Energy and Life
Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads, MIT 2003, is one of the best – and most comprehensive - books on current issues around energy and climate change.
One of the most striking points he makes is about energy and how we live. Reviewing evidence about life expectancy at birth, child mortality, educational attainment etc he points out that all these improve with energy use until it reaches 50-70 GJ a person for a year (don’t mind the units, just notice the numbers). (Smil pp 351-55) Now if you take the total amount of energy that’s traded (ie oil, gas, coal, electricity, wood etc) and divide by the world’s population, the answer is about 58 GJ a person a year. So the implication is that everyone on the planet could have enough energy for a long and healthy life and benefit from a good education. And CO2 emissions would be exactly the same as they are now.
In fact, according to Smil, this is the level of energy use that people living in France and Japan had in the 1960s. So it’s really very acceptable.
The huge catch, of course, is that to make this happen, energy use in countries such as Japan or France today would have to reduce by 2/3 and in the US and Canada by 4/5.
So food for thought.
Roadblogs
The BGC team are now travelling round the UK to publicise the Prize Fund and to encourage groups to apply. At the roadshows we’ve had a mixture of MPs talking about the BGC and climate change and local activists who’ve already been doing good things.
What’s been very encouraging is that the audiences who’ve come are very enthusiastic and start talking to each other about ideas they might develop and new groups they might form to enter the prize.
Bristol – 9 November
Here John Pontin and Rob Hopkins from Totnes Transition Towns talked about the projects they’re doing. It was very inspiring. Then we had a very lively debate about what kind of ideas could be submitted for the BGC. Someone who was vegan asked if she and her friends could submit a proposal based around encouraging people to become vegetarian. They would save carbon emissions if the outcome was that the number of animals reared for their meat is reduced. Cows produce large amounts of methane (a potent greenhouse gas). So if there are fewer cattle, there’s less methane. But that’s not all. Animals (including ourselves and cattle) are not very efficient at converting food into flesh. So in energy terms it is much more efficient for us to eat vegetables directly than for cattle to convert vegetation into flesh and then for us to eat their flesh. It should also be healthier for us.
But why stop there? Something like half the fresh food bought in the UK is eventually thrown away uneaten. So if we just eat more of what we buy
- less goes to waste (landfill or compost)
- we buy less in the shops and save money
- less food needs to be produced and moved round the country
And if you can eat your food raw, you save on the energy needed for cooking, or grow your own … the possibilities are endless.
Manchester - 15 November
In the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry we heard from Michael Jack, MP for Fylde, and Chair of the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs Committee. His committee have just produced a great report, “Climate Change: the “citizen’s agenda” and the Government’s response is imminent. Mr Jack spoke about that report and the great things that communities might do, highlighting some examples from his constituency where he has been encouraging local groups to take action. He was followed by Richard Scott from Baywind, a community owned wind energy project in Cumbria. He was very inspiring and showed how ambitious community projects could be. Baywind has featured in a recent report from NESTA, “The Disrupters.”
Later conversations covered a wide range of topics from the re-use of chip fat as biofuel for community transport to how faith groups might take up the BGC.
Belfast – 22 November
The Northern Ireland launch of the Big Green Challenge took place in W5 at the Odyssey. The location was wonderful, with inspiring views of the Belfast docks, city and surrounding countryside – very appropriate for an environmental launch!
The event was well attended with an enthusiastic audience from across Northern Ireland eager to learn more about the BGC, and gain the Northern Ireland perspective from Stephen Peover, Permanent Secretary at the Department of the Environment and Professor Sue Christie, Director of Northern Ireland Environment Link.
So a very interesting and varied set of meetings. We look forward to the applications.
