Billy Elliot and the Kyoto Protocol

Last night I saw Billy Elliot, which by the way is a really wonderful, crowd-pleasing musical filled with very cute, dancing children.

For those of you who have seen neither the musical, nor the movie, Billy Elliot is a story about a young boy from a working class family who wants to be a ballet dancer. Meanwhile, everyone he knows, including his father and his brother, are seeing their whole way of life change as coal mining jobs are eviscerated.

Billy's brother Tony has one of the most poignant lines in the show as he anguishedly points out that 200,000 men have lost their livelihood, and says, "We are dead. We are dinosaurs. What are we going to do now? We can't all be dancers."

Now you may be wondering at this point, "What does this have to do with the Kyoto Protocol?"

It turns out, more than you think.

Fast-forward 25 years later, and Britain is actually on target to meet its Kyoto targets. Why? Well, as I've heard in many a lecture as a light-hearted tossaway line, "Because Maggie Thatcher hated the coal-miners!"

I laughed when I heard it the first time, but after watching Billy Elliot, it no longer seems so funny.

Dane and I have been having an energetic debate about how to frame climate change. Whereas I favor an approach more focused on human welfare, Dane favors a more economistic approach, and believes that we haven't used the economic tools in our arsenal properly.

Perhaps he is right.

But I do wonder. We can set a price on carbon, but how do we measure the worth of a person? How do we measure communities broken? How do we measure livelihoods lost?

Now, do I favor a return to coal in order to give those 200,000 coal miners their livelihoods back? No, I don't think that's the right approach. But nor do I think we can sweep them under the table. It is all too easy for economists to blithely say that green technology will create jobs. That GDP will continue to rise because we'll replace our coal industry with a solar industry. But there is no guarantee that the coal miners will be the ones to get jobs in the solar industry. Thus, a focus on things like national GDP can hide the reality that some people's livelihoods are much more affected than others.

Weaning ourselves off of carbon-intense methods of energy is going to be very difficult. It's going to be economically difficult of course, but there are communities everywhere from Appalachia to the North-East of England to Orissa that are going to see their ways of life turned topsy-turvy.

We have to move towards clean energy. But we also have to keep these communities in mind when we move towards clean energy. We have an obligation to these communities to make sure that when they lose their livelihoods, we present them with other options, and provide them with education and training.

We cannot ignore them. We cannot allow them to turn into dinosaurs. Because the worth of a person cannot be measured in mere dollars and cents.