Big Green Challenge blog

Supporting tax avoiders (of the sort we need more of)

Mark Griffiths - 05.08.2011

Tim Harford, in his (wonderful) new book puts it very sharply - any solution to climate change "is going to come either because individuals voluntarily change their behaviour, or because governments change the rules."[1]

Tim argues that the very complexity of the problem means that we need a simple solution - a carbon tax that would serve to guide the actions of a multitude of individuals in the correct direction.  He argues this by setting out how difficult it is for a well-motivated, and even informed, individual to behave greenly: for example, should you replace your existing light bulbs with energy efficient ones before the existing ones have blown? (The answer is yes.)  Is it genuinely greener to buy British lamb as opposed to New Zealand (it takes more fossil fuel to produce lamb in the UK than in New Zealand, he argues); is it really that green to take the bus to the supermarket when the typical London bus only has thirteen people on it - would you, in fact, be better driving?

Tim's argument has force, and, while I agree with the desirability of his solution, in the absence of an internationally imposed carbon tax we are, as he diagnoses, forced to be reliant on individuals voluntarily changing their behaviour. 

Also, although a carbon tax would give people the incentive to change behaviour, and point them in the direction they should go, it won't always tell people how to action that. For example, that my energy bills are now more expensive to reflect the carbon cost doesn't, by itself, tell me how to reduce them.  So, even when people do have a financial incentive to be greener there is still a need to make them aware of the robust, simple, actions that can be taken with confidence.

In a previous NESTA blog I have reflected on the work that NESTA has supported as part of the Big Green Diffusion.  This project directly tackles the tough question of how to support successful environmental ideas to 'diffuse' across to other individuals or communities - rapidly, and at scale.  Now that the project has ended I wanted to reflect on one of the findings in the impact report - the importance of making every effort to make it easy for individuals to adopt the green innovations that work.

The Big Green Diffusion (BGD) projects worked hard to[2] make sure their green innovations were compatible with current behaviour:

For example, one of the BGD projects, Local Food Champions have established a model that allows a community to re-localise their food economy; an internet-based food hub allows local food producers to offer their products below retail but above wholesale prices.  They were conscious of the need to customise and flex a model that could suit the context in which the model was being diffused to.  In theoretical terms they developed a 'tight-but-loose' model: a model tight enough to make sure that the benefits of the model continue to be realised, but loose enough to allow it to be adapted to local contexts.

The Big Green Diffusion (BGD) projects also made sure that the innovations were easy to use.  For example, Bricks and Bread is a collaborative social enterprise that aims to supply and educate people with eco-resources to reduce their reliance on peak oil.  They do this by connecting people with experts and sustainable suppliers in their local area.  As part of BGD they used their networks in order to rapidly prototype and test their approach to developing a replicable model.  For Bricks and Bread, the existence of a 'central hub', the original sustainable living centre, supported this process by providing constant feedback loops between the project and those targeted for diffusion.

Another project, Global Action Plan working with the Centre for Alternative Technology identified, as part of the Big Green Diffusion project, helpful ways in which they could modify their already successful innovation - Eco teams - to suit the needs and motivations of their 'customers' even better.

Carbon co-operative were supported by BGD to create a community finance summer school, the starting point for which was the recognition that one of the barriers to more communities developing locally-led low carbon projects is a gap in the financial and legal knowledge available.  In preparing for their first school the team conducted extensive testing and co-production with their target audience.  Partly as a result of this testing, the project went on to great things - between two thousand and three thousand people visit their website every month since the first summer school was run.  They are in a strong position to expand their work going forward - eight Community Finance schools will be run over the next two years.

The role of prototyping is explored more in these great NESTA blogs - prototyping the public services of tomorrow.

The topic of supporting needed change at the individual level also leads to the concept behind the Citizens' University - The U - a project that NESTA is supporting The Young Foundation to trial and test.  The guiding hypothesis behind the U is that there are some skills that we need to have more of in our communities - skills like first aid, or stopping fights from taking place.  All the skills that the U is concerned with have in common big dollops of positive externalities - they have a benefit greater than that they confer to the individual with these skills.  Recognising that residents who understand their homes often save more money and energy than hi-tech solutions^[3],  one of the topics that the U, in conjunction with Sustainable Homes, will be delivering training in is how to green your home.

I think this is great.  The U have developed an approach to learning that brings communities together in a fun, fast-paced, easily digestible form that fits today's lifestyles ('seven skills in ninety minutes' is how they headline it).  Very encouragingly, the U's focus groups identified a great interest to develop skills in greening.  Typical comments from the focus groups included: "this is a skill for the future", "we all know we should be greener, but we don't know how to do it", and "because of global warming this is the most important topic for society".

The projects that NESTA worked with on the Big Green Diffusion, and the U, all show that with effort and thought we can make it easier for more individuals to voluntarily change their behaviour.  A carbon tax would incentivise more people to do this, but even then we will need to inform people how to be (carbon) tax-avoiders - tax avoiders of the sort we need more of!

[1] Tim Harford, Adapt, p157

[2] Although the projects didn't think in these terms (I am not sure many people outside of innovation think-tanks do) they in effect tried hard to score highly on Roger Everett's intrinsic characteristics of innovations - http://www.nesta.org.uk/blogs/assets/blog_entries/spreading_green_ideas

[3] http://www.sustainablehomes.co.uk/home_energy_awareness.aspx