What is it ?

Started by Terena Plowright in Petersfield UK, it is a community led campaign to reduced the carbon footprint and energy consumption.

The Aims

The aim is to take simple steps towards achieving carbon footprint & energy consumption reduction within a community - the emphasis on empowering the community to take action. This is not a government led initiative, and there is no profit involved. Transition to a low carbon economy has to start somewhere - where better to start by mobilising the community to take the initiative. The range of awareness within the community varies from one extreme to the other - its like running in a race with the knowlegable at the front wondering why there are stragglers at the back. But mobilising the community is about teamwork - we have to accept that some members may not be up to speed, and ideally we would rather not leave them behind.

So to summarise our aim is to :-

• Help you save money by reducing your energy consumption.
• Measure the reduction in Colden Common’s carbon footprint resulting from the campaign.
• Build on this early momentum to enable us to make more substantive sustainable improvements to our community in the future.

How does it work ?

The first phase is relatively straight forward and makes a start at “level setting” the community. In other words, making a start with communicating the issues and more importantly asking the community to take some positive action together. This is done by distributing challenge cards to all householders in the village. Each card has a number of energy / carbon footprint savings. The householder is asked to complete 5 or more and display their card in their front window.

After several weeks, the campaign team count up the number of cards and calculate the overal energy and carbon footprint savings across the village.

During this process, a Campaign Launch occurs aiming to

• To bring people together and explan further the rollout of the campaign.
• Explore ways in which we can all make a difference.
• Encourage people to join the campaign and help drive further more susbtaintive changes.

Why is it a good idea ?

Are we all generally agreed that climate change is really happening ? Or is it now a case of run away climate change ?

The IPCC is a panel of hundreds of the top independent climate scientists from all around the world. What is written in the report is the product of years of research and painstaking consensus – they all have to agree to the wording so it is fair to say that it represents the more conservative viewpoint of the science community.
Critically it rules out the idea that climate change is a predominantly natural process and suggests that it is ‘very likely’ a 9 in 10 chance that global warming is attributed to human action. It also makes clear the devastating implications for humanity if we allow emissions to continue on their upward course.

Peak Oil some experts are predicting 2015. This is when the global production of oil will peak. Because of the  way in which oil is extracted, once we reach this peak, global supplies will drop off very quickly – its not a gradual decline. As demand for oil increases / availability decreases we will see a dramatical change to the way we will live our lives. Our whole financial system is underpinned by cheap oil. Planes rely on it, supermarkets rely on it to provide cheap food.

Rising cost of fuel and food are totally related – we don’t have enough food to go around and we are now using more and more of that food to feed our cars. Its pretty simple really.  Because the oil that is left is harder to find and more diffciult and expensive to extract.

I think we need to face facts that irrespective of whether you believe in climate change or not, the world our children and grandchildren will be radically different from the one we enjoy today.

So its getting too difficult to ignor, but a mentioned earlier, there will be some of the community that will not be aware of the issues, so a combination of awareness generation and taking action is whats needed.