sustainability.[13] Many 'greens' adopt a non-anthropocentric position, which is not a necessary feature of a concern for sustainability.

For the citizens of rich nation states a concern for sustainability involves consideration of the interests of future persons and, poor, foreign persons. Dobson (1996b) asks for each of these groups whether the representation of their interests should be democratic, and if so, what form that democratic representation would take.[14] For both of these constituencies, Dobson's answer to the first question is 'yes', the argument being that all of the arguments for democratic representation as regards current nationals apply to future and foreign persons.[15] The answers to the second question differ for the two groups, basically because foreign persons currently exist whereas future persons do not. In the case of foreigners, Dobson rejects the representation of foreign persons in the national parliament, mainly, on the grounds that a better possibility exists – transnational parliaments. Transgenerational parliaments are not possible. In this case, Dobson's answer is to find a proxy for future generations which can be represented in the national parliament, he suggests that the 'sustainability lobby' would be a suitable proxy electorate.

Two ecological economists – to my knowledge, there may have been others – have raised the question of how the system of governance might take account of the interests of future persons. At the 1992 ISEE conference, Ralph D'Arge, in a plenary presentation, suggested that the franchise should be extended to children. Clive Hamilton, in an unpublished talk given at the University of Canberra in 1995, proposed the creation of an office of The Ombudsman for Future Generations, having the following functions:

representing the interests of future generations in decision-making processes affecting the environment, such as greenhouse policy

investigating complaints from citizens about public and private decisions that might have a major impact on future generations

making submissions to environmental impact inquiries

alerting the community impending problems for future generations arising out of public and private activities

It should be noted that the interests of future generations are not only affected by current decisions that impinge directly upon the environment – the current level of savings and investment, and current research and development activities, are, for examples, directly relevant to future interests.

I have found two examples of papers dealing with governance in the ecological economics literature. Renner (1999) 'develops some thoughts on how Ecological Economists could derive policy recommendations to alter a society's evolution towards sustainable development' (p322). To this end, he distinguishes between the 'traditional "direct" approach' which has been dominant thus far in ecological economics, and the 'new "indirect" (institutional) approach' (p323) that he argues for. The direct approach derives policy targets from 'ecology' and designs instruments using 'economics'. With the indirect approach, analysis and recommendations focus rather 'on the institutional settings of the political and economic order, that is, the set of rules defining the possible forms of interactions of the various actors within society' (p325). The central question then is:

How can an institutional framework be designed so that the spontaneous interaction of the members of the society leads to a 'desirable' – more precisely a 'sustainable' – social order? (p327)

Renner looks for answers by applying the principles of public choice theory as represented by the Freiburg School (eg von Hayek ) and the Virginia School (eg Buchanan).

In general terms, the answers involve developing 'constitutional reforms that make political decision-making more responsive to citizens' preferences' (p332). Expanding on this, Renner ends up re-stating his central question in away that bears upon the problem encapsulated in the quotation from Saward above:

However, in order to show that such reforms would lead to a sustainable development, we have to take a closer look at the notion of individual preferences. Whenever liberal social scientists argue that politics should be more responsive to individual preferences they have 'informed' preferences in mind. Democracy cannot mean that people vote – rationally or irrationally – 'ignorant' in the sense that they vote for a policy, which they would not opt for if they were better informed. This is particularly important for the domain of environmental policy. Ecological systems are too complex. It is hard for 'normal' citizens to judge for themselves which emission levels to prefer. We have to think also about constitutional arrangements allowing people to form 'informed' preferences. The basic questions are then: How can institutions be designed so that the political decision-making process is responsive to 'informed' (wise, long-term) citizens' preferences? (p332-3, emphasis added)

The recommendations that Renner derives from the Virginia School are:

1. Direct votes (referenda) on environmental objectives.

2. Parents to have proxy votes on behalf of their children

3. Greater transparency and independence in advising government

4. A professionally managed process of participatory networking across stakeholders affected by a legislative proposal

5. Subsidiarity – decision making devolved to the lowest possible level.

The argument for 1 is that it would encourage 'public discourse' and hence 'better informed' preferences. While I agree with Renner that 'informed citizens' preferences' are highly desirable, this, on its own, seems an un-necessarily indirect approach to that objective.

Renner cites a paper by Vanberg and Buchannan as the source of the idea that an individual's preferences, for constitutional arrangements in his context, depend upon both 'personal interests' and 'theories about the world'. He claims that looking at things in this way can resolve a problem facing ecological economists – they are reluctant to not take preferences as sovereign, but fear that preferences may lead to sustainability threatening outcomes. The point is that 'wrong' preferences may arise from 'wrong' theories, and that one can hope to design policies to 'improve' individuals' theories, and hence their preferences, without challenging the sovereignty of their preferences. I think that the point, which is important, is more general than just being about preferences over constitutional arrangements, and covers preferences over commodities, states of the environment, and policies. And, that 'theories about the world' is an unfortunate terminology. Something like 'understanding of the world' would be better, to indicate that what is at issue for an individual is dependent on current information about the state of the world, and what is happening in it, as well as the individual's 'theories' about it. Renner does not make any suggestions, apart from the 'public discourse' benefits of referenda noted above, as to how voter information might be improved.

Schneider and Volkert (1999) also draw on public choice theory, in their case to consider, in a representative democracy, why it is difficult to get environmental policies adopted and why, if adopted, such policies frequently employ inefficient instruments. Basically, the answer to the second question is that the use of price incentives goes against the self-interests of the bureaucracy and affected private interests, while the answer to the first is in terms of the interests of politicians and the preferences of voters. In regard to those preferences, Schneider and Volkert note the role of education and information The recommendations that they make are:

1. Subsidiarity

2. Referenda

3. Compensation of voters via tax/welfare system for the effects of incentive based environmental policy

4. Hypothecation of environmental tax revenues for environmental purposes.

As with Renner, one of the reasons given for referenda is that they stimulate public discussion and the dissemination of information. A similar point is made by Rippe and Schaber (1999). One of the reasons given by Schneider and Volkert for subsidiarity is that it reduces the costs of making information available to voters. While subsidiarity is relevant to many environmental problems, it is of limited relevance to threats to sustainability.

While Renner and Schneider and Volkert do pay some attention to the question of the information available to voters in representative democracy, on my reading, this question is almost entirely ignored in the literature on 'environmental politics' briefly alluded to above.[16] It is true that information availability and quality considerations are important in arguments for participative democracy, but at the national level serious movement in that direction does not appear a realistic prospect in the foreseeable future. Interesting as much of the literature about 'environmental politics' is, it seems to me that the operative question about governance and sustainability for the rich nations is: can we come up with ideas about democracy responsive to and representative of current nationals that improve the prospects for sustainability? And, I think that we have to look for answers to that question in terms of the information base with which that constituency operates, particularly in regard to information about foreigners, especially poor ones, and the prospects for future people. Voters', and consumers', relevant preferences are not genetically determined, and un-changing. They are influenced by information flows. Making the relevant information available does not guarantee that the majority of citizens will become more altruistic toward foreign and future others. But, we can we sure that where the relevant information is not available, such altruism is much less likely. For most citizens, information about the state of foreign people based on direct experience is, mass tourism notwithstanding, very limited, and they are principally dependent on the education system and the media for such information. As regards the state of future people, this is also true, and the situation is complicated by the fact that it is information about assessments of the implications of current conditions for future prospects that is at issue, rather than information about actual future conditions.

6. Information for citizens

The Journalism Industry

Williams and Pearce (1978), in a book in a series on librarianship and information science and aimed at ‘communications professionals’, provide a useful framework for introducing this section, and also describe the central problem rather pithily. They take the capacity for culture to be the distinguishing characteristic of the human species, noting that cultural evolution is Lamarckian. They identify three components of culture:

Language - is ‘the foundation of culture’ as ‘Human social systems are possible only because

Human beings possess language’ (p6)

Story systems – ‘A story system is an organisation of information constructs that describes, explains, and partly constitutes the world of lived experience’. The elements of story systems ‘assume many forms and have many names’ being called ‘science, philosophy, myth, legend, history, folklore, tradition, scripture, ideology etc’ (p16)

Institutions – ‘The stories that sustain life in a society must be produced, organised, adapted and disseminated. The structure that perform these functions are the major social institutions that occur universally…….’ (p22)

Cultures are differentiated by, and evolve in terms of, their story systems.

Williams and Pearce use the term ‘literature’ to refer to

the special story units and collections upon which the entire story system of a culture depends. The literature of a culture is part of its story system, but it is the central part, the nucleus that controls the functions and development of the rest (p34)

Two types of literature are distinguished, that of knowledge and that of imagination. ‘Communications specialists’ are people specially ‘trained in the content and communication of literature’ (p65). These people are the ‘workforce of three huge industries: the entertainment industry, the journalism industry, and the education industry’ which, in a modern industrial society, ‘present the only literature that is disseminated to the entire society’(p66) so that ‘The only real world that all (Americans) can share is the one presented in the literature that these industries disseminate’ (p67). The function of the entertainment industry is to distribute ‘vicarious experience to the populace’ (p67). That of the journalism industry is ‘to distribute information about events that affect the public interest’ (p74). The primary function of the education industry is ‘to prepare the young for employment’ (p83).

In this section of the paper I am concerned with the journalism industry in the sense of Williams and Pearce, and they characterise what I see as the central problem there so well that it is worth quoting them at some length.

The journalism industry is supported by advertising revenues. The quantity of revenues a news corporation is able to collect depends upon the size of the audience it attracts. Much of the literature that the industry produces, therefore, has no other purpose than to attract a mass audience and has no value apart from its ability to do so. Since the most reliable and efficient way to gather a mass audience is by providing vicarious experience, the journalism industry produces a large quantity of literature that is essentially entertainment. The literature is produced to attract a mass audience by providing vicarious experience of heroism, conflict, violence, danger and sex. (p76)

There can be no question of the importance of entertainment to the journalism industry. A survey taken by the American Newspaper Publishers Association shows that news items that entertain are the most attractive to audiences. The survey includes a listing of the categories “most widely read”. Of the thirty-six categories identified in the survey, the most widely read of all is “accidents and disasters”. Tied for third place are “crime” and “human interest”. “Advice columns” rank fourth. Among the eighteen to twenty-four age group the most widely read category is “comics”.

If the journalism industry did not provide entertainment on a massive scale, the industry could not maintain its position in American society. The industry has huge resources, a great many expensive facilities, and many highly trained personnel. These enable the industry to gather information from all over the world and to distribute it thoroughly, quickly, and efficiently in a large country of over two hundred million people. The resources, facilities and personnel are financed by advertising revenue. Without these revenues the industry could not exist in anything like its present form. The industry can collect these revenues because it can gather a mass audience by offering the excitement of vicarious participation in events happening all over the world.

The role of entertainment in the operations of the journalism industry is somewhat obscured because some of the entertaining stories that the industry produces are also stories of importance that affect the public interest…………

Neither the public nor the journalism industry distinguishes the entertaining reports that are important…from those that are not….All are covered by the obscure rubric news…….

There is little doubt that the need to provide vicarious experience in order to gather a mass audience leads to the neglect of many important public matters. (p77/78, emphasis in the original)

Williams and Pearce wrote 20 years ago about the situation in the USA. However, with a couple of caveats, it seems to me that both as regards the assessment of the nature of the journalism industry and the reason why it is so, this is a reasonable description of what can be observed now in the UK, and probably most other rich nations. The first caveat is that while Williams and Pearce describe the journalism industry as it serves most of the population, there exists a sub sector which is less in the nature of entertainment and serves, mostly, the higher socio-economic classes. There are also specialist sub sectors which serve audiences which are almost commercial in nature, where there is very little entertainment. The ‘financial press’ is a good example. The second is that there is little coverage of ‘events happening all over the world’, though what there is largely fits the Williams and Pearce characterisation.

The structure of the journalism industry in the UK may not be familiar to all readers, so I preface my own assessment of it with some very brief remarks on its structure. It is conventional to classify UK national newspapers as ‘tabloid’ or ‘broadsheet’. The distinction is in terms of the physical size of the page, but this aligns with style, content and (broadly) the socio-economic class of the readership. The tabloids are read mainly by the lower socio-economic classes, the broadsheets by the higher. Within the tabloid category, there are a couple of newspapers that are pitched at a more middle class readership, and see themselves as higher quality products than the ‘real’ tabloids. There is no public sector presence in the print sector of the UK journalism industry. There is a substantial public sector presence in UK broadcasting, in the form of the British Broadcasting Corporation, or the BBC.[17] The BBC is funded by a licence fee which is paid by all owners of TV and radio receiving equipment. In regard to TV some 30% of the population would claim to watch it more than its commercial competitors. In regard to radio, the equivalent figure is something of the order of 40%. In regard to the BBC’s role in the radio sector of the journalism industry, these figures can be somewhat misleading, as it runs 5 national radio channels as well as a number of local channels. Of the national channels, 3 are primarily music channels and not much distinguishable from the commercial competition in terms of news coverage. So, in broadcasting it might seem that the Williams and Pearce account of the functioning of the journalism industry does not apply to large minority sector of the industry. Actually, this is not substantively the case. The level of the licence fee is set by government, and in the last 20 years the government has taken the line that there must be justification for continuing BBC funding at current levels in the form of it delivering satisfactory market share performance. It is, in effect, competing with the commercial sector according to, somewhat attenuated, commercial sector criteria.

As regards regulation, for the print sector it is virtually non-existent except for the industry being subject to same laws against anti-competitive practice as industry in general. There is some self-regulation by the Press Complaints Commission, which is mainly concerned with matters to do with invasions of privacy, and is widely regarded as largely ineffectual. The journalism industry as a whole operates under the libel laws, generally thought (certainly by journalists) to excessively inhibit investigative journalism, and under the laws protecting the government, generally thought to be over-protective. The running of the BBC is overseen by a board of governors appointed by the government, which board appoints the chief executive. There is some regulation of commercial terrestrial broadcasting. In regard to TV, there are 3 channels but one, ITV, accounts for some 90% of commercial TV viewing. Commercial TV regulation is carried out by the Independent Television Commission, ITC, members of which are government appointees. Currently the ITC places some public service obligations on ITV, and is of the view ( according to an article about an ITC consultation paper in The Guardian June 1^st 2000) that these should be maintained so as to avoid excessive pursuit of advertising revenue, and also to avoid putting the BBC under greater pressure in regard to market share competition. In regard to its role in the journalism industry, ITV is required to provide one and a half hours per week of current affairs programming, and must take national and international news from a designated provider, showing it live across the whole national network, with news bulletins shown in the peak viewing periods. The effective power of the ITC vis a vis ITV is somewhat limited. While in principle it can withdraw an ITV company’s licence to operate, this has never been done. It does report on the performance of the regional ITV companies, and these reports, presumably, influence the government’s decisions when licences are periodically renewed/reallocated. The ITV companies recently moved the main (30 minute) evening news bulletin from 9.00pm to 6.30 pm, explicitly stating the motivation as the desire to free up the later part of the evening for programming intended to generate additional advertising revenue. It has apparently had this effect, while also reducing the number of viewers watching the ITV evening news – it is not apparent that the lost viewers have switched to watching the BBC news. The ITC is unhappy about this, but is not intending to do anything about it.[18] In the consultation document referred to above the ITC considers the implications of switch from analogue to digital TV. Its view is that in the ‘medium term’ ‘regulation should be simplified but not swept away altogether’ (as reported in The Guardian June 1^st 2000), while in the longer term ‘more significant changes are likely to be appropriate, involving the reduction and perhaps ultimately the abolition of public service broadcasting regulation as we see it today’ (reported in quotes in The Guardian June 1^st 2000).

My assessment of the output that this journalism industry produces is as follows:

As regards the print sector, over one third of the population either get their information from what are definitely tabloids in the quality sense, or do not read national newspapers at all. The extent to which these tabloids provide news relevant to the public interest is very limited, to put it kindly. The UK’s most widely read, about 15% of the population, tabloid does not really deserve the description of newspaper. The ‘superior’ tabloids, read by some 15% of the population, are actually little better in this respect. Less than 15% of the population read the broadsheet press.

A large proportion of the population watch terrestrial TV news programmes, splitting roughly 50/50 across the main BBC and ITV channels. These programmes do largely cover news relevant to the public interest, but both, and especially ITV, are deteriorating in this respect and increasingly devoted to short items for which good visual material is available. The extent to which this TV watching compensates for tabloid reading is unknown, but seems unlikely to be very great.

A smaller proportion of the population listen to radio news programmes. There are really only two, BBC, radio channels that are widely listened to and which take national and international news coverage to be an important part of their output. Less than 15% of the population listen to these channels.

Across all of these media, and at all levels, there appears to be increasing ‘tabloidisation’, by which I mean an increasing use of ‘entertainment’ in the sense of Williams and Pearce, and an increasing presentation of news in terms of personalities and conflicts between them rather than in terms of events and policy issues.[19]

Across all of these media, and at all levels, there appears to be decreasing coverage of foreign news. In the tabloids there is now very little foreign coverage that is not directly relatable to some domestic entertainment angle. On TV the selection of stories for their visual possibilities is even more pronounced in regard to overseas events.

Across all of these media, and at all levels, coverage of environmental stories is focussed on the local environment rather than the global, deals with matters that have (or may have) direct implications for individuals comfort and health rather than systemic problems, is in terms of discrete events and personality/organisational clashes rather than ongoing processes and policy issues, and is readily given pictorial treatment. Also, environmental matters are generally treated as dis-connected from economic issues, except in so far as there is a direct, usually regarding employment, trade-off angle.[20]

Media Monitoring

Of course, these assessments are necessarily subjective, based on limited consumption of the output of the UK journalism industry, and somewhat unfair to some of that industry's products. Appendix 2 presents some relevant supportive data from other sources and from a highly selective exercise that I myself undertook in ‘media monitoring’. Media monitoring, or content analysis, as a serious sociological study started in the early 1980s. As discussed in Nordenstreng and Griffin (1999), it is a labour, and increasingly software, intensive activity, which is attended by many difficulties, and which by itself gives an incomplete understanding of the nature of the output of the journalism industry. It really needs to be supplemented by ‘discourse analysis’. Whereas content analysis, mainly, concerns itself with how the journalism industry’s products allocate space/time over alternative pre-defined categories of content, discourse analysis

focuses on the analysis on the analysis of factual reporting, causal explanation, justification, and argument (rhetoric and accountability). The major analytic themes are how the nature of the world and ( or indeed versus) what people know or think about it are in various ways constructed, dealt with, and generally managed in talk and text ( Edwards et al 1999, p45, emphasis in the original)

In Appendix 2 in the content analysis of two UK newspapers, I have tried to do that in such a way as to give some sense not just of the categories covered, but also of the way that they are dealt with. To give some sense, that is, of the world view that somebody totally reliant on the newspaper in question for information, other than direct sense experience and interpersonal communication, might be likely to have. While this is a highly imperfect and selective effort, I think that it is important for people who do not read tabloid newspapers, who do go to conferences and read academic articles, to try to get some sense of the information input with which many of their fellow voters likely operate.

Media monitoring has been used to look at the treatment of the environment by the journalism industry, in Chapman et al (1997) for the UK and India, and in Papadakis (1996) for Australia, for examples.[21]

Here I will try to briefly convey the flavour of the Chapman et al results for the UK, as reported and discussed in their chapter 5. In terms of the print sector of the UK journalism industry, they studied one broadsheet, The Independent, and one tabloid, The Mirror, over a period of 6 weeks in 1993/94. The Independent ran 216 environmental items over 10667 column cm, while The Mirror ran 61 over 2824 column cm. For The Independent 11 of the stories made the front page, for The Mirror 2. It is noted that for The Mirror front page stories tend to of the human interest nature, and that this also tends to characterise its selection of environmental stories. As regards the geographical coverage of the environmental stories in both papers ‘The concerns are usually local, if not parochial’. The Independent has a fair amount on North America and on other advanced industrial nations’. The Mirror ‘has 15% on Africa but this turns out to be about wildlife safaris/holidays…. and not about issues such as desertification’. For The Independent ‘the Environment is fairly political – but not for the Mirror’. In both, the environment and development are ‘really not connected at all’.

The potential pitfalls of content analysis are illustrated in the results for The Mirror. The computer program used for the analysis show The Mirror with 10.1% of its coverage devoted to Africa/Ecology and 13.5% to Africa/Economics. These arise because of the ecotourism coverage noted above. Again, The Mirror apparently gave a lot of coverage to UK/Land and UK/Conservation, but it turns out that the first is mainly due to lots of articles about gardening, and that the second largely reflects its coverage of deer-hunting and blood sports.

In summary, The Independent is seen as ‘clearly committed to reporting the debates over these issues’ while

The Mirror has surprisingly extensive coverage on very specific things, but virtually all of these can be summed up by the conception that its readers could be personally involved – in gardening, in holidays abroad – or have some human empathy with animal subjects – huskies, dolphins and deer among them

And it is noted that ‘Not surprisingly, the advertisers seem to respond to this perception’.

The Chapman et al study also ‘attempted to cover all of the main news broadcasts for the same six weeks’, for TV and radio. Generally they found a large emphasis on UK stories, with ‘moderately heavy exposure on North America and the CIS+East Europe’. The environment got ‘a small coverage in the range 3-5 per cent’, whereas, for example, ‘there is a 5 to 10 per cent range for Sport’ leaving aside two TV channels with a small combined audience. The monitoring also covered the prominence, in terms of their position in the sequence of all stories, given to stories about various subjects. A tendency for environmental stories to come lower down in the order of presentation is noted. Across 42 news programmes on each of 6 TV and radio channels, just 3 environmental stories were the first story covered, and these concerned: a dispute between developers and conservationists over a derelict power station; Russian nuclear rectors dumped in the sea of Japan; anti-nuclear protestors climbing over the wall of the Queen's London residence. It is noted that

Protest groups know that media coverage is important, and are skilled in tactics which provide good visual news material. Greenpeace has often lead the way by taking dramatic high seas action in little speed boats..........

While the visual element here is important, one should also note that the entertainment element is also important, and that organisations such as Greenpeace also gets lots of coverage in the print media, choosing, generally, their campaigns so as to maximise the entertainment element and the visual possibilities.

This study also recorded the programme schedules of all the monitored broadcast channels, and had the researchers view/listen to those programmes involving the environment. My reading of the results presented, consistent with my own experience, is that where the environment is dealt with in general programming, the treatment typically is mainly focussed on entertaining rather than informing, and typically lacks contextual framing. According to Chapman et al:

The geographical focus for much of the material in gross terms reflects the kinds of concentrations seen before (ie in looking at news coverage): the UK shows most about itself, and then some about North America and other OECD nations (these may well be imported programmes) but there are some interesting small divergences: for most channels the percentage for Africa and Other Asia is higher amongst the environmental programmes than the general ones – and higher in every case than the percentage level in news broadcasts. This clearly suggests that both regions might not be conventionally newsworthy – in terms of politics or economics or conflict – but are nevertheless environmentally interesting. In the case of both regions the material is shown to be associated with the idea of 'wildlife' and the 'natural world' – which for the outside West seem to be distinguishable from society at large (as in most Attenborough films).

This study by Chapman et al is the only exercise that I am aware of that reports results from media monitoring of all news categories across national print and broadcast outlets with particular attention to the environment.[22] Other studies of media and the environment are Hansen (1993), Le May and Dennis (1991) and Anderson (1997). The latter, using interviews with participants in the journalism industry in the UK, considers the influence of the way that the industry works for its environmental coverage. The general thrust of Anderson's conclusions is similar to that of chapter 3 in Chapman et al (1997) which is also based on interviews with UK journalists and editors, and seeks to 'examine the issue of how journalists decide to privilege one story category over another'. These findings are consistent with the assessment that, while many journalism industry participants are interested in informing the public, the structures within which they work exert strong pressures in the direction of entertainment. Journalists compete for the attention of editors, who select from the offerings of their journalists on the basis of what they think will play well with their target audience. The following Chapman et al quote from an interview with the Foreign Editor of the Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet, is representative if more robustly put than by many of those interviewed :

I would look for universality and I'd also look for people – identifiable goodies and baddies, particularly baddies who are always interesting. An element of conflict is important, we want to see battles, people locked in combat in some way just like a greek drama. Somebody is for, somebody is against. They're fighting it out in some way, whether in a committee room or in a demonstration in the street or whatever. Also transparency, readers have to be able to get to grips with the story.

It is this approach that is one of the factors leading to erratic coverage of the environment, ups and downs in the level of coverage over time. While the systemic problems are, by journalistic standards, slowly moving processes going on continually, the personal/organisational conflicts arising are episodic and often bunched in time.

Erratic coverage is also argued to be the result of the differing interplay over time of the various forces at work in agenda setting. While Anderson (1997) argues that the role of politicians in this is not as great as was once argued, it remains important, and politicians' concerns and interests shift over time according to a variety of influences, including 'events' which nowadays can be created by protest groups.[23] Chapman et al emphasise the role of the economic cycle in agenda setting – 'the ebb and flow of interest in green issues is directly related to the state of the economy' was a point 'made strongly' by many of the people they interviewed. They also note that the complexity of environmental stories has tended to 'scare off' journalists. This works in two ways. First, complexity is seen as a problem for the target audience, particularly in so far as it often makes the presentation in terms of goodies versus baddies problematic. Second, journalists themselves often have problems with it:

Environmental stories are also complex because at their heart they are scientific stories and once the basic phenomenon has been described the journalist can only 'take the story on' if he or she is both able to understand the science at the heart of the problem and also explain it to a mass audience

In this connection a couple of points are worth making. Most journalists have no scientific education beyond high school: it is not the case that those who report on the environment, or who actually designated environmental correspondents, are necessarily scientifically literate, or even numerate. 'At their heart' environmental stories are economic and social as well as 'scientific', which increases the complexity.

Chapman et al report on interviews with workers in the journalism industry wherein the selective role of the availability of good visual material, noted above, is highlighted. Related to this is the question of cost. One of the claims for competition is that it forces down costs. This is what competition in the journalism industry does, and it affects what it produces. An American environmental correspondent ( for CNN) is, on the balance between American and international environmental coverage, quoted:

It's heavily domestic because of costs. We would do more international stories if we could afford it. It's certainly a factor that makes us go for one story rather than another.

Assessment of costs and market readings generally point in the same, local, direction.

Public Attitudes

Basically the picture that emerges from this literature and my own observation is that, in the UK anyway, the competitive nature of the journalism industry drives it generally, and particularly the segment aimed at mass audiences, in the direction of entertainment rather than information for citizens, and that this is particularly a problem in regard to global citizenship and threats to sustainability. As previously noted, there does not appear to be any reason to think that, among rich nations, particularly those dominated by an anglo-saxon heritage, the UK is peculiar in this respect.

One would expect that this state of affairs would be reflected in individuals' attitudes and beliefs. Of course, if it were established that people were not concerned about sustainability, that would not necessarily confirm that the journalism industry was failing to provide information. Even if it were, people might be, by genetic inheritance or early cultural conditioning, irredeemably selfish and parochial. Or, one could blame the participants in the political process for failing to provide the necessary leadership by focussing on the issue and thus setting the agenda for the journalism industry to follow. But, as suggested above, there is something of a chicken and egg problem here. If the journalism industry wants to treat information as entertainment, politicians in a democratic system face incentives to behave in corresponding ways. It seems to me that in the last couple of decades we have seen the proclivities of the journalism industry and the behaviour of politicians acting in mutually re-inforcing ways to drive the journalism industry even further in the direction of entertainment.

If we look at public opinion as revealed in surveys, a casual inspection might suggest that, whatever the journalism industry has been doing, environmental concern is actually very strong. Thus, for example, Worcester (1997) reports that a 1996 survey in the UK found that 70% of people believed that 'pollution and environmental damage are things that affect me in my everyday life' and that 71% rejected the notion that that 'too much fuss is made about the environment these days'. Similarly, in the same survey 28% of respondents reported themselves as undertaking 5 or more pro-environment activities and 36% got defined as 'Green consumers' on the basis of having selected one product over another on the basis of its supposed environmental friendliness. However, whereas in 1989 35% of the electorate had put 'green issues' as the most important facing the country, by 1996 this had fallen to less than 10%. The peaking of this kind of environmental concern in 1989 has been noted in other countries, and is generally explained in terms of economic, and especially employment, issues coming to dominate other concerns in the early 1990s. Despite this, in 1994 'twice as many people (31 per cent) said they would choose to protect the environment at the expense of the economy as said they would protect the economy at the expense of the environment (15 per cent)' (Worcester 1997, p164). By 1996, with falling unemployment in the UK, nearly three times as many favoured the environment over the economy as vice versa.

This suggests some ambivalence, and even confusion, in the attitudes revealed by these surveys. Witherspoon (1996) reports results from particularly interesting surveys conducted in Europe in 1993.[24] According to Witherspoon

It is clear that some proportion of those responding to survey data do not have strong or clear attitudes, but that the survey context requires that they volunteer an opinion, even if they do not have one. ....Respondents have neither the time nor the motivation to work out the nuances of meaning, nor the inferences that might be drawn from their responses to questions, some of which they may never have thought about before, but about which they might have unarticulated or relatively inchoate feelings (p40-41).

What makes the surveys reported on in Witherspoon interesting is that they involved more intensive and structured probing of attitudes, including non-environmental attitudes, than is often the case, as well as covering six Western European countries. For this reason it will be worth considering some of the results and their interpretation at a little length.

The data from standard questioning about environmental concerns show that it 'is undoubtedly widespread'. As regards, for example, 'A rise in the world's temperature caused by the"greenhouse effect"', 51% of UK respondents said that they regarded this as an 'extremely' or a 'very' dangerous threat to the environment, and 43% that they regarded it as an 'extremely' or a 'very dangerous' threat to 'self and family'. Across responses over six environmental problems

respondents express more concern where there seems to be a clear 'villain' – industry, the nuclear industry – than in the case where individual citizens are identified as the culprit – car use. This is the first of many pieces of evidence which indicate that, if environmentalism implies that current structures of consumption and citizen behaviour need change, there is much less support for it (p46)

Before being asked about these problems and their level of concern, respondents were asked about their willingness to pay for environmental protection. Based on the responses to these questions, Witherspoon comments (p47) that 'once we start posing questions in a way that makes the cost of "going green" more explicit, levels of "environmentalism" plummet in most of the democracies we are examining'. This is less the case in the UK and the Netherlands than in the other countries. For the UK 47% were 'very' or 'fairly willing' to pay much higher prices to protect the environment, 38% very or fairly willing to pay much higher taxes, and 30% very or fairly willing to accept cuts in the standard of living. The high UK figure in relation to higher taxation is attributed to reaction against the tax cutting, and public expenditure cutting, of the Thatcher government.

After the environmental concern questions, respondents were asked about their support for environmental policies of different types. For the UK, 70% were 'strongly' or 'somewhat in favour' of strict environmental laws, 56% strongly or somewhat in favour of spending public money on campaigns to persuade people not to harm the environment, and 41% strongly or somewhat in favour of putting up taxes on things which harm the environment so as to discourage their use. Respondents were also asked about their support for measures to restrict car use for the sake of the environment. The results are shown in the last row of Table 1 here (Table 3.8 in Witherspoon), where a score of 4 is 'equivalent to being "somewhat in favour" of the restrictive policies'. These results show how for all countries except Netherlands willingness to sacrifice generally is much lower than general environmental concern and support for general environmental policies, and how for all countries support for restrictive car use policies is much lower than general willingness to sacrifice. I will return to the case of the Netherlands shortly.

Table 1. Percentage scoring four or higher on environmental scales.

	West Germany	East Germany	Italy	Ireland	Great Britain	Netherlands
General environmental concern scale	54	51	53	49	34	19
General environmental policies scale	49	40	44	46	33	40
Willingness to sacrifice scale	27	15	31	16	23	36
Support for environmental car policies scale	13	13	7	7	8	8

Witherspoon (1996, p56) reports, in contrast to the results from Worcester (1997) noted above, that they found that actual behaviours bore a similar relationship to expressed general environmental concern to willingness to sacrifice:

We asked about recycling behaviour, purchasing organically produced foods, vegetarianism, cutting back on car usage, refusing to purchase goods with excessive packaging or looking for environmental labelling. The proportion taking part in any of these was small, and the proportion doing them systematically was very small indeed..........when we asked about collective activities which citizens can undertake to protect the environment – taking part in protests or demonstrations, giving money to environmental groups, signing petitions about environmental matters or belonging to an environmental group – the numbers drop still further. Those who do take part are, however, more consistently green in their policy preferences and more scientifically knowledgeable about the environment (emphasis in the original)

As regards scientific knowledge about the environment, the survey presented twelve statements and asked respondents to say whether they thought the statements were 'definitely true', 'probably true', 'probably not true' or 'definitely not true'. They were also given the option of saying 'can't choose'. Responses were scaled with +2 for a correct definitely, +1 for a correct probably, -1 for an incorrect probably, and –2 for an incorrect definitely and a can't choose. Thus respondents scores could range from +2 to –2, with those giving an equal number of correct and incorrect answers getting a score of 0. The results arising are given in Table 2 here (from Table 3.9 in Witherspoon).[25] It was found that: 'net of education, levels of environmental concern and income, scientific knowledge was correlated with greater willingness to pay environmental taxes, for example' (p60).

Table 2 Mean scientific knowledge scores

	West Germany	East Germany	Italy	Ireland	Great Britain	Netherlands
Scientific knowledge scale	0.04	0.15	-0.04	-0.00	0.40	0.20

In the case of Great Britain the survey also involved an

independent measure of 'welfare altruism', asking about the strength of agreement or disagreement with statements such as 'the welfare state encourages people to stop helping each other', 'the government should spend more money on welfare benefits for the poor even if it leads to higher taxes', and 'many people who get social security don't really deserve any help' (p64).

Noting that that this is a measure of altruism 'organised politically through public spending', it is reported that

Citizens who had a strong sense of 'welfare altruism' were not only more concerned about environmental problems, and more likely to engage in political environmental behaviour; they were also more willing to make material sacrifices for the sake of the environment and to accept the need for specific environmental policies which regulated market choices (such as specific environmental taxes, or policies to discourage car use). This relationship held even when other variables were (statistically) controlled for. So environmentalism in the sense of a more coherent programme of action appears to be influenced not only by concern for nature but also by concern for others in society. A sense of community with others may be as important as concern over the biosphere in generating environmentalism (p64, emphasis in the original)

Now consider the Netherlands, which in Table 1 is the only country where the General environmental

concern scale is lower than the scales for General environmental policies and Willingness to sacrifice. It is the country with the lowest concern scale and the highest willingness to sacrifice scale. How is this apparent anomaly to be explained? First, some more information from the survey – on all of these scales there is less dispersion about the reported means for the Dutch than for the other nationalities, and 'expressive, "romantic" views of the environment....are weakest in the Netherlands' (p58). Witherspoon, plausibly, locates the answer to the question in the results on scientific knowledge, participation in political environmental activities (the Dutch are more likely so to do), and welfare altruism. The survey does not provide results on the last of these for the Netherlands, so this part of the explanation is somewhat speculative, though plausible. According to Witherspoon:

the link between altruism and environmentalism may explain why the smaller social democracies of northern Europe – Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands – have been more active in promulgating discussions about environmental issues which involve regulation of market externalities and making the distributional costs of environmental programmes more transparent. (p65)

It might also be noted that these countries have also been to the fore in pushing the agenda, and acting, in relation to the other leg of the sustainability problem – addressing current poverty in less developed nations.

In regard to the greater public willingness to sacrifice for the environment in the Netherlands revealed in the survey, Witherspoon goes on to comment that:

Of course, public opinion in this larger sense is as much a result of social and political structures as a cause. These smaller social democracies have social structural features (relative social homogeneity, relative income equality and so on) and political structures (more transparent corporatist features) that do not exist to the same degree in other democracies. [Which] does help to explain why publics in social democracies are more likely to encourage political elites to tackle the consumption side of environmental problems than are citizens in liberal democracies ( the United States or Great Britain). Acceptance of the specific policies to be adopted is more likely to follow their implementation than to predate it. But political elites have no incentive to tackle these issues, which inherently involve questions of redistribution of costs, unless they feel the climate of public opinion supports regulation for the public good (p65).

Johnson (1998) considers culture in relation to climate change policy, or lack of it, in Sweden, Japan and the USA, and concludes that cultural theory predicts differences across these countries fairly well. Neither Witherspoon nor Johnson considers the role of the media. I think that a systematic interdisciplinary study of how systems of governance, education, the media, and public attitudes are related in, and differ as between, the UK, the USA, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands would be of interest and value in pursuit of sustainability.

Regulation of the Journalism Industry?

NOTE: This subsection still to be 'fully articulated'

The idea of public service must be detached from the idea of public monopoly, yet remain public service in the true sense. The only way of achieving this is to create new kinds of institution. (Raymond Williams, quoted in Keane 1991)

It is occasionally indicated to us that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need and not what they want – but few know what they want, and very few what they need (Lord Reith quoted in Keane 1991)

No one is obliged to watch news programmes any more. We want to get away from the traditional notion of news services, that viewers get everything that the broadcaster thinks they need, rather than what the viewer wants ( Richard Tait, Editor ITN, quoted, p4, in The Guardian's media supplement, June 26th 2000).

Principles

1. by greatly reducing the industry's dependence on advertising revenue

2. to increase the availability and take-up of accurate and balanced reporting of information for citizens

3. and to promote the dissemination of a wide range of opinion and commentary

4. while avoiding government control of content

Mainstream (economic) view is that 2 3 and 4 to be achieved by competition, and that only regulation needed is that to ensure competition. But this is what gives rise to over-dependence on advertising. The implicit idea that the output of the journalism industry is a commodity like any other misses the point about information – without adequate information we do not know what information we want/need.

Application to the Print Section

1. Government to set up and finance a Press Corporation, PC.

2. Newspapers satisfying PC conditions to qualify for subsidy from PC, per copy, rate set so a proper newspaper could sell below tabloid price.

3. Conditions:

Upper limit on advertisement pages.

Three clearly identified sections – News, Editorial/Comment, Features, with minimum size set for proportion of News

Employment of appropriately qualified specialist staff for News

Responsibility for accuracy in News, and requirement to publish corrections if need established by PC, which can also sanction with reduction/withdrawal of subsidy.

PC to review balance of news coverage, and continuation of subsidy to require satisfactory performance

4. A newspaper may choose to remain outside PC regulation, in which case no subsidy, and required once per annum to carry in full PC's assessment of its performance.

5. PC to have publishing function wrt weekly journal of opinion and comment to which anybody can submit copy.

7. Concluding Remarks

NOTE: This section still to be 'fully articulated'

1. Agent based simulation modelling is a promising methodology for investigating the coevolution of human and natural systems, and policy.

2. Is it true that Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands do better wrt sustainability than US, UK, Australia? If so, why? What is it about their governance system, culture, media? These questions could form the basis for an international interdisciplinary research project.

3. Work up proposals for regulation of journalism industry.

4. Promote public debate of regulation of journalism industry.

Appendix 1: The UK Climate Change Levy

The following account of the main features of the proposed levy is based on HM Treasury (2000) as updating earlier versions, notably HM Customs and Excise (1999).

The levy will be paid by suppliers of energy products at the following rates:

Energy Product	Levy Rate p/kWh
Electricity	0.43
Coal	0.15
Natural Gas	0.15
Liquid Petroleum Gas	0.07

Note that the rate on electricity is calculated 'such that it is equal to the amount of the levy which would have been charged had the inputs to generation been taxed on the basis of their energy content'.

It will apply to sales to the business and public sectors, but not to sales to domestic and transport sectors. It will not apply to sales for non-energy use.

Electricity generated from 'new' renewable sources (except large scale hydro) and 'good quality' CHP will be exempt.

Where a sector negotiates an energy efficiency target with the government, the levy on sales to firms in that sector will be cut by 80%.

The revenue from the levy will be used to:

cut employers' NIC contributions (essentially a payroll tax) by 0.3%

establish a £50 million energy efficiency fund, particularly directed at small businesses

finance 100% first year capital allowances for energy saving investments – estimated cost £100 million

It is estimated that the CCL and negotiated energy efficiency agreements will reduce carbon emissions by 'at least 5 million tonnes a year by 2010'. At 21st December 1999, another government press release had put this saving at 4 million tonnes of carbon.

How did this bizarre CCL come about? In March 1998 the Chancellor of the Exchequer asked Sir Colin Marshall to examine whether economic instruments had a role to play in pursuit of the UK's Kyoto commitment and its unilateral CO₂ target, and if so to advise on implementation. Sir Colin assembled a Task Force of senior public servants from the Treasury, the Department of Environment Transport and the Regions, the Department of Trade and Industry, and HM Customs and Excise. This Task Force prepared a paper, Marshall (1998a), setting out its first thoughts and asking specific questions for reply by end July 1998. 'The Marshall Report', Marshall (1998b), was submitted to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in November 1998, by which time Sir Colin had become Lord Marshall. The essentials of the CCL as set out above are as recommended in The Marshall Report.

In Marshall (1999a), prior to seeking answers to question 'Is this potential scope of a tax appropriate in environmental terms?', it is stated that 'It is not Government policy to introduce new taxes on domestic consumption of fuel and power' (p14). As noted below, despite this framing of the question, a substantial minority of those responding to the consultation document did want to see the domestic sector included in the tax base. In the introduction to The Marshall Report it is stated that

Given current policy objectives for the domestic sector, the leading option for a tax would, in my view, appear to be a 'downstream' tax on the final use of energy by industrial/commercial consumers, with the tax rates reflecting (at least in broad terms) the carbon contents of different fuels (Marshall 1999b, p3, emphasis added)

The relevant paragraphs in the body of The Marshall Report are (emphasis in the original):

104. The Task Force has received a number of suggestions on the possible design of a tax. I note, in particular, the ACBE recommendation that any tax introduced should be directed at carbon dioxide emissions by business and domestic users of energy.

105. I can see that this is an attractive option in principle. It would target carbon dioxide emissions directly and, if applied 'upstream' to the use of primary fuels by industry and commerce (including fuels used by electricity generators in the generation of electricity) could encourage fuel switching on the part of those businesses towards low carbon fuels.

106. However, an 'upstream' tax could conflict with other objectives of Government policy. For social policy reasons, it is the Government's intention not to introduce taxes on domestic consumption of fuel and power. An 'upstream' tax could impact directly on domestic consumers if the electricity generators attempted to pass on the higher costs in the form of higher prices. Even with a complex system of rebates, there would be no way of guaranteeing an exemption for domestic consumers.⁸ Moreover, a complex system of rebates would add to the regulatory burdens on this sector at a time when the Government is seeking to promote competition and diversity of supply.

Note 8. There may, of course be indirect effects on the domestic sector if the effects of a downstream tax get passed on in the form of higher prices.

107. The stage at which the distinction between industrial/commercial use and domestic consumption is clearest is at the point at which it is sold to the final consumer. This suggests the need to apply the tax 'downstream' on supplies of electricity to final and commercial users, since only at the point of sale is the identity of the final customer known.

108. Given the current policy objectives for the domestic sector, the leading option would therefore appear to be a 'downstream' tax on supplies of energy products and electricity for final use by industrial and commercial consumers.

109. A 'downstream' tax could be collected from the suppliers of energy products to final industrial and commercial users. It would be paid for by the final users, and it may be sensible to include an explicit reference to the tax on energy bills to increase its visibility. Preliminary estimates suggest that that the distribution sector for all energy products involves no more than about 3000 businesses. The vast majority of these will already be registered for VAT. This would facilitate the administration of the tax since the distinction between supplies to business and domestic customers is already made for VAT purposes.

110. A 'downstream' tax would also:

ensure consistent treatment between imported and domestically produced fuels;

help maximise its visibility to final users of energy, thereby increasing the likelihood of it having a significant impact on energy demand and emissions.

It is also the approach advocated in the draft EU Energy Products Directive and that adopted by a number of other EU countries (see Annex B).

111. The main drawback of a 'downstream' tax is that, since input fuels to the generation of electricity would not be taxed, a 'downstream' tax would tend to have less effect on fuel switching in the electricity sector than an 'upstream' tax.

114. I am therefore of the view that any tax should be levied on the basis of a specific tax rate calculated by reference to the carbon content of the fuel consumed or energy used. This is the approach used in other EU countries which have introduced explicit carbon or energy taxes.

Carbon or energy?

115. The tax could be applied to either the carbon or energy content of different fuels used by industrial and commercial customers. A carbon based tax would have the advantage of encouraging some fuel switching (at the margin) amongst final users towards low carbon fuels.

116. However, given the current structure of the electricity and distribution industries, it would only be possible to determine the carbon content of electricity as a broad average. This may limit the extent to which fuel switching might occur.

117. The alternative would be to apply an energy based tax, on a pence per kilowatt-hour basis, derived from the known energy content of each fuel. This would have the advantage of simplicity, although, by not encouraging fuel switching , would be less effective in environmental terms.

118. The consultation paper issued in June asked respondents for their views on whether a tax should reflect energy or the carbon content of the different fuels. The vast majority of respondents thought that a tax should reflect the carbon content of different fuels rather than being solely targeted at energy use.

119. ............in my view, there is a good case for trying to reflect. at least in broad terms, the carbon content of different fuels in the rates set in order to maximise the emissions savings resulting from the tax.

Calculating a rate for electricity

120. The generation, transmission and distribution of electricity all involve losses of energy. In order to maintain a level playing field with other fuels, with an energy based tax the rate on electricity should aim to reflect the larger amount of energy input required to deliver the same amount of energy at the point of sale to the final customer. If this were not the case, the tax could result in switching to electricity from other fuels, which could have an adverse effect on energy use and emissions. This issue may not arise if the tax rates were set to reflect the carbon content of all the input fuels used in the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity. But the issue would arise if the tax rates were set on an energy basis. If the Government did decide to proceed with an energy based tax, it would need to consider carefully the appropriate relativities for the tax rates applying to electricity and other fuels.

Renewables

124. There are good arguments on environmental grounds for offering tax relief to electricity generated from renewable sources. This would be relatively simple to administer in cases where the renewable electricity is supplied direct to the final customer. However, for electricity not supplied directly, it is not possible to identify at the point of supply to the final customer whether the electricity whether the electricity came from a renewable source. ( In effect, a 'downstream' tax would treat electricity generated from renewable sources in the same way as electricity generated from other sources).

Existing mineral oil duties

131. Gas oil and fuel oil are already subject to excise duties. It could be argued that consumers of these products are already receiving price signals to encourage greater efficiency, and that additional signals in the form of a carbon/energy tax are unnecessary. On the other hand, these signals could be undermined if, as a result of a new tax on energy products that excluded mineral oils, oils became relatively cheaper. This would point to retaining the existing differentials. Again, this is an issue which the Government will wish to consider further if it were to decide to proceed with a tax.

As the table showing the rates for the CCL above shows, the Government did decide to exempt oil. In this connection it is of interest that in November 1999 the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that the fuel duty escalator, by which that duty increased annually at a rate 6% above the inflation rate, was being withdrawn.

The Marshall Report analyses and comments on the answers it received to its questions in the consultation document regarding the possible coverage of a carbon/energy tax, in Annex A Marshall (1999b). The comments relevant here are:

A.28 Despite the Task Force's remit to look only at new instruments that would apply to the industrial and commercial sector, and the Government's intention not to introduce new taxes on the domestic use of fuel and power, a consistent proportion of respondents in all sectors (between a third and a half) thought hat any new tax should extend to domestic and/or transport sectors.

A.29 Respondents were also asked whether they agreed with the Task Force's analysis that the requirement to exempt the domestic sector pointed to applying any tax downstream, on final energy use by industrial and commercial customers. A majority of respondents considered that the domestic sector should not be exempted.

A.30 Some respondents though that an upstream tax could be made to exempt the domestic sector (although without necessarily suggesting how this might be done). Those who did suggest ways to operate an upstream tax with exemption for the domestic sector tended to suggest that the electricity supplier would be compensated on the basis of the amount of electricity sold to domestic consumers (identified through the VAT system). The complexity and potential increase in regulation of a scheme like this was generally recognised. So was the inability of guaranteeing that some domestic bills would not rise.

A.31 More respondents thought that a tax should reflect carbon content of fuels rather than being solely targeted at energy use. Some noted that, with a downstream tax, only the average value of electricity would be captured.

It is clear that the Task Force was aware of the implications of its recommendations in regard to downstream rather than upstream taxation, and that it drew attention to the implications of energy rather than carbon content of the tax base. It is also clear that the decision to recommend downstream taxation was the direct consequence of acceptance of a design brief which required that there be no obvious impact on the domestic sector. As noted in the text of this paper, and as acknowledged at Note 8 from the Marshall Report quoted above, the CCL will impact on the domestic sector. As to why the government opted for energy rather than carbon as the basis for the tax, the answer is given in HM Customs and Excise (1999) (emphasis in the original):

5.2 The Government is aware of the attractions, in principle, for structuring the levy so that it reflects the carbon content of different fuels. However, as recognised in Lord Marshall's report, given the current structure of the electricity and distribution industries, it is only possible to determine the carbon content of electricity as a broad average. On that basis, the additional fuel switching that would be induced by such as (sic) approach is likely to be limited.

5.3 Structuring the levy with regard to the energy content of different fuels has the advantage of simplicity. It would also be consistent the 1998 Review of Energy Sources for Power generation. This identified distortions in the generation market as a potential threat to the security and diversity of energy supplies and announced a programme of reform to ensure fair competition between fuels. In the light of these considerations, the Government therefore intends to use the energy content of fuels as the basis of the levy.

It should be noted that the problem of 'determining the carbon content of electricity as a broad average' only arises given that it is necessary to tax electricity, which in turn is necessary only given the decision to go for downstream, as opposed to upstream, taxation. And, the decision for downstream follows from the desire not to have an obvious impact on the domestic sector, given The Marshall Report's assessment of the difficulties of insulating the domestic from the direct impact of an upstream, primary energy, tax – see 106 and A30 above.

In regard to references to current policy objectives for the domestic sector in the consultation document and The Marshall Report, the government's draft climate change programme document, DETR (2000), says (para 13, chapter 4, section II):

Lord Marshall was only asked to look at the business sector, as the Government is keen not to add to the significant problem of fuel poverty in this country by applying an instrument like the levy to the domestic sector

As noted in the text of this paper, it is not necessary to insulate the domestic sector in order to avoid adding to the fuel poverty problem, and the government in fact has announced measures to otherwise address this problem for one sector of the population thought to be particularly affected by it. Given the context briefly described in the text of the paper, and the fact that The Marshall Report acknowledges that the domestic sector will not be fully insulated from the impact of the CCL, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that, at least, the primary motivation for the design brief given to Lord Marshall and his Task Force was avoidance of the charge of 'stealth taxation'.

A BIT ABOUT AGREEMENTS AND TRADING??

Appendix 2: Some Media Monitoring Data

Tables 2.1 to 2.6 give some data in support of the statements in section 6 regarding the extent of tabloid readership and use of broadcast channels and their news programmes.

Table 2.1 UK National newspaper circulations

Newspaper	Circulation	Shares
	Apr-2000
The Sun	3559146	26.64%
The Mirror	2255916	16.89%
Daily Record	618708	4.63%
Daily Star	614738	4.60%
Tabloids Total	7048508	52.76%
Daily Mail	2354517	17.63%
Daily Express	1086169	8.13%
The London Evening Standard	436835	3.27%
Intermediate Total	3877521	29.03%
The Daily Telegraph	1030493	7.71%
The Times	711457	5.33%
The Guardian	387442	2.90%
The Independent	224534	1.68%
The Scotsman	78973	0.59%
Broadsheet Total	2432899	18.21%

Source: The Guardian 15/5/2000 based on ABC data

Table 2.2 Survey based newspaper readership proportions

Newspaper	% of Responses
The Sun	16
The Mirror	15
Today	4
Daily Star	3
Tabloids Total	38
Daily Mail	9
Daily Express	6
Intermediate Total	15
The Daily Telegraph	5
The Times	1
The Guardian	4
The Independent	3
Broadsheet Total	13
Other	7
None	28

Source: Chapman et al p219, refers to November 1993, based on 940 responses to question 'which national daily newspaper do you read most frequently?'. The original gives responses by sex, age, region and socio-economic class, the latter showing the dependence of the tabloids on the lower end of the market (51% of DE responses, of which 28% were 'none') and of the broadsheets on the upper (37% of AB responses, of which 25% were 'none').

Table 2.3 Hours spent watching TV

Hours	% of Responses
Less than 1 hour	6
1-3 hours	36
3-5 hours	32
More than 5 hours	24
None/never watch TV	2
Don't know	0

Source: Chapman et al p216, refers to November 1993, based on 940 responses to question 'In the last week how many hours a day on average would you say that you spent watching TV?'.

Table 2.4 Preferred TV channel

Television Channel	% of Responses
BBC 1	30
BBC2	4
Public service total	34
ITV	39
Channel 4	5
Satellite/Cable	7
Commercial total	51
Don't know	8
None	6

Source: Chapman et al p216, refers to November 1993, based on 940 answers to question 'Thinking of all the channels you can watch on TV, which one do you watch the most?'. The breakdown by socio-economic class shows that for the AB respondents 47% prefer BBC1 and 26% ITV, while for the DE respondents the corresponding figures are 20% and 49%.

Table 2.5. Preferred TV news programmes

Television Channel	% of Responses
BBC 1	41
BBC2	1
Public service total	42
ITV	42
Channel 4	3
Commercial total	45
Other	2
Don't know	3
None	9

Source: Chapman et al p217, refers to November 1993, based on 940 answers to question 'Which television news programme do you watch most regularly?', adapted here to match up with Table 2.4. The breakdown by socio-economic class shows that for the AB respondents 47% prefer the BBC1 evening news and 28% ITV, while for the DE respondents the corresponding figures are 25% and 49%.

Table 2.6 Preferred radio channels

Radio Station	% of Responses
National BBC 4 and 5	12
National BBC 1,2 and 3	23
Local BBC	7
Commercial	26
Other	8
None	21
Don't know	2

Source: Chapman et al p218, based on 940 answers to question 'In the last week which radio station did you listen to most regularly?'.

A Week in The Sun

Media monitoring is very time consuming, and rather boring. For broadcast media it requires the use of recording equipment. So, I undertook a very limited exercise on the lower end of the print sector of the journalism industry. I looked at two newspapers which account for some 43% of total readership

(Table 2.1), or some 25% of the adult population (Table 2.2). The two selected are two which are generally thought to be particularly read by the swinging voters seen as playing the crucial role in modern British elections. Until 1997 The Sun actively supported the Conservative Party, and especially Mrs Thatcher. For the 1997 election it switched to support for the Labour Party. It is widely believed, and claimed by The Sun, that it was this switch that determined the result of the election. Since then it has often been critical of the Labour Party, especially in regard to Europe. Recently it ran an anti-government piece which prompted the Prime Minister to spend the weekend personally writing a letter to The Sun defending his government. Although I only did this exercise for one week, I have no reason to suppose that it mis-represents the nature and quality of the ‘newspaper’, and what is here is consistent with what I have seen on other odd occasions when I have looked at The Sun. I actually read The Scottish Sun, but have no reason to suppose that, apart from some local stories, it differs significantly in any material way from The Sun as published in England.

Table 2.7 Content breakdown week beginning Monday May 8^th 2000- number of pages

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Sport	29	8	9	10	10	21
Entertainment Features	8	8	4	4	0	4
Lifestyle Features	2	1	12	2	8	4
Editorial Comment	1	2	1	2	1	1
Readers’ Letters	2	2	2	2	2	2
Crossword Cartoons Horoscope	2	2	2	2	2	2
Promotions	0	1	4	1	1	4
Advertisements	10	17	13	22	28	23
Total	64	56	60	64	80	80
‘News’(=Total minus Listed above)	10	15	13	19	28	19
News/Total	16%	27%	22%	30%	35%	24%

Notes: Numbers of pages rounded

‘Entertainment Features’ – pieces thus headed, as opposed to ‘news’ about entertainment

‘Lifestyle Features’ – health and appearance advice, cookery, travel etc.

‘Promotions’ – pieces about special offers from The Sun to readers

Except for Monday there is at least 1 ‘City’ page, which here gets included in ‘News’

Table 2.8. Front pages week beginning Monday May 8^th 2000

	First Story	Second Story	First Pointer	Second Pointer
Monday	Possible Soap Opera Cast changes	Scottish First Minster To have heart surgery	Scottish racing driver Comes second	Pokemon cards promotion
Tuesday	Compensation for man who killed burglar	Scottish First Minister recovering after surgery	Lottery tickets promotion
Wednesday	Soccer player’s tattoo	Man gets bail by falsely claiming need to attend father’s funeral	Lottery tickets promotion
Thursday	Man leaves wife for her daughter	Tyson to fight in Glasgow	Rival paper’s editor in trouble	Pokemon cards promotion
Friday	Soccer player (same one) on holiday with family		Scottish Executive changes proposals on Section 28 repeal	Criminal shooting leads to fear of gang war
Saturday	Film actor alleged to have beaten wife (25 years ago)	The Sun to give away tickets for Queen Mother’s birthday parade	Cash draw offer	Token toward free camera offer

During this week The Sun ran 0 stories about the environment, broadly defined.

There follows a listing of Thursday May 11^th 'News' stories ( ie not otherwise classified in Table 2.7) given more than 25% of page (including photos). I have ignored the content of the ‘City’ page(s). This day was selected at random.

Page 1. Hubby Dumps Wife For Her Girl

75% of front page plus 150% centrepage spread headlined ‘3-in-bed romps were the final straw….then I fell in love with Libby’

Page 2. Mirrorgate: Editor On Brink

3 pieces covering 80% of page – 25% editorial on this as well. The Mirror is the rival tabloid

Page 3. We’ll Strike 3-Sec Goal From Records

30% of page about non-entry in Guinness Book of Records

Pages 4 and 5. Limbo Dancer Swaps Shack for £10m Jackie’s mansion and Gleaming BMW

100% of each page.

Page 6. Paddington Rail Disaster Inquiry

100% of page

Page 7. Student’s Copy Cat Suicide 3 Days After Girlfriend

70% of page

Page 8. The Ali G Translator

30% of page – Ali G is a comedian who is ‘inspiring a whole new slang language’.

Page 9. Despair at Dagenham: Ford Plant to Build Its Last Motor and Rover Woo Honda

100% of page to pieces about UK motor industry crises.

Page 10. It’s Your Call: Parents Must Decide If Kids Have Mobiles

50% of page.

Pages 12 and 13. I Look Like Denis Law……..

140% across two pages – it is a story about actor playing the part of Denis Law (a soccer player) in a forthcoming movie about George Best (a soccer player).

Page 17. You’re Only On Blind Date For A Free Hol!

70% of page – Blind Date is a TV show.

Page 21. Bubble’N Shriek: Student In Stair Stunt

50% of page.

Page 22. Shakespeare Sex Rap Sir Quits Before Probe

70% of page – about a school teacher accused of seducing two schoolgirls.

Page 25. Prize Guys: Youngsters Battle It Out To See Who Can Collect Most Tokens

50% of page - relates to a promotion by The Sun.

Page 25. ‘Arrogant’ Docs Rapped For Taking Baby Hearts

25% of page.

Page 27. Cat’s way to do it, says Charles

25% of page – ‘Charles’ refers to the Prince of Wales and ‘Cat’ to the onetime popstar Cat Stevens.

Page 27. Naked TV Girl Fights Off Two Hotel Robbers

40% of page.

Pages 28 and 29. Would You Adam Neve It?

150% across two pages – a story about an actress and her holiday attire.

Page 31. Best Pal Cleared Of Knife Killing

30% of page.

Page 31. Lockerbie Trial Officer Branded A Prison Bully

30% of page – this is actually a story about a sexual harassment complaint lodged in February, the headline being possible because the subject of the complaint is now responsible for supplies to the Scottish legal operation in Holland which is conducting the trial of the two men alleged to be responsible for the explosion of the PanAm plane over Lockerbie. Underneath this story is one, 15% of the page, that does actually deal with evidence presented at the trial.

Of course the matter is somewhat subjective, but on my assessment of this list, ten pages of the 19 that got allocated to ‘News’ in Table 2.7 above do not really qualify as such in the sense of informing citizens. If I had gone through all the items taking up less than 25% of a page, the proportion of the ‘News’ coverage not so qualifying would be higher. Note that of the stories listed above, only one could possibly be classified as ‘foreign news’ – the Lockerbie trial is taking place in Holland. In this, as in other respects, the Thursday edition does not appear to be un-representative – in so far as there was coverage of foreign stories on the other days it was exclusively on the basis of some particular UK ‘angle’, as with the deployment of British troops in Sierra Leone, for example.

Reading the Mail

The Daily Mail is also thought to be influential in regard to swinging voters, though being read by a higher socio-economic group than The Sun. Its basic stance is pro the Conservative Party, though it is less hostile to the current Labour government than it has previously been. It is anti Europe. Again, I actually read the Scottish Daily Mail but have no reason to suppose, local stories apart, that reading the English version would have produced a different picture.

Table 2.9. Content breakdown week beginning Monday May 22^nd 2000 – number of pages

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Sport	18	11	11	11	11	12
Entertainment Features	3	4	4	4	4	0*
Lifestyle Features	7	11	12	13	11	6
Editorial Comment	3	3	3	3	3	2
Readers’ Letters	2	2	2	2	2	2
Crossword Cartoons Horoscope	3	3	3	3	3	3
Promotions	3	4	1	1	1	2
Advertisements	20	24	34	33	33	39
Total	80	88	96	96	96	96
‘News’ (=Total minus listed above)	21	26	26	26	28	30
News/Total	26%	30%	29%	27%	29%	31%

Notes: Numbers of pages rounded

‘Entertainment Features’ – pieces thus headed, as opposed to ‘news’ about entertainment

‘Lifestyle Features’ – health and appearance advice, cookery, travel etc.

‘Promotions’ – pieces about special offers from The Sun to readers

Except for Monday there are at least 2 ‘City’ pages, which here get included in ‘News’

* TV and radio listings in Supplement, which is not covered here

Table 2.10 Front pages week beginning Monday May 22^nd 2000

	First Story	Second Story	First Pointer	Second Pointer
Monday	Birth of Blair baby		Win a holiday Home	Woman’s own Cure for cancer
Tuesday	Birth of Blair baby (photo)		Prize draw	More Blair Photos
Wednesday	Mistress goes to Function with Prince of Wales	Celebrities split up	Blair baby	Prize draw
Thursday	Church wants Teaching to Promote marriage		(Same) celebrities split up	Prince of Wales Attends film Premiere
Friday	Suspect arrested for murder of celebrity		(Different) celebrity’s drink and drugs problem	Prize draw
Saturday	More on Friday Suspect story		Prize draw	Golf prize Draw

During this week the Daily Mail ran the following stories about the environment, broadly defined.

Tuesday

Page 4. Our mistake in GM scandal, by Mowlem

50% of page, focussed on government delay in announcing that GM oilseed was sown on 600 farms.

Page 33. Save our seals plea to expert

10% of page about scientist from ‘Scottish university’ investigating disease affecting seals in Kazakhstan, where locals fear release of hydrogen sulphide is oil drilling is cause.

Page 37. Household chemicals linked to Parkinson’s

40% of page about investigation of hypothesis that chemicals may be a factor in Parkinson's disease, introduced with references to film star and former boxer who suffer from condition.

Wednesday

Page 11. Poisoned, the eagle bird lovers watched over day and night

50% of page (including picture of an eagle) – the bird’s nest had been watched because of previous egg taking attempts.

Page 34. Why the Scots trawler fleet is forced to dump tons of perfectly good fish just to please Brussels Eurocrats

150% across two pages (including pictures) – fisherman claim that fish stocks are healthy and that quotas are too low and unfairly distributed as between EU nations.

Thursday

Page 8. GM-tainted maize may have found its way here

50% of page – based on the fact that the European Seeds Association takes seed with 1% GM contamination as acceptable, environmental groups are claiming that maize seed could be contaminated up to that level.

Friday

Page 7. Kept in the dark: Finnie confronts Nick Brown in secrecy row over GM seed gaffe.

40% of page – Nick Brown is the UK Agriculture Minister and Finnie is the Rural Affairs Minister in the devolved Scottish Executive, and the story is about inter-governmental argumentation.

Page 7. Charles’s friend has ordered GM crops’ destruction

60% of page with picture of ‘friend’ – ‘Charles’ is the Prince of Wales, who is well known for his opposition to the use of GM seeds, and his landowning friend has ordered that the crop on 160 acres of his land sown with rape before the government announcement be destroyed.

Page 12. Sowing the seeds of deception

25% of page editorial re-stating the ‘kept in the dark story’ and urging the UK government to order the destruction of all of the GM contaminated crop or add to the sentiment in favour of more devolution for Scotland.

Page 27. Rare flower is plucked to safety in a daring rescue

40% (including pictures) of page – people from the Scottish Wildlife Trust abseiled down into a glen to collect information on a population of a plant species that may be threatened.

Page 45. Tap water bug alert

30% of page – as compared with a normal annual rate of 150 cases, there were 37 cases ‘in the past two weeks’ of an illness which normally peaks in April and May, and which may be due to ‘lambs’ droppings on the banks of Loch Katrine’ the source of Glasgow’s water.

Saturday

Page 19. I warned about GM pollution but the experts wouldn’t listen

80% of page (large photo man who gave warning) – a plant breeder wrote to a body which advises the government about the contamination of Canadian rape seed, the origin of the UK problems covered in the stories earlier in the week, in 1998. The advisory body did not pass the information to the government.

There follows a listing of Wednesday May 24^th 'News' stories ( ie not otherwise classified in Table 2.9) given more than 25% of page (including photos). I have ignored the content of the ‘City’ page(s). This day was selected at random. The list does not include the two ‘environmental’ stories noted above. This day’s paper included a 20 page Money Mail feature ( 9 pages of advertisements) which includes stories relevant to personal finance.

Page 1. Camilla Seeks Kirk’s Seal of Approval

50% of front page continued, 50% of page, at page 5. Camilla is the mistress of the Prince of Wales and accompanied him to a reception hosted by the Church of Scotland.

Page 2. Labour aims to curb state role, says Reid

40% of page. Reid is the Secretary of State for Scotland in the Westminster Government. The role of the state referred to is the welfare system. The story refers to a speech to be given after the paper was printed.

Page 3. Why I want TV viewers to see me having my breasts removed

100% of page. The ‘I’ is a TV news presenter.

Page 4. Nurses’ desparate plea for protection

60%. The nurses at a Glasgow hospital are seeking a police presence in the hospital on account of abusive behaviour by patients and visitors.

Page 6. The Real Guilty Men

100%. The Millennium Dome has been a financial disaster, and this piece identifies the seven men held to be most responsible. It would perhaps have been more accurate to classify this as Comment.

Page 8/9. We’ve fallen out of love say Liz and Hugh

180% across two pages, one of which is all, captioned, photos of Liz and Hugh, model and actor respectively.

Page 10. Will marines lead fight for diamond mines?

50% about speculation, based on troop rotation, that government might be about to re-define the mission of British troops in Sierra Leone.

Page 10. Tired Noel quits Oasis for his wife

25% of page. Noel is a member of the pop group Oasis.

Page 15. Lebanon gun battles rage as pull-out by Israel turns to chaos

80% of page. Includes a subhead under which is given the background to the events reported. The final para reports that several lives were lost ‘including a driver for the BBC’. Clearly, this person was from Lebanon.

Page 16. Byers passes the buck on time off for 3m parents

30%. Byers is the Trade and Industry Minister at whose request a legal ruling on maternity/paternity leave was referred to the European Court of Justice.

Page 17. I can’t go on…How overdose PC kept a diary of despair

80%. An inquest was told that a female police officer who killed herself kept a diary recording bullying and sexual harassment and assault.

Page 19. The Lib-Dem who wants to take on Tyson and hang the consequences

50%. Tyson is the boxer due to fight in Scotland soon. The Lib-Dem is a member of the Scottish Parliament who wants people to protest about Tyson’s visit and fight.

Page 20. Snorers are braced for a sound night’s sleep

50%. Mouthguards may stop snoring.

Page 21. European threat to legal aid costs

50%. A bus driver is taking action in the Edinburgh Court of Session, under the European Convention on Human Rights which is effective in Scotland, to get legal aid, currently denied, for an unfair dismissal case before an industrial tribunal.

Page 22. Euro law could spell an end to strict school dress codes of dress

60%. It is possible that the European Convention on Human Rights could make it easier for students to avoid wearing school uniforms – no case has yet been brought on this basis. There is a photo of a girl who won a case in England, where the Convention is not yet law, without going to court.

Page 24/5/6. Seven Ages Of Fatherhood

225% across three pages. Seven stories, with photos, about fathers in teens, twenties and so on to seventies. This is the week in which the Prime Minister became a father, for the fourth time, in his 40s.

Page 27. The Ballpoint Baby pens his own piece of medical history

50%. A baby born prematurely, and then similar in size to a pen, has first birthday.

Page 28. The secret Polar hero was afraid to disclose

50%. One of the men who recently walked to the North Pole was convicted for assault one week before setting off on the expedition in February.

Page 29. Thugs shoot tycoon

40%. In the course of a robbery.

Page 30. Labour accused of patent negligence over sale of Dolly

40%. Dolly is the cloned sheep. The Edinburgh based company that developed the technology has been taken over by a US company, who have thereby acquired the rights to the technology. A Conservative politician wants a House of Commons committee to investigate whether this might have involved substantial financial losses by virtue of the fact that the technology was originally developed at a government funded laboratory.

Page 36. Baldrick wins a place on Labour’s top table

40%. The actor who played Baldrick in the Blackadder TV series has been elected to the National Executive of the Labour Party.

Page 37. Just leave our musical chairs alone say parents

50%. A booklet recently launched by a Government Minister advised teachers of primary school children to avoid musical chairs on the grounds that it encourages aggressive behaviour. An Opposition spokesperson’s view that this is political correctness gone mad was endorsed by a parent teacher association group. The piece lists other examples of political correctness affecting children, allegedly, going back 8n years.

Page 39. Triple whammy as Tories reveal how Ministers spin to deceive

50% including photo of Minister from Scottish Executive who opposition Conservative claims has misled by announcing same increase in health expenditure several times.

Page 40. First class stamps on sale at £2.75m

30%. A stamp collection goes on sale.

Page 41. Thief’s cruel hoax on AbFab star’s parents

30%. ABFab is a TV comedy show, no longer running. Two men were found guilty of using the mobile belonging to an actress from the show to phone her parents to say that she had been in an accident.

Page 42. No room for change for homesick Carol

30%. Carol is the presenter of a TV show about home decorating. She has refused offers to work in the USA. This piece is based on an interview in a magazine.

Page 43 carried 4 short foreign stories, together taking up 40% of the page. They were about: surgery to separate Siamese twins in Italy; findings from the USA that Viagra does nothing for women; plans to rebuild the Colossus of Rhodes; renewed fighting between Christians and Moslems in Nigeria.

While the Daily Mail has more space than The Sun that could be characterised as informing citizens, the entertainment driven nature of its coverage is very apparent, both in terms of subject matter and presentation.

The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution's 22nd Report

On Friday June 16th Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution ( http://www.rcep.org.uk/) published its 22nd report – Energy: The Changing Climate, with a press conference and an excellent press release, from which the following quotes are taken.

As a contribution to global efforts to prevent climate change running out of control, the UK should plan for a reduction of 60% over the next 50 years in the amounts of carbon dioxide it releases by burning fossil fuels.

The UK lags far behind many other European countries in developing the renewable energy technologies that will become much more important in the future....

The challenge climate change poses for the world is so fundamental however that a complete transformation in the UK's use of energy will be an essential part of an effective global response

The problems are complex and there are no easy answers. We hope that the analysis and recommendations in our report will begin the wide debate that will be essential if the UK and the whole world community are to rise successfully to the radical challenge that climate change is now posing.

the government's climate change levy, which will tax the downstream use of energy, should be replaced by an upstream tax on the carbon content of all fuels.....would apply to all sectors

I checked the two most popular tabloids, The Sun and The Mirror, on Saturday 17th June. As shown above, these account for over 30% of UK newspaper readership. In neither was there any mention of the publication of the report.

I also checked The Daily Mail. It accounts for about 10% of total readership. It covered the report on page 27, where it got about 20% of the page. The story appeared below one, taking about 40% of the page, about a godson of the Prince of Wales being arrested in connection with cannabis possession.

The Guardian is a broadsheet accounting for about 3% of total readership. It devoted 50% of its page 2 to this story. If front page coverage is a mark of the importance attached to news, The Guardian thought that the publication of this report was less important than the publication of the list of those honoured by the Queen, a photograph of the Queen's grandson ( his eighteenth birthday approaches ), bad behaviour in Belgium by supporters of the England football team, and a supposed disagreement within the government over policy in regard to the question of if and when the UK should join the European Monetary Union.

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[1] These quotes are from Boyden et al (1990), which was the first book to come out of the FQP.

[2] This assessment can readily be checked by examining the recent , January 2000, Cumulative Index issue of Ecological Economics. A recent paper in the journal, M'Gonigle (1999), notes the lack of impact of ecological economics to date and argues that it needs to be situated in 'a larger ecological political economy'. Commenting on ISEE conference papers and the journal's contents, M'Gonigle says that while 'Some topics still seek to break new strategic and political ground', 'the emphasis is less on refashioning the basic assumptions and institutions of the market economy than on examining specific policies and sectors through an essentially neo-classical prism of monetary exchange values and discount rates'

[3] See, for example, Funtowicz and Ravetz (1991). Beck, in Jacobs (1997), is a summary account of his theory of 'the risk society', and this book also has a chapter by Grove-White 'Environment Risk and Democracy' which looks at recent UK experience with, for example, the BSE problem.

[4] In fact, in the light of discussion toward the end of this section, it would be more accurate to say 'should not have any obvious impact on the Domestic sector'.

[5] See, for example, Symons et al (1994) for a carefully worked UK study which shows that carbon taxation could be used with changes to the tax welfare situation so as to improve the lot of the worst off.

[6] See Common (1985). For similar results for Australia, see chapter 9 of Common (1995), which also presents some illustrative results concerning the use of the revenues arising for a radical reform of the tax/welfare system.

[7] In the ecological economics literature, Köhn (1998, 1999) presents a similar schema, and considers information as well as energy and matter.

[8] This is discussed in Faber et al (1996) and in Boyd and Richerson (1985)

[9] Presumably Chris Patten was chosen for this because his wide experience of government – from Hong Kong to the EU – includes a spell as UK Secretary of State for the Environment, during which he oversaw the production of the first UK White Paper on sustainable development. In the context of this paper, it is of some interest that the Reith Lectures attracted virtually no media interest until the last one of the series. This was given by the Prince of Wales, and in it he questioned the role of science and pleaded for a sense of the sacred in regard to the environment. This lecture got an enormous amount of media coverage over several days, and extending to the tabloid press.

[10] As regards the connections between democracy and sustainability, the empirical evidence is relatively sparse and inconclusive. For most of human history democracy as now understood appears to have been absent, and threats to sustainability operating at the global level have also been absent. Some human societies have gone extinct, been unsustainable, on account of environmental problems rather than competition from other human societies. Others have persisted and evolved into democracies. Others – the indigenous Australians for example – persisted and did not so evolve.

[11] See Common and Perrings (1992).

[12] A similar remark could, of course, be made about much of the economics literature on sustainability.

[13] The EKC literature, and the argument for the EKC hypothesis, are of some interest in this connection. Basically, the idea behind the hypothesis is that as economies grow so their structure changes so as to reduce resource intensity, that as citizens become richer with growth so they demand higher environmental quality through the political process, and that that demand is more easily met with increasing national income. While there does appear to be some support for the hypothesis in terms of readily apparent local pollution problems, there does not appear to be much support for the hypothesis for global problems such as climate change. Ecological Economics ran a special issue on the EKC, May 1998, as did Environment and Development Economics, October 1997.

[14] Dobson actually distinguishes a third constituency about which these questions could be asked – non-human entities.

[15] It is perhaps worth noting that dictators frequently claim to be imposing current hardship in the interests of future generations. While those future generations are usually domestic citizens, in the case of communist dictators there was, at least, the possibility that the future generations to benefit would be global.

[16] Saward (1996) does remark that 'no part of the responsive rule conception of democracy requires that preferences be informed in order to count, but clearly that is a desirable state of affairs on any criterion' (p85, emphasis in the original).

[17] In connection with the Reith Lecture I noted above the views and reputation of its first chief executive, Lord Reith. The influence of Lord Reith on the development of the BBC was considerable. For a long time it was, and sometimes still is, referred to as 'Aunty BBC' or just 'Aunty', by those seeking to emphasise its paternalistic style.

[18] This sentence was written early in June, based on 'informed comment' several newspapers. The following updating at 27th June shows: how informed comment can apparently turn out to be wrong; inaccurate reporting of facts; a desire to present confrontation and sensational figures; the limited actual power of the ITC. On Friday 23rd June, The Times ran a front page story under the headline 'ITV ordered to show night time news earlier'. According to the story under the headline, the ITC issued an 'ultimatum' about moving the news to an earlier time, and 'If ITV wants to avoid moving the news, its only option now is to take the ITC to court for exceeding its powers'. On page 4 the story was covered at greater length under the headline @ITV must uield on the News at Ten'. According to this piece, 'The ITC unanimously rejected ITV's fresh proposals for improving audiences for national and international news...' and it 'is not clear what ITV can do in response to such an unambiguous instruction....'. This piece reports an ITV estimate that moving the news made it an extra £50 million to £70 million in adevertising revenue, though £64 million was spent 'on enhancements to the scedule' that went with moving the news. The piece ends with the statement that 'Being forced to bring it back (ie restore the news to 10pm) could cost the network a total of £420 million over the next five years'. This figure appears to be obtained by taking the £70 million for the gross loss of advertising revenue currently, applying an annual growth rate of 6% (the market average, which it is elsewhere noted is better than ITV has been doing), and adding over five years. In the media supplement to The Guardian for 26th June, p5, it was reported that 'no formal direction emerged' from the ITC, which '"insisted" that ITV move the news, but didn't "direct" it to do so'. According to this piece, the ITC is 'not sure' whether it has the power to force ITV to move the news, while 'ITV chiefs were adamant that they would not be forced into scheduling a bulletin at 10.30pm' which 'most believe, is off the agenda'.

[19] I recently heard on the, BBC, radio some informed commentators lamenting the decreasing use of the definite article in news reporting and comment. Whereas 20 years ago all references would have taken the form ‘The Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, said that…..’, now they often take the form ‘Prime Minister Tony Blair said that…….’. The commentators appeared to agree that this was down to laziness and/or declining educational standards. I think that it is probably more a reflection of the increasing personalisation of news reporting. Whereas formerly the message was that the Prime Minister, who currently is Mrs Thatcher, said……., now ‘Prime Minister’ is used as an adjective to describe the current status of the person Tony Blair. People are more entertaining than offices.

[20] The coverage of the Mozambique floods exemplifies some of these points. Given the strong visual images involved there was a lot of TV coverage, and lots of money was raised to assist the victims. Some, but in my experience rather little, of the coverage reported that some experts were making connections between the floods and global warming. I was aware of only one feature article in one of the quality newspapers that connected this to consumption in the rich nations. There was a lot of coverage of politics and, especially personalities, in regard to alleged disagreements among ministers as to the extent and nature of government assistance, and of alleged bungling in the delivery of this assistance in terms of helicopters and personnel.

[21] Papadakis looks at just one, relatively small circulation, weekly print publication over a long period of time, a focus which has obvious disadvantages but which does cut down on the amount of labour input and gives some sense of changes in the intensity and nature of media coverage over time, which is lacking from the Chapman et al study.

[22] Cottle in Hansen (1993) looks at TV coverage of environmental issues in the UK. As well as the results for the UK considered here, it also reports from a parallel study of Indian newspapers and broadcasting.

[23] Harold Macmillan, a British Prime Minister of aristocratic origins was asked after his resignation what had caused him the most trouble during his period of office, and his reply was 'Events, dear boy, events'.

[24] Of relevance to the proposal for a research project made in the final section of this paper is the following. The organisation that conducted the UK survey that Witherspoon draws upon, the National Centre for Social Research, has since 1983 regularly conducted the British Social Attitudes Survey, which often includes questions about attitudes on environmental issues, along with modules covering the full range of social issues. This survey is conducted as part of the International Social Survey Programme, which coordinates regular related surveys in 26 countries including the USA, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden.

[25] The results shown are based on the responses to 10 of the questions, as for two the scale produced was considered unreliable.