Archive for November 2007
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.
We sent Ben Cohen along to our event at Birmingham, to experience first-hand some of the buzz around the Big Green Challenge, as well as to meet some of the people behind the idea. Some of the potential participants were on hand to ask questions and listen to an inspiring case study of people working together to reduce their CO2 emissions.
Download the podcast.
Joan Ruddock MP - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Climate Change, Waste and Recycling, and Biodiversity has recorded a podcast about the Big Green Challenge. She speaks about her personal interest in the environment, some of the work she’s observed in her own constituency and the work Defra are doing on Climate Change.
It’s great to see that the Government are watching what happens with the Big Green Challenge and looking forward to seeing what ideas groups come up with.
At NESTA we want to learn as much as possible about how the Big Green Challenge works, about which ideas are out there and about how those ideas can grow. We’ll share these lessons with government, other funders and other organisations to try to make sure that, in the future - beyond the Big Green Challenge - ideas with the most potential to contribute towards solving big issues like climate change can be spotted and helped to grow.
Download the podcast
The (Big Green) Challenge for inventors
Can groups use new inventions in their entry for the Big Green Challenge? It would be great if they can but we thought there were a couple of stumbling blocks. First, really revolutionary ideas take years to become useful technology – the humble zip took decades to develop. That’s too long for the Big Green Challenge. But there might be problems for the inventor too. If they don’t have a patent or can protect their idea in other ways and it became public through the competition, then the inventor would not be able to get that protection afterwards. So the inventor might lose out.
But inventors could still enter if they want when they have – or are not bothered about – legal protection for their idea. Here’s how:
A group entering the Big Green Challenge would be a great way to test exciting new gizmos and get rid of the last bugs. So an inventor could get together with a community who use that invention and they could enter the Big Green Challenge. If that device does make a big energy saving, and the community show it could be taken up across the country, then they are well on the way to having a great entry.
Big Green Challenge events update
We held our first Big Green Challenge event in Birmingham on Friday. It was brilliant to see people there from a range of different groups and organisations. People who attended said they found it useful to find out more about the Big Green Challenge, and enjoyed meeting other people working on ideas to reduce C02 emissions in their area. Some people starting talking about the potential for collaborating on ideas, and one attendee laid down the gauntlet to the rest of the UK by saying that he felt positive a group from the Midlands would win…
The next event is in Bristol this Friday (9th November). I included links to sign up to most of the events in my blog post of 24th October. To register for the events you can either follow those links or sign up to receive an invite for your nearest event and get future updates on the Big Green Challenge.
We’ve now added three more event dates to our schedule:
London - 28 November
Scotland - 4 December
Sheffield - 6 December
Spaces at each event are limited so make sure you register.
I’ve been keeping track of coverage on climate change in the UK press and hope to capture some of my thoughts on news that resonates with the Big Green Challenge here.
Good to see the clear message coming through in today’s Guardian that the UK public needs to be given incentives if it is to really begin to take action on climate change. The Guardian has today launched The Green Living Awards with UnLtd – the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs (and incidentally our delivery partner for the Big Green Challenge). They are offering people taking action against climate changes small grants from a £100,000 pot. They’ve got two excellent case studies:
- Water Power Enterprises are going to use weirs that were built across British rivers in the 18th and 19th centuries to control water flow and drive wheels to generate hydroelectricity.
- Walkit.com provides customised maps and walking route instructions, as well as information on calories burned, carbon dioxide avoided and distance travelled – all in a bid to encourage people to walk rather than drive.
Elsewhere in the paper, Rosie Boycott refers to the fact that by 2015 all new housing in Britain is supposed to be carbon zero. Right now, only 2% of new builds reach this target. She suggests that homeowners who are trying to be green need to be given the same sort of tax-breaks as drivers of low-emission vehicles are given, if an appetite for green-living is to really take hold.
The Big Green Challenge is aiming to do all this on a much larger scale, incentivising whole communities rather than individuals to come up with the innovative solutions we’ll need to tackle climate change – the lion’s share of £1m being the carrot at the end of the stick. Together all these initiatives promises something quite powerful – to drive ordinary people to come up with the solutions that are evading government and scientists.
Why don’t you… ask your community?
We’ve targeted the Big Green Challenge at communities. Why? Well, there are plenty of schemes trying to get people to do good things such as getting homeowners to put in roof insulation or use low energy lightbulbs.
But one of the big things experts talk about but nobody knows how to make happen is to get people to change their behaviour. If more children walked to school, then there would be fewer car journeys so less road congestion and healthier children. And there are plenty of similar examples.
You can have “Walk to School weeks” and introduce parking restrictions or congestion charges. But are there more effective ways of discouraging people from driving their kids to school?
One way to find out is to ask communities for their ideas. Don’t tell them what to do but ask them to come up with good ideas and then test the best of these. They can be about anything – as long as it reduces the carbon dioxide emitted. That’s the thinking behind the Big Green Challenge.
