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Grassroots: Climate change and local government
Greenery from the bottom up
The Economist
A MULTI-STOREY car park in Woking, a commuter town just south of London, makes an unlikely totem for environmentalism. Only the chimney on the roof and the faint smell of burnt hydrocarbons betray its status as the centrepiece of Britain’s greenest local council. Besides parking spaces, the building contains a 1.3MW gas-fired combined heat-and-power (CHP) plant that supplies electricity and heat (the latter a waste product in ordinary power stations) to council offices, a hotel and several other city-centre businesses. With help from solar-powered parking meters, another CHP plant at the municipal swimming pool and an energy-efficiency drive, Woking has cut its carbon emissions by 21% since 1990, nine percentage points more than the national target.
Other councils are thinking along similar lines. The Isle of Wight, off the south coast in the Solent, aspires to become self-sufficient in energy over the next few decades through a combination of tidal power, a waste-to-electricity plant and efficiency savings. London has set up its own Climate Change Agency headed by Alan Jones, who provided many of Woking’s green ideas. It wants to cut London’s carbon emissions by 60% by 2025. To that end, its city hall is covered in solar panels and there are plans to fit cosier insulation to local-government buildings, build four waste-to-energy plants and buy 500 hybrid diesel-electric buses by 2010. Over half of Britain’s 434 councils have signed the portentous-sounding Nottingham Declaration on Climate Change (or its Welsh and Scottish equivalents).
For local politicians, greenery is a welcome relief from duller concerns such as bin collections, lollipop ladies and parking charges. Fighting climate change allows councils-which are usually kept on a tight leash by an overweening central government-a rare chance to look and sound statesmanlike.
…And grassroots enthusiasm for greenery is certainly growing. Residents of 31 British towns have joined the “Transition Town” movement, for example, as have a few in New Zealand, Ireland and Australia. Such local determination may turn out to be more powerful than windy rhetoric from central government-even if the initiative’s grand plans for “unleashing its own latent collective genius to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye” are perhaps a little melodramatic.
(21 February 2008)
New video at Transition Culture that quickly summarizes the movement.
On the verge of a revolution
Nick Galvin, Sydney Morning Herald
This man’s mission is to revegetate any scrap of unloved public ground, and he’s deadly serious.
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Where most people see nature strips that need mowing, scrappy grass verges and useless “waste” land, Bob Crombie sees only endless opportunities for more planting.
Mr Crombie is a retired National Parks and Wildlife Service senior ranger and TAFE teacher but prefers these days to describe himself as a “bewilderer”.
“‘Bewilder’ is an old term meaning ‘to become connected to life, the source, the spirit, God’,” he says. All of which sounds pretty high-falutin’ until you realise how startlingly practical Mr Crombie’s “bewildering” is.
With a couple of mates, he spends his spare time clearing weeds and planting out any public green space that catches his eye. “Once you start thinking, you see opportunities everywhere you look,” he says.
When the inevitable question arises of seeking permission from whatever public body owns the land, he just grins. “We just go ahead and do it,” he says. “If I see a place and think, ‘Jeez, an angophora would look good there’, I just put one there.”
Not that he takes his self-appointed task lightly. “Bewildering is much more than just planting trees, greening and hugging koalas,” he says. “It is a very deep human response to our relationship to our world, especially our immediate environment, that recognises our place in it, our dependence upon it and our responsibility to it.”
…Plants are often stolen or removed, he says, but even if only a quarter of his work survives, that is better than nothing. “Nothing is permanent,” he says cheerfully. “Change is a constant. You shouldn’t take it to heart. You’ve got to be prepared to lose but if you plant something for 10 years and then someone builds something on it, then you’ve had 10 years’ benefits out of it.”
(20 February 2008)
Green Economics and New Thinking
Tom Prugh, WorldChanging
A few years ago, a homeowner in Las Vegas-a place that gets maybe five inches of rainfall a year-was confronted by a water district inspector for running an illegal sprinkler in the middle of the day. The man became very angry. He said, “You people and all your stupid rules-you’re trying to turn this place into a desert!”
Ideas about how the world works that don’t accord with reality can be unhelpful. That’s especially true about mainstream economics, which is based in part on ideas that made a lot of sense at some point in the last 250 years but that have outlived their time and usefulness. These ideas-such as the reliance on GDP as the key index of general wellbeing-still dominate assumptions and thinking about economic matters in the media, governments, businesses, and popular consciousness.
But in recent decades, economics theoreticians and researchers have suggested a variety of reforms that would make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. My colleague Gary Gardner and I describe seven of these in Chapter 1 of the Worldwatch Institute’s latest report, State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy:
1) Scale. How big is the global economy relative to the global ecosystem? This is crucial, because the economy resides totally inside the global ecosystem-the ecosystem gives the economy a place to operate, supplies all of its raw materials, and supports it with many critical services. In physical terms, economic activity is basically converting bits and pieces of the ecosystem to human uses: trees and forests into lumber and houses, grasslands and other habitats into farms to feed the billions of humans, and so on.
We’ve gotten really good at economic growth. Since Adam Smith’s time, the number of people in the world has exploded from about 1 billion to nearly 7 billion. And in the last 200 years, Gross World Product has risen by nearly a factor of 60. The ecosystem has suffered as a result, hence the headlines we see every day: climate change, species extinctions, dwindling rainforests, water shortages, and all the rest.
(18 February 2008)
We’ll Save the Planet Only if We’re Forced To
Johann Hari, The Independent/UK via Common Dreams
Do you check every item you buy to make sure it is green and planet-friendly? Do you buy carbon offsets every time you fly? Stop. It is time to be honest: green consumerism is at best a draining distraction, and at worst a con. While the planet’s fever gets worse by the week, we are guzzling down green-coloured placebos and calling it action. There is another way. Our reaction to global warming has gone in waves. First we were in blank denial: how can releasing an odourless, colourless gas change the climate so dramatically? Now we are in a phase of displacement: we assume we can shop our way out of global warming, by shovelling a few new lightbulbs and some carbon offsets into our shopping basket.
This is a self-harming delusion. It’s hard to give a sense of the contrast today between the magnitude of our problem, and the weediness of our response so far. But the best way is offered by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen.
He explains that until 10,000 years ago, the planet’s climate would fluctuate violently: sometimes it would veer by 12 degrees centigrade in just a decade. This meant it was impossible to develop agriculture. Crops couldn’t be cultivated in this climatic chaos, so human beings were stuck as a tiny smattering of hunter-gatherers.
But then the climate settled down into safe parameters – and humans could settle down too. This period is called the Holocene, and it meant that for the first time, we could develop farming and cities. Everything we know as human civilisation is thanks to this unprecedented period of climatic stability.
Today, we are bringing this era to an end. By pumping vast amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere, we are creating a new era: the Anthropocene, in which man makes the weather. There is an imminent danger of it bursting beyond these safe parameters, and bringing about a return to the violent, volatile variations that prevented our ancestors from progressing beyond spears and sticks.
Those are the stakes. Every week, there is greater evidence that we are nudging further from our safety zone. The hottest year of the 20th century – 1947 – is now merely the average for the 21st century.
And what are we doing? Many good, well-intentioned people are beginning to grasp this problem – and then assuming green consumerism is the only answer to hand. They shop around for items that have not been freighted thousands of miles to make it to their supermarket shelves. They change their lightbulbs. They turn down the thermostat a few degrees. They make sure they buy products that don’t sit on electricty-burning standby all day. They buy the more energy-efficient cars, and scorn SUV drivers.
I don’t want to attack these people. They are an absolutely essential part of any solution. But we have to be honest. This is not even the beginning of a solution – and by pouring so much energy into it, we may actually be forestalling the real solution. I know a huge number of people who are sincerely worried about global warming, but they assume they have Done Their Bit through these shifted consumption patterns. The truth is: you haven’t.
In reality, dispersed consumer choices are not going to keep the climate this side of a disastrous temperature rise. The only way that can ever happen is by governments legislating to force us all – green and anti-green – to shift towards cleaner behaviour. Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily .
(21 February 2008)
