Cut your carbon

Why we need to use energy more sustainably

2012-01-27T11:09:00.000Z

My guest blog on the British Gas Customer Newsroom website.
http://www.britishgasnewsroom.co.uk/2012/01/why-we-need-to-use-energy-more-sustainably/

Two photographs illustrate the article. The first depicts my schoolfriend, David Kidd, fitting a Navitron solar thermal heating system on my roof. He's standing safely in a long, horizontal valley between two pitched roofs so no need for a harness. The second shows the excellent downlights that I fitted into the bathroom cabinet recently, replacing 60 watts of halogen lights with 7.2 watts of warm white LED cabinet units from www.ledcentre.uk.com

Many people argue that we can best engage the public in climate change action using positive terms, such as money to be saved, rather than evoking fear and other negative sentiments by describing the threats of unmitigated warming. A recent scholarly analysis of climate change communications by Jacqueline Stewart, of George Washington University, gives examples of effective and counter-productive attempts to communicate climate change but concludes only that success depends on the specific message, messenger and circumstances.

I believe people need to hear the truth about our situation - how can we care about something we aren't aware of? - but agree that this needs to be coupled with positive messages on what we can do about it.

This guest post is my attempt to communicate the big picture on consumption, carbon emissions and consequences, together with clear proposals for personal action to reduce all three. I am pleased that British Gas have agreed to post it on their customer website and hope that it will reach a wide audience.

Numbers not Adjectives

2012-01-04T10:11:00.000Z

In the words of Professor David Mackay, we need "numbers, not adjectives" to compare, understand and manage our country's energy supplies and our own energy demands. In this spirit, here are two charts.

The first shows my family's energy use at home each year from 2006 to 2011. For reasons I have made clear throughout this blog, we used 52% less energy in 2011 than in 2006.

The second chart shows the costs of this energy.

Sticking to Prof. Mackay's injunction, I will simply note that, despite increases in the unit costs we pay for energy over this period, our total bill for energy in 2011 was 38% smaller than we paid in 2006.

There are all sorts of issues, from fuel poverty to carbon emissions, that this comparison does not address. The simple point that it illustrates well, however, is that individual efforts and investments to use energy more efficiently have a real impact on our energy bills. If my family had used as much energy in 2011 as we did in 2006, our bills would have risen by 17% over this period - despite switching to a cheaper supplier at the end of 2008.

And the carbon emissions from our energy use? I calculate that, in 2006, these amounted to 8 Tonnes CO2. In 2011, our annual emissions were down to 3.6 Tonnes CO2. The total reduction over five years (2007 - 11) amounts to 15.7 Tonnes.

This may not sound much compared with, for example, long-haul flights, but we haven't taken any of those in the last five years either. Cutting carbon makes each and every part of life more sustainable, from holidays to heating, from commuting to computing and from diet to DIY. Oh dear, I've forgotten the Professor's advice and slipped into rhetoric so I'd better stop and leave you to do the maths.

Warm winter, green Christmas and other stories

2011-12-19T15:05:00.001Z

This time last year, I wrote a post for this blog called "What Colour Christmas are you Dreaming Of?"
I covered food, pressies and the merits of real vs. artificial trees. It's all still valid so I won't harp on about these things again but I just want to add this BRILLIANT picture of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future from Best Foot Forward!

What was most memorable about last Christmas was the weather - we had the coldest December on record in England, with snow on the ground from the beginning of the month almost until Christmas Day. This year, in southern Britain, we had such a long, warm autumn that trees were coming into bud and flowers blooming in November! Even December has hardly been cold and the Met Office have confirmed that we're in for a green Christmas.

The extreme winter of 2010 meant high consumption of gas to heat homes, with scare stories of "just 7 days supply" held in Britain. This year's mild winter has enabled my family to keep our home warm with much less gas: so much so that our consumption for 2011 is down more than 30% on 2010.

This dramatic decrease is due to weather rather than my home's efficiency or my family's behaviours relating to energy use, so should be reflected across the region. None of us know what temperatures we will face next week, next month or next year and I take no credit for the weather. However, I imagine that our country's 2011 carbon emissions will be lower than 2010, because of this climatic variation.

I have continued to cut my home's electricity usage, by replacing even more halogen lights. A couple of years ago, I replaced the fluorescent under-cabinet lights in my kitchen with LED link-lights but was left with overhead halogen lights totalling 350 watts. LED lights with the colour and brightness needed to replace 50 watt halogen downlights are now becoming available and I have fitted two Edison GU10 bulbs, each with 3 X 2 watt CREE LEDs, above the kitchen sink. Even these are not as bright as the MR16 halogens they replaced, so I am holding off on replacing the two most critical lights in the kitchen, above the oven and kitchen table.

However, the room's main illumination is a mirrored cluster of 10 watt and 20 watt halogen bulbs, totalling 150 watts. The power supply in this lamp recently burned out, giving me the opportunity to replace it with a suitable LED driver and to fit warm white LED lamps and G4 bulbs in place of the halogens. I purchased these from http://www.ledcentre.uk.com/ and they were delivered the next day - in the middle of the pre-Christmas rush.

The chrome lamp units have a really high quality feel and I am amazed that the light they provide is simply BETTER than the illumination we got from the halogen bulbs they have replaced. What is more surprising is the feeling of warmth that this bright light creates. The mirrored cluster has 12 light fittings and the whole thing now uses the same amount of electricity that a single one of the halogen bulbs used to consume! I have bought another three of these lamp units, to convert the bathroom lights from 60 watt halogen to 7 watt LED.

I worked really hard to cut my home's carbon emissions by 10% last year, to deliver my 10:10 promise, but the bitterly cold weather scuppered this for me. This year's mild winter has enabled me to reduce my home's CO2 by more than 20% which more than makes up for missing last year's target. The effects of warm weather and more efficient use of electricity have combined to save almost a Tonne of CO2 emissions from our home's energy usage in 2011 (3.6 Tonnes), compared with 2010 (4.6 Tonnes).

Why my (or your) carbon footprint matters

2011-08-31T15:48:00.004+01:00

At the Ashden Awards in June, I was lucky enough to meet Emma Murphy, one of the founders of the green PR outfit, Life Size Media. She combines great technical understanding of climate change mitigation with a creative flair for communicating the subject. I mention this because they are now running a poll on the question, "Do you think it's important to know your carbon footprint?" Quite apart from the audience selection bias of their followers, I suspect that very few people have a clear idea of their own carbon footprint and almost nobody can be sure of their own direct and indirect contribution to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions, the scale of which is illustrated beautifully by a post on Karina Rubiera's blog:

Here are some of the confusing carbon emissions measurements that I have come across today:
1) My local leisure centre used 6 million kWh of gas last year and its carbon emissions were almost 1500 Tonnes CO2e. I go there once every few months: how much of that carbon footprint has my name on it?
2) The local boys' secondary school, that my son and I both attended and where my wife is a governor, had publicly reported emissions of 984 Tonnes CO2e in 2008.
3) Intensively reared lamb in the USA causes CO2-equivalent emissions of almost 40kg for every kilo of meat. Some of this is due to methane emissions from the ruminant gut but much is due to the agricultural feedstock: lamb raised on hill-farms in Britain would, quite literally, embody much less carbon emissions than their grain-reared cousins imprisoned in American feedlots.
4) Duncan Clark, of 10:10 and the Guardian, has reflected deeply on the question of short-haul flights in his blog post today. He concludes that our personal carbon emissions matter much less than the effect that our awareness-raising can have on those of others.

Of course, I agree that communication and awareness-raising are at the heart of the matter. Duncan and Emma are both leading exponents of sustainability communications and yet even they, I think they would agree, have limited ability to reach out to the wider public, at home and abroad, and engage them in the battle against dangerous climate change due to fossil carbon emissions from unsustainable behaviours and practices in so many aspects of our contemporary lifestyles. The clamour of commercial concerns, urging us to consume and spend so that they can grow and profit, is usually too loud and incessant for quiet voices of restraint and reflection to be heard.

This is one reason why I think it matters that each of us considers our own carbon footprint and makes sure to reduce it over time. If you will excuse the clumsy analogy, it's the ethical equivalent of a medical thermometer for my environmental conscience. The 10:10 campaign grabbed the attention of 100,000 people last year, along with 1000s of businesses and institutions, and focused them on the challenge of cutting their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. Positive, purposeful progress - what an amazing achievement! It's still full steam ahead for the good ship 10:10 and their challenge to each of us now is to cut 10% every year.

However, it's not enough to know the amount of indirect emissions that feature in my personal carbon account simply for being a citizen - including healthcare, education, defence, government, transport and other infrastructure. I cannot influence these through my own efforts. The direct carbon impacts of my activities and decisions are much more important to me in measuring my personal responsibility for human-induced climate change. I want to know, and reduce, the carbon footprint of my personal consumption - such as transport, diet, shopping, entertainment and home energy use.

Useful books and online tools abound to help me know my numbers but, where possible, I favour direct measurement. It's simple, accurate and reflects my improvements every year. At home, just put regular meter readings into a basic spreadsheet and, with a couple of standard conversion factors, you can see directly what progress you are making towards cutting your carbon year on year. This graph shows our home's total energy use for the calendar years 2009 -11.

The next one is smoothed using Moving Annual Totals (MAT) for electricity and gas use, and carbon emissions, over the same period. You can see that the green line has been bumping along just above 4 Tonnes/year CO2 emissions since May 2011: by contrast, our home energy use in 2006 emitted more than 8 Tonnes CO2.

These direct measurements and graphs are not to everyone's taste but they motivate me to remain focused on our home's energy use. If you don't want to make your own spreadsheet, Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute (ECI) have already done it for you! Just sign up to iMeasure and they'll prompt you to type in your meter readings every Monday. Over time, iMeasure shows you your home's energy consumption, and its carbon footprint, in a variety of ways. The two features that I find most impressive are the weekly energy performance rating (A-G) that it gives your home and the rolling competition with neighbours in our local Carbon Club - we're nothing if not competitive!

Similarly, I keep a little logbook in the driver's door pocket of my car, to record my fuel consumption. I multiply the litres of diesel purchased by 2.68 (kg CO2 per litre) to calculate my direct driving emissions. I have to make some estimates for maintenance and embodied emissions in the car's manufacture: these last go down for every additional year that I keep the car on the road but do they offset the direct emissions from a newer, more efficient vehicle? Mike Berners-Lee wrote this excellent piece in the Guardian, from his book, "How Bad Are Bananas?". There was also a great decision tree for keeping or replacing an older car - I'll post a link if I can find one.

For travel by public transport, eating, reading, holidays, gadgets, etc., the Guardian's quick carbon calculator, posted by Duncan Clark in 2009 and created by Small World Consulting, is the best footprint calculator I know.

To sum up, I think it does matter that we each care about our individual carbon footprint, gain some idea of its size and become engaged in whittling it down over time. It's not going to stop dangerous, manmade climate change in its tracks but it is an ethical, personal response to the moral challenge of treading lightly on the Earth and the living world that we continue to share it with.

A sustainable summer

2011-08-15T12:17:00.002+01:00

A summer to remember! The joy of rail. The beauty of Italian cities. The weak pound. Endless blackberries.

We haven't flown abroad on holiday for several years, for rather obvious environmental reasons, yet we love the experience of European travel and are loathe to give up our annual immersion in other languages, cultures, climate and cuisine. This year, despite the poor exchange rate, we decided to travel to Italy for our summer holiday, to see places we haven't seen before and to give our 16-year old daughter a more memorable European experience. We invested plenty of time up front in planning our itinerary and accommodation, so that we could book the right trains on Rail Europe as soon as they became available, 3 months before travel. All our plans bore fruit, every train throughout the holiday ran on time and we loved the adventure of watching countryside, seas and mountains from our panoramic windows. Our hotels in Paris, Rome and Venice were all well situated for exploring these great cities on foot and by underground or river bus. Our most relaxing break was in an apartment overlooking the small village of Argegno, on the shore of Lake Como, which we reached by ferry and bus.

Last year, the carbon emissions from our family of four travelling to the Tarn region of southwest France and back, by car and cross-channel ferry*, were around 670 kg - or 170 kg CO2 per head. According to Best Foot Forward, in their study commissioned by Rail Europe, the equivalent emissions for this year's holiday by rail for the three of us were about 135 kg - a mere 45 kg CO2 per head. Conversely, if three of us had flown to Rome and back, our journey's climate change impact (including radiative forcing, due to the altitude of the plane's emissions) would have been 1,660 kg - or 550 kg CO2 per head, according to the Carbon Footprint calculator.

So, a European family holiday by train results in less than a tenth of the carbon emissions of the same holiday by plane. The same holiday by car results in 3-4 times the emissions of the train but only a third of the plane.

Scaling this up, I have just returned from a fabulous week at Scout camp in Belgium. 22 of us travelled by Eurostar and 5 leaders took our kit across in a car and a van. The GHG emissions from our 22 return rail journeys were just 57 kg CO2, the same as those from one single passenger making the same trip by plane! Adding in the car and van journeys (475 kg CO2*) gives a carbon footprint, for 27 of us and our kit travelling to and from camp, totalling 530 kg - only 20 kg CO2 per person.

And the blackberries? I'm not talking about the rioters' social medium of choice but rather the extended harvest of wild fruit we have enjoyed this summer. Spurred on by the hot, dry spring, all our apples, blackberries and other wild food are offering a prolonged and bountiful harvest of succulent fruit. Even the mushrooms seem to be coming out early this year - if you know what to collect and eat safely, you are in for an outstanding season of delicious, free food!

* Modern cross-channel ferries emit around 8kg per passenger (return journey), according to the Best Foot Forward study reported on the SeaFrance website. I have included this amount in all the driving calculations shown in this post.

Inspiring Energy Events

2011-06-27T21:15:00.003+01:00

The annual Ashden Awards for sustainable energy enterprises were presented in London this month and I was lucky enough to be able to join their seminar at the Royal Geographical Society. The morning session, chaired by Jonathan Porritt, focused on UK projects and the international session in the afternoon was chaired by the Guardian editor, Madeline Bunting. During each session, the five finalists in their category screened a film summarising their project's achievements and the representative of the organisation gave a short speech about their work. In the case of the UK finallists, this was posited as an "elevator pitch" to Chris Huhne and David Cameron, to persuade them what needs to be done to make Britain a great place to invest in sustainable energy technologies.

The films themselves are one of the Ashden Awards greatest achievements. I look forward to screening them to the right audiences when the opportunities arise but you can view them yourself on the Ashden Awards website, for both the UK and international finalists.

After the films and pitches, the Chairs facilitated a couple of really useful discussion of pertinent issues - in the case of the international session, Local Clean Energy for the Poor. This brought in technologists, regulators and investors and considered some of the artificial obstacles raised by institutional backers, aiming to verify the outcomes achieved with their support. This discussion also highlighted the merits of grid vs. off-grid energy systems, with all parties agreeing that mini-grids, as seen in Peru and Ecuador, are often the best way to bring efficient, low carbon energy to poor rural communities.

As in previous years, I was greatly inspired by the overseas projects, which seem to exemplify courage and creativity in meeting the needs of - literally - billions of under-served people in the developing world. I was privileged to chat at length with Suraj Wahab Olugburo, the founder of Toyola Energy Ltd of Ghana, who explained his elegant business model that provides work and income for over 500 entrepreneurs in making and selling the Toyola stove, which allows families to cook on half the charcoal needed for traditional stoves. His simple credit scheme allows the local sales agent to give the stove to a family, with a collecting tin: each day that the customer does NOT need to pay for charcoal (because the stove halves their usage), they put their charcoal money into the tin. After a few months, they have saved enough to pay for the stove!

The UK projects were also an inspiration this year and I was delighted to learn that one of the finallists, Radian Housing, was about to open a flagship project in Windsor, where they have built 9 new houses in Tinkers Lane - one is Code 6 (essentially zero carbon) and the others are all Code 5 dwellings, which are highly efficient in the way they use energy. I was delighted to attend the opening ceremony last week, where our Mayor cut the ribbon and some of the residents opened their new homes to all the visitors. We were a distinctly non-technical audience and the main take-home message was that these houses are very attractive, liveable homes that require no special skills from their residents. Sure, some behaviours can be learned (for example, with a huge solar PV power station on the roof, it's worth running the washing machine when the sun is shining) but all the buildings' clean technologies simply run themselves itself without placing any responsibilities on the household.

It was a great pleasure to learn that these two finallists, Toyola and Radian, received the two Gold Awards at the Ashden Awards ceremony, on the evening of the day after the conference.

The other inspiring energy event that I have attended this month was, surprisingly, the RBWM Sustainability Panel at the Town Hall in Maidenhead. After a slow start, discussion moved to the Government's disclosure requirements for greenhouse gas emissions. The responsible officer outlined the framework of Scope I, Scope II and Scope III reporting but focused on the costs and complexity of data-gathering and analysis. The councillors set a different pace, however, reminding the panel that residents expect leadership from their council and that time is of the essence in moving to meaningful reporting of these GHG emissions. This decision was passed unanimously. Good on them!

The same tone was maintained when considering energy reporting, with annual overviews by invoice described as insufficient and unsatisfactory. The vice-chair, Councillor Sharp, called for electricity and gas usage by site to be reported "at least monthly". On Energy Action Plans, the Chairman called for focus on the significant few actions, to make real progress. Lastly, proposals for solar photovoltaic installations up to 50kWp on council buildings were reviewed and the vice-chair, Cllr. Sharp, now well into his stride, said, "We must do it now. Must do it now!" The Chairman concurred, saying "We want it and we want it tomorrow."

Having sat through a few of the previous administration's Sustainability Panels, which I felt were typically bogged down in politics, I found the new council's can-do mentality so empowering. In the closing words of the Chairman, Cllr. David Coppinger, it's time to move from talking to doing. Amen to that.

A change is brewing

2011-05-29T14:09:00.001+01:00

Last week, our Bosch kettle died. We bought it in March 2009, 26 months ago, with a 24 month warranty. I stripped it down but could not get close enough to the sealed electronics to to find the fault. It just blows the 13A fuse in the plug every time we switch it on. I called Bosch customer service, to find out what could be done. They told me to send it back to their workshop, with a cheque for £9, and they would investigate the fault and let me know what needed to be done to repair the kettle. I might just do that, to see if we can keep this otherwise high quality appliance in service rather than having to recycle it. However, I can't imagine that many people would be prepared to throw good money after bad to prolong the life of stuff that has become essentially disposable.

In the meantime, we need a kettle. Making tea and coffee with a saucepan is all very well on the odd occasion, such as a power cut, but we're all used to brewing up a hot drink in a matter of minutes. I have been trying to track down an old-fashioned kettle with a heat exchanger skirt, for use on our gas hob. My Grandma used to have a Simplex kettle like this and I found the company's website but there has been no response so far from their Contact Form.

I'm fairly clear, however, that the rest of the family won't tolerate life without an electric kettle that switches itself off when it comes to the boil. I have long been fascinated with the Eco Kettle, which combines an onboard water reservoir with a clearly-calibrated boiling chamber, designed to make it consummately easy to boil only the amount of water that you need. I decided to get one from Ecotopia, because they offered the best price and the fastest service, and I was pleasantly surprised to take delivery of a chrome Eco Kettle 2 the following day.

Having lived with the new gadget for a couple of days, I am happy with almost all aspects of its performance. It's very quiet because it uses a less powerful element than most ordinary kettles. This makes no appreciable difference to boiling times for one or two cups but must take slightly longer than a regular kettle to boil a teapotful, I suppose. It's certainly heavy because it's carrying a full tank of water even when you're just boiling one cup. However, the weight is not a problem for my family and the Eco Kettle is very well balanced and pours cleanly. It also lives up to its promise, making it truly effortless to boil just the amount you need.

The one thing that makes no sense is that the kettle is terribly slow to switch off, once the water has boiled. The power stays on for more than 10 seconds after the water can be seen and heard to be boiling vigorously. When boiling a full charge of water, the EcoKettle moves around violently and seems ready to jump off its base. It hasn't actually spilled any boiling water yet but it seems likely that this aspect of the design needs to be refined, so that the Eco Kettle doesn't waste electricity raising steam while the boil detector makes up its mind to turn the power off. More importantly, any possibility of scalding from spitting liquid or even a spilt kettle is a serious safety issue. I'll share my concern with the manufacturer and report back any response that they offer.

Simple Energy Saving at home

2011-05-09T13:44:00.002+01:00

I was very pleased that Julian Worricker read out my email in full on Radio 4's "You & Yours" programme today. You can Listen Again on iPlayer here, until Monday 16 May - around 46 minutes in. Here's what I sent into the programme:

"It's worth all the effort to insulate, switch off and replace inefficient bulbs and appliances. I have managed to cut my family's home electricity use in half, and our gas consumption by a third, since 2006. The cost of insulation, light bulbs and an A+ refrigerator were quickly paid back and my energy bills are a third lower now than they were in 2006."

Of course, I couldn't provide the evidence behind this on the programme, so I will do this here. I was also struck by Julian's response: he said, "That's very positive from his point of view but we don't all have the time to do that". Accepting this viewpoint, the challenge is to make it so easy for people to use energy wisely in their homes that they find it only natural to cut waste and save money on their bills.

In 2006, our home used 30,400 kWh of energy: 21,200 units of gas and 9,200 of electricity. This cost almost £1500. Since then I have invested in great tranches of loft insulation, all shapes and sizes of energy-saving light bulbs, a condensing boiler, a solar thermal panel (the boiler has been off for weeks now), an efficient larder fridge and the 8 watt Fit-PC computer (strictly a net-top) that I am writing this blog on now. We have also pulled together as a family to change our behaviour, switching everything off at the mains when not needed, keeping the thermostat down low in the winter and generally striving to avoid wasting energy.

2010 was an unusual year, starting and ending with prolonged spells of extreme cold. As a result, our 2010 energy use was greater than expected. However, 2011 has been unseasonably warm so far and our energy consumption since January has been 20% lower than the same period last year. In the past 12 months, we have used a total of 17,200 kWh at home: 12,800 units of gas and 4,400 kWh of electricity. This graph shows our annual energy costs, for gas and electricity, over the past five years. I've also included my estimate for 2011 and we are on track to spend just £1000 on home energy this year:

The point of all this data is to make clear the savings to be had by using energy wisely. If my family's power consumption had remained at 2006 levels, we would now be paying over £1,700 a year for our gas and electricity. On the news today, Centrica warned that forward gas prices for next winter are 25% higher than they were at this time last year. This makes it apparent that everyone's energy bills will rise - unless they act to reduce their usage! The investments needed are one-off costs but the payback comes ever after - in my case, a saving of £60 a month on the cost of home energy. The higher the price, the bigger the saving. What's stopping you, Julian?

Let's recycle more!

2011-04-27T15:32:00.000+01:00

We have had kerbside recycling in Windsor for quite a few years. Several years ago, I learned that our local authority, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, won't accept mixed plastics (ie., plastic food packaging other than bottles) for recycling. At this point I took Greenpeace's advice and started to clean and collect my family's own mixed plastic packaging (yoghurt pots, margarine tubs, ready meal trays, fruit punnets, etc) in anticipation of future recycling services. My collection of mixed plastics has featured prominently in the local paper and was also used artistically last year, to make a "10%" sign in front of Windsor Castle, in support of the Global Day of Doing on 10 October 2010 (10/10/10).

Other Boroughs across the country now collect mixed plastic - the latest to announce this service is the neighbouring Woking Borough Council, who have a contract with Biffa to recycle all types of plastic (other than bags and films) within their domestic, co-mingled kerbside collection. Biffa have acquired Greenstar WES and their new mixed plastics recycling facility, opened this month in Redcar, will be able to sort and bale 20,000 Tonnes of mixed plastics each year.

Closer to home, this morning Neil Grundon (a founder member of our Sustainable Windsor group) showed me around Grundon's materials recovery facility (MRF) in Colnbrook. They are able to sort and bale steel and aluminium cans, paper and cardboard, mixed plastics. They also collect glass which is used as aggregate in roadbuilding or for recycling. Grundon recycle household waste from nearby boroughs such as Guildford, Spelthorne and Hillingdon. I took some of my mixed plastic packaging along with me today, to see how well their sorting process coped with it.

I was delighted to see my carefully laundered yoghurt pots and margarine tubs flying along the final conveyor into the mixed plastics silo, ready for baling. Black plastics are hard to sort, at present, because an optical process, near infra-red reflectance (NIR), is used for the sorting. However, these could be separated from the final waste stream in future by an additional sorting machine that is "trained" to work on black plastics.

Recoup, a charity promoting the RECycling Of Used Plastics, publishes an annual report on the collection of plastic packaging from UK Households. In their latest report, RECOUP reports that mixed plastics (ie., rigid plastic packaging other than bottles) are actively recycled by 120 local authorities in the UK, out of 401 that they contacted.

Despite all this progress in the recycling of mixed plastics nationally, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead seems to be locked in a recycling time-warp! The Royal Borough's current waste and recycling contractor is Veolia and there is no indication on the Veolia website that they are prepared ever to provide a mixed plastics recycling service to their municipal customers. The waste and recycling contract for Windsor and Maidenhead is up for renewal this year. Clearly Biffa and Grundon are competent, commercial partners who should be allowed to tender for this valuable contract. Will the Council insist on the provision of a wider range of recycling streams from the company that successfully tenders for this valuable contract - or will the business stay with Veolia because they can offer the lowest price?

EcoBuild fires the imagination

2011-03-03T09:35:00.001Z

I headed over to the EcoBuild exhibition in Docklands yesterday. The Travelcard from Windsor is now valid on the Docklands Light Railway, so it's quick and cheap to travel right to the door of the ExCel centre. There were well over 2,000 exhibitors, so it's impossible to see everything in a few hours but I was able to pick out a few highlights.

There is a boom in flat roof technologies! Many commercial buildings have load-bearing roofs that are unused and the Government's Feed-In Tariffs are making solar PV an attractive option for buisnesses and home-owners alike. What's new is the range of alternatives to traditional silicon panels mounted on A-frames. Lots of thin film solar technologies have now reached the market. Producing fewer watts per square metre, meaning larger panels, thin film photovoltaics are also cheaper to buy than the same generating capacity of crystalline panels. Moreover, they harvest a wider spectrum of radiant energy and so are more effective in overcast conditions - quite well suited to our climate. Being thin, cheap and, in many cases, flexible, they can simply be glued onto roofing decks, facing straight up. The most attractive design was from US company, Solyndra. Designed to simply be placed over large roof areas, each flat panel has many horizontal photovoltaic rods and is shaped like a car roofrack. The advantages are that the individual tubes are fixed at the correct angle for optimum power generation whilst the flat racks let wind and rain through, meaning that they don't need bolts or ballast to keep them in place in stormy weather. Then there were the integrated solar PV and thermal panels, generating electricity and hot water, the advantage being that the water flow keeps the solar panels at the low temperatures needed for optimum generating efficiency. Most confusing, there was even a solar thermal panel running on refrigerant gases that is claimed to generate heat in the dark of night as well as in the daylight! I think that, in reality, this is an air-source heat pump which is boosted by the sun's warmth during the day.

Beyond solar panels, the most attractive designs were of green roof technologies, bringing biodiversity back to 'urban deserts' and helping to clean up the air we breathe in our towns and cities. The most beautiful display was from Blackdown green roofs of Somerset who had planted so many spring flowers into their flowing sedum roof that it looked like an Alpine meadow and would not have been out of place at Chelsea.

Under all these working rooftops were a bewildering array of structural, insulating and cladding materials together with hyper-efficient doors and windows. For green plumbing and heating, there were oodles of heat pump systems (these use a little electricity to harvest a lot of renewable energy) and new, high-efficiency radiators that run at the lower water temperatures provided by heat pumps or even our current, gas-fired condensing boilers when operating at their most efficient. To save electricity at home, the brilliant VPhase system retails at around £200 plus fitting. This simple fit-and-forget technology is widely employed in commercial buildings. VPhase is the domestic version that has been proven in large-scale trials over the last five years and will cut the average home's electricity usage by 8 - 10%.

Surprisingly few LED lighting suppliers were exhibiting but the architectural lights on show from Deltalight were simply mind-blowing. Their secret is the tiniest LED chips, giving incredibly sharp edges to the light thrown from these low-power sources. The only downside was the price ...

If I had the money and the land, I would love to take the best of these technologies and build a sustainable home needing no fossil fuel energy for heating and lighting. That's the point of these exhibitions - to make us dream!

Windsor news

2011-02-05T14:28:00.002Z

Congratulations if you've found your way here from the article in this week's Windsor Express - it's on page 17 of the digital edition - and thanks for looking me up!

Francis Batt, the journalist who wrote this flattering story, has helped to promote our local efforts on 10:10 and mixed plastics recycling (which has earned me some local notoriety, and much ribbing from my friends). He has rather bravely featured the idea of biomethane - energy from sewage - which the National Grid say could eventually provide most of the gas for domestic customers in Britain. Last year, British Gas became the first energy company to inject biomethane into the National Grid. As a member of their Customer Panel, I proposed that this could be marketed as a green tariff: the world's first Dual Fuel deal offering 100% renewable energy to households wishing to minimise their environmental impact. To their credit, British Gas are taking the idea very seriously and have proposed to launch something along these lines during 2011.

Elsewhere in the paper, a letter from Mike (a resident of Bolton Road) lampooned Councillor Maxwell, the chairman of the Royal Borough's Sustainability Panel, for his suggestion that the council investigate the provision of charging points for electric vehicles in Windsor and require taxi drivers to replace their cars with electric ones. He describes the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change as "insanity" and asks, "has anyone done the calculations - the cost of providing electric capacity to charge up 11 million vehicles?". The answer to this question, of course, is yes - for starters, Mike could try Professor David Mackay, FRS, the author of "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air".

Mike's unreconstructed world view appears to be that batty green councillors are interfering with the perfectly well running fossil fuel economy and that they should just stick to the day job of running council services. I don't mean to put words into Mike's mouth but, unlike him, I did attend the Sustainability Panel when electric vehicles and charging points were discussed and I do know what was said. I shall be setting the record straight in my own letter to the paper and I hope this is published in the coming weeks.

Bright and early this morning, Hannah, Laura and I got together with Sue, the organiser of the Thames Valley Farmers' Markets, to discuss how Sustainable Windsor can support the local farmers who are selling their produce direct to Windsor residents. We sampled some local cheeses and then bought bread, fish and beer to take home. I loved the sign on the stall selling watercress from the Basingstoke area - "Total Food Miles = 27.4". There is much scope for us to highlight the environmental benefits of these local and sustainable products and perhaps, as we develop Sustainable Windsor during the coming year, we can help them to grow their businesses in our town.

Worldwide CO2 emissions

2011-01-31T10:24:00.003Z

A fascinating graphical report in the Guardian online shows the CO2 emissions from energy use in 2009 from every country in the world. Here is a link to the article.

The data comes from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and does not reflect total Greenhouse Gas emissions from human activities. The principal omissions are carbon (as CO2 and methane) released from tropical deforestation and other land use changes and the agricultural production of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. Taken as a whole, global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities equal approx. 50 billion Tonnes CO2-e per annum.

What it does show is the phenomenal growth in emissions from China. A decade ago, in 2000, China emitted 2.8 billion Tonnes of CO2 from energy use. In 2009, the country's emissions had risen by a further 4.9 billion Tonnes to 7.7 billion Tonnes, a quarter of the world's total carbon emissions from energy use. CO2 emissions from energy use in Asia and Oceania as a whole have grown by 6 Billion Tonnes, from 7.2 Billion to 13.3 Billion Tonnes over this period.

Over the same period, the combined emissions from energy use in both Europe and North America fell just 5% from 11.3 Billion Tonnes to 10.7 Billion Tonnes CO2.

The consequence, not seen in this graphic of current energy use, is that the world's annual emissions from energy use have risen by 6.6 Billion Tonnes CO2 since 2000 - more than a quarter of the total emissions in that year. As reported by BP and other oil companies in January, their outlook is that exponential growth of carbon emissions from fossil fuel consumption will continue unchecked for the next 40 years. If they are right then catastrophic, runaway climate change is guaranteed.

As Ban Ki-Moon said in Davos last week, the world's economic model is environmental suicide.

Mr Ban's solution, endorsed by the delegates at this session of the World Economic Forum on Friday, is to "tear down the walls between a green agenda and a growth agenda. There is no time to waste."

In response, the president of Finland, Tarja Halonen, called for a "modern trinity" of growth, social justice and environmental responsibility - the triple-bottom-line of responsible development.

Even the President and CEO of WalMart, Mike Duke, chipped in, "Business should not see a conflict between doing what is right for business and what is right for the world".

On Board with British Gas again

2011-01-28T11:13:00.006Z

During 2010, I volunteered to take part in British Gas' Customer Panel. They selected a cross-section of around 30 customers to visit a range of their businesses, talk to lots of managers and staff and share our views on what the company can do better for its customers.

The reason I joined was my passion for energy efficiency and renewable generation: I wanted British Gas and its parent company, Centrica, to help all their customers use energy wisely and to lead the transformation of Britain's energy infrastructure towards a future of intelligent distribution of low carbon power.

At our final presentation to the Board of British Gas last August, I posed a suite of direct challenges to the company on the theme of leading Britain to a low carbon future. I am delighted to say that the company and its directors have been completely open to my suggestions and they have indicated their intention to act on the vast majority of these proposals. Indeed, British Gas has committed to act on many of the recommendations that the Customer Panel developed, across all five themes - customer service, simpler billing, clearer prices, open communications and low carbon leadership.

This year, British Gas will continue to deliver the recommendations of the Customer Panel and has invited a number of panellists - including me - to join their new Customer Board, monitor the way that these improvements are implemented and continue to challenge their senior managers to serve British Gas customers better.

Some people wonder why I am giving my time to a commercial business in this way. To be treated as a valued guest and shown around a major corporation is rewarding in itself and to develop cogent proposals for improving that business is an exciting intellectual pursuit. My most important motivation for volunteering is the hope that this investment of time and enthusiasm will influence the strategy and performance of the company and that, as a result, millions of British Gas' customers will be made aware of the reasons and opportunities to save energy in their homes.

The company tells us that it is "Looking after your world".

To paraphrase Archimedes, I see the new Customer Board at British Gas as a fulcrum, a place to stand and press the case for clean energy and sustainable business practices, from a customer's perspective. I might just have a long enough lever to move "your world", that British Gas looks after, a little closer towards the needs of Earth - the world that we all depend on for our very existence.

Carbon-Neutral Ashton Hayes and a new Climate Leader

2011-01-28T08:53:00.001Z

Fabulous talk at Transition Maidenhead on Tuesday evening by Garry Charnock, the driving force behind Ashton Hayes becoming Britain's first carbon-neutral community. As Garry made clear, "carbon-neutral" is a vision rather than a destination, and a vision that has resulted in verified reductions of this community's carbon footprint by around 25% in their first five years. Exciting plans lie ahead and the goodwill, the community spirit that has built up through the enthusiasm of everyone puling together, has drawn even the most sceptical residents into this unique, sustainable movement.

Carbon-neutral Ashton Hayes asked commercial donors to fund their launch - and quickly had £3,500 cash with none of the strings that come with grant funds. 400 adults came to their launch event, and the BBC World service broadcast it to 120 million people worldwide! Garry told us that residents like to get their news from their local papers, so this is a much better way of reaching the local community than putting leaflets through doors. He also observed that, up and down the country, the sustainable communities that succeed are the ones that engage children - working with schools is an essential ingredient.

Another secret of success has been the long-term involvement of the geography department at the nearby University of Chester. Students and academics benchmarked the Year 1 carbon footprint of the village (5,000 Tonnes CO2-e) and provided feedback to every home. Ongoing surveys established the carbon reductions of all households in the village - demonstrating that even the people who didn't sign up to the campaign had reduced their emissions as a result of the all the buzz and chatter about it in their village. The pub landlord was a great example: initially a vocal sceptic, he turned to the carbon-neutral group when his energy bills were threatening his business. A team from the University spent a day measuring the pub's energy use and he achieved an immediate cut in his monthly bill of 20% as a result. Thereafter, he became a real advocate for the scheme and 9,000 other Punch Taverns nationwide learned about his reduced energy bills.

Community cohesion is a strong motivator and carbon-neutral Ashton Hayes has kept people involved through parties in peoples' homes. A community shop provides local food ingredients without excess packaging and a community electric car (Nissan Leaf) will soon be bookable through the shop, which will take a small cut of the fees in return for managing this service. The village has produced a toolkit to replicate their Carbon-Neutral community and this has allowed Eden Mills to become the first community in Canada to go carbon neutral.

Garry's rules:

Keep it non-political: their MP wanted to speak at the launch but this was not allowed.
Don't fall out with anyone: the biggest petrolheads and most frequent flyers are key assets in a carbon reduction campaign!
Carbon footprint information and feedback is private but ALWAYS share news of successes (e.g., new renewables or energy efficiency measures installed) with neighbours!

My feelings, having listened to Garry, is that unimaginable change has been achieved by unswerving passion. There are just so many ways in which his project could have stalled but, instead of letting people say "No", Garry has brought his community together and drafted powerful resource providers in to make great things happen. He embodies the inspired leadership needed to tackle climate change in communities of all sizes, from villages to nations, continents and the world.

Two invitations

2011-01-24T10:33:00.000Z

If you live near to Maidenhead or Egham then one or other of these events may be of interest to you. Both are free to attend and no booking is necessary.

Transition Maidenhead have invited Garry Charnock to speak about Britain's first carbon-neutral community. Garry is from the rural village of Ashton Hayes in Cheshire and their community website is a great read.

Come and hear Garry describe the villagers' experiences of going carbon-neutral, at the Desborough Suite in Maidenhead Town Hall on Tuesday, 25 January, from 7 until 9:30pm. After Garry's talk, there will be an opportunity to meet and chat with members of Transition and Sustainability groups from the Thames Valley and beyond.

Royal Holloway, University of London, in Englefield Green are hosting their Annual Sustainability Lecture on Monday 31 January at 6:15pm. This event is organised by Dr Laura Spence, one of Sustainable Windsor's founders. The speaker will be the eminent scientist, Professor Lord Robert May, who was until recently President of The Royal Society, and before that Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government and Head of its Office of Science & Technology. He is a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change.

Lord May's topic for this lecture is, "Best of Times, Worst of Times: Hard Choices for Tomorrow's World".

The first results are in ...

2011-01-13T16:03:00.003Z

America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just published the first analyses of global average temperatures for 2010.

Here are the 15 warmest years from 1880 to 2010
(average of global land and sea surface temperature records):

Rank Year Difference vs. 20th century average

1= 2005 0.62°C

1= 2010 0.62°C

3 1998 0.60°C

4= 2003 0.58°C

4= 2002 0.58°C

6= 2006 0.56°C

6= 2009 0.56°C

8 2007 0.55°C

9 2004 0.54°C

10 2001 0.52°C

11= 2008 0.48°C

11= 1997 0.48°C

13 1999 0.42°C

14 1995 0.41°C

15 2000 0.39°C

These are all in my daughter's lifetime. How old is she? 15.

NASA have just released their analysis, confirming the ranking for the warmest 8 years on record (with a slight discrepancy between 7th and 8th place).

The Guardian reports that more analyses of the world's climate in 2010 are due later this month from the Met Office and the World Meteorological Organisation.

Update: Here is the Met Office data, with a handy table comparing these three data sets. Interesting to note the difference in their reporting of temperature anomalies for these years.

10:10 performance - deeply technical stuff!

2010-12-22T13:16:00.004Z

In my first post of 2010, I set the target for my home's 10:10 challenge - to cut our domestic emissions to 4.5 Tonnes CO2-e by Christmas eve. This required our annual energy use to drop by 10%, to 4,770kWh electricity and 12,655kWh gas.

And the results are: SUCCESS with electricity but FAIL with gas. I am disappointed with this because, despite the cold and snowy weather we had in February, our moving annual total gas consumption was 13,000kWh from February to May and it hadn't risen much over the summer. It had crept up to 13,600 by mid-November and I was determined to keep the thermostat turned down but this made no difference when one week of snow was followed by our current, much harsher freeze. In the last four weeks of Arctic weather, our annual total gas usage has jumped to 14,850kWh.

My friend and neighbour, Vincent Jansen, has just introduced me to the concept of degree-days. The Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University run the i-measure website, where you can benchmark your home's energy use and emissions each week. They also publish tables of heating demand for buildings, measured at a number of sites around the country - available here. These record the effective temperature difference that has to be maintained in buildings, in units called degree-days. You can plot these weekly or monthly data sets against your home's heating energy usage to see how much benefit your insulation improvements or boiler upgrades have given you. As you can see, the correlation between degree-days and gas usage in my home is remarkably strong.

Each record has a columns of degree-days recorded against a range of reference temperatures and it is important to choose the appropriate reference temperature for your building. 15.5°C is traditionally used for homes and offices (and 18.5°C for hospitals) but my records fit closest to the 14°C curve. I have split the difference and used a base temperature of 15°C.

If you plot a building's energy use against degree-days, the line is called the performance line and the slope of this line is the building's energy loss rate. Here are three separate performance lines for my family's home in 2008 (red), 2009 (blue) and 2010 (green). The slope of the green line is noticeably less than the blue and red, suggesting that the extra-thick loft lagging I added last autumn has been of some benefit.

So the bottom line is that I missed my 10:10 target for home heating energy but, given the extreme weather we are experiencing this month, I could quite well have used 10% more gas than I have done, if it weren't for the extra insulation that I put in to meet my 10:10 commitments.

What about the 'leccy? You may recall that I fitted LED lights in the kitchen and in the bedrooms. I also switched my tower PC off last Christmas and replaced it with the amazing Fit-PC 2 net-top computer, running on just 8 watts. The result has been remarkable. Our moving annual total usage has dropped smoothly throughout the year and is almost on target, at 4798kWh.

One last picture shows my home's cumulative gas and electricity use through 2009 and 2010. The effect of our prolonged cold spell is strikingly clear when this year's gas usage jumps ahead of last year's at the end of November. Nationally, this must have led to a huge surge in energy demand, emissions and customers' bills.

So far, I have neglected the carbon-intensity of my electricity provider. In calculating my home's carbon emissions, I use DECC's national average carbon-intensity of 430g CO2 per kWh electricity. However, as a British Gas customer, my electricity has the lowest carbon-intensity of any of the big 6, at 371g CO2 per kWh supplied. If I recalculate using the British Gas carbon intensity, my home emitted 4.6 Tonnes CO2 for the year to Christmas Eve 2010. So I can console myself that, despite missing my target for gas usage, our overall carbon emissions are almost where I had hoped.

For the broader aspects of carbon footprint, such as diet, lifestyle, shopping and travel, I don't have any hard and fast measures. If we all eat less meat and dairy, buy more local and seasonal food, make our clothes and electronic gadgets last longer and keep our feet firmly on land (or water) when we take our holidays then I suspect we'd make a big dent in Britain's climate-changing carbon emissions. The transition to a sustainable economy is going to be a major theme of the coming decade and I hope many people here and around the world will jump at the chance to make life better for all the generations to come.

What colour Christmas are you dreaming of?

2010-12-14T16:38:00.002Z

My inbox is filling up with seasonal cheer and helpful advice, generally around the theme of a enjoying a jolly green Christmas. For instance, this beautifully wrapped cracker from Global Action Plan and this charming range of e-cards from Friends of the Earth.

But what is the real impact of Christmas? Beyond the original, spiritual meaning(s), our festive season clearly retains a central cultural role in bringing families together. Unfortunately, this leads to the seasonal binge of over-consumption - from wrapping paper to decorations, from turkey to more turkey and from overcooked veg to repeats on TV. As a vegetarian household, we are at least spared the excesses of turkey - but we do have to endure our share of repeats.

Recent press coverage suggests that most families are letting their heads rule their hearts and agreeing budget caps for presents, in response to the financial pressures that we are all feeling this year. But there is also the danger that, when times are hard, we cut back on our charitable giving. We may not want to give a goat, indeed we're being told that a goat might be a burden for some families and their local environments, but the Good Gifts range has presents that will appeal to everyone. Rather more personally, KIVA and Deki allow you to lend a little money ("microloans") to an individual family in the developing world, for a specific purpose. Microcredit was pioneered by the Grameen Bank (whose founder, Muhammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel peace prize for this) in Bangladesh and it has spread rapidly around the developing world because of its amazing power to change the lives of the ultra-poor.

KIVA and Deki both allow you to give gift certificates to your loved ones, who then have the pleasure of selecting the projects and the people that they wish to lend to. Almost all the projects repay their loans and the lender is then free to withdraw their money or to lend to another project - meaning that the credit "revolves" to help one family after another. It could be a gift for life, not just for Christmas.

One of the perennial debates during Advent is the merits of real vs. artificial trees. When our children were young, we always went to buy a freshly cut tree from the nearby Crown Estate in Windsor Great Park. About 10 years ago, my uncle decided to throw out his old, artificial tree, and offered it to us. Since then, we have changed our annual ritual to a journey into the attic to bring down this majestic fake fir and I was delighted that, last weekend, my daughter put the tree up and decorated it all by herself while mum and dad had a leisurely lie-in! The moral of this tale has to be that, whatever the relative merits of real or artificial Christmas trees, the greenest choice has to be the artificial (or real, if potted and movable) one that you carefully store from year to year.

My top tip for December shopping? B&Q Everyday Eco loft insulation - mineral wool top-up at £3 for 5.5sq. metres. That's the cheapest it's ever been so snap it up while it's going! Merry Christmas everyone.

Will Britain ever be sustainable?

2010-12-02T11:44:00.006Z

Walked through Hyde Park in the snow last night to attend this fascinating debate at the Royal Geographical Society in Exhibition Road (next to the Albert Hall). The presentations and the discussion were videoed and are available to watch online, here. Author and sustainable business advisor, Peter McManners, has published another thought-provoking take on this debate here.

Sir Stuart Rose (of M&S fame) talked about positive action from business and was credible, upbeat and sharp. He recognised that most of the hard work lies ahead and acknowledged the paradox that, right now, it's business leaders rather than consumers who are leading the transition to sustainability. When asked what can WE as individuals do to make Britain sustainable, Sir Stuart replied with admirable candour,
"Eat everything in your fridge (I eat lots of out-of-date stuff) - keep your clothes for longer (they're much tougher than you think) and use less." Good on him! The debate's chair and Guardian editor for Environment and Sustainability, Jo Confino, has reported Sir Stuart's comments in more detail here.

Hilary Benn, MP, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and former Minister at DFID and DEFRA, took a very different tack from our nation's premier shopkeeper. He highlighted issues of unsustainable consumption in our modern world, from the inequality of food supply (1 billion overweight/obese and another billion going to bed hungry tonight) to the impoverishment of biodiversity. He noted that scaring people is bad politics and asserted that we must lead the way to sustainable lifestyles in Britain with a dream, not a nightmare. Most provocatively, Hilary told us that Government can't do things alone: radical change involves all of us. Where were the public and NGOs during the fuel price riots, he asked? The Labour government looked all round for support for their environmentally-driven fuel price escalator but found not a single voice.

Mr Benn concluded that others must show leadership, especially when the going gets tough. As you might imagine, the audience returned to this point during questioning. Rad Hart-George asked him whether the transition to renewable energy was too big for citizens to lead themselves and, if so, would the Government step up to make it happen. Benn responded with the importance of citizen-generated renewable energy through the Feed-In Tariff and Rent-a-Roof schemes. Of course, this was not intended to be a technical discussion but I didn't get the impression that the Shadow Leader of the House sees any substantial barriers to the decarbonisation of Britain's energy sector, which I found deeply troubling in the light of Monday's "Countdown to 2020" conference.

A very creative and inspiring presentation followed from Andy Hobsbawn, founder of Green Thing, the not-for-profit organisation behind the outstanding website, Do the Green Thing. Why do people queue all night to get the latest iPad but can't be bothered to switch a light off when they leave the room? These activities live in different brain areas, he said, one associated with pleasure, desire, reward and the other with admin, chores and to-do lists. Great creativity transforms things - it's a "meme-maker" and leads to insanely desirable tools for self-expression, like the iPad. Andy applies great creativity to making the simple, sustainable choices attractive - like going for a walk and turning off a lightswitch. He showed us his solutions to these challenges - they were all lovable, quirky and fun, making environmentally sustainable choices and behaviours desirable.

A "clean coal" developer asked the Panel whether his penchant for frequent air travel makes him into a "walking contradiction". In response, Hilary Benn talked of the "complex ecology of modern existence" and the interdependence that makes it hard for countries to act on their own - whereas Andy Hobsbawn said, "Think, act. Get information and then do it right. Change the people around you." In that moment, I saw where the clear vision of a sustainable future is going to come from. While business leaders will work pro-actively to make their products and services sustainable, to protect their future earnings, politicians need the likes of Andy Hobsbawn to wake up the electorate - because democratic Governments can't and won't act until their constituents demand that they do. As Mr Benn said, radical change involves all of us.

Post Script:
This 5-minute video from the American Post Carbon Institute just landed in my inbox, thanks to Eco-Tube. I think it encapsulates what Hilary Benn tried to convey in his opening remarks and I am inspired by the narrative. More creative communication than creative solutions, it makes the point that we are heading for a post-carbon future either way. By acting now, we can make it sustainable and beautiful. Do nothing and it will be ugly and terminal. Last night's debate was really about how we get this message across to people, effectively and immediately.

Renewable Energy: Countdown to 2020

2010-11-30T17:12:00.004Z

Thanks to the lovely people at the UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC), I was able to attend the Energy Institute's conference yesterday, reviewing the prospects for a renewable energy revolution in the coming decade. My thanks also to the organisers and sponsors for a very professional and informative event.

So what are the prospects? On balance, the speakers expressed significant doubts as to whether we will achieve the UK's target of 15% renewable energy by 2020. They made clear what the obstacles are. Broadly, these boil down to four key areas:

Complex and uncertain policies and regulatory environment.
Access to the National Grid.
Planning and Consent.
Lack of investment due to uncompetitive returns.

The first speaker was our Minster of State for Energy, Charles Hendry, MP. He enthused about Britain's renewable energy prospects and promised comprehensive reform of the electricity industry, including a floor price for carbon emissions, emissions performance standards (EPS), upgraded grid "interconnects" between regions and a roadmap to meet our renewables targets, all within 6 months. Under questioning, he was unflappable but made no commitments - particularly in response to my enquiry about the level of the EPS, which he said would be decided by consultation, at a level to encourage investment in new coal and gas. Knowing that new unabated coal power stations will be a call to arms for climate change campaigners, I am deeply concerned about the Minister's response.

Subsequent speakers exposed the holes in the current financial and regulatory frameworks. Gemma Grimes described this as "policy soup", making investment unattractive because of the risks and uncertainty of making acceptable returns. Most disturbing, one eloquent speaker complained that, of all our government departments, it is the Treasury that simply doesn't "get" renewable energy and the need to decarbonise our economy. Their incomprehension is perhaps the greatest risk to our country's low carbon future.

The shining star of the conference was Alastair Dutton from the Crown Estate, promoting massive scaling up of our offshore wind power capacity. They are now licensing 9 "zones" in British territorial waters, where collectives of partners with different strengths will be able to establish offshore wind farms that will triple our offshore wind capacity.

The Cassandra, surprisingly, was a large-scale investor, managing £500M of pension funds. He told us plainly that the funds needed to meet our renewable energy targets will not be available.

I asked the panel to comment on the sustainability of liquid biofuels, used in all our transport fuels but also planned as fuel for two new power stations being developed by W4B-UK. We were privileged to have the CEO of the Renewable Fuels Agency, Nick Goodall, to shine a spotlight on bioliquids and their carbon reduction and sustainability credentials. A real expert in getting the details across, Nick made clear that, due to the RTFO, transport is the only area of our 2020 renewables targets that we are on track to meet. "But not at any price", he said. His agency's target is for 80% of biofuel to be sourced against meaningful sustainability standards: the industry's current performance is a meagre 33%. Of the 3 billion litres of biofuel that have been burnt in Britain's fuel tanks from 2008 to date, over 250 million litres were palm oil. Nick told me afterwards that this is just 3% of the country's consumption of palm oil and he asked wryly when Greenpeace is going to go after lipstick.

It seems to me that the palm oil industry has aligned itself with campaigners this year, in acknowledging that production methods are unsustainable and threatening tropical biodiversity. Is this a tactic to buy them a little more time? My fear is that, by the time the industry implements the sustainable production standards and traceable sourcing that it now claims to want, there won't be any remaining habitat for orang-utans and all the other species clinging to life in the threatened rainforests and peatlands of Borneo and Sumatra.

In conclusion, as noted by a lawyer specialising in renewable energy finance, the low carbon economy can only be delivered by government. My feeling is that there is a critical role for citizens and campaigners to call for decisive leadership from our government to decarbonise Britain's economy - and to make their voices heard above the siren calls for less capital-intensive fossil fuel energy capacity (that's unabated coal and gas) and more attractive returns for investors looking for 12% annual growth (nice if you can get it).

Windsor & Eton Brewery

2010-11-25T17:00:00.000Z

What an excellent evening we had last night! Our local brewery hosted a meeting of Sustainable Windsor, with an inspiring tour of their newly-built plant and the opportunity to taste all three of their excellent, cask-conditioned ales.

The brewer, Paddy Johnson, explained many fascinating details of the brewing process, ingredient sourcing and distribution, emphasising how sustainable these processes are for a local brewer delivering cask-conditioned beers to local pubs. From the low-energy malting of their barley to the heat-recovery systems on the copper, everything felt right about the way Paddy is crafting his beers. Moreover, he explained that the brewery was deliberately situated in the heart of the town, in order to play a responsible part in our community.

In the Sustainable Windsor meeting that followed, Paddy once again led the way with some great suggestions for engaging local businesses and promoting sustainable activities and behaviours through regular features in the local press. An inspiring vision for 2011 from the team that have created an exciting and successful local business in 2010.

The Two Brewers at The Two Brewers!
Willie and Paddy at the launch of their first beer on St George's Day, 2010

Sustainable Living, beyond energy

2010-11-22T12:32:00.004Z

In my recent post, "The Basics Revisited", I covered the essentials of cutting carbon by saving energy at home. Here I want to look beyond energy and explore the vast question of how to live more sustainably in our consumer society. I can do no more than scratch the surface - whereas the film, "No Impact Man" gets uncomfortably close to the bottom of this issue!

While I am doing my best to reduce the impact of my everyday living on the environment, I remain comfortably affluent and middle-class. In discussing these matters I am aware of the risk of hypocrisy in bleating about sustainable sourcing while poverty, war and natural disasters are ravaging millions of families around the world. My purpose in writing this is not to solve the world's problems but to offer you practical ideas and encouragement to make your life a bit greener by cutting waste and making the most of what you have. I hope this will make you a little happier and it will also rub off on the people around you. This article, published in the Wall Street Journal last month, compiled decades of research that demonstrates the best way to persuade other people to make ethical and environmental choices is to lead by example. When we do what we say, practice what we preach, other people take notice. "You must be the change that you want to see in the world" - Mahatma Gandhi.

Food and Drink
We had friends round for dinner on Saturday. While dinner parties are not about sustainability, I was very happy with the menu we prepared. To start, ricotta and herb-filled courgette parcels in beetroot cream (from the Montali vegetarian cookbook). For main course, MSC-certified lemon sole with Atlantic prawn and breadcrumb gratin. The dessert was FairTrade chocolate mousse with walnuts and cream. Tragically, I used Divine's 85% cocoa recipe which turned the mousse rock hard. Lesson learned!

The Lemon Sole link, above, takes you to the START initiative, which encourages us all to - yes - start doing a little to help protect our climate and the diversity of life on earth. To buy sustainable seafood, look out for the MSC logo. Similarly, to buy products from the developing world, from bananas to coffee, sugar to cotton and roses to red wine, look out for Fair Trade. It is often slighted as being "less good" than some other people's schemes but, honestly, it is the best across-the-board consumer signpost for ethically sourced produce. Rarely seen in Tesco now, this is the best argument for shopping in Sainsbury's (their own-label teas and ground coffees, their bananas and their Taste the Difference jams are all fair trade) and the Co-op.

The important point is not to restrict yourself to finding only the most ethical and sustainable ingredients but rather to develop your sense of particular things to avoid. I've been trying lately, for example, not to buy products containing palm oil that do not state it is sustainably sourced. It is practically impossible to avoid this ubiquitous ingredient - it doesn't even have to be listed in the Ingredients Declarations! - so I'd prefer to give my business to companies that recognise the importance of sustainable sourcing. Sainsbury's "Pure" soap and Nairns oatcakes are just two examples. So far, I haven't found a low-fat vegetable spread that claims sustainably-sourced palm oil and I am waiting for the likes of Unilever to fix this. Fortunately, that's exactly what they are going to do. This week they launched their Sustainable Living Plan, committing to source ALL their ingredients sustainably within a decade. I hope they will move fast on palm oil while there are still orang-utans left to save.

More broadly, the most sustainable food is local and seasonal. We've lost touch with the gardening year so most of us, myself included, are pretty woolly on what's in season each month. Of course, the best remedy is to grow your own and gain a real connection with the soil. Reading the labels to find home-grown veg at a decent price per kilo is a poor substitute but it does help to home in on seasonal produce! Conversely, Mike Berners-Lee points out in his book, "How Bad are Bananas?" that a single kilo of organic cherry tomatoes grown in Britain in March has a carbon footprint of 50 kg CO2! That staggering figure is the highest carbon footprint of any food. He advises us to buy tinned tomatoes in the winter / spring, or fresh tomatoes grown in warmer climes like Spain, to avoid the intensive fossil fuel heating of greenhouse-grown crops. While the transport impact of shipments within Europe is much smaller than heating the greenhouses, I do try to avoid fresh, perishable foods that are flown from South America - 12,000 miles away.

The golden rule of sustainable housekeeping is to plan your meals and make a list. Buy only what's on the list, cook only as much food as needed and eat everything you prepare - leftovers make great ingredients!

Waste and Recycling
For years, the mantra of environmentalists has been "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". We tend to skip over the first two so let's just remember that they mean buy only what we need, make it last and, when it breaks, try to repair it or use it in another way. Throwing things away is the last resort (and there is no 'away') but we are all becoming accustomed to the third R, recycling. My council (RBWM) has introduced a progressive policy of commingled recycling, with consumer vouchers to reward residents for recycling.

I find it ironic that they are aiming to maximise weight of recycled material by giving away vouchers for buying more stuff! More serious is the fact that they will collect NO PLASTIC, other than bottles, in their doorstep recycling service. Other packaging they consign to landfill includes aluminium foil and drinks cartons! These exceptions are absolutely crucial and must be addressed - either by upgraded doorstep recycling or expanded "bring sites" for residents to recycle these materials. I hope that my readers will be motivated to collect all these packaging materials and find ways to recycle them because, let's face it, the decision to send stuff to landfill is a personal one. I refuse to send mixed plastic packaging to landfill so I am filling my garage with bags of the stuff, cleaned and ready to recycle when the Council finally recognises their duty to enable this. Foil and cartons are much simpler (as are batteries and compact fluorescent lamps) because there are "bring sites" that I can take them to when my boxes are full.

Transport and Travel
I covered driving in a much earlier post but the key points bear repeating. Personal transport is one of our largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Nowadays, a typical car emits something like 150g CO2 per kilometre. We drive an average of 12,000 miles a year. Assuming we're always alone in the car, this emits around 3 Tonnes of CO2, which is 20% of the average Briton's total of 15 Tonnes/year.

There is a great decision tool on the Start website, to help you work through the choices of whether to keep an old, inefficient car or replace it with a shiny new, low-emisisons model. Living without a car for a couple of years taught me to view them as antisocial constructs! Of course, we need them for commuting, shopping and holidays. Indeed, the car is a greener choice than the plane for our summer hols but still we are poisoning our atmosphere and tarmacking our countryside to make this choice possible. Accidents result in horrendous cost and suffering for the unlucky victims - frequently the people who chose to walk or cycle, without the protection of a steel box packed with airbags. What is impossible to appreciate when regularly driving all over the place, for all sorts of reasons (good and bad), is how dependent we are on these machines and the freedom they provide, as they propel us wherever we wish to be on a cloud of carbon emissions from highly-refined fossil fuels.

Ours is a genuine and complete addiction and it is not clear how we will ever break the habit. If we can't quit then let's at least cut down a little! With cars, like flights, it is time for us to begin weighing up whether each journey is necessary. Our commute to work might not be optional but the school run, the quick trip to the post office or the corner shop, might be better and more enjoyable without the car. Clean your boots, pump up your bike tyres and get outdoors! I now walk to town for all the minor errands and only drive to the supermarket for a big shop once a week. Even this could be ordered online, and delivered by a fuel-efficient multi-drop driver but I'm not usually that well organised.

There are endless other categories and tips but this is a blog post not a Haynes manual. Please have a look at some of the book references in my last post - particularly Chris Goodall's comprehensive "How to live a low-carbon Life". I would be very interested in your own suggestions so please add your comments to this page.

Green Teams, Best Books and a Teen Movie

2010-11-18T20:38:00.008Z

A big "Thank You" from me to the Centrica / British Gas Green Teams, for inviting me to open their annual Forum at the Energy Academy in Leicester today. I was given half an hour to explain why the environment, and sustainability, is so important to me - and to run through the current status of our knowledge of climate change and biodiversity. What an opportunity - and what a reception! I enjoyed meeting so many of you afterwards and discussing particular points that had caught your attention. My presentation, together with the References for each slide, will be on your intranet site and I hope you will also have my library of public-domain reports that will help you to drill down into any areas that interest you.

In my humble opinion, anybone wanting to read some particularly accessible books on climate change could do no better than these titles - available from all good bookshops!

1) "What's the Worst that could Happen" by Greg Craven, a science teacher from Oregon who posted a famous series of common-sense videos on YouTube that became the biggest hit in 2008.

2) "The Last Generation" by Fred Pearce, an immensely readable overview of the science and forecasts.

3) "The Hot Topic" by Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King, former Chief Scientist.

3) "Do good lives have to cost the Earth?" edited by Andrew Simms and Joe Smith. Essays from many famous commentators.

4) For unsurpassed insight into the demographic and political issues, with the best attempt at regulatory solutions, "Hot, Flat and Crowded" by Thomas L. Friedman was President Obama's holiday reading in 2009.

5) For the best photographs, "An Inconvenient Truth" by you know who.

6) To hear it from the horse's mouth, "Storms of my Grandchildren" by James Hansen pulls no punches.

7) To understand the global movement of our everyday goods, "Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Travels to where my stuff comes from" by Fred Pearce is an eye-opening travelogue of the sources and sinks of modern consumer goods.

8) "How Bad are Bananas" is a light-hearted number-crunch through "the carbon footprint of everything", by Mike Berners-Lee. Mike is an unbeatable sustainability consultant - his company, Small World consulting, put together the Guardian's excellent, "Quick Carbon Calculator".

9) Lastly, the definitive guide to reducing our impact is "How to Live a Low Carbon Life" (2nd Edition) by Chris Goodall. Chris writes Carbon Commentary, which is a much better blog than this one, and his books are just about the last word in meticulously researched advice for sustainable living.

Tomorrow is a very special day for young climate campaigners.

This is from www.beyondthebrink.org:

Beyond the Brink is a young filmmaker’s take on the climate change debate. 18-year-old Ross Harrison spent a year chasing up experts, studying the news and filming to create a short documentary that answers the ever-pressing questions, Are we really causing climate change? and Who cares?

The result is a 40 minute film about the knowns and the unknowns of the science, about the risks, and about being hopeful for the future too. Interviews with Sir David Attenborough, Mark Lynas, David Shukman, Prof Dieter Helm, the UK Youth Climate Coalition, and Ross’ grandparents among others, offer fresh perspectives on a subject that saturates the media, divides the public, and yet is still meaningless to many.

At a time when people feel overloaded by hype and put off by scandals, Beyond the Brink seeks to lay out how things really stand now. Beyond the Brink is a not-for-profit production available for free for anyone to watch and use. Please let us know if you intend to screen it.

No Impact Man

2010-11-02T10:24:00.003Z

Sustainable Windsor has teamed up with the Firestation Arts Centre to bring you the best eco-films at a discounted price. That's right, being eco-conscious really does pay off!

The first film in our eco-films promotion is No Impact Man on Thursday, November 4 at 8pm. The film tells the true-life story of Colin Beavan and his family who abandon their high-consumption New York lifestyle to try and live for a year without making any net environmental impact on the planet. That's no cars, no buses, no electricity, no rubbish.

Go here to see the trailer.

The first 25 Sustainable Windsor film lovers will get a massive 20% off the price of their tickets (normally £7.25). Just say, 'I'm with Sustainable Windsor!' when you book and you can see the film for just £5.75,

Don't worry if you haven't come to one of our fab Sustainable Windsor meetings before - you can still enjoy along to the screening and, hopefully, we'll see you at the next one!

Go to the Firestation website for more info and call 01753 866865 to book tickets or just turn up on the night.

The basics revisited

2010-09-29T20:11:00.007+01:00

I've had so many people asking me for advice on saving energy, reducing emissions and consuming less in recent weeks. I do love advising people on these topics but, really, I'm delighted because it shows that many more people are becoming interested in reducing their own impact.

So here's my attempt to summarise the things that we can do to reduce our emissions from energy use at home.

I won't be able to get everything in but feel free to let me know anything important that I've missed. Other guides to the basics are available, such as this one from Tesco, but I'd recommend caution with any advice - for instance, Tesco claim that DAB digital radios save energy compared with your existing, analogue radio - the truth is precisely opposite.

Meters

Before you even start thinking about cutting your home energy use, please please PLEASE begin recording your meter readings on a regular basis! Monthly is ideal. Weekly if you're really into it, like me, or if you want to use i-measure to compare your energy and emissions with other, similar households.

If you can put your readings straight into a spreadsheet then you are well on the way to seeing exactly what benefit your energy-saving efforts are giving you. If not, just write them down in a small book or log-sheet and keep it in your meter cupboard. When you want to know how much you have saved, you'll have the all-important data to answer this question.

Heat

Our homes are responsible for over a quarter of Britain's carbon emissions while, altogether, buildings account for more than half our emissions. What works at home may well be applicable at work, in the shops or in public buildings across the country.

The biggest chunk of our home energy use in Britain goes on heating: both air (space) and water. Ultimately, this heat is all lost to the home's surroundings. Energy efficient heating involves slowing the rate at which our heat escapes, so that we can maintain a comfortable indoor temperature using less fuel and therefore less emissions.

The cheap and easy place to insulate in most houses, or top-floor flats, is your loft. I've posted lots of links to various types of loft insulation in this blog but, basically, any DIY store should have plenty of top-up insulation available at half price, or BOGOF, subsidised by the energy companies under their carbon reduction commitment. The recommended depth of loft insulation is now 275mm (call it a foot) but I've gone for 400mm over most of my loft, to make up for the storage areas where I have only got 200mm of rigid urethane foam. This works, in conjunction with reflective bubble-wrap on the rafters, to keep my water tank from freezing in winter.

Post-war houses typically have cavity walls and these need to be insulated. If yours haven't been done, you will find this an unbeatable investment - it will pay for itself in reduced energy bills in a couple of years! Older houses have solid walls, which are tougher to insulate. But all is not lost! If you're redecorating, it's the ideal opportunity to fit high-performance internal wall insulation. Although only 1 or 2 cm thick, these amazing materials can cut heat loss through your walls by as much as 25 cm of mineral wool loft insulation.

Doors and windows are, put simply, holes! To keep your warmth in, fit draught excluders to make sure that they fit securely. This is one of the cheapest DIY energy-saving methods. Nice thick curtains are great insulators and they turn south-facing windows into passive solar heaters, allowing the light and warmth in during the day but preventing it from escaping at night. Just so long as you use them.

Replacement windows and doors are much more expensive than draught excluders and curtains but replacing single-glazed windows and doors with double glazing will make your home warm and quiet and can be a good investment in maintaining the value of your home. The latest energy-efficient windows have cleverly-designed frames to prevent "thermal bridges" - parts of a building structure that conduct heat through the fabric of the building. At lower cost, secondary double glazing can be a fantastic investment and may be the only way to reduce heat loss from windows in listed buildings or conservation areas. Magneglaze polycarbonate panels fit inside your existing window-frames and are secured with magnetic strips. They cost £100-120 per square metre. They will reduce your energy bills and emissions, cut down external noise and reduce condensation. Of course, you could make your own secondary glazing - we used the ultimate cheap solution in our previous house, until we could afford to fit decent double glazing.

Other holes are responsible for heat loss as well. Chimneys, kitchen extractors, cat flaps, gaps round pipes and even air bricks. Ventilation is important but modern buildings, built to 'passivhaus' or even zero-carbon standards, are designed to be hermetically sealed. Ventilation is then provided deliberately, using ducted heat-recovery systems that bring fresh air in and pump stale, moist air out without losing its heat. I live right under the Heathrow flightpath and fitted one of these systems to my 1950s house in 2008. We have benefited in 3 ways: firstly, the energy savings from heat recovery and an airtight home (I have found and blocked up all the holes in our walls and around doors, windows and pipes). Second, clean, filtered air means less dust and smells in the house (and you should see the inlet filters when I change them every quarter). Finally, the ventilation system means that we can keep our windows closed at night and this means that we are not woken up by aeroplanes before dawn!

The last place to consider heat loss is through the floor but, as I am not prepared to raise the level of my home's floors, there is very little that I can do to cut this heat loss.

While space heating is very seasonal, we need hot water all year round. Solar water heating is a big investment (about the same as a new boiler) but it does enable you to shut down your boiler in the summer months. If you have a hot water cylinder, it pays to insulate it thoroughly - it should keep your water hot for 24 hours.

You can also save energy, and cut your emissions, by using less hot water when you shower. First, get used to turning off the shower water when you lather up. This technique is called a navy shower, and allows you to have a relaxing and effective shower while using running water for just 2 minutes in total. Second, fit a low-flow device such as this one from EAGA, available free in a government-funded energy-saving scheme.

Use your heating controls. Make sure that the hot water cylinder is fitted with a thermostat and that you set it to a lowish temperature, that is hot enough for showers / baths / washing up.

Lots of people prefer to keep their hot water "always on" which means that your heat loss from the cylinder is continuously at its worst. Instead, limit the time that the boiler runs - for both hot water and for central heating - because heating fuel consumption is, surprisingly, well correlated with running hours! It's also worthwhile replacing your room thermostat (the temperature dial) with a modern, "adaptive" thermostat. In my home, this saved 10% on the winter gas bill because it learns how your home responds to the boiler and prevents the room temperature from over-shooting and wasting fuel. Lastly, thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) can help to reduce heating bills by limiting the temperature in bedrooms or unused rooms. They can only do this if you adjust them to meet your needs. Don't have a TRV on the radiator nearest to your room thermostat - it will prevent the room 'stat from turning the boiler off when it should.

Light

Many of my earlier entries in this blog detail how to replace inefficient lights with energy saving alternatives. The variety is bewildering so I would just say here, make a start. Don't try and do it all at once. Pick on a type of lighting in your home and try one or two replacements. When you find the energy-efficient lighting solution that you like for that type of bulb, fit it to all instances of that light in your home. When you're ready for another round, pick on another type, and so on. I started in 2006, with the SBC (small bayonet) golfball bulbs that were all around my living and dining rooms. I moved on to ceiling mounted BC (bayonet) and ES (screw) bulbs and then tackled the mains halogen bulbs called GU10s.

Next came the fluorescent striplights over the kitchen counter and the filament striplights found in our drinks cabinet and lots of bathroom lights. Replacing these with LEDs was a big win, reducing power consumption of those lights by 90%.

Lastly, the plethora of low-voltage halogen lamps that have colonised our homes in the last 10 or 20 years. It is now becoming practical to replace these with LED bulbs but to obtain equivalent brightness to the commonest halogen lamps (50 watt) remains very pricey.

Appliances

After heating and lighting, our gadgets are the biggest energy consumers in our homes. Top of the league are WET appliances - washing machine, tumble drier and dishwasher. Minimise energy wastage by running them less often, waiting until they are fully loaded, and selecting a lower temperature. Your kettle also swallows up a surprising amount of energy for such a little feller - be sure to boil only as much water as you need.

Next comes COLD appliances - fridges and freezers. Any of these over 10 or 15 years old are likely to be costing you a fortune to run. My 1990 Zanussi larder fridge got through almost 800 units of electricity (kilowatt-hours or kWh) a year: its same-sized replacement runs on just 80 kWh a year! At a cost of less than £200, this new fridge has paid for itself within 3 years.

Thirdly, entertainment and IT are using an increasing proportion of our household electricity. The proliferation of little black plugs and in-line boxes shows how many transformers we have plugged into our sockets in recent years. They ALL need to be switched off at the wall when not in use because they all (apart from the very latest, super-green phone chargers) suck power from the grid 24/7, regardless of whether or not we are using them. Remote controls like Bye Bye Standby are great for lights and home entertainments but, for all the black boxes you have around the home, the best thing to do is to hunt them down and UNPLUG them. Just plug them in when you need them and pull them out when you're done. No cost and even a bit of aerobic exercise for free!

Specifically on IT, I am writing this blog on my Fit-PC 2. This magical machine (technical term, net-top) is a small block of aluminium, about the size of two fag packets side-by-side (I don't smoke but it's the best illustration), that runs Windows just as well as my old tower PC but consumes less than 10 watts! When I got it, I expected that it would only be good for email and spreadsheets but I've come to rely on it for all my digital photos, music (I run a Squeezebox sever on it the whole time), Skype, YouTube and even BBC iPlayer! It's not quite as quick as my old PC when it comes to playing DVDs but, to be honest, I don't want to do that on my PC.

Another brilliant gadget for power saving with your computer bits is called the Intellipanel. You plug your computer and all its peripherals into the panel and, when you shut down or hibernate your computer, it kills the power to all the peripherals. It has special sockets for external hard drives, so that these don't crash if they're still running when the PC stops. You can even switch the Intellipanel off at the wall when everything's off and, when you turn it back on, it is ready to detect when you press the power button on your PC for another online session. Magic!

This post has concentrated on reducing home energy use. In my next post, I will review other aspects of sustainability in everyday life in modern Britain, such as food, recycling and travel.

Thanks for reading and don't hesitate to get in touch: either leave a comment or email cutyourcarbon (at) gmail (dot) com - this is not a clickable link because I don't want lots of spam from automated crawler bots.

Coming of age

2010-08-23T15:29:00.009+01:00

We hosted my son's 18th birthday party at the weekend. A low-carbon occasion? Probably not. Much work went into preparing the house and garden for the influx of guests and we were so happy to be able to celebrate with most of our family and many of our friends.

Having finally completed the recycling I can confirm that we got through a fair few bottles and cans. The most important thing is that everyone enjoyed the party, particularly the birthday boy and his friends who stayed up most of the night.

I do think that our celebration had sustainability in mind, though. While we did have some gorgeous pastries made for us by Waitrose, the bulk of the catering was home-made: we enjoyed an extensive buffet (mostly vegetarian - there was no meat but we did poach a couple of salmon) and our daughter made several delightful desserts - some healthy, others less so. We had a spectacular birthday cake prepared and decorated by my wonderful Mum. Friends from the Windsor & Eton Brewery provided us with a firkin (70 pints) of "Knight of the Garter" - an irresistable, golden ale brewed within a mile of our house. Waitrose loaned us all the glasses and we borrowed cutlery and crockery from friends and family, to avoid all those disposable cups and plates. The solar garden lights and the LED spotlights in the marquee made for a great evening atmosphere. Fortunately, the only breakage of the evening was an exceedingly old deck-chair that gave up the ghost when three merry 18-year old girls tried to share it.

Although I seemed to be running the dishwasher non-stop throughout the party (about 6 "eco" cycles, I think), our annual electricity usage has slipped below 5,000 kWh for the first time today. This will help me on my way to my 10:10 target of 4,770 kWh electricity during 2010.

My other 10:10 target has been to sign up as many local people as I can. Last week, at Centrica's offices in Windsor, I was honoured and delighted to present 10:10 tags to 6 members of the Board of British Gas, all of whom pledged to sign up to the campaign. This took place during the final presentation of the Customer Panel, where we set out the challenges of our Customer Charter. I am sure that British Gas will work hard to publicise this in the autumn and they have promised to bring the Customer Panel back together some time in the spring of 2011, to tell us how they are getting on with implementing our Charter. For now, I will only say that it has been an absolute privilege to take part in the Customer Panel and I have complete confidence that British Gas have taken sustainability right to the heart of their business.

Soap Boxes

2010-07-09T11:53:00.004+01:00

The erudite comedian David Mitchell has summed up the true position on climate change perfectly in this 3 minute Soap Box monologue. Priceless - and probably more use in spreading the word than Al Gore's Inconvenient movie. Please watch it and share it with everyone you know with a sense of humour and an open mind.

I heard another Soap Box oration yesterday afternoon, from Phil Bentley, the Managing Director of British Gas. I'm on his company's Customer Panel because I want to encourage them to promote sustainability to the 12 million households that buy energy from British Gas.

The amazing thing about Phil's address to the Customer Panel was that his strategic concerns and intentions are exactly what I would have wished them to be. He highlighted three aspects, that he called the 'eternal triangle' of energy supply:

1) Security of supply - the past winter was the the first time that Britain imported more gas than we produced. As North Sea gas supply continues to wane, our net energy imports will continue to rise so we need to act now, to diversify our energy supplies.

2) De-carbonise the energy supply - climate change will have a huge impact on society across the world and Britain is taking the lead on building our low carbon energy future.

3) Affordability of energy - British companies will spend £200Bn over the next decade, to secure energy supplies from low-carbon sources. Unfortunately, while we have the lowest unit prices for energy in the whole of Europe, our energy bills are the highest because of the low energy efficiency of much of our housing stock. British Gas focuses resources to support households that are low-income and vulnerable, these costs are shared by all its customers. Phil is happy to discuss the best solutions to improving the energy efficiency of the nation's homes with you, me and our Governement.

I suggested that these were the same requirements for our sustainable energy future that Thomas L. Friedman articulated in his book, 'Hot, Flat and Crowded', where he argues the case for clean, cheap and plentiful electrons. Phil responded emphatically that he can't deliver cheap and I am in total agreement with him that affordable is the more appropriate target.

In my view, it's because energy is so cheap today that we are willing to waste it without a second thought. Just as you can't unboil an egg, the laws of thermodynamics mean that we can't unwaste energy. All we can do, going forward, is to waste less.

Being on the Customer Panel at British Gas has given me unique insight into the company's environmental programmes and practicies. As a volunteer, with no contractual arrangements to constrain what I say, I remain fully independent and willing to criticise and praise as I see fit. I have nothing but praise for Phil's strategic intentions and hope that constructive criticism of his company's pace of change, and actions to communicate these intentions to customers and the wider public, might help them to lead the energy industry and its customers in Britain towards a more sustainable future.

Exploring an onshore wind farm

2010-05-27T11:47:00.016+01:00

There was a lot of discussion last week about the merits of offshore renewables, following the launch of "The Offshore Valuation", the latest report from the Public Interest Research Centre.

I agree with their findings but not with some of the interpretations of this report in the press. For example, George Monbiot argued that this work shows that onshore wind is not worthwhile in comparison with offshore wind, wave and tidal power.

Last week, I took the train from King's Cross to Aberdeen to visit the Centrica's 20-turbine wind farm in the Glens of Foudland, near Huntly. The airports were closed that morning by volcanic ash so there wasn't a spare seat to be had on the train. The plus side was that the emissions per passenger-kilometre were absolutely minimal on this journey. Actually, I was pretty confident that, during April and May, Eyjafjallajokull was responsible for more carbon emissions reductions than the wind farm I was visiting - but that's not a popular sentiment amongst our erstwhile-airborne friends and colleagues. I have to confess that the return journey, with about 30% occupancy on the train, was a lot more comfortable.

The windfarm was commissioned in April 2005 and is ideally situated at an altitude of 330m on rocky hills set in a wide, windy valley. Because of this situation, it has achieved a consistently high load factor (ie., proportion of its theoretical peak output) throughout its 5 years of operation. It is now reaching the end of its manufacturer's warranty period so there were several engineers on site, checking each of the turbines for faults and preparing to change the gearbox oil (which, I was assured, is taken away for reconditioning and reuse). With the right build quality and the appropriate level of care, these turbines will continue to generate renewable energy from free fuel for a quarter of a century.

Wind turbines are very valuable assets and their components operate under extremely high stress - just imagine the weight of a turbine blade (which can now be up to 60 metres long) turning full circle every few seconds, bolted onto a steel shaft driving a generator through a huge gearbox on top of a hollow steel tube, in a highland gale.

Now picture the same construction glued onto another 100-metre pile driven into the seabed, battered by waves and corroded by salt spray. The maintenance challenges are much more extreme than for these onshore wind turbines but the access is unimaginably difficult and expensive. So, while I agree that the longterm prospects for renewable energy from Britain's offshore territories are superb, I am certain that we need to continue erecting onshore wind turbines in suitably windy locations across the country. Britain faces energy supplies issues from the middle of the current decade and we need to be working flat out to install do-able renewable energy technologies now, at the same time as we are developing next generation renewables for the future.

The other piece of the puzzle which was written up by Jamie Bull, one of the researchers for the PIRC report, but not developed within the report, is the return on energy invested in building and maintaining renewable energy assets. Along with tidal range schemes like the lagoons proposed as a alternative to the Severn barrage, wind turbines yield the greatest return on energy invested in their manufacture, installation and maintenance. They are about three times as efficient as solar electricity panels, for example. And that goes for both onshore and offshore wind installations. So let's keep putting more wind turbines in windy places, where the load factors will be as high as possible and where the ground won't be damaged (for example, installing wind turbines on peatland dries out the precious peat, causing large-scale methane and CO2 emissions) and let's get used to their visual impact. After all, we have covered the countryside with pylons and cables for distributing electricity - let's put up with these bigger pylons that actually make it, for free!

My thanks to British Gas, for covering the costs of my rail fare and accommodation for this visit, and to Matthew Walsh, the extremely knowledgeable and able manager in charge of the operation and maintenance of Centrica's wind farms. He's one of those unknown soldiers in the fight against climate change and I take my hat off to him.

First "Sustainable Windsor" Newsletter

2010-05-05T14:20:00.003+01:00

It's two weeks since we had our first meeting to launch Sustainable Windsor and we have just published the following newsletter to report all the great ideas that came out.

This new community organisation has a bright future ahead: email cutyourcarbon@gmail.com if you'd like to be added to our distribution list.

Local people form "Sustainable Windsor", a community organisation to promote sustainable living.

Sustainable Windsor, a community group inspired by the 10:10 initiative to reduce our carbon emissions by 10% in 2010 (www.1010uk.org), had its first meeting in April. We enjoyed a good turnout at The Alma pub in Springfield Road, with plenty of lively debate and many practical ideas across a range of subjects. Please feel free to pass on this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Details on how to get involved with Sustainable Windsor are at the end of this newsletter.

We started on waste and composting. We heard about the Composting Coach, who teaches companies how to compost their organic waste matter, and that Transco (who run the National Grid) are planning to build a huge biogas plant for London.

We talked about the "Green Point" logo, owned by Valpak, that obliges consumer goods manufacturers to fund the recycling of their packaging in Germany but not in other parts of Europe. We also recognised the missed opportunity to recycle valuable cans and bottles that are drunk "on the go" and thrown away in our high streets. We agreed on the need to campaign for on-the-go recycling points in our town.

We also liked the idea, emailed by one of our members, of collecting the red rubber bands that are dropped all over town by our dear postmen and women. We could then make them into balls and bounce them into the Post Office in Windsor for reuse, with a friendly journalist on hand to witness this simple action on litter and waste!

We learned that British business uses brown and clear glass whereas green glass is principally reused in Spain, for European wine bottles. The current trend of mixed glass recycling ends up as aggregate (replacing gravel) for surfacing roads, meaning that the UK glass industry has lost its free supply of recycled material. Waste sorting companies can readily segregate recycled glass into separate colour streams, renewing this valuable supply of clear and brown glass as raw materials for British manufacturers.

The last point on waste was mixed plastics recycling. Several of us have been fobbed off by the council, who say that collecting plastics (other than bottles) for recycling is prohibitively expensive and that there is no market for these plastics. Peter considers both these points to be false and is working with the Royal Borough's waste management team to find a solution for mixed plastics recycling in Windsor, as soon as possible.

We moved on to local food and allotments. It was noted that, although the council have long waiting lists for allotments in the Royal Borough, many of our allotments are currently lying fallow. Anne offered to contact Geoff Lane, the allotment manager in Eton Wick, to dig deeper (excuse the pun) into the reasons for this. Laura suggested that we partner up with the Windsor Allotment Society (WAGGA) to drum up more support for their summer fair and sales of produce from the allotments.

Neil proposed that we need to, "live like a village, not a town". This captures perfectly the essence of community actions for sustainable living. He suggested that we can arrange to collect all the windfall and unwanted apples across the town this summer, to make community cider. We loved this idea and will seek the help of our friends at the new Windsor & Eton Brewery.

Suzie thought we should co-opoerate with the CPRE, Civic Voice and the Civic Trust, to support our open spaces and wild areas.

Next came home energy use, looking at the latest LED lights that can replace low-voltage halogen lamps. We talked about the carbon club, called "Windsor Sustainable Living", on the imeasure website at www.imeasure.org.uk. Anyone signing up to imeasure is asked to enter their weekly energy usage, in the form of meter readings, and you can then see the emissions of CO2 per person from your house, in comparison with all the other users of the site, or with the other members of the carbon club if you decide to join. It's a great way to see how you're doing compared with like-minded people and the element of competition pushes you to turn down, switch off, and save a little more than you might otherwise do. Peter would be more than happy to offer informal, free advice to anyone wishing to reduce their home's energy use. Indeed, he was heard on Radio 4's "You and Yours" programme last week, extolling the virtues of saving energy - and money - at home. You can hear him here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007k260.

We then considered how to promote cycling in Windsor. Peter pointed out the little-known bye-law that permits children aged 12 and under to cycle on pavements in the town. We agreed that this should be publicised, together with the need for courtesy towards pedestrians, to encourage families to help their young children to begin cycling more safely. Hand-in-hand with more use of pavements, we recognised that the anti-social practice of parking on pavements is becoming prevalent in some parts of town and needs to be addressed pro-actively by both the council and the police. We also felt that the Windsor cycle network needs to be more integrated - particularly in the light of the major redevelopment of the Imperial Road roundabout that is due to begin shortly.

We addressed media and communication with a proposal that the Fire Station Arts Centre could screen an amazing eco-film festival this autumn, with titles such as "The Age of Stupid", "Eleventh Hour", "The End of the Line" and many more. Hannah, Laura and Neil all know Dan and the team at the Fire Station so we have a real opportunity to put together a major event in the civic calendar for Windsor, and attract a wide range of new members to join Sustainable Windsor.

Finally, we thought about education and the benefit of speaking to children at school, to engage them and their families in Sustainable Windsor. This will be more practical once we have some teachers amongst our membership, which should happen naturally as we continue to recruit local people through our initiatives and activities.

Having talked through so many topics at our first meeting, we look forward to a second meeting in a couple of months time - probably late June or early July. In the meantime, please email me your comments and suggestions on the points raised in this newsletter and any other matters you feel we could usefully cover in our next meeting.

To find out more about Sustainable Windsor or to be added to the email list, please contact cutyourcarbon@gmail.com

Earth Day and St George's Day

2010-04-23T10:51:00.006+01:00

Thursday 22 April was the fortieth Earth Day, when people around the world reflect on our ecological impact and try to change their behaviour in some way that lessens this impact. An article in "Slate" (an American online magazine) this week has reviewed research published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (which sounds like an oxymoron to me) on how to reduce the environmental impact of households.

Their key recommendations are: insulation, energy-efficient appliances, drive fuel-efficient cars (and drive less), eat less meat and dairy products, eat more locally produced food and drinks and more foods in season.

I cannot disagree with any of these but the important thing for me is to encourage people to look beyond their household and feel part of their community. This week, Hannah Masters-Waage, Laura Spence and I launched "Sustainable Windsor", a community organisation focused on making Windsor a little more sustainable. I will write up the outcomes of our first meeting separately but it was a really positive start.

Speaking of Start, The Prince of Wales has launched a campaign called Start which encourages people to begin changing their behaviour now, with the things that matter most to them. Prince Charles is known to be the lead member of the Windsor household for sustainability and I look forward to seeing this campaign grow.

Another initiative launched for Earth Day was GreenMyParents and its Facebook page. This is a great movement for young people to influence their elders and to spread the message by teaching their peers to do the same. It has a commercial side (they are selling a book) but the basic message to young people and their parents is to work together to save money and the planet through simple, everyday actions.

And now it is St George's Day. There could be no more sustainable way to celebrate our Patron Saint than with a pint of Guardsman ale, the first product from the Windsor & Eton Brewery.

Produced within a mile of my home by the father of two of my Scouts, and three of his friends, this beer epitomises the local economy. Its launch today has been eagerly anticipated by thousands of Windsorians through their remarkable use of social media to link up local people online. And I am looking forward to joining the Brewers, and the newly-appointed Mayor of Windsor, for my first taste of Windsor beer at the Two Brewers in Park Street, right next to the Long Walk. It is auspicious that today's Google header shows the exact location of the Two Brewers - it is in the first "O" of Google!

Resigned to our fate?

2010-03-30T16:50:00.004+01:00

Listening to James Lovelock on the Today programme this morning was deeply disturbing. You can hear his interview with John Humphries here.

I am not troubled by his comments on the so-called 'climategate' emails from the University of East Anglia. He hasn't read the transcripts and, if the scientists involved have fudged the data in any way, then I would agree with his dismissal of any dishonest practices in science.

What really concerns me is his fatalism. He asserts that it will take us 20 - 30 years to rein in our carbon emissions and that this will lead to the cumulative total addition of a trillion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere. He describes this as "civilisation has pulled the trigger" and says we'll be lucky if the world population is as high as a billion people in future. Although Lovelock does not give a date for this future population in this interview, he did refer to the earth's population being well below a billion people in 2100 in his recent book, "The Vanishing Face of Gaia". In a similar interview on The Guardian website yesterday, Lovelock stated that the inertia of humanity is such that we can't do anything meaningful about climate change.

In my opinion, everyone who cares about the future of humanity and life on earth should take this as a personal challenge and set about making Lovelock wrong on this point. After all, as Greg Craven has so powerfully observed, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?"

A visit to the Council

2010-03-24T10:40:00.004Z

I have been collecting mixed plastic packaging (ie., food trays, tubs, pots, etc. but not bottles, bags, expanded polystyrene or film) at home for the past two years and have tried throughout that time to contact the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and ask them to recycle it.

In February, the local paper carried this story, with a picture of me glaring from a mountain of binbags full of our accumulated plastic. This led to an invitation to addresss the Council's Sustainability Panel, which met last night.

I had the honour of speaking before presentations from the Head of Packaging at each of our two largest retailers. My message was that many residents of the Royal Borough labour under the mistaken belief that their local authority recycles mixed plastics. These are therefore carefully cleaned and placed in the purple recycling boxes, along with bottles and cans, for kerbside collection by the council's contractor, Veolia, who then strip them OUT and send them to landfill!

Since 64% of our waste still goes to landfill, I said, it is the duty of the local authority to extract these valuable materials from our waste stream and recycle them. Pure picked polymers (ie., mixed plastic packaging SORTED into separate types) have a commercial value of £50 - £150 per Tonne.

I was saddened by the response from the council officers responsible for waste management, who said that reclaiming additional plastics from the waste stream would add greatly to the cost and would not make much difference to the tonnage going to landfill (because of the low density of plastic packaging) and also by the somewhat cynical allegation that many other authorities across the country are only 'pretending' to recycle these materials while actually burying, burning or exporting them to the developing world.

On the other hand, I was heartened to learn that the borough's contract for waste management is up for renewal in 2012 and that stringent environmental criteria could be included in the specifications for tender. My comments in response were that the Goverment's Waste and Recycling Action Programme (WRAP) had made the case for mixed plastics recycling and that RECOUP has developed comprehensive tools and analysis to enable more local authorities to do this in future.

When the senior packaging people from Tesco and Sainsbury addressed the Council, their presentations were inspiring, impactful, relevant and positive. It was a privilege to hear these thoughtful and informed contributions and this confirmed my view that retailers really are striving to green their operations because their customers expect this of them.

I was particularly moved by the forceful support for my position on post-consumer recycling of mixed plastics from one of these speakers - who told the Councillors that the myth of '36 types of plastic to sort' is an archaic hang-up from the past. There are just 4 or 5 high value polymers to sort and there are automated sorting facilities in operation around the country.

He went on to say that non-bottle PET is a high value material that can't be left to go to waste, that polypropylene (PP) is the next high value target for collection and that 'on-the-go' bottles and cans, thrown into street bins, are a problem that must be solved.

He said that his customers send him more letters about the availability of local recycling facilities than anything else and that bringback facilities in store car parks are destined to be replaced by kerbside collection as Councils increasingly fulfil their responsibility to recycle more of the domestic waste stream.

I was invited to visit the waste management officers in the coming weeks and am optimistic that, away from the political atmosphere of a Council panel, there is much that can be achieved and that there will be a shift in Council policy towards greater recycling in the coming years. Bring it on.

A day for 10:10

2010-03-07T10:47:00.012Z

Hannah, Laura and I have been working together for a few weeks, preparing to promote the 10:10 campaign to our local community.

It was a great pleasure to visit the 10:10 office in Camden last week and meet the team who are running this amazing initiative, many of them volunteers and all of them incredibly committed to inspiring the public at large to make personal commitments to combat dangerous climate change. They kindly lent me a 2-metre high 10:10 banner and gave us lots of handouts and even the coveted 10:10 tags to sign up lots of new recruits.

Yesterday, we spent 8 hours in Waitrose, chatting about climate change and this simple pledge to cut 10% of our carbon emissions right now, in 2010. This certainly improved our sales techniques, to the point that I could now sell "The Big Issue" if things go wrong on the domestic front.

There is definitely a 'fear factor' to be overcome when talking to the public and you have just milliseconds to allay their suspicions and convince them that you're not after their money or their time and that you're not going to sell their email address to spam marketing outfits!

In our experience, many people who got as far as understanding what 10:10 means were happy to sit down at our laptop and add their name to our campaign. The only disappointment was the number of shoppers who support the idea of 10:10 but do not use email. We did keep their telephone numbers, to invite them to be part of the sustainability group that we plan to set up in our local community as a result of yesterday's promotion.

We are incredibly grateful to Waitrose for their hospitality in allowing us to talk to their customers in the comfort of the store. We are also grateful to Julian, Shaun and Theo who gave their time yesterday to catch people's eyes and charm them into hearing what 10:10 is about.

Many lovely people signed up on the spot, or went away with literature and agreed to sign up online later. Some told us that what we were doing was important and worthwhile, for which we were grateful.

A few were forthright in telling us what's really going on!

One gentleman explained that it's the human population that has gotten out of control (I'm with him so far) and that this has shifted the Earth on its axis, resulting in the climate getting hotter.

Another said that it's all these damn wars (again, nothing to disagree with to this point) and, now we've pumped all the oil out of the ground, there's nothing left to absorb the noise of all those bombs and they are warming the planet by ringing it like a bell.

Other than these contrarian theories, the only objections to the idea of 10:10 came from serving and retired cabin crew - because the town is not far from Heathrow. In the words of Upton Sinclair, quoted by Al Gore in 'An Inconvenient Truth', "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Hannah, Laura and I felt privileged to present such an important message to the people of our town and were delighted with the response we received. It was an enlightening way to spend our Saturday and will lead, we hope, to a small reduction in the town's carbon emissions.

Finally, LED replacements for 12-volt halogen spotlights!

2010-01-20T15:59:00.007Z

It's almost 3 years since I replaced the many mains-halogen GU10 bulbs in my house with compact fluorescent alternatives. At about £8 each they were a significant investment but they have been paying me back in reduced bills ever since.

I was still stuck with about a dozen 12-volt halogen lights known as MR16. No CFL alternative exists and sufficiently bright LEDs have only recently started to come to market. I have now found suppliers for LED bulbs that are bright enough to replace MR16 halogen bulbs, at £10 - £25 each. I can't spare £25 a bulb but I am happy to pay £10 a pop to get rid of my remaining, wasteful MR16 halogen lamps.

There is a catch, however! Buried in the small print on the LED bulb packaging is the warning that they must not be used with standard, 12-volt halogen power supplies. Instead, they must be run using dedicated "LED drivers" which will not supply excess voltage when using such small loads.

There are two solutions to this situation:

1) If you have room above or behind the light fitting, for example in a recessed downlighter, you can simply rip out the MR16 socket and its 12-volt power supply, and fit a GU10 connector in its place.

This photo of our bedroom shows 4 LED bulbs (240 volts, GU10 fitting), each using just 3 watts - that's 12 watts in total. Each has a single LED and a lens to focus the light. While they are less bright than the halogen bulbs they have replaced, they do project the same lighting shapes on the bedroom wall and are as aesthetically pleasing.

They have replaced 4 halogen spotlights (12 volts, MR16 fitting) and 4 separate power supplies, using over 200 watts. Total saving 190 watts, at a cost of £50 for the bulbs and the GU10 connectors.

If these 4 LED lights are used for 3 hours a day, they will save £25 a year on electricity (paying for themselves in just 2 years) and avoid 90 kg of CO2 emissions annually.

2) Many halogen light fittings are multi-spot designs. It is not possible to switch these over to mains operation, using GU10 connectors. Instead, you can buy an LED driver (mine cost £8 from TLC-Direct) and wire it up inside the light fitting in place of - or alongside - the existing 12 volt power supply.

Then replace the halogen bulbs with MR16 LED lights, as shown in the "flying pig" multi-spotlight on the ceiling of my son's bedroom. These LED bulbs and drivers are using 9 watts in place of 60 watts that the original halogens consumed.

Once converted to LED lighting, you must ensure that halogen bulbs are never refitted in place of the LEDs as this would destroy the LED driver and could cause a fire hazard.

While it is straightforward and legal for a competent, non-qualified person to fit LED lighting in place of halogen lights, as described in this blog, you should pay a qualified electrician to do the job if you are not sure of your capabilities. If you are doing it yourself, make sure the lights are off before you start work and that nobody will wander in and turn them on!

Here is the third and final example of LED lighting that I have fitted this week. Our very dated drinks cabinet incorporates three incandescent light fittings, each with a 30 watt striplight. I was able to replace these with 2 watt LED striplights for £10 each, from RS Electrical, saving 84 watts. If used for 3 hours a day, the annual savings resulting from this conversion will be £11 and 40kg of emissions.

What I paid the chlidren

2010-01-11T12:44:00.005Z

You may recall that I promised my children the full financial benefit of our home's energy savings in 2009, as an incentive for them to concentrate on switching things off, avoiding standby, and so on.

At the end of November I predicted a 10% saving, worth £100 to my kids. In the event, December turned very cold and we had to use much more gas than expected. Still less than last year, however! The annual gas usage fell by 374 kWh, just 2.6% of our total.

We did much better on electricity - saving 728 kWh vs. 2008, that's a reduction of 12.1%. Overall, our 2009 energy usage was 5.4% less than 2008 and resulted in a 7% reduction in CO2 emissions.

So what did the kids earn? £44 each. Good for them, they helped reduce energy wastage throughout the year. Hopefully, this will become instinctive for them as they grow up and make their own ways in the world.

Now for the 10:10 challenge! Since September I have invested in serious loft insulation and replaced the undercounter fluorescent tubes in our kitchen with LED striplights. For Christmas I was given the Fit-PC 2 net top computer (running Windows XP) which has completely replaced my 6-year old Mesh PC tower. This little black box (10cm X 12cm X 3cm) runs silently on just 8 watts, compared with up to 200 watts for my old Mesh monster. If your desktop is left on 24/7, replacing it with a Fit-PC would pay for itself within 3 years. Of course, the first thing to do is stop leaving it on 24/7 - as I did a couple of years ago - but even so, I can now take great delight in running spreadsheets, email, music, videos and internet as fast as ever, but for less power.

With other tweaks around the house, I have managed to halve my baseload electricity consumption (ie., everything off apart from landline phones, built-in appliances, hard-drive recorder, etc) from 160 to 80 watts.

I am setting the benchmark for my 10:10 challenge, at home, as the year to Christmas eve 2010. To cut our emissions from home energy use by 10%, compared with the same period in 2009, our targets will be 17,425 kWh in total (4,770 kWh electricity, 12,655 kWh gas), resulting in household emissions of 4.5 Tonnes CO2e.

Success in Copenhagen

2009-12-07T13:51:00.005Z

On Saturday I walked through London with many, many thousands of very ordinary people of all ages, backgrounds and beliefs. We were united in our determination that the leaders of all nations, convening in Copenhagen this month, reach an ambitious, effective and fair agreement to prevent dangerous climate change.

This is the defining issue of our time, transcending politics, faith, economic status and all other divisions in society. Success in Copenhagen means rapid and effective reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from all nations. Success in Copenhagen means equitable finance for the poorest nations, most threatened by the growing dangers of an unstable climate. Success in Copenhagen means immediate and comprehensive protection for the few remaining areas of pristine rainforest, peatlands and other biodiversity hotspots around the world, on land and at sea.

Most of all, success in Copenhagen means worldwide action now, to protect the habitability of our children's world and the diversity of life that they would wish to share it with.

The Copenhagen climate conference is the most important global meeting the world has ever seen. In solidarity with all my fellow demonstrators for climate justice, I ask each of the World Leaders gathered in Copenhagen:
Open your hearts and minds to the needs of humanity and of all life on earth.
Do everything in your power to protect climate stability for future generations.
Rise to this challenge and be sure you deliver success in Copenhagen.

Our children and their children, throughout the ages to come, will thank you from the bottom of their hearts.

10:10 savings in the bag?

2009-11-30T12:54:00.004Z

Having signed up to the 10:10 campaign at its launch on 1 September, I rushed to upgrade my home's energy efficiency once again. Despite having cut our annual energy use by 10 MWh (i.e., 10,000 kWh) from 2006 to 2008, I am delighted to find that we are now achieving further reductions in both electricity and gas usage versus last year.

Our annual electricity usage has dropped 15%, from 6.1 MWh this time last year to 5.2 MWh today.

The annual gas we used actually went UP in 2008, for two reasons. Firstly, the very cold weather we had from October to February and, secondly, I fitted a basic, wireless thermostat in an attempt to improve the control of our central heating. This backfired because the cheap model I used was much less accurate than the old bimetallic strip it replaced, leading to a couple of degrees overshoot every time the heating ran. I have now replaced this with a more sophisticated controller that is accurate to ±0.2 °C and features "adaptive intelligence" that learns how to control the boiler to achieve the required temperature without overshooting.

Since fitting this smart heating controller, and boosting the loft insulation to 400mm, our gas usage has dropped substantially. While the warm autumn weather is now coming to an end, I estimate that our annual gas usage will drop from 14.4 MWh in 2008 to 13.1 MWh in 2009. If we achieve this, we will have reduced our gas consumption by 9% and our home's total energy use - and carbon emissions - by 11% this year.

Away from home, we have avoided leisure flights for 3 years and have replaced our 30mpg BMW with a 50mpg Golf. However, we did buy a second car this year, to get four of us plus luggage to S-W France for our summer holiday (saving around 6.4 Tonnes of CO2 emissions compared with flying) and will keep it for next summer too. Other than holidays, it gets little use.

I hope to have a wider impact on my community's emissions by persuading others to sign up to the 10:10 campaign and embark upon their own footprint reduction. I am working on this with two local schools and preparing to speak with community organisations to advocate 10:10 and offer advice and support on energy saving to anybody who wants it. Wish me luck!

LED Linklights are brilliant for under-cabinet lighting

2009-10-12T10:45:00.004+01:00

The new LED linklights are up in our kitchen and they are every bit as good as the T8 fluorescent tubes and battens that they have replaced. While the total light output is less, it is ALL directed down onto the worksurface, where it is needed. The reflection of the 400-odd LEDs on the black kitchen counters also adds a beautiful, starry sparkle.

I have put before and after photos on Photobucket - click the links to see what you think!

While the fluorescent tubes that were there before used 300 watts of electricity, the new LED linklights are running at just 40 watts. I'm delighted with them and the family are happy that I have stopped turning the lights off all the time - even when they were in the room.

Ecolightstore.com were very helpful in getting me all the right clips and connectors and, at just £150 for 4 metres of lighting, the new lights will pay for themselves in around 4 years.

I had always believed that fluorescent striplights were energy saving. Perhaps they are, compared with tungsten filament tubes, but I learned from using a wireless electricity meter (The Owl) that they were the single biggest use of electricity in my home lighting circuit.

Replacing them is also my first step to meeting the 10:10 commitment to reduce my CO2 emissions by 10% during 2010 and will save around 160kg of CO2 each year. Another step is to increase my loft insulation. I am fitting the new polystyrene and chipboard storage panels from B&Q, to double the insulation under all the stuff I've got stored up there. I am also topping up the Warmcel over our bedroom with Knauf 170mm mineral wool at just over £1 a square meter.

Hopefully, all this will get me my 10% reduction next year. I'm also helping others to reduce their energy usage and, frankly, that's going to make more difference than I can achieve alone!

How to cut my 10% in 2010?

2009-09-09T17:35:00.005+01:00

The 10:10 campaign from Franny Armstrong and the Not Stupid team is such a simple and engaging idea that well over 10,000 people have signed up in the 10 days since it was launched at the Tate Modern on Tuesday of last week. I went along with a sense of great excitement and occasion and was rewarded with a pretty little slice of aircraft aluminium and a gurning appearance in the RSA arts and ecology video of the launch event.

But now I'm left with the small challenge of how to cut my 10% next year! I already took the Energy Saving Trust's challenge to cut 20% and actually managed to reduce my domestic energy usage by a third in 2008 vs 2006. After the cold winter we had this year, our gas consumption actually rose above 2007 (boo, hiss).

I've done all the loft insulation, the windows are good, the wall cavities are insulated, we have no drafts and the house even has a heat-recovery ventilation system so we can breathe fresh air all year round without keeping any windows open. Our lightbulbs are energy-saving, nothing is left on standby, the oldest, most wasteful appliances have been replaced with efficient new models and our solar panel gives us free hot water in summer (though there haven't been many recent days with enough sun to leave the gas boiler off entirely). While I am vegetarian, I don't yet grow my own food or buy strictly local produce: they don't make a lot of meat substitutes in this neck of the woods.

Away from home, we haven't flown on holiday since 2006 and we had cut down to one car since 2007 - although that's now gone by the wayside as we replaced the big family car with a new, frugal Golf and an old Honda diesel estate for holidays and other occasions when the Golf just isn't big enough for 4 adults with luggage and an Irish Setter.

So will my next 10% emissions reduction have to come from our suppliers? Until now, I have resisted switching to green electricity suppliers for three reasons. Firstly, they can't supply renewable gas because its not yet available - although the National Grid themselves have proposed biomethane as a future source for most of our domestic gas requirement. Second, my purchase of green electrons just makes everyone else's a bit more brown without creating additional renewable generating capacity. And lastly, it costs a good deal more than online duel fuel deals from the big 6 utilities. At least Good Energy will now give me a discount for my solar thermal installation but the rebate is comparatively small and unmetered - i.e. it is independent from the amount of renewable energy the system actually provides.

What might make the difference is the Government's proposed Feed-In tariffs, obliging my utility company to buy power that I can generate from micro-renewables. This should kick in next year and I have just the right roof-space for a few square metres of solar PV panels. We use about 5500 kWh of electricity a year at the moment so I would need to generate 550 kWh to meet my 10:10 pledge. That's an average of 1.5 kWh per day, achievable with PV modules producing just 500Wp. The inverters and other feed-in kit are quite costly, though, so I would probably need a greater area of PV modules than this to make financial sense of the overall project.

In the meantime, I do have two outstanding opportunities to cut down on electricity usage. I have known for months that a low-power netbook would minimise the hours that I have this old, 300-watt PC powered up. Today, I have finally ordered LED striplights to replace 4 metres of fluorescent tubes under the kitchen cabinets. For £150 including the transformer, from Ecolightstore, these could save 300 watts for several hours a day, cutting 200 - 400 kWh a year from our electricity usage. I await the family's response to LED lighting with interest.

Perhaps these two investments alone will be enough to cut my 10% next year ...

2009-07-13T13:30:00.004+01:00

Long days and warm nights are keeping the meters turning really slowly at this time of year.

We're generally happy to keep the lights off apart from a couple of hours in the evening. The hot water comes from the sun and I've even disconnected the cordless room thermostat I fitted to the central heating last winter, to try and control the boiler more accurately. This was not a great improvement because it was right next to me all the time, bringing the temptation to just turn it back up half a degree if we were feeling chilly. I had much more success with lowering the power settings on my modulating condensing boiler. The gas consumption is directly proportional to this setting and, with the radiator temperatures set low as well, the boiler is able to operate in condensing mode for much of the time.

I am (evidently!) focused on the nitty-gritty details of domestic energy saving but I don't expect everyone else to be as interested, engaged or obsessed with this as me. Expressing problems in the language of money is a continuous improvement tool: to attract my children's attention, I have offered them whatever we save on our home energy bills in 2009 compared with 2008.

My son's purchase of a Macbook for his A-level studies resulted in a substantial drop in electricity usage because it means that his old desktop PC no longer gets used and will soon be rehomed. To date, the kids are about £40 in credit on electricity but a little behind on gas because of the much colder weather we had in the first quarter of 2009.

Sunshine

2009-04-23T11:08:00.005+01:00

The unseasonably fine weather we have been enjoying for the last week has given my solar heating panel its first chance to perform this year. We have had the boiler turned off for a week now and our family of four are enjoying daily hot showers (and the odd bath) with just the solar heated water. There's plenty for washing up as well. If only we could count on this lovely weather throughout the spring and summer, we wouldn't need to run the boiler again until late September.

Combined with the solar heated water, the home energy improvements that I fitted in 2007 (efficient heating / lighting /refrigeration and effective loft insulation) have reduced our home's energy usage by 33% since 2006.

Our total gas and electricity consumption in 2006 was 30.4 MWh and this resulted in 8 Tonnes of CO2 emissions. In 2008, our total home energy usage fell by 10 MWh to 20.4 MWh, avoiding 2.7 Tonnes CO2 emissions.

At current prices, this energy saving is giving me a cash return of £510 a year! That makes for a likely payback period on my investment in home energy efficiency and solar hot water of just 12 years.

Without the big ticket items (solar panel, condensing boiler), many households would see a payback within 2-3 years on simple investments like top-up loft insulation, heating controls, efficient light-bulbs and replacing outdated fridges and freezers with the most energy-efficient modern units. So what's stopping them? I suspect they simply don't realise how much energy their homes are wasting and how much it is costing them!

In my last post, I said that I hoped to arrange local screenings of "The Age of Stupid". The producer, Franny Armstrong, has now set a start date for licensing such events of 22 May.

Visit http://www.indiescreenings.net/ to calculate the license fee and register for your screening.

I hope my children's schools will agree to show the film and I will try to get some inspiring speakers along to give the audiences some big ideas for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. I shall also use these occasions to advise anyone who has yet to start making their home more energy efficient that they could save around £10 a week on heating and electricity bills, with just the basic energy-saving home improvements.

We also need a national campaign to persuade millions of voters to lobby their MPs about Copenhagen 2009, where the nations of the world will come together to agree a successor to the Kyoto protocol from 2012. The Age of Stupid website is promising just such a campaign - Pete Postlethwaite signed their pledge in front of Ed Miliband, on stage at the film's Premiere in Leicester Square in March. More details coming soon at http://www.ageofstupid.net/notstupid

The Age of Stupid

2009-03-16T11:50:00.007Z

I have followed the development of "Crude" and "Age of Stupid" with eager anticipation for what seems like years - well, it was years - so when I finally got to the People's Premiere in Staines last night, my expectations were sky-high.

They were more than met.

I was moved, challenged and inspired by this simple, haunting film. The power in these stories and interviews is the plain, unvarnished truth of what we are doing to our species and our only home.

The People's Premiere also featured live links to the solar tent in Leicester Square, before and after the film. Nicholas Stern chatted with Franny on the green carpet, telling us how his 2007 Report under-estimated the costs of doing nothing and the speed with which dangerous climate change is progressing. The President of Mauritius delivered a well-spoken video contribution: to have the President of a Sovereign State announce the complete decarbonisation of a country, at this premiere, was electrifying. Seeing Ed Miliband on stage between Franny and Mark Lynas was buttock-clenching viewing - all credit to the younger Miliband for agreeing to stand alongside them.

Franny also used the Premiere to launch the Not Stupid campaign, which everyone who sees the flim this year should be itching to join! See their website for details - it currently has the unmissable video from the President of Mauritius:

http://notstupid.org/

At the cinema in person were Sarah from the Greening Campaign and Sam from the Campaign Against Climate Change. They were great comperes and explained what we all need to do to influence the outcome of the critical UN climate change conference (COP15) in Copenhagen in December 2009, including getting everyone we know to join the March against Climate Change in London on 5 December. I met Rachel Urquhart from Envision, who work to engage young people in making a difference, and was invited to a CACC co-ordination meeting at Houseman's bookshop in London on 24 March.

This is enough of a springboard for me. When the Not Stupid campaign are ready to release local screening licences, I will arrange one or more showing of "The Age of Stupid" in the Windsor area. I will host one for the young people involved in Scouting and their families and am keen to arrange other evening screenings for the wider public, in our local schools.

Congratulations to Franny, Lizzie, Leo, Pete Postlethwaite and all who have brought "The Age of Stupid" to our screens. It is a brilliant film and I wish them huge success with its launch on 20 March, which is also the Spring equinox and my birthday, so a great day to start!

Update: Download the "Climate Safety" report

2008-11-28T14:38:00.005Z

Following yesterday's launch in London, the new report from PIRC entitled "Climate Safety" is now available as a free download from their website.

http://climatesafety.org/

If you were at the launch meeting on Thursday evening, please email me (cutyourcarbon@gmail.com) and let me know your thoughts. I look forward to hearing your views Thanks so much!

You may also like to view the excellent climate change animation on the Oxfam website, here:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/facethemusic

Please use the link on Oxfam's website to email European environment leaders in advance of two critical talks in December. The first is the 2008 round of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which starts next week in Poznan, Poland. This is the 14th Conference of the Parties (COP14) to the UNFCCC and the 4th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol. The 9000 delegates expected in Poznan will be working to establish a new, global protocol for climate change mitigation, to succeed Kyoto from 2012, that will be finalised at the 2009 conference in Copenhagen.

The second is a debate in the European Parliament on 11 December, to set European emissions reduction targets for 2020. You can send your views on Europe's 2020 emissions targets direct to your representatives from here:

http://www.timetolead.eu/

Please add your voice to these campaigns now!

Climate Safety - a clear and present danger?

2008-11-26T09:54:00.008Z

George Monbiot's weekly column in the Guardian and at monbiot.com is always bitingly sharp and accurately argued from the recent references that he shares. This week he began by attacking Bush's final acts of environmental vandalism as he slips away into obscurity.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/11/25/one-shot-left/

However, Monbiot quickly moved his argument on to recent claims that runaway global warming is much more likely and more imminent than any follower of the IPCC would have imagined.

Having just read the excellent book by Wally Broecker and Robert Kunzig, "Fixing Climate", I am well aware that many climate changes in the historical record happened incredibly quickly. I understand that positive feedbacks mechanisms like the lubricated flow of icesheets from meltwater drainage and the release of methane from melting permafrost and Arctic waters have the potential to raise sea levels in decades rather than centuries or millenia. These are the tipping points of dangerous climate change that we have heard so much about since Al Gore's inconvenient lecture in 2006. What I didn't know was the sheer magnitude of the changes already in progress and the climate impacts still to come - even if we ceased all manmade greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow - as the planet's air, land and water all return to equilibrium under the insulating blanket that we have already discharged into our skies.

I ws sufficiently sceptical of Monbiot's claims to begin trawling through his online references, where I soon found myself in a world so much bleaker than Broecker's. It will take me a while to assimilate this new information and to decide whether this is reality rather than paranoid delusion. However, I would like to share the references here and encourage you to review them and draw your own conclusions.

First, a scientific paper published this year by Jim Hansen et. al. which assesses what level of atmospheric CO2 we need to target in order to retain climatic conditions similar to those that have held throughout human history.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126

In dense shorthand of technical abbreviations, satellite observation and ice-core histories, Hansen and colleagues assess the correlation between previous, sudden climate switches and all the possible drivers for these events (e.g., greenhouse gas levels, aerosols, solar irradiance, ocean circulations, etc).

They draw the unambiguous conclusion that our current atmospheric CO2 level of almost 400ppm wil result in several metres of sea level rise and other dangerous climate shifts that will render many populated areas uninhabitable and undermine any efforts to feed the world's people or protect our remaining biodiversity. They advocate rapid stabilisation at no more than 350ppm CO2 and assert that this is inconsistent with ANY future use of coal without carbon capture.

Having digested this, I was prepared to move onto a beautifully assembled work from the Graduate School of the Environment (GSE) at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), published in collaboration with a charity called the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC).

http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/

The centrepiece of this new website is their 2007 report of the same name, giving a powerful and cohesive evaluation of the steps needed to totally decarbonise Britain's energy infrastructure within 20 years. Central to their vision is a system of Tradeable Emissions Quotas (TEQs), to be issued free to individuals and businesses and used or sold as the holders see fit. Numbers of TEQs issued will decrease gradually and drive our investments and behaviour towards carbon-neutral alternatives. The animation on their home page gives a short, sharp and accessible summary of the challenge and is well worth viewing.

Another incisive home page animation can be seen on the iconic 350 website, which seeks to become the hub of a new global movement to bring about Hansen's vision.

http://www.350.org/

Lastly, I come to what Monbiot was really telling us. Tomorrow, he will be on the panel of an open meeting in London to launch the new report from PIRC, called "Climate Safety".

http://climatesafety.org/

Try as I might, I could not download the report or its conclusions from the PIRC website. It will, however, be available from Amazon for around a fiver and I trust that an electronic version will also be available after the launch event. I am gutted that I cannot be at the meeting on Thursday but I look forward to hearing about it from anyone who can get along.

While this climate of fear about climate seems far from everyday sustainable living, it actually needs to engender the sense of urgency that even now is missing from almost all the debate in Britain, whether in Parliament or in the pub. We're all doing something, we all know we should be doing more but we wonder whether it will make any difference and we're kind of waiting to be told what to do because it's the Government's job to lead on this sort of thing isn't it?

Well, that would be nice but the reality is that it's down to us. You and I have always been part of the problem and, however much we're doing to tread lightly, we remain part of the problem. If you've read this far then you, like me, are also determined to be part of the solution.

We don't know all the elements of this solution but our journeys of discovery can be guided by the process of Continuous Improvement, the quality methodology pioneered by Joseph Juran, who died this year at the grand old age of 103.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/03juran.html

Continuous Improvement starts with understanding the issues ("get the facts"), measuring where we are starting from (baseline analysis) and determining the "vital few" actions that will make the biggest difference (using the "Pareto principle"). We then work to establish relevant improvement targets and we continue measuring, to monitor our progress towards these targets, as we implement those actions. Ultimately we are rewarded by celebrating success.

New facts, such as those presented by Monbiot and the websites I have reviewed here, challenge us to go round the loop again, to reassess the targets we have set and think more creatively about the actions needed to reach them. Those actions with the highest impact will, like sudden climate change, also be discontinuous, step changes - revolution rather than evolution - but this does nothing to diminish the importance of each citizen's responsibility and duty to reduce their own carbon footprint progressively. I am certain that personal awareness and individual determination will remain at the heart of our response and form the essence of all effective actions to keep our climate safe.

At this point, I feel we need to think very creatively indeed. The "Zero Carbon Britain" report opens with a perfectly chosen quote from President John F. Kennedy.

"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were."

Two prizes in one week!

2008-11-14T16:52:00.007Z

I am discovering how difficult it is to remember to post regular articles to a blog. This time, I want to share my excitement at winning a couple of competitions for communicating sustainability.

The first competition was won by my Scout Troop. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC-UK) got in touch with schools and Scout groups across the country and asked them to come up with imaginative activities for their young people, to mark their first annual awareness day on Friday 26 September. This event was called, appropriately enough, FSC Friday.

I designed a simulation game where the Scouts played the parts of Factories, Trees and Atmosphere. They used old CDs to represent oxygen molecules and paperclips played the part of carbon atoms. The Factories burnt fossil fuels and released CO2 by clipping the paperclips to the CDs. The Trees removed the paperclips and released O2. The Atmosphere ran around distributing O2 and CO2 between the Trees and the Factories. After a few minutes we checked how much CO2 there was in the atmosphere. Not much. Then we "cut down" half the Trees and turned those Scouts into Factories. They used the carbon they had gathered in their "timber" to make more CO2 and, at the end of the game, we checked the final amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This time, there was lots. The Scouts had fun and understood that we need trees (as well as oceans, rocks and lots of other parts of the natural environment) to maintain a healthy atmosphere and prevent runaway climate change.

After this game, the Scouts sat down and sorted through a pile of forest products - from ecosystem services like nutrient recycling and water treatment to traditional economic products like timber, latex, cocoa, etc. They deduced that the diversity of a forest is of greater value than the limited agricultural produce that can be grown on deforested land.

I wrote this up and sent it to Rosie Teasdale at the FSC , with a couple of photographs. Rosie got back to me a few weeks later and told me that our Scouts had won their competition and asked me what prizes they would like! I was delighted to hear this, of course, and asked whether anyone from FSC could come to our Scouts and present the prizes in person.

So it was that Charles Thwaites, the head of FSC-UK, joined us last night and congratulated the Scouts on winning the FSC Friday competition. He handed out a number of FSC-branded goodies and awarded the Scout Group a beautiful clock, made from sustainable hardwood, as a permanent trophy. He ran an enthralling role-play exercise, modelled on his experiences at a global forestry conference in Cape Town last week.

Three groups of six Scouts took the parts of loggers, indigenous people and environmentalists. They were given 10 minutes to come up with the Top Three things that they wanted to achieve from negotiations with the other parties. Each group's representative read out their three requirements and placed them on a table, each on a separate slip of paper. Once all nine requirements had been shared, the groups took it in turns to remove two slips of paper, leaving a final set of three "agreed" outcomes.

Two of the three remaining outcomes were proposed by the Indigenous Peoples and the third was from the Environmentalists. Although none of the Loggers’ requirements were agreed, they were happy enough to accept that their products would command premium prices because they could be marketed as sustainable timber and their investment in local communities and conservation would enhance their reputation as responsible businesses.

Their three agreed outcomes were:

Sustainable logging restricted to 20,000 trees a year
Loggers to supply Food, Water, Education and Healthcare for every village
Loggers must plant more trees than get cut down

All this serves to illustrate just how interested - and motivated - teenagers can be in protecting the future of Earth's natural environment. They have a lot less trouble than adults taking complex issues on board and reaching consensus on co-operative solutions. Of course, these exercises are gross oversimplifications but the level of excitement in the room showed just how engaged the Scouts can become in sustainability matters. These are the people who will be making a difference in the coming decades, both in their personal behaviour and in the influence of their careers on the success of the next generation in tackling the wider, long-term issues of climate change, biodiversity and protection of human rights.

http://www.fsc-uk.org/about/news/82/most-innovative-fsc-friday-event/

The second prize was for a competition I entered on Yahoo! Answers. They asked the question, "Now that autumn is getting a little colder, how do you plan to keep warm without wasting too much energy?" I spelled out the details of my own investments in energy efficiency and solar thermal, explaining that I funded these by selling my car and that, while I did not expect them to pay back financially in the short term, my reason for making these investments was to reduce my carbon footprint. You can read my answer here:

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20081021090656AAFg8II

I was delighted, once again, to learn that my response was chosen as the Best Answer and I am now looking forward to receiving the valuable prize - a wooden double bed made from FSC-certified timber and a handmade orthopaedic mattress. That certainly enhances my prospects for a return on my investment in sustainability, in an entirely unexpected way!

Still Debating Manmade Global Warming?

2008-10-03T11:29:00.007+01:00

There is a small but vociferous group of contributors to discussion sites like Yahoo! Answers who continue to argue that the earth isn't warming or, if it is, then we (mankind) are much too trivial to have any influence on the great big planet's thermostat. Even that CO2 is such a minor component of our atmosphere that increases in its concentration cannot possibly affect the Earth's temperature.

I have been genuinely surprised by the virulence of this online community's posts, in response to contributors who attempt to explain or communicate the evidence for climate change, mankind's role in global warming and the likely consequences for our descendents.

Dr Iain Stewart (Professor of Geology at Plymouth University) has presented two extraordinary series on the BBC in the last year, "Earth: The Power of the Planet" and "Earth: The Climate Wars". The producer for both these series was Jonathan Renouf.

In the Gaurdian's "Comment Is Free" column yesterday (2 October), Renouf has written the most compelling rebuttal of the climate change sceptics. He dismisses their aggression and their disingenous aderence to discredited hypotheses with consummate grace. In his clear and calm language, Renouf displays the same thoroughness, objectivity and balance that the researchers and writers of "Climate Wars" achieved. They have documented the emergence of evidence, the development of ideas, the campaigns and battles that have been fought. In conclusion, Renouf writes that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree on three points: earth is warming, our emissions of greenhouse gases are the principal cause and that the coninuing rise in these emissions will become damaging to society.

"Earth: The Climate Wars" was a seminal production and will serve to put to rest some of the outdated objections of the climate change deniers. I am honoured that my licence fee pays for people like Jonathon Renouf to produce transformational documentaries like this.

NB: I don't know whether these links to Google video are legal or if they will work outside the UK. I found them on another forum and will remove them if they breach copyright.

Episode 1:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8547224522119252436&hl=en

Episode 2:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1668329593924661115&ei=lT7cSMe3E5ryqAOI_ZjdCw&q=The+Climate+Wars

Episode 3:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4809718812879164013&ei=OZbeSICfIZXeqAO3ufGWCw&q=The+Climate+Wars

Meat is murder - on the atmosphere

2008-09-25T14:11:00.005+01:00

I just signed a petition that will be submitted to the United Nations on Earth Day (22 April) 2009.

http://www.evana.org/UN/index.php?lang=en

Having been vegetarian for 33 years (other than a brief lapse at university) it seems obvious to me that our ability to feed the world's population is hampered by our determination to feed our crops to animals that are raised in horrendous conditions before being transported hundreds or thousands miles to meet their deaths in poorly regulated slaughterhouses. I thought everyone would understand that this unnecessary cruelty is also hugely inefficient, reducing the calories that reach people's mouths from our farmlands by 90 or 95%. Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and Colin Tudge ("So Shall We Reap") made all this crystal clear to millions of people - Schlosser's book topped the bestseller lists for months.

What this petition could do is bring this truth out into the open in 2009, something that powerful lobbies for the food industry and farming would rather we kept quiet about.

Of course, some kinds of animal husbandry are more ethical than others. No-one could begrudge subsistence farmers their chickens and goats - these are essential to survival and quality of life for millions of impoverished families. They are hardly likely to see much grain, anyway, as their starving owners have none to spare. Similarly, grazing animals on hillfarms may be seen as a natural part of a sustainable lifestyle and what they consume (in summer at least) is free feed, additional to the calories our farms can provide. Against all my instincts as an animal lover, I have to concede that hunting genuinely wild animals, not those that gamekeepers have reared for so-called sport, can form part of a sustainable diet for indigenous families in remote areas. I am not excusing the probable extinction of great apes or other primates by the bushmeat trade, just noting that the use of wild populations can be sustainable in a way that intensive animal husbandry can never be.

However, the burgeoning appetite for meat in the emerging markets will not be met from these more ethical sources any more than it is in Europe and North America. The world's demand for meat and meat products is being supplied by intensive farming.

This industry, built on the suffering of animals, competes with human mouths for the crops that our farms can produce.
Meat production, together with the current generation of biofuels, is driving the clearance of tropical rainforest at a greater rate today than ever before.
Lastly, if more reasons were needed to stop eating meat, animal husbandry results in around 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

In a letter published in the current edition of New Scientist (27 September 2008), Peter Martin of CarbonSense points out that methane has an 'instantaneous' greenhouse gas potency that is more than 60 times as great as carbon dioxide. The biggest manmade source of methane is animal husbandry - from both ruminant guts and fermentation of slurry. We may be unable to prevent the outgassing of methane from the Arctic Ocean and tundra, as the northern sea ice and permafrost disappear, but at least we must begin to tackle the methane contributed by our own actions in raising animals for meat and dairy products!

This blog is about reducing the environmental impact of everyday life. That means changing our behaviour. Adopting a vegetarian diet is one of the most significant changes we can make in our impact on the environment. We need some basic knowledge and information to maintain good nutrition without meat but it's a really big contribution to a healthy lifestyle.

If everyone were to halve their meat intake, this would go a long way towards feeding all the world's people, reducing deforestation (for cattle ranching and soya production) and cutting the greenhouse gases that animal husbandry emits.

Please sign the "FOOD vs FEED" petition and think about cutting your own consumption of meat and dairy products.

http://www.evana.org/UN/index.php?lang=en

Giving up the car

2008-09-22T11:05:00.009+01:00

I started this blog a year ago with little idea what it would achieve and that's why it didn't achieve much. This time around, I will try to post regularly and keep it practical so that you may be able to make use of what I have to say.

I have been busily working to cut my family's home energy usage and have now reduced our annual consumption by 30% since 2006. Some of this required capital outlay - money which came from selling my two year old Civic Type-R. This pocket rocket was much loved but owning it contradicted everything I believe about sustainability. Consequently, selling it became a powerful statement of my personal commitment to reduce my own impact on the environment. In a rare case of economic and environmental coherence, ditching this 200 horsepower runabout saved me at least £2000 a year (insurance, maintenance, tax, fuel and depreciation), cut my carbon footprint by around 4 Tonnes a year and put more than enough cash into the bank to fund my energy efficiency measures at home. In the interests of transparency, I must add that my family still has the use of my wife's company car at weekends and for holidays.

I know that my former online buddies at the CTR Owner's Club were unable to take the environment seriously but it's really hard to get your head round the idea that your own lifestyle is the problem! Nothing is wrong with the CTR in particular, it's a fantastic car. Like all petrol and diesel engines, however, it emits greenhouse gases whenever you use it. The emissions per passenger-kilometre depend on driving style and number of people on board. The incredible performance of the CTR is begging to be used and encourages the driver to adopt a fiery rather than frugal attitude. It is also rare to see more than one passenger in a CTR and, during the rush-hour, most have no passengers - just a lone driver commuting between work and home.

The alternatives to driving to and from work are difficult for many people and adopting them takes real courage. Perhaps we should start by persuading everybody to avoid one day's commute a week - or even a month! For the record, here are the obvious alternatives:

1) Work from home - using broadband, phone or just catching up on all that reading you're supposed to get through.

2) Share a lift - find out who lives near you and what days it will be convenient for you to pool.

3) Try the public transport options. No really, they do exist for many of us.

4) If it's within an hour's cycling distance - pedal.

5) If it's within an hour's walking distance - walk! (or pedal, it's so easy if it's that close)

Less obvious - and really hard to do - is to face up to the environmental impact of living so far away from your place of work. Few of us are in a position to trade in our current job for something closer to home - or to 'up sticks' and move closer to the office/ factory / shop, etc.

The change that will drive us towards more sustainable personal transportation is likely to be painful and unpopular. It will involve paying the true cost of the energy used and the environmental impact of this usage. Fuel prices may bring this about, some years after peak oil has been recognised, but that will be too late to start managing down the carbon emissions of our personal transport choices.

Reducing oil consumption

2007-10-05T17:39:00.001+01:00

Here are my thoughts on reducing our use of oil while we still have some left to play with!

New Scientist (4 July 2007, "Biorefineries: curing our addiction to oil") reports that over 70% of the oil we extract is used for transport fuel. Most of the remainder is burned for energy (and this without including natural gas, another fossil carbon) or used for roads, lubricants and waxes. Just 3.4% is used in the petrochemical industry, to synthesise all the materials we depend on in our everyday lives - e.g., plastics, cosmetics, paints and medicines. Wouldn't it make sense to cut down the 90-odd percent that is used for energy and save the oil for petrochemical manufacture? If we were to do this ahead of "peak oil" then the feedstocks that we need for the synthetic chemical industries could last for centuries.

It is comparatively easy to switch electricity generation over to renewables, including woodchip and pellet technologies used for industrial "cogeneration" or combined heat and power (CHP). Slough Trading Estate has been doing this for several years so your UK Mars Bars are made using sustainable energy. This type of biofuel makes sense and does not compete for agricultural resources with food supply. The biggest problem will be scaling up the supply of woody fuel - perhaps an argument for restoring some of Britain's native woodland cover that was displaced by farming?

It is much harder to make the switch to renewables for the transport fuel we all depend on because few other materials have the energy density of petrol or diesel. Plug-in hybrids could help, if recharged from renewable electricity, but hybrid cars today are really no more than green window-dressing to enhance the reputations of the world's largest car manufacturers, while they continue to flog Chelsea tractors, SUVs, pickups and luxury limos.

Whether it's ethanol from sugar cane ('gasohol' in Brazil) or biodiesel from oilseed crops, production of biofuels for transport displaces food production (witness the soaring price of bread). More importantly, to meet the current transport fuel demands of the developed world, biofuel would have to supplant food production entirely - and then some more!

There is an overwhelming need is to change the way we use transport - both personal and freight. That's a very tall order but nothing else comes close to providing a sustainable solution.

Energy efficiency, both domestic and industrial, offers huge prizes but is barely beginning to be tapped here in England because energy is still far too cheap. There is loads of advice available on improving our domestic energy and I will post the best links I can find to help with this. Retailers and manufacturers have much scope to cut their energy consumption but the economics will need to change before they pay more than lipservice to these opportunities. Massive hikes in the price of oil and gas would drive energy efficiency but this is not going to win elections anywhere in the world and so seems unlikely to happen before we reach peak oil.

Solar thermal power is already highly efficient - vacuum collector tubes can capture over 90% of the solar energy reaching them. Rooftops around the world should be covered in them already but - outside of Germany - they are not.

Solar electricity generation, in contrast, uses only up to 15% of the incident energy. There is plenty of room yet for technological innovation, both the physics of solar energy capture and the manufacturing processes used to produce photovoltaic panels in large quantities and at low cost.

Even nuclear fission is ultimately unsustainable because the uranium reserves are limited and the environmental and human costs of uranium mining are very high. If we could tame nuclear fusion as an energy source we would really be getting somewhere!

Light bulbs

2007-10-05T15:58:00.000+01:00

The first thing that seems to spring to mind when you mention carbon is changing your lightbulbs. That's good because it's easy and, once you've done it, it takes no further effort.

A lot of people though, including Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy, have pointed out that we can't just BAN high-energy lights because they are not suited to all situations, a lot of current light fittings won't use them, etc. How far is that true?

Energy-efficient bulbs for the standard bayonet (BC) or screw (ES) fitting are now sold for under a pound in supermarkets, department stores and the like. They are longer than their equivalent high-energy bulbs, however, so they might not fit your existing lampshade or luminaire. In that case, you need to get hold of the tiny little energy-saving bulbs that are now available from online retailers - I've listed some below - for even the small bayonet (SBC) and screw (SES) fittings. They work really well. Yesterday, I replaced a 40 watt tungsten "golfball" bulb, 95mm-long, with an energy-saving equivalent that is 5mm shorter and 35 watts lighter.

Unfortunately, these non-standard energy-saving bulbs cost £4 - £8 each which is a big barrier to replacing all the tungsten bulbs in your home.

Halogen downlighters and spots are the very epitome of modern lighting. Bright and affordable, they claim higher efficiency than regular tungsten filament bulbs. In practice, they are highly directional so that many more bulbs are needed to light a room than with traditional bulbs.

Just before I started to think about energy efficiency, I fitted 12 mains-powered halogen bulbs in a long, narrow utility room at home. I think this stupid deployment of 600 watts was the first thing that made me feel guilty about my household energy consumption. Fortunately, I discovered Megamann 7 watt compact fluorescent spots and spent a hundred quid reducing this figure to 84 watts.

Sad to say, these are only available for 240v lights so I don't think we can do anything practical yet to replace all those 12 volt halogens our homes are filled with.

I have just tried out some 1 watt LED replacements for the little 10 watt halogen bulbs with two metal legs coming out of them (called G4 capsules). They were £5 a piece, very fragile (I broke two), difficult to fit and produced negligible illumination with a ghastly mains flicker.

Furthermore, the power consumption of the transformer supplying 12 volt DC to the 1 watt LED was still 15 watts, so the real saving was 50% rather than the 90% I had hoped for.

My next stop was the lounge and dining room, with a grand total of 17 matching wall and floor lights, each using 40 watts. The Omicron replacements, at 5 watts each, have cost me £140 but they are saving 600 watts between them.

My latest discovery is energy-saving striplights, to replace those long filament bulbs built into bathroom mirrors, furniture and under kitchen cabinets. The 221mm bulb uses 5 watts rather than the 30 watt incandescent bulb: the 284mm one uses 7 watts in place of 60 watts.

How about Tesco start piling them high and selling them cheap so that we can all switch more of our lights over to energy-efficient bulbs?

In the meantime, please check out these online retailers and buy all the energy-saving bulbs you need, and can afford, to replace your high-energy incandescent lamps. I have been happiest with BLT Direct because their prices are fair, they deliver quickly and they handle returns very efficiently.

http://www.bltdirect.com/

http://www.ebulbshop.com/

http://www.toplightco.com/acatalog/Energy_saving_lightbulbs.html#a25_20watt_20Daylight

First things first

2007-10-05T15:21:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the "Cut Your Carbon" blog. I haven't written one of these before and apologise if the style or content fail to live up to your expectations.

I am a life scientist who down-shifted from an industrial science career a couple of years ago and now work part-time on a project to generate commercial funding for really great causes in the developing world. My work on renewable energy has drawn me into the sustainable living arena and I have begun to form my views on what we can do as individuals to mitigate the impending tragedies of climate change and peak oil.

I will attempt to set out these views here and invite your responses. I will be more grateful for constructive comments than suggestions that I am mad, dangerous or likely to die soon.