| David Fleming | |
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David Fleming giving a talk in a tent at the 2009 Climate Camp protest in Blackheath, London, UK. |
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| Born | 2 January 1940 Chiddingfold, Surrey |
| Died | 29 November 2010 Amsterdam |
| Nationality | English |
| Citizenship | British |
| Alma mater | Oxford (Trinity College) and Birkbeck |
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Dr. David Fleming (2 January 1940 – 29 November 2010) was an independent thinker and writer on environmental issues, based in London, England. He was one of the whistle blowers on the possibility of peak oil's approach and the inventor of the influential TEQs scheme, designed to address this and climate change.[1][2][3][4]
He was also a significant figure in the development of the UK Green Party,[5] the Transition Towns movement[6] and the New Economics Foundation,[7] as well as a Chairman of the Soil Association.
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He was born in Chiddingfold, Surrey, to Norman Bell Beatie Fleming, a Harley Street eye surgeon, and Joan Margaret Fleming, an award-winning crime writer. He had three sisters.[8]
He attended Oundle School before reading Modern History at the University of Oxford from 1959 to 1962. He then worked in manufacturing (textiles), marketing (detergents), advertising and financial public relations, before earning an MBA from Cranfield University in 1968.[9]
He was the Ecology (Green) Party's economics spokesman and press secretary between 1977 and 1980 (the party office at that time being his flat in Hampstead).[10] In 1980 he began studies in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London, completing an MSc in 1982 and a PhD on the economics of the market for positional goods in 1988. In this time, he also helped to organise the influential The Other Economic Summit (TOES).[11]
He was Honorary Treasurer of the Soil Association from 1984, and then became that organisation's Chairman between 1988 and 1991.[12] He was a regular contributor to Country Life magazine, and was published in Prospect and other journals, as well as in academic literature and popular newspapers. He was editor of The Countryside in 2097, published in 1997, and gave the third annual Feasta lecture in 2001.[13][14][15]
From 1977 to 1995 he worked as an independent consultant in environmental policy and business strategy for the financial services industry. In this time he edited a manual on the formation and management of investment funds in the Former Soviet Union, which was published in 1995.[16]
From 1995 until his death he wrote and lectured widely on the environmental and social issues which he expected to have a major impact on the global market economy in the 21st century, including oil depletion and climate change.[17]
David Fleming died on the 29th November 2010, in Amsterdam.[18]
For over thirty years Fleming worked on a major book, Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. It was completed just before his death and published posthumously on the 7th of July 2011.[19]
His influential April 1999 article for Prospect magazine, The next oil shock?, interpreted the International Energy Agency’s 1998 report as predicting an impending global oil crisis. He later revealed that Fatih Birol – the future Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency – agreed to meet with him after reading the article, and confessed that “you are right… there are maybe six people in the world who understand this”.[20] Fleming had a long history with peak oil, having been part of the team who wrote the Ecology Party pamphlet The Reckoning in 1977, which discussed the peak oil problem and our need to rethink our use of energy.[21]
He developed the idea of TEQs - the most widely studied model for the implementation of a carbon rationing scheme - and founded The Lean Economy Connection to work on the application of Lean Thinking to economic theory and society in general.[22] Until his death he remained a strong advocate for TEQs, and an ardent critic of nuclear power.
In his 2007 book The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy: A Life-Cycle in Trouble, Fleming argues[23]
“Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.” [24]
“Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no
alternative.” [25]
"At present, we have a policy-response (to climate change) shaped by sophisticated climate science, brilliant technology and pop behaviourism, based on simple assumptions about carrot-and-stick incentives."[26]
"I am a capitalist and I am a bit of a right winger, and I think in many ways the system we have got at the moment is really not a bad system. I think capitalism is a good thing. The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it’s based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it’s got a lot to be said in its favour.
It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That’s a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I’m to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it." [27]