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Maurizio Pallante:
"It is no easy matter to speak immediately after Beppe, but together we will nevertheless consider a few issues, beginning with some comments on the current crisis, a terrible crisis because it involves two different issues: the one is the financial issue of excess production of goods that are not selling, while the second issue is environmental, both as regards the depletion of resources and pollution, but above all the aggravation of the greenhouse effect.
This crisis has been one of excess production from the very start, even though we tried to pass it off as a financial crisis, in other words, when the American banks were granting mortgages to people who would not be able to make the mortgage payments and by doing this they were supporting the construction industry, thereby enabling them to produce more than the market could absorb, all of which was simply a way to delay the oversupply crisis that was already busy exploding. Both aspects of the crisis, namely the economic/financial/employment aspect and the environmental aspect, are due to the economic growth mechanism, namely that the aim of the economy is to produce greater quantities of goods each year, thus utilising ever increasing amounts of resources and producing ever increasing amounts of refuse, so we continue to flood the market with huge quantities of goods that can no longer be absorbed since all of our houses are already overflowing with things, meaning that we won’t have to buy more of them for years and still manage to have all we need.
The recession that we are living through is an opportunity, however, since it is putting the brakes on the environmental crisis and, because not all bad things are necessarily terrible, it is forcing us to look back on 50 years of folly in which we lived through and, due to the fact that there was an abundance of cheap crude, we were able to lose all common sense, all common sense in terms of our relationship with the world around us, as well as all common sense regarding the relationships between us and as regards our own individual lives.
There is currently a dangerous misconception that we can get through the current crisis simply by kick-starting the economy and re-launching the traditional industries, namely the motor vehicle industry and the construction industry. What they are doing today has no end in sight, it simply won’t work for two reasons: 1) simply because both the motor vehicle and the construction industries are already more than saturated, we are sitting with lots of houses standing empty and we have so many cars that we don’t know where to put them all, while the traffic in our towns has become impossible; 2) because not only is the market over saturated, but there are extreme energy consuming items. We know that our cars are energy guzzlers because they run on petrol, just like we know that our houses and buildings are energy guzzlers too, even more so than our cars because, just to heat our houses and buildings for 5 months each year, we use more energy that that used by all of the cars and trucks on our roads for the entire year.
These choices lead us nowhere. I live on the outskirts of Turin and I have absolute proof of this fact. While we hoped to re-launch the local economy thanks to the construction work for the Olympic Games, the result is that many of those buildings are already showing signs of decay, while on the other hand we have a whole lot of buildings that are consuming energy and a population, namely Turin residents who are currently in debt to the tune of 6 thousand Euro each, including babies. Were the City to sell off all of the Council owned buildings, it could pay off about half of its accumulated debt, but the city is blocked, all thanks to construction industry pressure.
The second aspect, and one that is even more problematic, is that of the motorcar. On July 2, 2007, fireworks were set off into the skies over Turin because the economy was going to recover and production levels were going to increase again thanks to the Fiat “Cinquecento”, however, just one year and four months later, all of FIAT’s workers are on short time. These people don’t know what to do, they don’t have the slightest ability to forecast the future, not even one year ahead and they are simply re-hashing what they have been saying for decades. They have no imagination and no creativity whatsoever; have you read today’s papers? How does Berlusconi propose to re-launch the economy? Via the construction industry, on the one hand by encouraging construction by private individuals in order to increase their living space, and on the other hand by encouraging public construction by means of major public works.
Not even the evidence is enough to convince these people that this route leads us nowhere, so what needs to be done in order to get out of this situation? This is an issue that also affects Obama because, although there is a vast difference between Bush and Obama, all that glitters is not necessarily gold and Obama also has a certain commitment as regards the motor car and, as regards energy matters, we always highlight the fact that while he does talk about renewable energy sources, he also talks about nuclear power, bio fuels an clean coal, because the thinking is still set on producing what we produced in the past.
What is the right way to go, you ask? What is the alternative? We must re-start the economic cycle and kick-start production and employment by means of policy measures aimed at eliminating the root causes of the two aspects of the crisis. We need to develop technologies that reduce the amount of resources used and the environmental impact. There is ample room for these technologies in the marketplace because we have totally ignored them for the past 50 years, but they enable us to give new meaning to our work by adding a human touch that will improve our world, and they enable us to transform the crisis into a great opportunity for change and improvement that we simply cannot afford to miss.
From this point of view, I believe that the candidates appearing on the civic lists for these will have to focus their campaigns on initiatives that will enable the development of technologies aimed at reducing the use of resources, aimed at reducing environmental impact, and there is a lot the local authorities can do in this regard.
Let me give you some simple examples: as regards energy, we need to set ourselves an objective to reduce our energy consumption by at least 50%. Our currently wastage of energy is running as high as 70 and even 80% and it makes no sense for a so-called civilized society to claim that it is technologically advanced while there is this kind of negative performance going on! How can the local authorities reduce energy consumption? Well, the first thing to do is to is to do an analysis of energy consumption in their buildings and fix any faults because they have no right to tell other people to behave in a certain way unless they set the right example!
There are certain public officials that have done such an analysis and so they know precisely how much energy is being consumed in each of their buildings and how much is being wasted. They are able to intervene where necessary, albeit second time around, and know when a roof needs to be replaced, or when extraordinary maintenance is required, simply because they know which buildings are wasting energy, so they can re-allocate money in order to ensure that the consumption is reduced, thereby cutting the cost to the end users.
At that point, all that is needed is a slightly higher expense on energy efficient materials, because the workers need to do the job anyway, the roof needs to be replaced anyway and the scaffolding needs to be put up anyway. At very little additional cost, the extraordinary maintenance can become a great opportunity to show commitments and to reduce our environmental impact.
Once we have put our own house in order, the second point concerns the building regulations. All councils are entitled to make their own building regulations, as well as an energy appendix stating that: in this municipal district, no houses may be built, and no old houses may be renovated, if they consume more than 7 litres per cubic metre per year, which is the maximum permissible amount in the Alto Adige Region, as well as in Germany and a number of other European Countries. Still in terms of kick-starting employment and the production of these technologies, they must encourage the establishment of firms known as Energy Service Companies, firms that do energy renovation at their own expense and then recover their costs by cashing in, for a specified number of years, on any energy savings that they are able to achieve. This involves arranging a massive re-allocation of funds, funds that are currently being spent on purchasing fuel from abroad, to rather paying the wages and salaries to people that can help us to reduce our consumption of fuel from abroad. This is one way to re-launch the economy and to self-fund these types of projects. All we have to do is to say no to any type of additional power stations that is proposed for our area!
As a second measure, after reducing our consumption, the kind of renewable energy sources that we support will be based on small installations to supply the individual needs of buildings, as Beppe was saying earlier. We don’t need huge power stations, what we do need is a lot of citizens that self-produce enough energy for their own needs and input any excess energy they may have produced into the power grid. Another very important measure that will be introduced by the city councils is to propose that heating charges for apartment blocks be based on actual consumption rather than on a lump sum because, at the moment, these costs are charged out to the tenants based on the square meterage of their apartments, so there is no real incentive for them to fix their heating installations, whereas, if their charges was based on actual consumption, if any tenants renovate their apartments in such a way that they are more energy efficient, they will recover these costs over time by reducing their consumption of fossil fuels.
What we are talking about is transforming these savings into salaries for a lot of people with specific skills, which are now simply hanging around in a manner that is unacceptable from a civic duty point of view!
A final issue that is often discussed is that of bio-fuels and of agricultural production aimed specifically at producing bio-fuels, but no one talks about the fact that certain types of crops can be used to produce materials that could be used to reduce energy consumption rather than simply to provide energy. For example, there is significant proof that hemp can be used as insulation material for buildings or, just think that we currently have huge amounts of poor quality sheep’s wool that is deemed to be special waste and is simply taken to the rubbish dump, at a very high cost. This wool could be used as wall insulation in houses, thereby reducing consumption, reducing the amount of waste, reducing energy consumption, reducing environmental impact and creating some new jobs.
Point two is land use. We need to put a stop to the continuous expansion of urban plans. Not another square inch of our agricultural land must be lost to urban construction!
This is not intended to block employment or to block construction in any way, but rather to redirect our construction industry towards the renovation of existing buildings. For fifty years we have been building in a shameful manner and we now need to right the wrongs of the past 50 years. There is an enormous amount of work to be done and a measure such as this will force the people working in the construction industry to use their skills to fix the problems of the past, so that we build in a more environmentally friendly manner!
Still regarding land use, as Beppe has already said, we must rehabilitate that which we already have, rather than build something new, by demolishing where necessary and re-building in a more decent manner, however, we often underestimate the importance of reclaiming our urban parkland, which we do by creating a wooded avenue here and a little flower garden there. Instead, what we need to do is to bring back the right balance between the organic and the inorganic in our towns, because when we develop our green areas significantly and not just for the purposes of embellishment, we achieve 3 basic things: 1) the green areas absorb water and allow the level of the water table to rise. Waterproof surfaces instead force the water to runoff, while we continue to use more water and at the same time we increase the amount of surface area covered by waterproof tar and cement, thereby preventing the water from reaching the water table. 2) the green areas lower the temperature of the local microclimates in our towns, which are 3 or 4 degrees warmer than the surrounding microclimates. 3) urban forestation absorbs Co2 and therefore reduces the greenhouse effect and slow down the rate of climate change!
We need to realise the real importance of access to green areas in our towns. Another important issue is that of refuse, which will be the specific topic of a later address, but all I would like to say is that we need to start preparing those of us who will soon be sitting on the town councils to view the problem of refuse from a financial perspective, because this is the only way to approach this problem, also in terms of the environment. If the quantity of refuse is reduced and if we can reclaim the secondary raw materials contained in the refuse, then we will save on the costs of transporting the refuse to the dump. If I don’t have to dump one kilo of rubbish, either because I haven’t produced it or because I have recycled it, then I will be saving the disposal or incineration costs, but if I don’t take it to the dump at all, it probably means that I have sold it to someone else, who will extract the secondary raw materials from it.
For this very reason, differentiated refuse collection and the reduction in the quantity of refuse will enable the town councils to reduce the current refuse removal costs borne by the residents and indeed to convert these costs into revenues that will increase their budget, something that is essential in order to reverse the current suicidal trend of increasing the available funds by destroying the territory as they are doing at the moment.
As regards the technical issues, these will be discussed in a later address, but all I wanted to do was to highlight this very important issue regarding the method.
The next thing is that the municipalities should also consider are the economic – employment policies. We were talking about short production chains. We must draw attention to our local products. It is inconceivable that we transport products over such long distances because this has a certain environmental impact, which in turn increases the greenhouse effect and that takes jobs away from people because we then over-exploit workers in faraway lands, who don’t get paid a fair value and that provide us with products that are not good for us, or rather, products whose goodness is only as good as their low price!
We must increase the people’s purchases of organic products, products produced in an environmentally friendly manner and produced close by. Our town councils must manage the organic waste products from our school canteens in a responsible manner. There is stuff being wasted that brings tears to God’s eyes. The amount of stuff that is being thrown away is truly frightening and we cannot allow this to continue … a whole range of stuff is being thrown away untouched for some or other silly health reasons, while there are many, many needy people!
Anything that cannot be used for this purpose must be used to produce compost to enrich the soil with organic nutrients. We must give preference to our farmers and our small-scale local growers and appreciate the fact that they can sell their wares in town and have to overcome all of the bureaucratic requirements such as VAT registration numbers, etc., which are no great obstacle for the large companies but represent a real problem for the small, family-run firm.
You should know that this phenomenon of the farmer’s markets and short production chains is one that is gaining ground all over the place, in all of the more advanced industrialised countries. We need those of you who will be entering the institutions to be in favour of this type of process.
Two more things before I close: the first being the issue of traffic. We must prevent the historic centres of our towns being turned into parking areas, because doing so means increasing the traffic in our towns. We must prevent the creation of parking areas in office and factory buildings, because this encourages people to go to work by car rather than use the public transport, and we need to identify alternative means to ensure mobility. This is essential and I don’t know why the electric trams were taken out of circulation, because these are the epitome of environmentally friendly vehicles, also because they don’t have to carry the extra weight of on-board batteries but draws its power from an overhead line. These trams have been eliminated from our cities. We need to re-introduce them and, better still, they should be powered by a line passing under the road surface rather than an overhead line. Once these underground lines have been installed to power the trams, the same lines can also be used to power electric cars with no on-board battery packs. Therefore, the tram service can be augmented by introducing a fleet of “public cars”, which can be used by members of the public with “pay as you go” cards and then left at his/her destination, to then be used by other users.
Thus, if the electrical supply lines are laid under the asphalt we could power not only buses, but also a fleet of public cars for private use.
There are also other systems that we should consider, in particular, there is a group of people in Rimini that is busy experimenting with a system called “Jungo”, a sort of card-based hitch-hiking system, which could go a long way towards reducing traffic levels. This system is being tested in the Trento Province and we should investigate it more closely.
Finally there is the issue of water and the fact that it should be considered a public asset. I don’t believe we should really need to discuss this issue any further because it is such an elementary concept, however, that is not enough and a lot of work needs to be done in terms of repairing the aqueducts. We have some aqueducts that are losing as much as 40% of their water, so we are pumping water and losing it at the same time, so we need to do something to ensure that this water is not lost. This is a major undertaking.
I believe that companies that operate in a certain manner, like the Esco (Energy Service Company) companies, can assist communities with this type of initiative to repair the aqueducts and benefit from the water savings resulting from their intervention. I can think of a myriad … My hope is that the greatest possible number of people from our civic lists get voted onto the town councils, because it won’t take many, perhaps one or two town Councillors voting against a vacuum, could take the reigns of the situation and lead the way for others who have no ideas and who don’t know what to do, to follow!
Even if our success in the elections is limited, you must remember that each and every one of us that that is voted onto a Town Council is equivalent to 10 other councillors, because the important thing is to have clear ideas, to be able to make constructive proposals and to have the ability to convince others to follow. I also believe that our presence on the town councils will not only improve the quality of life in our communities, but also provide a very strong general impetus to help us get through this crisis in terms of increasing skilled employment, adding meaning to our work, improving the environment and thus convert the danger we are facing into a great opportunity for change. Thank you and goodbye!"