Newcastle – CAfE Conference – 29th November

The Energy Savings Trust has an offshoot, the Community Action for Energy, Café, which does exactly what its name suggests. I went to its annual conference in Newcastle in November and had a great time (while telling the delegates about the Big Green Challenge).

Mark Lynas sketched why he thinks humanity is now writing a collective suicide note – but we should not sign it. Instead we take much more radical action to reduce emissions. So we should have the maximum emissions around 2015 with steep declines afterwards. To get there, we need to take a wide range of measures, from tradeable carbon quotas to widespread use of electric cars powered from renewable sources. He was optimistic because there was now more local activity around climate change, such as Ashton Hayes or the 250 groups working on climate change in the South West of England. To make a big difference all that was needed was to mobilise a critical mass in a community. It wasn’t necessary (or possible) to get everyone to sign up.

We then heard from three inspirational projects, Sanford Housing, Ashton Hayes, and Community Buildings. Jim Noble of Sanford talked about their mutual housing cooperative with 130 members where they had renewed kitchens, installed solar water heating, and a biomass boiler. Tracey Todhunter gave us the Ashton Hayes experience. This is a community of 1000 people who announce their household carbon footprints in their front windows! For Tracey it was important to show how people could live a good life and have a low-carbon footprint. It was definitely not about wearing hair shirts.

Arthur Scott from National Energy Action described how they helped to save energy in community buildings. An important knock-on effect was that any cost savings were then likely to be spent in the local area. We then heard about Personal Carbon Trading from Simon Roberts, Centre for Sustainable Energy, Bristol. (See his and Joshua Thumin’s report for Defra, (A Rough Guide to Individual Carbon Trading )

It’s a complex topic. But Simon did a terrific job of explaining the advantages and the disadvantages. The principle is simple. Everyone gets a set carbon allowance every year. Each time they pay for fuel, or a utility bill, or buy a travel ticket (bus, train or plane) they surrender part of their carbon allowance. So if you want to use more carbon than your allowance one year, you have to buy the extra you need from someone who is using less.

The beauty of the scheme is that it provides a mechanism for reducing overall carbon use. The Government sets a total for everyone in the country, and divides that by the population to get an amount of carbon that each person can use. The next year, the Government reduces the overall amount and carbon use comes down. But while personal carbon trading is a great idea, would it ever work in practice? What’s needed, according to Simon, is a large scale trial to see if it could work. A group of people sets a carbon allowance for their members. Those that needed more could buy extra from other members and the money that’s raised could go into energy saving measures or renewable energy kit. Maybe some entrants to the BGC could be testbeds for these ideas.