Slack. It's not a bad word

I've been meaning for a while to write about the lack of slack in modern, highly-efficient distribution systems.  It's a foregone conclusion, really:  almost any business looking to optimise its distribution network will pare it to the bone in order to minimise capital and staff costs.  What's the point of having machinery and people sitting around, doing nothing, when you can operate at 99% capacity all the time?

The mantras of just-in-time, production-on-demand, and zero inventory make firms completely reliant on highly complex integrated distribution systems.  Usually, when the distribution systems hit a snag, it's easy to change suppliers.  But when the entire system fails, well, what then?  David Wighton, Business Editor at the Times, writes today:

One lesson we learn from Eyjafjallajökull is about the rigidity of modern integrated transport networks. Freight companies focus their operations by creating huge logistical hubs — DHL uses East Midlands and FedEx operates out of Paris Charles de Gaulle. Hugely efficient until ... a volcano erupts.

This fits with my recurring theme about resilience, slack, and systems that can bend but don't break.  Here we've got a system that broke due to an external event.  What would a system that wouldn't break in the face of a massive volcanic ash cloud and total air-traffic grounding look like?  I don't know, but I can tell you this much:  It would have a lot more slack and flexibility than what we've got now.

(One could read this as conflicting with what I wrote much earlier, on this site, about the efficiency of supermarket distribution systems.  A system in which individual farmers take care of their own distribution does have a lot more slack; it, or at least the road transit part of it, is likely, however, to be less efficient in carbon terms.  This is not to say that any resilient system will necessarily be more carbon-intensive, but that there may be trade-offs to consider.)

The three-day week

So, the new economics foundation (why the no capital letters?) has published "21 hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century".  The idea is that moving to a three-day working week would reduce income inequality and increase quality of life.

Would it?

Anna Coote, one of the authors, said at the launch today that they are 'still working' on how people would pay their mortgages.  It would also be dependent on a more progressive tax system, a higher minimum wage, a de-facto monetization of non-'work' time, a change to employers' National Insurance contributions in order to facilitate having greater numbers of employees rather than fewer, and reductions in the desire for consumer goods - "a change to what we think is enough", partly through self-production of goods in 'leisure time'.  The authors want to change the way we value all our time, paid and unpaid.

A certain amount of the following discussion was really a reaction to the prescriptive nature of the ideas and the implicit call for regulation contained in the report.

Mark Littlewood (Director General of the IEA), replying, pointed out that there are people who work 50-hour weeks and there are people who barely work at all, and that over a person's life, the number of hours varies dramatically.   He also contended that workshare doesn't, ah, work, and that Mitterand's government in France, and an experiment in Germany by IG Metall in the 1980s, prove it.  And he suggested that 'self-production' is highly inefficient - far better to do that which one is good at, no? - and, finally, he pointed to OECD figures showing that working hours in the UK have dropped by about one-sixth since 1970.

John Philpott, chief economist at the CIPD, welcomed the vision but not much of the detail regarding the solutions, saying they're "not the right ones", and pointing to the old Keynesian idea that increased riches will lead to greater leisure.  He thinks that 'low-growth-low-consumption' doesn't work, favouring flexibility in working practices and greater choice in how we produce and consume.  (That's all very well, except for what Hank Sohota calls 'fat, sugar, and salt' - when the choices people make aren't the ones they perhaps ought to.)

Perhaps the issue is that the nef folks are trying to push too hard, that these kinds of changes could happen over a century or more - but that structural shifts take time, a lot of it. The authors contend that they understand it; but if they do, why the call for prescriptive regualtion?  With something this complex - we're talking about a fundamental re-working of our economy here - any policy intervention is going to have unintended consequences.  Nonetheless, the aims are laudable, and as a bid to start discussion, this is a good beginning.

(As an aside - if the problem is that we don't sufficiently value what is currently unpaid time, why don't we find ways to remunerate it?  Not to sound Panglossian, but the logic of capital would, I think, always drive us to the current economic system.  The big question is:  Can we combine markets with an economic model which is not predicated upon eternal growth, natural resource use, and measures of GDP?)

Peak Oil

I went to the launch of the second report of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security. Philip Dilley, Arup Chairman, started things off mentioning our increasing reliance on just-in-time logistics. This is something I'll be coming back to later in relation to Haiti and resiliency - a fundamental problem our economic system faces. Jeremy Leggett of Solarcentury mentioned the possibility of shocks to oil supply, too: a real risk to the ability of our economy to function given low inventories and the exaggerated interdependency created by modern logistics.

Meanwhile, back at the launch: My friend John Miles (also at Arup) contended that OECD oil demand could peak now - but that the BRICs countries will keep powering along, literally, and drive up demand, and prices with it. At the same time, the UK is becoming a net importer of energy. This doesn't bode well for Britain. And Ian Marchant, of Scottish & Southern Energy, projected that as coal goes out of fashion, we could end up in a gas shortage too. SSE's emphasis is on reducing demand - households have on average reduced their demand by 15% in the last few years, through condensing boilers, insulation and the like - not to mention rising prices, as my neighbour from the Energy Saving Trust whispered to me! Ian thinks we can get that down by 50%, but he's focusing on the design of new housing. I'm more interested in the existing building stock: we've already got it, after all...

Nice to see Brian Souter of Stagecoach, and Richard Branson of Virgin, talking about the need to deliver demand reductions. Brian - in his wonderful brogue - suggested a carbon tax instead of the lowest rate, redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor.

Of course, the risk we're dealing with needs to be dealt wth by 2014-15 - even shorter-term than with carbon, you could argue. Will Whitehorn (Virgin) and Ian Marchant argued that the North Sea can still provide up to 60% of UK demand by 2020, but only if tax on North Sea extraction is reformed.

Of course, I've got an axe to grind when I put on my localCarbon hat. I was struck by the emphasis on the supply side of energy as compared to the demand side. Have we given up on efficiency? What about fuel poverty, as highlighted by the gentleman from the Association for Conservation of Energy? Or is it just never going to be enough? Will demand peak before supply? No-one knows, but while the chap from DECC who responded defended government's strategy, he admitted that we probably need to be doing more.

Superfreakonomics - and a thought on industry vs the individual

Hey, this is interesting.  The Guardian has an article on the new Superfreakonomics book, which describes

...an artful takedown of the fashionable "locavore" movement: transportation, Levitt and Dubner argue, accounts for such a small part of food's carbon footprint that buying all-local can make matters worse, because small farms use energy less efficiently than big ones. 

It's always nice to see your instincts supported.

The question about the proportion of energy used by transport vs that used by food production brings up another one:  What about the balance between industry and individuals?

Bear with me here.  The 10:10 campaign in Britain is trying to get the great unwashed masses to reduce their carbon footprints by 10% in a year.  All well and good; perhaps it's great if the people signing up are those folk who drive everywhere, fly every week, never recycle and don't care how high their energy bills are as they heat their houses by burning coal in open braziers while leaving the windows open.  But I have a feeling that many of the folks signing up to 10:10 already have lower-than-average carbon emissions; and, more important, that this does nothing to decarbonize our energy supply - nor does it do anything about industrial energy or resource use.  I'll come back to this in a future post, without doubt, but remember this:  if we run out of water, it won't be as a result of you leaving your tap on while you brush your teeth.

What to eat?

The problem with dinner is that most of us don't have much choice about what to eat - or at least that we don't value food provenance enough to do the things that we would if we could be bothered.  There's a small farmer's market close to my home in London, but only on Wednesdays in the middle of the day; how many working Joes can support it?

The bigger problem is not just that we don't choose to eat local produce (or decide whether it's better to buy our what-have-yous - apples, let's say - from farmers in far-away places where the climate is right for apple-growing at certain times of the year vs. from chaps just down the road who use much more cheap energy to grow the same things in hothouse conditions), or pay attention to seasonality or food miles to the exclusion of all other things.  It's that we don't look at the system as a whole.

Sure, local food sounds great.  But what of the logistical system - or lack thereof - which it implies?  I'll freely admit that I haven't found the numbers which would prove the point either way, but what seems better:  A host of individual farmers carrying out their own small-scale harvests, getting in their little white vans, and driving their produce around highways and byways to get the food to local markets?  Or a smaller number of highly mechanized super-farms selling to big supermarkets, which use enormous logistics systems and centralized processing centres to make distribution as efficient as possible?

And what are we trying to optimise, anyway?  Carbon emissions?  Flavour?  Employment, either local or in far-away places?

I won't be the first person to point out that eating a local diet in some places could be pretty boring most of the year.  And that it's more efficient (certainly from an energy, and therefore carbon, perspective) to produce certain things in certain places; so shouldn't we be thinking about the balance of energy calculations required to decide whether to produce X easily in Y and ship it to Z vs. producing X in hothouses in Z?

Carolyn Steel points out that the Industrial Revolution, and the taming of distance that came with it, allowed London to feed itself by rail, as it were:  Farmers no longer had to walk their cattle down the road to a market; they could put it on a train, thus opening up new possibilities and vastly increasing the amount of food available to the city, which allowed it (and countless other cities) to grow into the metropoles we know today.  We can't expect those cities to shrink back to their pre-Industrial Revolution sizes (nor would I want them to), but we do need to decide how we will continue to feed our city dwellers.  And much as some would have it that vertical farming and Utopian ideas of new centralized urban distribution/logistics systems are the silver bullets that will fix everything, I have a feeling that the reality will be much more mundane, and that - whether we like it or not - the supermarkets may, far from being the problem, hold the key to the answer.

Update on Friday, October 16, 2009 at 8:41 by Eli

Just found this article covering the issue of transport, energy, and food:  http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/07/22/the_localvores_dilemma/.  It covers the bases pretty well.  And it's great to see this kind of thinking in the general press, too.

Jan Jongert of 2012Architecten

Last night I heard Jan Jongert, of 2012Architecten, at an Architecture Foundation talk about his firm's work.  2012Architecten has done some very interesting work in re-use of components.  This is very different from using recycled materials, the more obvious process in which materials are broken down, recycled into a raw state, and then formed, shaped, or worked so as to appear as virgin materials; 2012Architecten use ready-made, already-formed components - washing-machine doors (evidently Miele makes high-quality products which, being properly screwed or bolted together, are easy to take apart), unused automotive windscreens, pieces of wood from the centres of large cable reels - and thus avoid the energy involved in, say, melting down recycled glass and forming it into new sheets, not to mention the transport required to move the materials around.

The ideas are fascinating but raise a host of questions:  Can this work on a large scale?  Don't you need a major exchange for materials?  (It turns out they implemented such a thing years ago, but the idea was probably ahead of its time - the website no longer exists.)

A house they have recently built with a facade made of wood from cable reels (it took them 10 years to go from realizing that this wood could be a construction material to figuring out how to successfully recover and treat it so that it can be used as such) look good, but the pictures he showed the audience were of a suburban subdivision that could be Surbiton, or Phoenix, for that matter.  It's all very well and good to reduce the embodied energy in buildings, but what about the automobile use implied in the location?  Even in Holland, the land of the bicycle, the tram, and the train, some 70% of all journeys are made by car.

The biggest issue, as ever, is one of speed and scale.  If the challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation are what we think they are; if we do need to reduce our carbon emissions by something between 60% and 80% by 2050; if sea levels are already rising - and never mind crises, real or imagined, in the availability of energy or raw materials - we don't have time to spend on small interventions.  We need to be rethinking all the energy and resource flows in our economies, as well as the spatial implications of reducing the size of those loops, and we need to be doing it now.