False Accuracy of Discount Rates: The Kleptogarchy part 4

Posted: August 14, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Climate, Economics, Education | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

The False Accuracy of Discount Rates

A major difference between the Stern Report and the Nordhaus data in the DICE model is the discount rate applied. The discount rate determines the difference between present and future returns on investment. A zero rate means there is no difference. A negative rate means that the future value of an investment is lower than at the present time, in which case the investment is not worth making in financial terms. A positive rate increases the future value compared to the present, and it indicates that investment should yield a profit. The Stern Report used a low discount rate of 1.4% a year, making investment in climate measures less and less attractive over time and indicating that investment should be made now and in the very near future. Nordhaus, in contrast, used a rate of 4.1% a year, which he argued accorded with market rates at the time (2005-06). While the Stern value gave a carbon price of $85 a ton, Nordhaus’s figure was about $7.40 for 2005, fluctuating a little depending on the precise figures fed into the DICE model. Thus choice of a different discount rate has a huge impact on the price polluters should be asked to pay for their CO2 emission, or on any other parameter to which it is applied.

Earth systems including climates do not respond to discount rates, but they do respond to changes within their own primary system and in other systems with which the primary system interacts. An investment in nuclear power generation on a low-lying coast, for example, would be pointless if it fell victim to sea-level rise, and would incur additional damage-limitation costs if radioactive waste polluted the waters.

The initial discount rate calculation would not count for anything at all.

Follow the Money

Stanford University in California is super-selective, admitting only four or five qualified applicants in every hundred. It features in league tables as one of the top half dozen universities in the world. The Hoover Institution is housed at Stanford University. John H Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. John H Cochrane argues against radical policies to try and mitigate climate change.

Rose-Marie and Jack R Anderson’s foundation promotes free markets and small government. Via the Donors Trust, it has links to a network of funding sources including a number distributing funds from Koch family foundations. Koch Industries, big in oil, natural gas, coal, fertilisers, plastics, chemicals, minerals and much more, is the USA’s largest privately owned company, with revenues of $115 billion in 2019. Action to limit climate change is a red flag to Koch Industries, given the importance of carbon-emitting technologies in its portfolio.

The Hoover Institution, the current director of which is the former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has an extensive list of Distinguished Visiting Fellows including the near-centenarian Henry Kissinger; former US Defence Secretary James Mattis (and fellow Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld until his death in 2021); and the UK’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

John H Cochrane says that “Climate policy is ultimately an economic question”.[1] Yet it is an economic question only through the lens of privilege and entitlement, for people with assets they are desperate to preserve. For most people, and indeed for all life forms, climate is a matter of survival.

John Cochrane: “Even our sclerotic post-2000 real GDP grows at a 2% annual rate. At that rate, in 2100, the US will have real GDP 400% greater than now, as even the IPCC readily admits. At 3% compound growth, the US will produce, and people will earn, 1,000% more GDP than now. Yes that can happen. From 1940 to 2000, US GDP grew from $1,331 billion to $13,138 billion in 2012 dollars, a factor of ten in just 60 years, and a 3.8% compound annual growth rate.”[2]

But how did the USA achieve these numbers?

  1. OIL! And coal and gas. Burning fossil fuels to fire economic growth at supersonic speeds, growth that would have been impossible if only renewable resources had been used. The first commercial oil well in the USA was drilled by Edwin Drake in Venango County, Pennsylvania, in 1859. Oil displaced the labour of slaves; if oil had not been ‘liberated’ in huge quantities, the USA could not have become an industrial titan. 
  2. Advertising, creating demand for goods no one knew they needed. Advertising agencies, starting with N W Ayer & Son in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, developed in the second half of the 19th century.
  3. Consumer debt. It really took off in 1856 in the USA, when the Singer Sewing Machine Company began to offer instalment plans to customers. In 1899 the Retail Credit Company, later to become Equifax, was founded in Atlanta, Georgia. This gave lenders data on who (in the opinion of Equifax) was creditworthy and who was not. By 1914, a new industry was emerging – financial services companies, offering loans for customers to buy cars like Henry Ford’s Model T. Henry Ford did not embrace hire purchase directly, but competitor General Motors had no such qualms and in 1924 launched General Motors Acceptance Corporation to offer finance for new cars, the risks split between the manufacturer and the dealer.
  4. What enabled the automobile industry to exist, grow, and dominate transport? OIL!
  5. The ‘military industrial complex’ that President Dwight D Eisenhower warned of (albeit late in the day) has a primary aim of securing access to resources, oil among them, from around the world. The operations of the military industrial complex feed GDP, which is an amoral measure of revenue-earning operations of every type (including drug-dealing and prostitution). If roads, buildings and other structures are badly damaged after flood, or fire, or hurricane, and are rebuilt, damaged again, rebuilt, all the costs are added to GDP, creating a mirage of a buoyant economy, but actually masking alarming disasters. 

So, to go all out for GDP growth is hardly a laudable objective, and to persist in the endeavour when the risks of climate disaster are multiplying is symptomatic of irrational belief rather than logic.

Returning to John Cochrane, he comments in the National Review: “Growth risk is an order of magnitude larger than climate risk.” It is an opinion, but not a provable fact. He continued: “If the question is, ‘What steps can we take, perhaps costly today, to improve GDP in the year 2100?’ hurried decarbonization is not the answer. If the question is, ‘What steps can we take to improve the well-being of the world’s poor?’ climate policy is not the answer……. Sturdy pro-growth policies, however unpopular to so many in today’s political class and incumbent businesses and labor organizations, are the answer.” Oh dear.

“Looking under the hood of big models, it is not even obvious that climate change hurts the economy at all,” Cochrane wrote. “People and companies are moving in droves from the cold Rust Belt and cool, coastal California to Texas, even though Texas is a lot hotter than anything climate change will bring to the former……The central uncomfortable fact is that the output of an advanced industrial economy like the US, moving headlong into services, is just not that sensitive to climate or weather. The worse heat waves, floods, and storms just do not move national GDP”. To be fair to John Cochrane, he admits that the environment is in trouble – “We are in the middle of a mass extinction” – but he blames human activities like encroaching on habitats and poaching, not climate change. If he had been writing in 1750, he could have been correct, but he is now mistaken. WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, fears that “Up to half of plant and animal species in the world’s most naturally rich areas, such as the Amazon and the Galapagos, could face local extinction by the turn of the century due to climate change if carbon emissions continue to rise unchecked”.[3]

Perhaps John Cochrane felt he had to stick to the script and write as a climate change sceptic. Doubts may be starting to creep in, perhaps in the same way that they did for the late Martin Weitzman. Cochrane admits that “total warming is robustly related to total carbon”, so he accepts a fundamental cause of climate change, he just does not yet believe that it will have severe repercussions for humans. This stance means he can champion the business-as-usual pursuit of profits. 

Vast wealth controls the narrative, able to buy politicians, professors and journalists, and able to fund overt and covert promotion campaigns. The covert operations are particularly insidious, including as they do social media messages tailored to each individual’s profile, and not sent to people who might disagree, thereby seeking to minimise contact with those likely to hold opposing views. Wealth buys power, and power therefore works to protect wealth.

The ‘Climategate’ furore just before COP (Conference of the Parties) 15 in Copenhagen in 2009 could not have happened without intent, organisation and technical skill.  Climategate was so labelled by climate change deniers after a hack of emails and other documents from the servers of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The hack released over 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents, which appeared to have been selected to highlight certain terms and words chosen to convey ambiguity, notably ‘trick’. 

The Trick was the title of a BBC drama shown in October 2021, focusing on Professor Phil Jones, the Director of the Climate Research Unit at the time, and the personal trauma he suffered after the hack. The word ‘trick’ was seized upon by sceptics, who accused Professor Jones of misrepresenting temperature data to exaggerate the global rise. The ‘trick’ was in fact a statistical way of integrating evidence from tree rings – dendrochronology – and temperature data. Warm temperatures help trees to grow, creating larger rings than in cold climates, but temperature is not the only factor affecting tree rings. Rainfall, pollution, pests and diseases can all affect tree growth and thus tree rings, therefore evidence from tree rings and temperature readings can diverge.

The sceptics seized upon decontextualised words to sow doubt and confusion about climate change in the public’s mind. The journalist James Delingpole, who publicised the term ‘Climategate’, wrote this in the Conservative-leaning magazine The Spectator, on December 12th 2009:

“Some of us have been saying for years that the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s) process is corrupt; that dissenting voices have been shut out of the debate; that raw data has been subverted, suppressed, corrupted and destroyed; that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) theory owes more to political activism than disinterested science; that the measures currently being proposed to deal with AGW are a global economic disaster waiting to happen.”

The stolen emails and documents did not give journalists like Mr Delingpole ammunition for long, because the data was not misrepresented, but the hack released acrid, blinding smoke that slowed progress towards international action on climate change.

As to who was responsible for the hack, their identity was never discovered. Norfolk Police closed their investigation in July 2012, because they could see no realistic prospect of identifying the offender or offenders or of launching criminal proceedings within the legal time limit.

[1] ‘Climate policy should pay more attention to climate economics’ by John H Cochrane, www.nationalreview.com, September 3rd 2021.

[2] Ibid.

[3] https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/half-of-plant-and-animal-species-at-risk-from-climate-change-in-world-s-most-important-natural-places, accessed September 12th 2021.

The Erasure of Rural Wales Edges Closer

Posted: September 15, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Agriculture, Education, Rural Economy | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Reblogged from West Wales News Review

Policy to Revitalise Rural Areas — Where Is It?

Llansawel Show was yesterday. Sheep, poultry, ponies, giant vegetables, odd vegetables, flowers, jams, cookery, arts and crafts. Burgers (local), beer (from local pub), ice cream (local). The weather was kind, all in all a very pleasant afternoon. Most people, certainly most older people, were chatting and conducting the business of the day in Welsh.

One field to the east is Llansawel School. The word around the village is that the school will close in 2016, and under-11s will be bussed to Cwmann on the outskirts of Lampeter, between 12 and 13 miles from Llansawel village along twisty roads. The AA calculates that the journey is just on half an hour, without any stops. Add in the numerous stops made by school buses…. You get the picture.

Read on:

http://westwalesnewsreview.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/the-erasure-of-rural-wales-edges-closer/

Fatal Impacts of Short-Term Thinking

Posted: March 25, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Rural Economy | Leave a comment

Short-term thinking and narrow cost-benefit calculations are killing the countryside:

Dead Horse, Dead Community

Schools are not self-contained financial units but are — or should be — part of the surrounding community. In rural areas especially, if the school is closed the community is damaged, sometimes fatally.

Student Debt a Disaster for Future Graduates

Posted: July 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Politics | Tags: | Leave a comment

Repayment of student loans is already so patchy that the portents are disturbing for future repayment of the much higher loans from 2012-13.

The Student Loans Company reports[1] that, of the England-domiciled student borrowers who graduated in 2000, one in seven, 14%, earned too little in 2010-11 to have to make repayments, and another 10% were unemployed. Another 3% had ‘disappeared’ and 4% more were receiving payment holidays. That totals 31%, nearly one in three, not making repayments, 10 years after graduating. This compares with 23% who made at least one repayment in the year.

In those 10 years, 45% of the 2000 graduates had repaid their loans. We need to remember that back then, loans were much smaller than they are now, and from this September they soar again. The average value of loans taken out in 1995-96 was £1,250, and in 2000-01, £2,900.[2] From 2000, repayments have begun when annual income exceeds £15,000, at the rate of 9% of income above this threshold.

New students this September will face tuition fees of up to £9,000 and will be able to borrow up to £7,675 for living costs if they study in London, up to £4,375 outside London. This means that London students will have access to up to £16,675 in their first year, and this starts to accrue interest charges straight away.

The interest charges are going up too. They will be at the RPI on incomes under £21,000, RPI plus up to 3% on a sliding scale on incomes between £21,000 and £41,000, and RPI plus 3% on incomes over £41,000. Repayments will be at the rate of 9% of income over £21,000, but incomes below this will not escape, because interest charges will be applied and rolled up until the payment threshold is reached.

Compared with interest rates on savings – negligible in 2012 – and with the 1.5% interest rates on student loans in 2010-11 and 2011-12, the new rates will appear sky-high. As an example, the Retail Prices Index, RPI, was 3.1% in May 2012. Add 3% on top, and the rate becomes 6.1%. The new loans will remain live for 30 years, up from 25 years currently, and will be very hard to repay for graduates who  move in and out of the threshold, because the longer the loan takes to pay off, the bigger the interest bill.

Graduates today are more likely than ever to be in low-paid jobs – as waiters, bar staff, cleaners, receptionists, and the like. For the final quarter of 2011, 35.9% of workers who graduated in the previous six years were in jobs that did not require a degree, and another 9.1% were known to be unemployed.[3] Low-paid jobs and high rates of interest on student loans are not good companions.

Students should pay for their education, the argument goes, because they will benefit financially. That has never been true for all students, and becomes less true overall with each passing year.

The costs of higher education are diverging in the nations of the United Kingdom. Wales will require Welsh-domiciled students studying anywhere in the UK, and EU students studying in Wales, to pay tuition fees up to £3,465 from September 2012. In Northern Ireland, Northern Irish and EU students studying in the province will also pay no more than £3,465. In Scotland, Scottish-domiciled and EU students continue to have fee-free higher education. Devolution is leading to very different patterns of subsidy – or not – for higher education. Currently, English-domiciled students have the worst deal.

In three years’ time, students will be graduating with debts that a few years ago would have been a medium-sized mortgage. Debts of around £40,000 for students outside London, and £50,000 for students in London, will be common. Add the hefty interest rates, and the 30 years before debt is written off, and higher education transforms into a disastrous financial millstone, especially for the very many graduates who never become higher-rate taxpayers.

The electoral gains that Tony Blair’s New Labour acquired from its promise to provide higher education for half of all school-leavers have turned into a financial ball and chain that students and their families have to lug with them for decades. How could we improve matters? A few ideas: more distance learning and local study centres, so more higher education students can remain living (usually more cheaply) at home; a national investment bank – not a derivatives casino – to build up sustainable, low-impact enterprises in renewable energy, recycling, biotechnologies, water and soil management, and so on, ventures that will employ graduates (and pay them); and a clampdown on corporate tax evasion, with the recovered money invested in public services including education, which should be seen as a social necessity and not as a private consumer purchase.

[1]
Statistics from the Student Loans company, table 1(ii), borrowers who were students domiciled in England studying within the UK, and EU students studying in England.

[2] ‘Student Loan Statistics’ by Paul Bolton, House of Commons Library, June 19th 2012, Note SN/SG/1079.

[3] ‘Graduates in the Labour Market 2012’, from the Office for National Statistics, March 6th 2012.

Spend less on schools, more on the rural economy

Posted: May 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Carmarthenshire, Education | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

This item is also published on West Wales News Review 

Carmarthenshire’s ‘21st Century Schools’ programme is, stripped to essentials, a plan to replace small local schools with large new ‘hub’ schools. The impetus comes from the falling numbers of school pupils. The decade April 2001 to March 2011 saw 25 closures, mainly in rural areas, and a net fall of 1,873 school places in the county.[1]  The axe is poised to continue falling on under-subscribed schools.

Caio Primary School is set to close to pupils in July 2012. By the spring term 2012 only four pupils were enrolled. The catchment area contained more children than this, but their parents opted to send them elsewhere. The explanations are politically sensitive. Your reporter has been told that the exodus is increased by parents moving in from England who reject Welsh-language education.

Originally, the decision to maintain Welsh-medium primary schools in the rural areas of Wales made sense because the rural farming communities spoke Welsh, our priceless link with Celtic civilisation. That is no longer the case in the rural tracts of Carmarthenshire with which your reporter is familiar. The last four decades of in-migration, largely from England, have changed for ever the linguistic map. Farmers retiring from the land and without a successor, and farmers who converted outbuildings into homes, have ensured a plentiful supply of desirable real estate for buyers from outside. Welsh speakers remain, of course, and some incomers enthusiastically support Welsh-medium education, but by and large their numbers are not sufficiently large to keep Welsh-medium rural schools alive.

Carmarthenshire County Council’s plans include the replacement of four surviving primaries with an area school in Cynwyl Gaeo ward, and another area school in Cwm Tywi East. The Cynwyl Gaeo school, expected to be in Llansawel, would replace Caio, Brechfa ,Talley, and the current Llansawel school. A fifth school in the cluster, Rhydcymerau, has already shut. The new school for Cwm Tywi East would replace Llangadog, Llansadwrn and Llanwrda.

Language is such a fundamental expression of identity that its decline is cultural impoverishment, but efforts to force its preservation through compulsion in education will fail unless more is done to strengthen Welsh-speaking communities, and that means a different form of planning system in which tightly defined employment zones are rejected in favour of permissions for small and medium-sized enterprises to start and grow within rural areas, so that there are many more opportunities for people of working age to find jobs locally, instead of having to move away, generally to places where English is supreme.

A major handicap of ‘21st Century Schools’ is its lack of flexibility for the future. Once an expensive new school has been built, and the redundant old schools have been sold, it will be hard for the education authority to adjust to changing needs in the future. The ‘Strategic Outline Programme’ published by Carmarthenshire in October 2010 makes the point, at the end of a section on ‘benefits, risks, dependencies and constraints’,[2] that “lack of capacity to model an uncertain and fast changing future” is one of the main risks.

The flip side of the costly ‘21st century schools’ programme may emerge to be an even more expensive ‘rural revitalisation’ programme, to spur the local food and fuel production that will be required as water and energy shortages  make imports scarcer and much dearer. There is a case for less money to be allocated to school building, and for freed-up funds to be spent in re-firing the rural economy.

Close the local school and chop the school transport service!

Posted: April 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Carmarthenshire, Education, Energy | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

Free transport to and from school for students aged 16 and over is to be axed in Carmarthenshire from September 2013. That is, unless a new administration reconsiders the decision.

That’s not all. Pupils aged under 8 who live within two miles of their school, and pupils over 8 living within three miles of school, will no longer be able to travel as fare-paying passengers on registered school bus services.

The end of free transport for students aged 16 and over will save the county council £65,000 in 2013-14 and £412,000 in 2014-15, according to the budget figures. The removal of fare-paying seats on school buses will apparently save £200,000 in 2013-14.

If you live in the middle of Carmarthen, Llanelli, or Ammanford, these cuts may not seem too drastic, but in the rural north of the county, they are extremely serious. The county council still wants to press ahead with the closure of Llandovery’s high school, Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, and impose long journeys to Ffairfach on pupils from the town and the surrounding, very rural, catchment area. Once those pupils reach 16, they will have to pay for the dubious privilege of spending two or three hours a day on buses. What an incentive to remain in education!

The ending of paid-for travel on school buses for young pupils who have to travel up to two miles, and for over-8s travelling up to three miles, would also bring new problems. How many parents these days have the time to walk with their children up to six miles on a return trip every morning, and another six miles in the afternoon? What happens if they do not have a car? If they have a child under 8 who can ride the bus and one over 8 who cannot? The rural areas do not have pavements, so children would be walking in the road. Over a century ago, before the motor age, this might have been safe, but today roads are for fast traffic, not for pedestrians. If parents decide that their only option is to drive their children to school, they will increase the demand for motor fuel and increase carbon emissions, when we know that fossil fuels are finite and that the climate is changing, and we should be doing everything possible to cut both fuel use and gas emissions.

The current county council is controlled by an Executive Board selected by the Leader, Meryl Gravell. Not one of the members of this powerful Board represents north Carmarthenshire. Perhaps that is why they agree policies that harm the rural parts of the county. Their transport and education policies conflict with national sustainability objectives which require us to move about less, unless by low-emission public transport.

The cost savings from these decisions are minor when compared with the £30 million-plus expense of building a huge super-school by the river Tywi at Ffairfach, on the other side of congested Llandeilo from Llandovery, which is 13 miles up the valley. No doubt the council would claim that the new school will be energy-efficient, but what is the point of constructing a low-carbon school if pupils rack up high-emission miles in cars and buses to get there? Not to mention the wasted hours commuting.

Story of my election campaign, part 1

Posted: April 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Carmarthenshire, Education, Politics | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Why on earth stand for election to the County Council, almost at the last minute? The prospect of delivering leaflets in heavy rain – I’ve just checked the forecast for the next two weeks – does not fill me with unbounded happiness. Yet as a member of Plaid Cymru, I want the party to gain control of Carmarthenshire and start to turn the administration in the directions of transparency, sustainability and localism. Also, there was no election in Llandovery ward last time, as there was only one candidate, Ivor Jackson of the Independent Bloc, who for the past year has been the Chair of the council.

The first task was to obtain a proposer, seconder and eight more signatures. Easy, you might think, just ask the Plaid members in the ward. Unfortunately, in the years without a Plaid councillor the local organisation had faded a little and, in the sincere belief that, like last time, there would be no Plaid candidate, Mr Jackson sought and received the backing of some seasoned Plaid supporters.

Conversations went something like this:

Me         “As a Plaid supporter, would you please consider signing my nomination papers for the county council elections?”

Response             “If only you had asked me earlier, but I have already signed for Ivor Jackson/ I have pledged to support Ivor Jackson… but you could try Mr X….”

While admiring Mr Jackson’s astuteness in gaining the support of people who, in a national election, would probably vote for Plaid Cymru, this meant a scramble to obtain the signatures in the four days remaining before nominations closed on April 4th. Plaid supporters who had not already backed Mr Jackson came up trumps, as did signatories with Green sympathies and/or concern at the coming closure of the town’s comprehensive school, Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn. The people of Llandovery feel their views counted for nothing when the county council decided that it will build a mega school near the river Tywi on the far side of Llandeilo, over 13 miles from Llandovery, and to impose long twice-daily journeys on pupils from Llandovery and beyond, as far as the border with Powys.

The nomination papers were ready on April 2nd, and the next step was to take them, with the other forms such as authorisation to use the Plaid logo, and details of my eligibility to stand, to County Hall in Carmarthen, where the identities of my signatories were checked against the electoral register. Then I was asked to await Mark James, the Chief Executive, because “Mr James always likes to see new candidates”. It turned out that Mr James had more urgent calls on his time, and I did not see him.

Papers in order, the next step was to finalise a leaflet which David Thomas at the Plaid offices in Ammanford translated into Welsh. My weak spoken and written Welsh is an embarrassment, and so I have started a crash revision course and wish I had begun earlier. The leaflets should be ready to collect in two days’ time.

The school issue is top of the agenda for many people. The county Education Department argues that there are too many surplus places, that a shiny new school would provide a better education, and that children’s education is their only concern, i.e. the fate of the town left without a publicly-funded senior school does not matter. (Llandovery is also home to the independent, fee-paying Llandovery College, but the fees of £14,085 a year for a day pupil in the senior school are unaffordable for families on ordinary incomes.)

It comes down to the purposes of education. Is it worth damaging a whole community to give pupils access to the latest educational technologies? By taking children out of their community, are you telling them ‘We are not concerned if your community declines so that in the future, there is no work for you there’? Do you use a narrow frame of reference, or consider the bigger picture?

Why not a two-site secondary school in north east Carmarthenshire?

Posted: March 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Carmarthenshire, Eco Politics, Education | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Email sent today to Rhodri Glyn Thomas AM and Jonathan Edwards MP, suggesting a two-site secondary school for north east Carmarthenshire, a region which the county council apparently deems of little importance. The council wants to replace both Pantycelyn school, Llandovery, and Tregib school, Ffairfach, Llandeilo, with a new ‘super school’ on another site at Ffairfach.

The Carmarthen Journal, March 14th 2012, has a story on p.3 headlined: ‘Protesters lose school legal battle’, i.e. have been refused a judicial review into the processes followed by Carmarthenshire County Council as it sought to close Llandovery’s secondary school, Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn.

The story quotes council chief executive Mark James as saying: “It’s cost us money so far but we will be pursuing costs. I’m fairly hopeful that we are going to get the costs. If it goes further it could potentially get very expensive and we would be pursuing our costs.”

Councillor Clive Scourfield told the paper: “People have the right to appeal, but I would have thought the people in the north east of the county would have some common sense. Having seen what the judges have said, I would have thought they would have withdrawn it by now.”

These comments highlight several issues:

The council is using the threat of a legal claim for costs to dissuade the residents of north east Carmarthenshire from continuing to campaign against the school closure.

The ‘consultation’ about reorganisation was merely to show that a consultation process had taken place. The council took no notice of residents’ views, and regards the majority anti-closure opinion as devoid of common sense.

If Pantycelyn closes, there will be no state secondary school between Builth Wells and Ffairfach on the southern side of Llandeilo, a distance exceeding 37 miles. Think of the marathon bus journeys that children from 11 years old would have to endure, the schooldays lost during periods of bad weather, the rising costs of transport (Peak Oil has already happened), the problems faced by parents without private transport when they are asked to collect a child, or to visit the school. There is also the issue of emissions from all the extra transport.

I can see that teachers and other staff have more opportunity for career progression in large schools than in small ones,  and to achieve this could we not have a two-site campus, one school with sites in Ffairfach and Llandovery? Considerable funds have been spent on Pantycelyn in recent years, money that would be wasted if the school closed. Education is not about buildings, but about engagement in learning, and that is boosted when there is collaboration between school, family and community. Damage the community, and that pillar collapses.

Fantastical Fantasy?

Posted: January 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Carmarthenshire, Eco Politics, Education | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Carmarthenshire News has arrived. This is a promotional publication for Carmarthenshire County Council and associated public organisations.

‘£151m extra for schools’, exclaims the main headline.

The article mentions the “fantastic news” that Carmarthenshire can afford fully to fund its ‘Modernising Education Programme’ until 2020.

The ‘Modernising Education Programme’ is decidedly not fantastic for very many families living in and around Llandovery, in the east of the county, because Llandovery’s comprehensive school, Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, will be closed.

The objections that poured in from Pantycelyn’s pupils, parents and governors, and from the wider community, were ignored because the county council appears to believe that good education requires big, shiny new buildings, even if pupils must spend a significant part of each day in buses trundling to and from the planned Super Campus at Ffairfach.

Travelling last week south-westwards from Builth Wells through Llanwrtyd Wells, Llandovery and Llanwrda to Llandeilo, I realised that when Pantycelyn has closed there will not be a single state secondary school between Builth Wells and Ffairfach, Llandeilo. That is a road distance of 37 miles.

What sort of world are we educating children for? The fans of large central campuses seem to have confidence that long-distance travel to and from school will be easy and affordable, that the certificate-centred education in big schools will be the best route to well-paid permanent jobs, and that the climate and resulting weather will be benign enough to allow pupils to attend school every day.

All these assumptions are widely believed, but should be questioned. We probably face years of rising fuel prices because there are no new big discoveries of easily extractable oil, and the technologies for extracting oil from sands, as in Canada, are expensive, wasteful and deadly to the environment. As for the utility of certificates, how many unemployed and under-employed graduates do you already know? The weather? The world is warming, and that means more extreme weather, more storms and, counter-intuitively, more ice and snow in some areas. How safe will it be for buses full of schoolchildren to negotiate flooded roads, icy roads? How well maintained will the roads be, if they are frequently scoured by heavy precipitation?

Local, decentralised services seem to me a better way ahead than a reliance on large construction projects that are inherently inflexible.

Carmarthenshire County Council as currently constituted is unlikely to agree.

Elections are in May.

The forthcoming election raises another issue. Accepting that councillors are often public-spirited and hard-working, should the publicly-funded Carmarthenshire News praise their actions without allowing space for alternative opinions?

Cut off

Posted: January 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Cuba, Education, Tourism | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

The water famine in the Centro Habana district of Havana was extreme. When I was there in December, people rushed to fill storage tanks, bowls, buckets,  whatever receptacle was to hand, when the mains supply was turned on, generally around 4pm in the afternoon. The supply was turned off again about 7pm.

Despite the water shortages, the Cuban government is apparently planning to build ten golf courses for the tourists. One golf course uses as much water as a town of 12,000 inhabitants, according to www.tourismconcern.org.uk/golf.html.

The University of Havana suffers from the same privations as most of the rest of the city. The water supply to our campus building was turned off when I was there. This meant that the toilets were closed, although the guardian of the WCs would unlock in response to an urgent plea. Then it was a case of using a pail to scoop some of the remaining water from a barrel, and tipping it down the pan. The flush mechanisms had all been removed, and there was no water for hand washing.

The 88 wide steps leading up to Havana University are a city landmark. Students sit and stroll in pairs and groups on the pleasantly tree-shaded campus. I was there for a week to learn more Spanish, not nearly long enough, of course, but the maximum time I had. My fellow students were of all ages, including pensioners, mainly from northern and western Europe and Japan – and some from the USA.  Our teachers were expert, their classes excellent. They work in difficult conditions, because the university has other shortages besides water.

Books are scarce and many date from before the demise of the Soviet Union. In the pharmacy library, half the floor was up, and the dusty surroundings made me think I had stumbled into Miss Haversham’s hermitage in Charles Dickens‘ Great Expectations. An assistant was searching in an old-fashioned card index. There is no internet access on the campus, not a surprise because only Cubans with special authorisation, or with enough money to pay 6 to 10 cuc (£4 to £6.67, the equivalent of a week’s wages) for an hour at an official access point, can use the internet. Even then, the sites visited are monitored. In the university’s classrooms, teachers have a blackboard and chalk but not much else.

I think there are circumstances in which Cuban self-reliance goes too far, and education is one of them. It is a closed world. Outsiders cannot routinely apply for jobs or even work for free in Cuban schools or higher-education institutions, unless they have a place on one of the few tourism-cum-culture three- or four-week volunteer holiday programmes, which are closely monitored. I suppose the government thinks foreigners would spread imperialist propaganda. As a result, young people are not exposed to different points of view, nor challenged to think in different ways. Little by little, this deliberate sequestration threatens to marginalise Cuban scholarship. It’s not only water that is cut off in Cuba. Even if it’s not yet possible fully to restore the water supply, why not allow teachers and students more freedom to open the taps of communication?

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