Sunday, 3 May 2020
Saturday, 2 May 2020
Deliveroo was the poster child for venture capitalism. It's not looking so good now
The food delivery company is a case study in the destructive nature of its own ‘disruptive’ business model writes James Ball in The Guardian
‘Earlier this week, Deliveroo was reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500.’ Photograph: Alex Pantling/Getty Images
If any company can weather coronavirus well, it should be Deliveroo. The early days of lockdown saw demand surge for the service delivering food from restaurants and takeaways. The decision by several major restaurant and fast-food chains to shut for weeks during the early stages of lockdown might have dented demand, but as they begin to reopen for delivery – with most other activities still curtailed – prospects would seem bright for the tech company.
The reality looks quite different. Earlier this week, Deliveroo was reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500. Others seem to be in similarly bleak positions – Uber is said to be discussing plans to let go around 20% of its workforce, some 5,400 roles. The broader UK start-up scene has asked for – and secured – government bailout funds.
Why Deliveroo is struggling during a crisis that should benefit its business model tells us about much more than just one start-up. The company’s nominal reasoning for needing cuts is that coronavirus will be followed by an economic downturn, which could hit orders. That’s plausible, but far from a given.
The financial crash of 2008 – which led to the most severe recession since the Great Depression – saw “cheap luxuries” perform quite well. People would swap a restaurant meal for, say, a £10 Marks & Spencer meal deal. Deliveroo is far cheaper than a restaurant meal for many people – there’s no need to pay for a childminder, or travel, and there’s no need to purchase alcohol at restaurant prices. Why would Deliveroo be so certain a downturn would be bad news?
The answer lies in the fact that Deliveroo’s real business model has almost nothing to do with making money from delivering food. Like pretty much every other start-up of its sort, once you take all of the costs into account, Deliveroo loses money on every single delivery it makes, even after taking a big cut from the restaurant and a delivery fee from the customer. Uber, now more than a decade old, still loses money for every ride its service offers and every meal its couriers deliver.
When every customer loses you money, it’s not good news for your business if customer numbers stay solid or even increase, unless there’s someone else who believes that’s a good thing. What these companies rely on is telling a story – largely to people who will invest in them. Their narrative is they’re “disrupting” existing industries, will build huge market share and customer bases, and thus can’t help but eventually become hugely profitable – just not yet.
This is the entire venture capital model – the financial model for Silicon Valley and the whole technology sector beyond it. Don’t worry about growing slowly and sustainably, don’t worry about profit, don’t worry about consequences. Just go flat out, hell for leather, and get as big as you can as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter than most companies will try and fail, provided a few succeed. Valuations will soar, the company will become publicly listed (a procedure known as an IPO) and then the company will either actually work out how to make profit – in which case, great – or by the time it’s clear it won’t, the venture capital funds have sold most of their stake at vast profits, and left regular investors holding the stock when the music stops.
This is a whole business model based on optimism. Without that optimism, and the accompanying free-flowing money to power through astronomical losses, the entire system breaks down. That’s the real struggle facing this type of company. It’s also why the very idea of bailing out this sector should be a joke: venture capital chases returns of at 10 times their investment, on the basis that it’s high risk and high reward. If we take out the element of “risk”, we’re basically just funnelling public money to make ultra-rich investors richer.
What pushes this beyond a tale that many of us might be happy to write down to karma, though, is the effects it has well beyond the rest of the world.
Tech giants move in on existing sectors that previously supported millions of jobs and helped people make their livelihoods – cabs and private hire, the restaurant business, to name just a few. They offer a new, subsidised alternative, that makes customers believe a service can be delivered much more cheaply, or that lets them cherry-pick from the restaurant experience – many restaurants relied on those alcohol sales with a meal to cover their margins, for example.
These start-ups come in to existing sectors essentially offering customers free money: £10 worth of stuff for a fiver. It turns out that’s easy to sell. But in the process, they rip the core out of existing businesses and reshape whole sectors of the economy in their image. And now, in the face of a pandemic, they are starting to struggle just like everyone else. It’s not hard to see how this sorry story ends. Having disrupted their industries to the point of leaving business after business on the verge of collapse, the start-ups could be tumbling down after them.
If any company can weather coronavirus well, it should be Deliveroo. The early days of lockdown saw demand surge for the service delivering food from restaurants and takeaways. The decision by several major restaurant and fast-food chains to shut for weeks during the early stages of lockdown might have dented demand, but as they begin to reopen for delivery – with most other activities still curtailed – prospects would seem bright for the tech company.
The reality looks quite different. Earlier this week, Deliveroo was reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500. Others seem to be in similarly bleak positions – Uber is said to be discussing plans to let go around 20% of its workforce, some 5,400 roles. The broader UK start-up scene has asked for – and secured – government bailout funds.
Why Deliveroo is struggling during a crisis that should benefit its business model tells us about much more than just one start-up. The company’s nominal reasoning for needing cuts is that coronavirus will be followed by an economic downturn, which could hit orders. That’s plausible, but far from a given.
The financial crash of 2008 – which led to the most severe recession since the Great Depression – saw “cheap luxuries” perform quite well. People would swap a restaurant meal for, say, a £10 Marks & Spencer meal deal. Deliveroo is far cheaper than a restaurant meal for many people – there’s no need to pay for a childminder, or travel, and there’s no need to purchase alcohol at restaurant prices. Why would Deliveroo be so certain a downturn would be bad news?
The answer lies in the fact that Deliveroo’s real business model has almost nothing to do with making money from delivering food. Like pretty much every other start-up of its sort, once you take all of the costs into account, Deliveroo loses money on every single delivery it makes, even after taking a big cut from the restaurant and a delivery fee from the customer. Uber, now more than a decade old, still loses money for every ride its service offers and every meal its couriers deliver.
When every customer loses you money, it’s not good news for your business if customer numbers stay solid or even increase, unless there’s someone else who believes that’s a good thing. What these companies rely on is telling a story – largely to people who will invest in them. Their narrative is they’re “disrupting” existing industries, will build huge market share and customer bases, and thus can’t help but eventually become hugely profitable – just not yet.
This is the entire venture capital model – the financial model for Silicon Valley and the whole technology sector beyond it. Don’t worry about growing slowly and sustainably, don’t worry about profit, don’t worry about consequences. Just go flat out, hell for leather, and get as big as you can as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter than most companies will try and fail, provided a few succeed. Valuations will soar, the company will become publicly listed (a procedure known as an IPO) and then the company will either actually work out how to make profit – in which case, great – or by the time it’s clear it won’t, the venture capital funds have sold most of their stake at vast profits, and left regular investors holding the stock when the music stops.
This is a whole business model based on optimism. Without that optimism, and the accompanying free-flowing money to power through astronomical losses, the entire system breaks down. That’s the real struggle facing this type of company. It’s also why the very idea of bailing out this sector should be a joke: venture capital chases returns of at 10 times their investment, on the basis that it’s high risk and high reward. If we take out the element of “risk”, we’re basically just funnelling public money to make ultra-rich investors richer.
What pushes this beyond a tale that many of us might be happy to write down to karma, though, is the effects it has well beyond the rest of the world.
Tech giants move in on existing sectors that previously supported millions of jobs and helped people make their livelihoods – cabs and private hire, the restaurant business, to name just a few. They offer a new, subsidised alternative, that makes customers believe a service can be delivered much more cheaply, or that lets them cherry-pick from the restaurant experience – many restaurants relied on those alcohol sales with a meal to cover their margins, for example.
These start-ups come in to existing sectors essentially offering customers free money: £10 worth of stuff for a fiver. It turns out that’s easy to sell. But in the process, they rip the core out of existing businesses and reshape whole sectors of the economy in their image. And now, in the face of a pandemic, they are starting to struggle just like everyone else. It’s not hard to see how this sorry story ends. Having disrupted their industries to the point of leaving business after business on the verge of collapse, the start-ups could be tumbling down after them.
'A deluge of death': how reading obituaries can humanise a crisis
Those brief features have long provided readers with a moment of connection that help us stay in touch with our humanity writes Oscar Schwartz in The Guardian
Obituaries can help readers stay in touch with humanity during an overwhelming crisis. Photograph: Kzenon/Alamy Stock Photo
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned how to think a little more like epidemiologists. Each morning, we pore over statistical models that offer grim projections about how many people might get sick, when hospital beds will run short, how many might die within our age bracket. The coronavirus pandemic, in other words, has been a plague of statistics – and our expectations about the future have suddenly come to hinge on abstractions.
In opposition stands the obituary. These brief features, a cross between a short story and a death notice, have long provided readers with a moment of particular connection within the impersonal headlines. In a crisis of this magnitude, finding the emotional space to care about a single death can feel purposeless, unnecessary. But for many obituary writers past and present, there is a belief that this unique and embattled form of journalism can help us stay in touch with our humanity.
“It’s a deluge of death at the moment,” said Adam Bernstein, obituaries editor at the Washington Post. “When you see a figure like ‘50,000 people have died’, those are numbers that make the mind reel. But it’s very hard to touch people’s hearts with numbers – that’s where we come in.”
Bernstein has been working on the death beat at the Post since 1999, and for the past decade has led a team that prides itself on the obituary craft. A good obituary, according to Bernstein, reveals surprising, intimate details about a life. “Maybe this person was most famous for being a criminal, but maybe they were also a roguish criminal with a terrific sense of humor,” Bernstein said. “Those details are what connect us to other human beings and our task is to find them.”
Since writing his first obituary as an intern at a newspaper in Bakersfield, California, Bernstein has relished the task. “It’s the hidden gem of the newsroom,” he said. But in the past month, the work has become increasingly taxing as the list of deaths they confront each morning balloons. They have churned out obituaries for notable deaths, like John Prine and Lee Konitz, while some non-coronavirus-related deaths have been sidelined.
There is also a sense of dread and suspense involved in monitoring those who have become ill. “If a well-known person is sick and it’s looking dire we make sure we have a story ready to go,” he said. “It feels like an endless game of Russian roulette and you just never know what the next day will bring.”
Janny Scott can relate to the experience of writing obituaries in a time of crisis. On 11 September 2001, Scott, then a young reporter on the New York Times metro desk, was assigned to cover, simply, “the dead”. With the city in chaos and no official victim count forthcoming, she and her colleagues trawled the streets of Manhattan collecting missing persons flyers that had become the city’s gloomy wallpaper.
As days passed, it became clear that most of the missing had died. “We began calling families and contacts, trying to piece together who these people were,” Scott told me. From these conversations, Scott and her colleagues began drawing up 250-word thumbnail sketches of those who had been lost, which were run at the back of the paper under the title “Portraits of Grief“. The paper ran almost 2,000 of these mini-obituaries in the coming months. “In New York, reading the portraits became some kind of religious ritual that helped us grieve together,” Scott said.
Obituaries and death notices can also serve an important political function during a crisis. In 1989, when obituaries at major newspapers still refused to cite Aids as a cause of death, the Bay Area Reporter published an eight-page section titled Aids Deaths, which listed all the people who had died from the illness during the previous year. Obituaries have similarly functioned as a form of advocacy around the opioid crisis, providing parents with a chance to publicly address the issue of addiction and connect with others in the community dealing with similar hardship.
As local newspapers across the nation continue to fold, however, most obituaries are now published on memorial sites, such as legacy.com, which hosts notices for more than 70% of all US deaths. During the current pandemic, these sites provide an accessible way for families to memorialize those lost at a time when obituary writers are otherwise overwhelmed.
“But the local news obituary is more than a death notice or a eulogy,” Kay Powell said. “It really should be an objective news story about one person’s life.” Powell worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 to 2009, where she wrote close to 2,000 obituaries about “extraordinary ordinary people”. The church choir singer who had a frontal lobotomy and donated his brain to science, the boy who sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral, the woman who was Flannery O’Connor’s secret pen pal for 30 years.
Powell told me that she often fell in love with her recently deceased subjects and tried to impart this affection to her readers. But as a journalist, she also prided herself on accuracy and objectivity. She would never euphemize cause of death, believing that wider social truths about disease, mental health, addiction could be communicated more effectively through the experience of an individual. “When it is the name of somebody right there in your community, these issues are no longer some arbitrary thing affecting some number of people somewhere else,” she said.
The psychologist Paul Slovic has referred to this greater concern for the one over the many as a product of “psychic numbing”, a psychological glitch whereby, as the number in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. For many of us, this has intensified as the weeks pass. As the death count rises, cold-eyed statistical thinking that would have a few months ago seemed abhorrent becomes part of our daily news diet.
Of course, thinking about the pandemic in numbers is crucial. Demographic analysis shines a light on systemic truths that the individual story cannot, like how this virus is disproportionately taking lives in communities of color.
But Powell, who is in her 70s and sheltering in place alone, told me that engaging with the granularity of human suffering can shock people back into a sense of moral responsibility. “The emotion makes it harder to deny the reality of what’s happening here,” Powell said. “In the end, it keeps us better informed.”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned how to think a little more like epidemiologists. Each morning, we pore over statistical models that offer grim projections about how many people might get sick, when hospital beds will run short, how many might die within our age bracket. The coronavirus pandemic, in other words, has been a plague of statistics – and our expectations about the future have suddenly come to hinge on abstractions.
In opposition stands the obituary. These brief features, a cross between a short story and a death notice, have long provided readers with a moment of particular connection within the impersonal headlines. In a crisis of this magnitude, finding the emotional space to care about a single death can feel purposeless, unnecessary. But for many obituary writers past and present, there is a belief that this unique and embattled form of journalism can help us stay in touch with our humanity.
“It’s a deluge of death at the moment,” said Adam Bernstein, obituaries editor at the Washington Post. “When you see a figure like ‘50,000 people have died’, those are numbers that make the mind reel. But it’s very hard to touch people’s hearts with numbers – that’s where we come in.”
Bernstein has been working on the death beat at the Post since 1999, and for the past decade has led a team that prides itself on the obituary craft. A good obituary, according to Bernstein, reveals surprising, intimate details about a life. “Maybe this person was most famous for being a criminal, but maybe they were also a roguish criminal with a terrific sense of humor,” Bernstein said. “Those details are what connect us to other human beings and our task is to find them.”
Since writing his first obituary as an intern at a newspaper in Bakersfield, California, Bernstein has relished the task. “It’s the hidden gem of the newsroom,” he said. But in the past month, the work has become increasingly taxing as the list of deaths they confront each morning balloons. They have churned out obituaries for notable deaths, like John Prine and Lee Konitz, while some non-coronavirus-related deaths have been sidelined.
There is also a sense of dread and suspense involved in monitoring those who have become ill. “If a well-known person is sick and it’s looking dire we make sure we have a story ready to go,” he said. “It feels like an endless game of Russian roulette and you just never know what the next day will bring.”
Janny Scott can relate to the experience of writing obituaries in a time of crisis. On 11 September 2001, Scott, then a young reporter on the New York Times metro desk, was assigned to cover, simply, “the dead”. With the city in chaos and no official victim count forthcoming, she and her colleagues trawled the streets of Manhattan collecting missing persons flyers that had become the city’s gloomy wallpaper.
As days passed, it became clear that most of the missing had died. “We began calling families and contacts, trying to piece together who these people were,” Scott told me. From these conversations, Scott and her colleagues began drawing up 250-word thumbnail sketches of those who had been lost, which were run at the back of the paper under the title “Portraits of Grief“. The paper ran almost 2,000 of these mini-obituaries in the coming months. “In New York, reading the portraits became some kind of religious ritual that helped us grieve together,” Scott said.
Obituaries and death notices can also serve an important political function during a crisis. In 1989, when obituaries at major newspapers still refused to cite Aids as a cause of death, the Bay Area Reporter published an eight-page section titled Aids Deaths, which listed all the people who had died from the illness during the previous year. Obituaries have similarly functioned as a form of advocacy around the opioid crisis, providing parents with a chance to publicly address the issue of addiction and connect with others in the community dealing with similar hardship.
As local newspapers across the nation continue to fold, however, most obituaries are now published on memorial sites, such as legacy.com, which hosts notices for more than 70% of all US deaths. During the current pandemic, these sites provide an accessible way for families to memorialize those lost at a time when obituary writers are otherwise overwhelmed.
“But the local news obituary is more than a death notice or a eulogy,” Kay Powell said. “It really should be an objective news story about one person’s life.” Powell worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 to 2009, where she wrote close to 2,000 obituaries about “extraordinary ordinary people”. The church choir singer who had a frontal lobotomy and donated his brain to science, the boy who sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral, the woman who was Flannery O’Connor’s secret pen pal for 30 years.
Powell told me that she often fell in love with her recently deceased subjects and tried to impart this affection to her readers. But as a journalist, she also prided herself on accuracy and objectivity. She would never euphemize cause of death, believing that wider social truths about disease, mental health, addiction could be communicated more effectively through the experience of an individual. “When it is the name of somebody right there in your community, these issues are no longer some arbitrary thing affecting some number of people somewhere else,” she said.
The psychologist Paul Slovic has referred to this greater concern for the one over the many as a product of “psychic numbing”, a psychological glitch whereby, as the number in a tragedy increases, our empathy decreases. For many of us, this has intensified as the weeks pass. As the death count rises, cold-eyed statistical thinking that would have a few months ago seemed abhorrent becomes part of our daily news diet.
Of course, thinking about the pandemic in numbers is crucial. Demographic analysis shines a light on systemic truths that the individual story cannot, like how this virus is disproportionately taking lives in communities of color.
But Powell, who is in her 70s and sheltering in place alone, told me that engaging with the granularity of human suffering can shock people back into a sense of moral responsibility. “The emotion makes it harder to deny the reality of what’s happening here,” Powell said. “In the end, it keeps us better informed.”
Friday, 1 May 2020
Wednesday, 29 April 2020
Airlines and oil giants are on the brink. No government should offer them a lifeline
This crisis is a chance to rebuild our economy for the good of humanity. Let’s bail out the living world, not its destroyers writes George Monbiot in The Guardian
Governments like the UK’s should drop their road-building plans. Instead of expanding airports, they should publish plans for reducing landing slots. They should commit to an explicit policy of leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
During the pandemic, many of us have begun to discover how much of our travel is unnecessary. Governments can build on this to create plans for reducing the need to move, while investing in walking, cycling and – when physical distancing is less necessary – public transport. This means wider pavements, better cycle lanes, buses run for service not profit. They should invest heavily in green energy, and even more heavily in reducing energy demand – through, for example, home insulation and better heating and lighting. The pandemic exposes the need for better neighbourhood design, with less public space given to cars and more to people. It also shows how badly we need the kind of security that a lightly taxed, deregulated economy cannot deliver.
In other words, let’s have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let’s not waste our second chance.
‘Governments have the oil industry over a barrel – hundreds of millions of unsaleable barrels, to be more precise – just as they had the banks over a barrel in 2008.’ Photograph: BEAWIHARTA/REUTERS
Do Not Resuscitate. This tag should be attached to the oil, airline and car industries. Governments should provide financial support to company workers while refashioning the economy to provide new jobs in different sectors. They should prop up only those sectors that will help secure the survival of humanity and the rest of the living world.
They should either buy up the dirty industries and turn them towards clean technologies, or do what they often call for but never really want: let the market decide. In other words, allow these companies to fail.
This is our second great chance to do things differently. It could be our last. The first, in 2008, was spectacularly squandered. Vast amounts of public money were spent reassembling the filthy old economy, while ensuring that wealth remained in the hands of the rich. Today, many governments appear determined to repeat that catastrophic mistake.
The “free market” has always been a product of government policy. If antitrust laws are weak, a few behemoths survive while everyone else goes down. If dirty industries are tightly regulated, clean ones flourish. If not, the corner-cutters win. But the dependency of enterprises on public policy has seldom been greater in capitalist nations than it is today. Many major industries are now entirely beholden to the state for their survival. Governments have the oil industry over a barrel – hundreds of millions of unsaleable barrels, to be more precise – just as they had the banks over a barrel in 2008. Then, they failed to use their power to eradicate the sector’s socially destructive practices and rebuild it around human needs. They are making the same mistake today.
The Bank of England has decided to buy debt from oil companies such as BP, Shell and Total. The government has given easyJet a £600m loan even though, just a few weeks ago, the company frittered away £171m in dividends: profit is privatised, risk is socialised. In the US, the first bailout includes $60bn (£48bn) for airlines. Overall, the bailout involves sucking as much oil as possible into strategic petroleum reserves and sweeping away pollution laws, while freezing out renewable energy. Several European countries are seeking to rescue their airlines and car manufacturers.
Don’t believe them when they tell you they do this on our behalf. A recent survey by Ipsos of 14 countries suggests that, on average, 65% of people want climate change to be prioritised in the economic recovery. Everywhere, electorates must struggle to persuade governments to act in the interests of the people, rather than the corporations and billionaires who fund and lobby them. The perennial democratic challenge is to break the bonds between politicians and the economic sectors they should be regulating, or, in this case, closing down.
Even when legislators seek to represent these concerns, their efforts are often feeble and naive. The recent letter to the government from a cross-party group of MPs calling for airlines to receive a bailout only if they “do more to tackle the climate crisis” could have been written in 1990. Air travel is inherently polluting. There are no realistic measures that could, even in the medium term, make a significant difference. We now know that the carbon offsetting schemes the MPs call for is useless: every economic sector needs to maximise cuts in greenhouse gases, so shifting the responsibility from one sector to another solves nothing. The only meaningful reform is fewer flights. Anything that impedes the contraction of the aviation industry impedes the reduction of its impacts.
The current crisis gives us a glimpse of how much we need to do to pull out of our disastrous trajectory. Despite the vast changes we have made in our lives, global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to reduce by only about 5.5% this year. A UN report shows that to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding 1.5C or more of global heating, we need to cut emissions by 7.6% per year for the next decade. In other words, the lockdown exposes the limits of individual action. Travelling less helps, but not enough. To make the necessary cuts we need structural change. This means an entirely new industrial policy, created and guided by government.
Do Not Resuscitate. This tag should be attached to the oil, airline and car industries. Governments should provide financial support to company workers while refashioning the economy to provide new jobs in different sectors. They should prop up only those sectors that will help secure the survival of humanity and the rest of the living world.
They should either buy up the dirty industries and turn them towards clean technologies, or do what they often call for but never really want: let the market decide. In other words, allow these companies to fail.
This is our second great chance to do things differently. It could be our last. The first, in 2008, was spectacularly squandered. Vast amounts of public money were spent reassembling the filthy old economy, while ensuring that wealth remained in the hands of the rich. Today, many governments appear determined to repeat that catastrophic mistake.
The “free market” has always been a product of government policy. If antitrust laws are weak, a few behemoths survive while everyone else goes down. If dirty industries are tightly regulated, clean ones flourish. If not, the corner-cutters win. But the dependency of enterprises on public policy has seldom been greater in capitalist nations than it is today. Many major industries are now entirely beholden to the state for their survival. Governments have the oil industry over a barrel – hundreds of millions of unsaleable barrels, to be more precise – just as they had the banks over a barrel in 2008. Then, they failed to use their power to eradicate the sector’s socially destructive practices and rebuild it around human needs. They are making the same mistake today.
The Bank of England has decided to buy debt from oil companies such as BP, Shell and Total. The government has given easyJet a £600m loan even though, just a few weeks ago, the company frittered away £171m in dividends: profit is privatised, risk is socialised. In the US, the first bailout includes $60bn (£48bn) for airlines. Overall, the bailout involves sucking as much oil as possible into strategic petroleum reserves and sweeping away pollution laws, while freezing out renewable energy. Several European countries are seeking to rescue their airlines and car manufacturers.
Don’t believe them when they tell you they do this on our behalf. A recent survey by Ipsos of 14 countries suggests that, on average, 65% of people want climate change to be prioritised in the economic recovery. Everywhere, electorates must struggle to persuade governments to act in the interests of the people, rather than the corporations and billionaires who fund and lobby them. The perennial democratic challenge is to break the bonds between politicians and the economic sectors they should be regulating, or, in this case, closing down.
Even when legislators seek to represent these concerns, their efforts are often feeble and naive. The recent letter to the government from a cross-party group of MPs calling for airlines to receive a bailout only if they “do more to tackle the climate crisis” could have been written in 1990. Air travel is inherently polluting. There are no realistic measures that could, even in the medium term, make a significant difference. We now know that the carbon offsetting schemes the MPs call for is useless: every economic sector needs to maximise cuts in greenhouse gases, so shifting the responsibility from one sector to another solves nothing. The only meaningful reform is fewer flights. Anything that impedes the contraction of the aviation industry impedes the reduction of its impacts.
The current crisis gives us a glimpse of how much we need to do to pull out of our disastrous trajectory. Despite the vast changes we have made in our lives, global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to reduce by only about 5.5% this year. A UN report shows that to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding 1.5C or more of global heating, we need to cut emissions by 7.6% per year for the next decade. In other words, the lockdown exposes the limits of individual action. Travelling less helps, but not enough. To make the necessary cuts we need structural change. This means an entirely new industrial policy, created and guided by government.
Governments like the UK’s should drop their road-building plans. Instead of expanding airports, they should publish plans for reducing landing slots. They should commit to an explicit policy of leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
During the pandemic, many of us have begun to discover how much of our travel is unnecessary. Governments can build on this to create plans for reducing the need to move, while investing in walking, cycling and – when physical distancing is less necessary – public transport. This means wider pavements, better cycle lanes, buses run for service not profit. They should invest heavily in green energy, and even more heavily in reducing energy demand – through, for example, home insulation and better heating and lighting. The pandemic exposes the need for better neighbourhood design, with less public space given to cars and more to people. It also shows how badly we need the kind of security that a lightly taxed, deregulated economy cannot deliver.
In other words, let’s have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let’s not waste our second chance.
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