19 July 2024. Education | Climate
Keeping students in education, instead of failing them // Five big projects to try to do something about climate change [#589]
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1: Keeping students in education, instead of failing them
I was at a meeting in London earlier this week organised by New Capital Consensus, which is a research group that is looking at how to how
“to identify the behavioural, political and regulatory levers necessary to release billions of pounds of private, long-term investment capital to green the UK economy and tackle structural inequalities.“
This obviously relates to the piece I wrote here recently about Britain’s ‘stagnation crisis’, and it turns out that when you look at it through the lens of the overall financial system, there are some clear systemic behaviours that we can change. But it is technical stuff—we’re in the world of pensions and regulatory frameworks—and I’m going to need to re-read my notes before I write it up, probably next week.
So instead I’m going to write about an inspirational talk given to the meeting by Jonathan Maguire of Tomorrow’s Company, who is running a project that is trying to reduce the number of children who leave school without any usable qualifications, and end up classified as ‘NEETs’—Not in Education, Employment or Training.
The data are shocking.
Overall, 18% of British schoolchildren—100,000 young people—leave school each year without any usable qualifications. (In the best-in-class Netherlands, the comparable figure is 4.4%).
The figure climbs to 37% for children from a low-income household (which from my notes, was a household with an income of less that £15,000 for two or more years.)
And it climbs again for children with special educational needs and disabilities [SEND], to 45%.
In other words, this is a massive problem, in terms of social mobility, lost opportunity, and lost individual lifetime income. Individually, when you spend some time as a NEET it scars your earning potential for life.
There’s also the effect of lost economic activity in the economy as a whole. If Britain closed the gap on the Netherlands, it would be £69 billion more productive—with the uplift this represents for tax revenues and so on.
What the project does is to work with these young people in a ‘Future Skills’ programme. This is a 10-week coaching and mentoring course—an hour a week—which works with 14 to 16 year olds who are at risk of being failed by school.
The way Jonathan Maguire described this programme is that they are delivering a “corporate coaching programme to 14 year olds,” although with examples that are more relevant to young people.
This is what the brochure says about their approach:
As well as designing our programme to deliver the essential skillsets, we focus equally on developing healthy, resilient mindsets too. Our unique approach enables students to develop self-confidence, self-esteem and mental resilience, with a particular emphasis on coping with and learning from failure.
We help them discover more about their own skills, interests and passions, and then give them the tools and techniques to become better leaders, team players, innovators, communicators, problem solvers and change-makers.
Apparently the kids enjoy this, and you can see why. It’s probably the first time in their lives that they have been taken seriously rather than being written off.
Any novel programme like this needs its hero/heroine stories, and Maguire had a couple to share.
They put the kids into five teams on the programme, and encourage entrepreneurial thinking. The first story was about a couple of students, close to exclusion from school, who had an idea for a sports prototype while kicking a rugby ball around in the park.
They’ve now sold the idea to a manufacturer who is making 10,000 to test it—they said it would have just have been an idea without the confidence instilled by the course.
Not all of the ideas are so commercial. Maguire told a story about two kids who had developed a drone shaped like a Cornish pasty, although he wasn’t clear why they had hit on that shape.
The other story was a bit more conventional. ‘Kevin’—probably a pseudonym—was barely at school and about to be kicked out. He has severe learning difficulties. Even so, he was the first member of his family still to be in school in Year 9 (age 13).
Since he did the programme, he has a full attendance record, he has passed his GCSEs (a family first) and is now in the Sixth Form (another family first).
Each of these 10-week courses costs £8,000, at an average cost of £266 per pupil, with about 30 pupils per course.
The most depressing part of all of this story was about how difficult it was to raise money from businesses to support the programme. As he said, young people are the place to invest if you want to make a difference, but
I spend my days begging businesses to fund the programme.
There’s not much data on the website about impact, but I was doing some sums in my head while he was talking. Given the scale of the educational problem, and the long term downward effects on income for those who end up categorised as NEET, there doesn’t need to be much impact at all to justify the cost of a course.
To spell this out, if one student in each cohort of 30 stays on and gets some qualifications, that entire cohort will have paid for itself in terms of public economic outcomes (in terms of higher tax and national insurance payments, and lower support payments), and in years rather than decades. In those terms, we’re talking peanuts.
(I’m just reducing this for the moment to a discussion of investment and social return, and for the moment parking the large moral and ethical arguments in favour of enabling social mobility and not reinforcing cycles of disadvantage, although clearly these arguments matter as well.)
So one route to expanding this programme might be through a social impact bond of some kind, measured by the number of young people who get some qualifications rather than failing to do so. Somewhere between the City of London and some of our philanthropic foundations some of our brighter financial minds might be able to work something out.
But let’s face it: £8,000 isn’t very much in terms of a typical medium-to-large business’ community engagement programme. Perhaps this is an awareness issue. In which case, the brochure can be downloaded here. And just in case you think it’s easy for me to sit here and spend other people’s money: I have already spoken to Jonathan Maguire about contributing personally to a programme in the north-east of England, where my parents come from.
2: Five big projects to try to do something about climate change
The New Scientist has an article about five “climate megaprojects”that might or might not help deal with our climate emergency. (It’s free during the summer provided you register). Each article is written by a different NS contributor.
The five megaprojects are:
Launch a solar power station into space
Build a set of energy islands
Stabilise the doomsday glacier
Regreen the Sinai peninsula
Suck 80 megatonnes of CO2 from the air each year
I’m going to try to summarise each of these quickly here.
(A) Launch a solar power station into space
Situating a solar power station in space rather than having it sitting on land is immediately more efficient, at least in power generation terms, because in space it doesn’t cloud over. It gets “the perpetual glow of sunlight.”
Engineers have been talking up the idea of a solar power station in space for decades, and when you look at how much energy it could produce, you can see why. A 10-kilometre-wide solar panel in geostationary orbit could produce 570 terawatt-years of energy, according to Ian Cash at International Electric Company... (For comparison, the UK’s total electricity demand in 2022 was 320 terawatt-hours.)
That’s a lot of electricity, in other words.
Why haven’t we done it before? First, the cost of getting it up there. The economics of this have been transformed by the advent of reusable launch rockets, and this part is now feasible. Second, getting the energy back down to earth. But it turns out that we now know how to do this:
microwaves beamed to a ground-based receiver called a rectenna. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena demonstrated this was feasible for the first time in February, as part of their Space Solar Power Project.
The rectennae (I’m guessing the plural isn’t rectennas) would be contentious, because they are large and they are on the ground. The best solution would be to put them offshore. There are also the emissions costs of building all this stuff, which are substantial. But one UK analysis says these are recouped within six years of use and the technology has a life of 60 years. Interest is growing in China, Japan, and Europe, where the European Space Agency is working on a prototype.
(Space based power station concept. Source: European Space Agency, via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA IGO 3.0)
(B) Build a set of energy islands
Denmark is busy building an artificial island called Vinde in the North Sea which will, they intend, be the first of a series of ‘energy islands’ which will each support a vast wind farm. The problem is that to support the transition to electric energy systems we will need a lot more windpower than we have built already, perhaps 10-15 times as much.
The idea is that the energy island solves the two main problems associated with windpower:
One is that the power generation is intermittent, meaning it can be hard to match supply to demand. Another is that the power must be transported via cables to where it is needed on land – and the infrastructure required is wildly expensive.
Denmark isn’t the only country planning an energy island; Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium have similar plans. The idea is that each of this will share cables with multiple countries, making it easier to use the energy to balance demand in different countries.
Beyond energy production, this clean wind energy could also be used to produce green hydrogen, which is cheaper to transport and which can also be used directly in some green transport, such as shipping. The ‘islands’ could also be refuelling stations. This ‘second generation’ opens up potential new locations, such as the west coast of Ireland, where energy demand is too low to justify building the islands and cabling the electricity to the mainland.
(C) Stabilise the doomsday glacier
The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is known as the“doomsday glacier” because there’s a fear that if it fails, it could precipitate widespread Antarctic melting and raise global sea levels by up to 5 metres. It has lost more than a trillion tonnes of ice since 2000. Five metres? New York, Shanghai, Calcutta and Hamburg would all be at risk.
John Moore at the University of Lapland has been working on ways to stabilise it for years. One plan that might be feasible could be to reduce the amount of warmer water reaching the underside of the glacier’s ice sheet by tethering an 80-metre curtain to the ocean bed. They are testing a prototype at the University of Cambridge.
The cost of this project, if it works, it could be of the order of $50-100 billion dollars. These numbers always seem large, but that’s about 1% of global GDP. And a lot cheaper than abandoning New York.
(D) Re-green the Sinai peninsula
Until about 10,000 years ago, the Sinai peninsula was a lush sub-tropical paradise. But then a combination of over-use and changes in the Earth’s orbit reduced it to desert. If we could re-green it?
In principle, the reintroduced vegetation would not only suck a huge chunk of carbon from the atmosphere, but also reinvigorate local water cycles, ushering in desperately needed rainfall and allowing flora and fauna to thrive.
A Dutch company. the Weather Makers, has been studying the problem, and think that digging out Lake Bardawil, now shallow and saline, could start the regeneration process, provided you can provide fresh water to it. That creates a whole lot of second order problems, but possible approaches include fog collectors or capturing water from the excavated sediment and using it to restore plant life. At some point, the re-greened land would recreate a biosphere with its own water cycle.
Of course, messing with bits of biosphere is likely to have consequences elsewhere, so some academics sound a note of caution here. On the other hand, humans have desertified 6% of the world’s drylands in the last 30 years. So we’re probably going to have to start remaking biosphere eventually.
(E) Suck 80 megatonnes of CO2 from the air each year
If we want to remove carbon from the atmosphere, then sucking it out directly may be the most efficient way to do it (I mean, trees are so inefficient in comparison).
The idea is to absorb CO2 from the air and then release a stream of the concentrated gas that can either be buried in the ground or sold as a useful product, such as synthetic jet fuel. In that sense, you can think of it as recycling CO2.
The 80 megatonnes number is an estimate from the International Energy Agency of how much CO2 we need to extract each year if we are to hit net-zero emissions by 2050. At the moment the technology is young and we have 18 direct air capture plants in operation: the biggest one, Orca in Iceland, can extract 4,000 tonnes a year. So we’d have to scale this quickly and build a lot of plants quickly—about 10 megatonnes plants a year, on average.
At the moment this takes a lot of energy; there’s a reason why Orca is based in Iceland, where it can use geothermal energy. Water and energy are the big issues: the IEA estimated that running enough plants to hit net zero would take about 1% of global water use and 1% of global energy use. Cost is also a problem. The only good news here is that once the technology works,
the plants can be built pretty much anywhere and relatively quickly.
I know that time is not on our side, and we have to try everything, but I’m sceptical about this one and I think that the opportunity costs of pursuing it are high. Trees and peat might be a better bet.
j2t#589
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