Tag Archives: climate change

Demand a better Energy Bill & Warm Homes

Posted on by
1
Posted by Daisy who is an intern at the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition (of which People & Planet is a founding member):
demand-better-bill-logoThe vote on a Warm Homes amendment to the Energy Bill is fast approaching. At present, it looks like the government are going to vote against it. Apparently, they say, they are not feeling the pressure. We need a big last push to make sure the UK government walk the talk on climate change. After all, they have pledged to be the greenest government ever. There’s great aspiration in their dialogue but a comprehensive plan to deliver our legally binding emissions targets is necessary if the Green Deal is really going to be a success.

Clear plans and definitive scale of ambition need to be included in the Energy Bill if the level of investment needed in this emerging and vital market is going to be generated. The Warm Homes amendment will make sure the Energy Bill is up to the task, paving the way for warmer homes, reducing fuel poverty, creating green jobs and cutting UK emissions from buildings. Help build the pressure by taking this e-action today http://www.stopclimatechaos.org/better-eb

More information on can be found at www.demandabetterbill.org.uk

Stop Climate Chaos anticipates that the vote on this amendment will fall on Tuesday. Based on the outcome, the e-action will be updated accordingly. Please make sure you take this action again and tell your friends too!

People & Planet Green League – leaders falling behind

Posted on by
Reply

Universities have long led the way. There is a myth that people in Britain over the last 10 years spontaneously decided to massively increase their consumption of Fairtrade products. The truth is that activist groups pushed universities, schools and churches to change their procurement. Millions of cups of coffee switched in the space of around two years. The Fairtrade companies were able to invest their supply lines and in improving quality. Graduates started to demand that supermarkets too sell fairly traded goods, and supermarkets in turn saw from mass sales in these public sector and community institutions that they couldn’t resist the trend. They too switched. Hundreds of thousands of people began to be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

And so it is that the People & Planet Green League of universities, out in today’s Guardian, is about so much more than universities. Because if these institutions are failing to meet the carbon reductions that their own scientists have calculated are necessary, then even those who ought to be leading are failing.

The Climate Change Act requires 34% emissions reductions by 2020. Yet since 2005, university carbon emissions have actually risen. This is despite some significant institutional changes. People & Planet student groups have successfully pushed for dedicated environmental staff at universities across the country. They have secured ambitious policies, often with clear targets.

But the delivery is simply lagging behind. The reasons for this vary hugely: for some institutions, climate change is a tick box, others do understand it is a ‘challenge to unite a generation’. Many sit in between these two extremes: people care, usually. But they are failing to prioritise. They have set their targets, and they are working towards them – sort of. But they aren’t considering the impact of everything they do, and many don’t seem to have appreciated the significant changes they will need to make in order to meet the targets that they accept are, quite simply, necessary.

With an important role in public life, and with savage government cuts, this may seem understandable. But which institution doesn’t have other pressures? If our university communities – which are mostly populated by a generation who could live to see the worst nightmares of climatologists unfold – can’t find the time or the resource to make the changes that are needed, then who will?

And there are some institutions genuinely showing the way. Nottingham Trent – who top the league this year – have shown that carbon reduction doesn’t have to be painful. Their state of the art video conferencing facilities mean that academics don’t have to get up at 5am and yawn in the yellow light of East Midlands Airport in order to deliver papers at international conferences. Their buildings have been designed to make use of natural light. This reduces the need for energy, but also means their academics aren’t so much buried in libraries as basking in them. But this is an exception rather than the rule. The sector as a whole needs to learn.

Similarly, the government need to buck up their ideas. They may tell others to reduce our emissions. But when it comes to the public sector, they have to lead the way. David Willetts needs to do much more to help universities show that our climate targets are achievable. Yes, this will be hard work. Yes, it will at times seem impossible. But for my generation, carbon cuts are a necessity. And it is the job of politicians to make the necessary possible.

Calling Go Green Week bloggers

Posted on by
Reply

Are you running a Go Green Week at your university, school or college on 7 – 14 February? If so, we want to hear from you.

Throughout the week we’ll be featuring blogs about your activities and events, culminating in the day of action on Friday 11 calling on the Government to “cut the carbon, not education”.

Not blogged for People & Planet before?  It’s simple, just write us a short piece about your views, experiences or describing an event you’ve organised or attended.  You can register for a WordPress blogging account by emailing us or simply send your Go Green Week blog post in by email and we’ll post it up for you if you’re not familiar with WordPress.

Don’t forget to include:

  • hyperlinks to useful sites (eg. your Go Green Week facebook events or useful resources)
  • at least 1 picture
  • your name, email and university name/group name (your email will be kept private)

So what are you waiting for?  Get blogging and you’ll feature news of your Go Green Week and campaigns on the front page of People & Planet’s website!

Leicester’s Big Green Week

Posted on by
Reply

logoimdex17755The past week has been eventful to say the least. Being volunteers for the environment team at University of Leicester has meant working hard in a friendly, committed team of staff. Helping to bring out the message of their 10 year commitment to cutting our carbon level 60% by 2020 through a ‘Big Green Week’.

The week encompassed a range of social, interactive and informative events in the attempt to bring the message to people through different forms. The more popular events included a Climate Change debate on whether climate change is affected by human activity. Even though the sceptics provided a more focused argument on the actual debate, the vote before and after the debate went from 73% to 76% believing that humans had some affect. I had the ‘enjoyment’ of taking MEP Roger Helmer back to his car who mentioned that the environment sector at the moment is growing, but is just a fad and will collapse.  Maybe if I was more of an argumentative type I would have stood my position on this, but maybe this is what he wanted me to.  He also informed me he was looking forward to driving down the motorway to Birmingham Airport. What a nice man! big-photo-stunt

For the past 3 weeks the university has played host to the Hard Rain photographic exhibition. On the Wednesday of Big Green Week Mark Edwards came and did a thought-provoking presentation based on the exhibition. It helped make clearer how we as individuals can have an impact on the future. It’s not too late!

big-green-week-sign-with-2-vols

Big Green Week volunteers

What particularly has emerged through this week, is the enthusiasm volunteers have to help bring together the fluidity of the week, from early starts to eventful evenings.  Particularly noticeable is how much international volunteers have a stronger presence in the opportunities opened up to them through volunteering.

A common question which emerged throughout the week was how much it was all costing – one student commented ‘why are my student fees being spent on this? ’ and another ‘what damage the team was doing by putting on the event’.  First of all, without sponsors a lot wouldn’t have been possible. Secondly, the environment team are going to work out the carbon footprint of the event and in particular the Carbon Cube structure which made the news through new social media, tv and radio. The criticisms are nothing compared to what effect this week will have on the community, not just the university.

big-carbon-cube_nightThroughout the week we’ve been trying to get as many students and staff to work out their carbon footprint. Being able to relate their scores to the size of the Big Carbon Cube has meant people have been able to simply picture how much carbon they produce (average 9-15 cubes’ worth), with University of Leicester producing a shocking 33,000 of these  in 2004/2005.  For the University to reach its 60% cut by 2020 target this will need to be cut to 19,800 tonnes! At the last count we had managed to get 1335 people to do their footprint, apparently the biggest student engagement at the university (although ‘keep the cap’ debates sure will engage a lot more students!)

Time will tell whether this week was worth it. From a personal perspective, students and staff will not be able to forget the impact the team had over one week. Even though some events proved not so popular, at least the events with the strongest message of Leicester becoming greener were.

The climate crisis, mad people and economists.

Posted on by
Reply

1195867204oel3fj

Faced with the twin crises of the global economy and the global climate, politicians and economists worldwide have embraced a ‘grow and hope’ strategy: let’s just get back on the noble track of economic growth – the process of endlessly getting richer – and hope for the best. But grow and hope solutions that aim to stop climate change whilst maintaining economic growth cannot possibly work. If economic growth continues, we will be unable to avoid runaway climate change – natural disasters, resource wars and species extinction on unprecedented scales.

The EU’s climate change target is to limit the increase in global temperature at 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels (in fact the science tells us we need a more radical 1.5 degree target, but that’s for another rant.) ‘Growth Isn’t Possible’, a recent report published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) think-tank, shows that meeting the 2 degrees target whilst maintaining growth cannot be done. The report calculates that if the global economy was to maintain growth at a relatively low 3% growth rate, in order to meet the 2 degrees target, the global economy’s carbon intensity – the amount of C02 released per dollar made – would have to fall by 95% by 2050.

Grow-and-hopers have to be hoping, specifically, for this 95% fall in carbon intensity. Now, the ‘green growth’ lobby have always seen techno-fixes as the answer to our prayers – we’ll keep getting richer and leave it to those brilliant (bit nerdy though) scientists to sort us out. I doubt, however, that even the most ardent techno-fixer would have claimed, prior to the NEF report, that we could hope for technological advances sufficient for a 95% cut. Of course, this is exactly what ‘grow and hope’ proponents will be claiming now.

However, we’ve seen no evidence of any technology-fuelled falls in carbon intensity as of yet: the carbon intensity of the economy remained effectively unchanged between 2002 and 2007. And there’s no sign of significant improvement when the techno-fix industry’s most hyped-up ideas are scrutinised. According to the Director of the US Geological Survey carbon capture and storage won’t be commercially viable on a widespread scale until 2045 – too late for us! As for biofuels, if the UK were to use oilseed rape and corn biofuels instead of petrol and diesel we would need 36 million hectares of land to grow it – 650 per cent more than all the arable land in the UK! What about nuclear? David Flemming, in ‘The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy: A Life-Cycle in Trouble’ argues that the world’s endowment of uranium ore is now so depleted that the nuclear industry will never, from its own resources, be able to generate the energy it needs to safely store its waste (the waste must be cooled in what is a very energy intensive process).

Worse still, we’ve got to account for the ‘rebound effect’: increases in efficiency are accompanied by increased consumption. Suppose we invent a new energy-efficient car that gets more km from a litre of petrol than before. One of these cars is going to save me a fair bit of money, meaning that I’m going to be able to buy more stuff. Indeed, an analysis of domestic energy consumption before and after the installation of energy saving devices has shown that only half the efficiency gains are translated into genuine reductions in carbon emissions.

We must accept then, that techno-fixes cannot deliver the improvement in carbon intensity that we need. Environmental campaigner and writer Danny Chivers has summed up the techno-fix-and-growth strategy perfectly: ‘Your house is on fire, so you sit down in the living room and start drawing up designs for a giant wall-smashing robot.’

Our only option, therefore, is to give up economic growth. But what does this mean? Grow and hopers tell us that we need growth to alleviate poverty. They tell us we need growth to make us happy. They’re wrong on both counts.

Let’s take the poverty myth first. As is noted in ‘Growth isn’t Possible’ ‘Between 1990 and 2001, for every $100 worth of growth in the world’s income per person, just $0.60, down from $2.20 the previous decade, found its target and contributed to reducing poverty below the $1-a-day line.’ Trickle down economics has failed – instead of poverty being alleviated, what we’ve seen is the rich enjoying faster cars, more holidays and bigger TVs. There are more than enough resources in the world to ensure that everyone has their basic needs met – poverty isn’t a problem of scarcity, but of distribution.

Moving on to the second myth, GDP (the metric used to measure growth) is a notoriously bad indicator of wellbeing. Research conducted by NEF reveals that although the UK’s GDP has doubled since 1980, people’s satisfaction with life has hardly changed. Doing away with growth isn’t going to mean doing away with the things that really make us happy – flourishing relationships; artistic creativity; strong communities; healthy lifestyles; educating ourselves; personal freedom. In fact it will mean lots more of those things – in a zero-growth economy, we’d work less and have more time to do the things we love.

This might sound like hippie bullshit, but I bet there’s a guilty part of you that wants to agree. Parents tell their kids that money doesn’t matter, but spend hundreds on their Christmas presents. After seeing ‘Trainspotting’, I bet you agreed to ‘Choose Life’ instead of ‘…a fucking big television…washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers’. But we leave the cinema to return to consumer paradise. Doing away with growth will just mean practicing what we preach – let’s embrace this!

Kenneth Boulding said that ‘Only mad men and economists believe in infinite growth in a finite world’. Andrew Simms, the head of NEF, illustrates this wonderfully by recalling an encounter with one such mad man economist. How, Simms asked, when the human race has used up the last of the Earth’s natural resources, will economic growth continue? Our mad man’s response: ‘We’ll exploit asteroids!’ Simms is calling for both pragmatists and utopians in shaping the ‘bold transition’ to the new economic system we so urgently need. Please: be a pragmatist, be a utopian; don’t be a mad person, don’t be a (grow and hope) economist.

Get Off Your Arse and Change the World

Posted on by
Reply

pigs

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE!

In 2009, environmental activists hit the headlines possibly more than in any other year. From the seminal G20 protests to the street mobilisations at the Copenhagen climate conference, the press were fascinated with the dynamism of a growing movement which was able to articulate its ideas in new and exciting ways.

Yet, inevitably, the mainstream media barely told half the story; sadly, violence sells. The rioting protester has always been a key image for the press, a narrative supported by both the police and corporations targeted by protest groups, like e.on and BAA. Emily James‘ incredible film released after the G20, went quite some way toward redressing the balance, giving hard evidence the extent of police violence during the Climate Camp in the City and arguably forcing journalists to tell a different story.

However, the G20 was only the beginning for Emily, who followed activists from Climate Rush, Climate Camp and Plane Stupid through a year jam-packed with inspiring events; recording their plotting and planning, capturing actions as diverse as the Climate Rush bike rush and aeroplane lock-ons, secreting film tapes in safe houses and releasing short films left, right and centre. Just Do It, now in production and set for release in early 2011, is the culmination of these 250 hours of raw footage and is now being concocted into a feature-length documentary by a diverse and committed team.

Just Do It seeks to tell the human story of activism in 2009 – a story frequently ignored by the mass media; one in which the protesters are not faceless and incomprehensible vandals, but ordinary men and women who feel that to do nothing in the face of injustice and destruction is no longer tenable; in which that decision is not an impulsive reaction, but a gradual thought process; in which activism involves both inspiration and disillusionment, joy and sacrifice. Most importantly, it seeks to show that anyone can ‘just do it’ and moreover, inspire and even incite people into taking action.

In many ways, making Just Do It is in itself activism, although of a less obviously racy kind (as is so much of the behind the scenes work that goes into movements). In the Just Do It HQ in east London, Emily James and her team have been pursuing an innovative method of film-making, challenging corporate profit-driven models and suggesting a grass-roots vision of both fundraising and distribution.

The crowd-funding model, successfully used by films like the Age of Stupid, whereby many people donate a little bit each to raise the money to make the film rather than being tied to a corporate sponsor, is essential in enabling the Just Do It team to put forward an alternative narrative to the Murdoch-dominated press. Arguably, Just Do It also takes this model one step further than the Age of Stupid, which still relied on a commercial distribution system to pay back investors. Emily aims to eliminate the profit motive all together by making the film free at the point of distribution and encouraging guerrilla screenings, free downloads and ‘pirate’ DVDs of the documentary.

As Emily says; “It’s precisely the kind of film that wouldn’t get made within the existing profit and ratings-driven funding structures. Crowd-funding through donation enables us, as creative artists, to be supported by our audience in a more direct way, without the involvement of cultural gatekeepers. This is another nail in the coffin for traditional media.”

In this way, Just Do It promises to push boundaries and inspire, both in the story it tells and the way in which the film is made.

***

Please donate to make this film happen: http://just-do-it.org.uk/fund-this-film

Without big billboards, Just Do It are depending on word of mouth, so join the facebook group here: www.facebook.com/jdi.thefilm and invite your friends.

You can also find Just Do It online in these places:

www.just-do-it.org.uk

www.twitter.com/justdoitfilm

www.youtube.com/justdoitfilm

Isabel’s Granny has a lesson for International Politics

Posted on by
Reply

Granny @ 90

Every time I come home for the holidays, or for a special occasion, or just because I need to, mortality and the fragility of life seem to become more and more apparent. In the last year there have been family and friends deaths that have shocked, the bloodiest month of the war in Afghanistan, the sale of our family business, my God Mother turning 70, the culling of analogue TV (joke) and the death of legends such as Michael Jackson and John Dankworth.

I’m lucky to live in the same town as most of my close family, my Granny lives just next door. For as long as I’ve noticed she has been hailed as ‘remarkable’ for her age-still driving, still bright eyed and quick witted, still going on holiday, and still making jewellery at 93. I.e. she is still passing comment on what I wear with a designer’s eye, winking at…everyone, snorting into her whiskey etc.

We also have a pretty cool dog, a beautiful striped greyhound that always seemed to me to be able to run faster than a cheetah. We have had her since she was 2 years old, I was 11 when she joined the family. Now that I’ve reached 20, I can see her legs failing, her laps of the beach getting slower and fewer, and eyes going murky.

Just like the dog, every time I return home, Granny seems to take a step closer to death.

She no longer has ‘interesting conversation’ because all she wants to tell me about is this bruise and this ache and this pill and this life that she no longer wants for herself. Her tenacity to not wear beige like the rest of the retired population of this town has been transferred to threatening me with her walking off the harbour wall and beating the demons that haunt in her in her old age rather than feeding the aspects of her life that warded them off in the first place.

Would frivolity lessen the pain of facing death?

Would a trip to the other side of the world shroud her aches and pains in cultural diversity and distraction?

Would drinking herself to oblivion make her remember better times so as to override and smother the current ones?

Well apparently not.

I have suggested all of these things, and apart from the latter, which she has always done anyway (she doesn’t like water) the cons of her life always win over.

What is the psychology behind this? What are her motivations?

From the outside it is hard to see past how annoying it has become, your sympathy is marred by her selfishness in focusing on it, it should be easy to be frivolous, but if I put myself in her place I cannot think I would be much different. I’m sure, being a do-er, that I would feel like enjoying myself and throwing caution to the wind all the more if I could walk properly, if I could do it all without wincing in pain and having to drag a scarily purple leg around with me to see the sites of the world. To do it anyway requires a lot of money and a lot of organisation to make up for your lack of capacity; thus my efforts day in and day out to reduce that pain, to solve the problem, to replace my teeth, are all the efforts of a compos mentis human who still has pride in themselves, and still has the sense of self to be embarrassed by the slow unravelling of what you know about yourself, with the ultimate knowledge that death is the only outcome.

To desire to put it off, to remedy your ills so that you can enjoy life more, has got to be an indication that the capacity to enjoy life, and to hang onto it, remains within.

Recently I have noticed that countries of the world can suffer from this too. I hate to mention it so close to Granny (the other day she said to me “it’s all very well saving the planet but if you can’t save your Grandmother….”) but in the UNFCCC process, i.e. the UN Climate Change Negotiations, those countries who sit in plenary at the negotiations brazenly telling the world they are going under water or being starved to death by the climatic changes their country is facing betrays the same thinking as Granny.

Obviously every human knows that death is their final destination, and that it’s what comes in between now and death that counts. But, if you see death every day, in the colour of your leg, your teeth falling out, in the tides lapping on your doorstep, or the face of your child who you can’t feed because the crops have failed and it’s your only source of income, it is no longer an issue of deciding how to best use your in-between time, it is survival.

As the youth emphasised in Poznan in 2008, survival is not negotiable.

That fear of death, that reflex for survival is surely what drives the brazen please in plenary to commit to 350 parts per million, and agree on 1.5 degrees maximum temperature rise without compromise-it is not a matter of choice but necessity.

Similarly it is my lack of proximity to death that makes me unable to empathise with my Granny when she just doesn’t shut up (I am sympathetic though), and equally the Saudi Arabians who follow Tuvalu’s pleas for survival with excuses of loss of crops and profits from oil as a reason to commit comes down to a lack of empathy and concern because it is not happening to them. If they were fighting for survival, oil profits would be the least of their worries, but they are not.

Countries with the money to get themselves out of any fixes they come across, are the fully endowed frivolous people, they are the ones who no matter what nature throws at them, they believe they can throw money back at it in equal weight and see a solution without compromising anything of what they do.

The SIDS (Small Island Developing Nations) and African countries are those with immense national pride and culture but who are already seeing the worst effects of nature’s aging and unravelling, thus they are ones who need to reduce the pain, plug the gaps, and get help. They are the 93 year olds in this process, the ones who cannot consider frivolity until they have solved the ills that they already have, a lot of which happen to be caused by a changing climate.

The developed countries, who have the funds, and already feel the impacts of climate change, such as Australia and New Zealand are the 93 year olds who are the same as my Granny, but they have the money to throw at the situation, so that instead of changing their reality, they simply become frivolous to cover it up.

The developed countries who aren’t yet in that position, like the UK and most of Europe, are something like my God Mother who has just reached 70 and is, as of yet, vehemently without aches and ailments that need servicing, so she can be frivolous with her time and focus in any which way pleases her-after all, the pain isn’t imminent, it is merely something we all accept as a future possibility, and one which we could take vitamins for today, but really, are we convinced it will make the difference in the long term?

I draw two lessons from this; firstly that life is precious, in all its forms, in all its pains and in all its beauty. Secondly, it is this inspiration and pride in one’s life and lands that will keep international negotiations and agreements alive in the coming years.  As long as we have headstrong countries like Grenada and Tuvalu, Kenya and Bolivia clinging onto survival because they love their country and their life, we have a reason to negotiate.

To apply the question I ask of Granny, would frivolity lessen the pain of facing death?

I would answer no.

Frivolity in the face of death makes everything more acute.

When you know what the frivolity is masking, what it is really trying to achieve, rather than add pleasure to a dying life it creates an excuse for inaction, it is disturbing to witness and sickening to face because you know that death came unhindered and without fear of a challenge.

The day we give up on life and the future, the day we stop campaigning and lobbying our MP’s and Governments to solve the pains and ailments of our earth, is the day we become frivolous with ourselves and our children’s futures, and thanks to globalisation, this is not acceptable on more than a merely personal level because we are not only carving out a future for ourselves but a reality for the SIDS and African countries today.

[for other stories and posts about the UN Climate Negotiations see www.izzykb.wordpress.com]

Where Are The Facts? Climate Change And The Science Of What We Don’t Know…

Posted on by
Reply

It looks like science doesn’t have all the answers, but whoever said it did?

Since the release of private emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, the climate change sceptics have been enjoying a renaissance. Apocalypse-predicting moralists have been covering up inconvenient findings and now the empirical basis of their research, and of the arguments for climate change, have been undermined. Continue reading →

Transition Edinburgh University step 1: Get people together and make friends.

Posted on by
1

The Transition Edinburgh University initiative was set up to put the Edinburgh University community on the road to transition, lowering carbon emissions and finding a community response to peak oil and climate change. TEU was set up partly as a consequence of the People & Planet campaign Go Green and partly as a consequence of the work of the Energy Manager of the University, David Somervell. Continue reading →