<<Climate Change>> Report of meeting in London J

julianj

Harriet Harman MP’s Climate Change Summit

30th June 06

City Hall, London (aka The Mayor’s Headlamp)

Moderator:
Jim Patterson (Friends of the Earth)

Speakers:
Harriet Harman MP
Tessa Jowell MP
Cllr Andrew Pakes (vice chair SERA – Labour environment Group)
Martyn Williams (Friends of the Earth)
Val Shawcross (London Assembly Member for Lambeth and Southwark)
Cllr Lisa Rajan (Southwark Councillor in charge of Environment and Leisure)
Donnachadh McCarthy (Author of “Saving the Planet without costing the Earth – 500 steps to greening your lifestyle”, and Environmental Auditor).
Plus Simon Hughes MP from the floor.

Popular pressure from the FoE Big Ask campaign (www.thebigask.com) clearly jumpstarted Harriet Harman to invite all those consitituents (including myself) to a meeting about Climate Change. Looked to me like 80+ turned up, on a scorching Friday lunchtime. This is a brief summary of what was said, with the most empty rhetoric weeded out.

The session started half an hour late because of computer problems, and ended at 2.30 so we only had 90 mins, which was far too little.

Harriet Harman opened the session with a Mea Culpa about how ungreen she was, and explained that she was supposed to do an environmental audit with Donnachadh, but couldn’t find any bills and hadn’t a clue what her energy consumption was: I do love it when MPs are so in touch with the concerns of her constituents. It felt like the Marie Antoinette Seminar on Peasant Life.

Jim Patterson (an excellent chair) explained that the meeting would focus on five areas:

International Action, National Action, London-Wide Action, Southwark Council Action, Individual Action.

International Action
Andrew Pakes is a New Labour Wonk, and spouted jargon.

Val Shawcross then talked about Aircraft emissions being the biggest international problem to tackle, and a speaker from the floor pointed out that the EU was trying to bring aircraft emissions into the Emissions Trading Scheme.

Rozine Roberts from Greenpeace made the first of her several idiotic interventions; about flying aircraft on biofuels. I marked her down as Twit of the Meeting, she always spouted a piece of PRspeak about “GreenPeace – we supply solutions”, then said something totally wrong, e.g. 660 windturbines can replace a nuclear reactor, or after pointing out that giant power stations have huge transmission losses, suggested that we should carpet the Sahara with PV. I’ll not mention her again.

Simon Hughes said that the polluters should pay the full cost of CO2 emissions.

Donnachadh McCarthy said we should be aiming for 2 tonnes of CO2 emissions per UK citizen instead of the current 8.54 because this was the survival level (although I have read it’s 9.85 per person), lets split the difference and call it 9.

Jane Kelly from a refugee organisation pointed out that a little-recognised effect of rising sea levels will be massive migrations of people from inundated areas, like 50 or 100 million or more. This is something that will increase pressure on the remaining environment. I also had visions of draconian anti-refugee provisions, like electric fences and shoot-to-kill policies.

National Action

Martyn Williams gave an excellent speech, about how the government is not doing enough. There is going to be a Climate Change bill in the next parliamentary session, so I suggest you write to your MP to support this.

Tessa Jowell gave us a by-the-numbers New Labour speech about meeting targets, which was met with some scepticism.

London-wide action

Val Shawcross told us that London was responsible for two-thirds of UK carbon emissions! I was astonished by this, but haven’t been able to verify the figure. If so, it’s something that really needs working on by the London Climate Change Agency. Val said that we have ten years to turn things around.

A speaker from the floor talked about the embedded energy in buildings and how it was better to reuse/refurbish them than the more environmentally damaging course of knocking them down and building new ones.

Simon Hughes said that economic growth was the problem, and that we should redefine it in environmentally friendly terms, like the Dutch have. He also mentioned the city of Graz in Austria, which has very sound environmental policies which also appeal to business.

Harriet Harman made a very good point that we should not call it Climate Change, but Climate Crisis, because that is a more accurate description.

Southwark borough-wide action

Lisa Rajan then talked about what Southwark were doing, which sounded admirable, but as it is one of the most impoverished boroughs in the country, with loads of ancient housing stock (including where I live!) I felt they would struggle to achieve sizeable reductions, although carbon emissions are around 4 tonnes per resident (general level of borough poverty), i.e. below the national average.

Individual Action

I really warmed to Donnachadh McCarthy: he doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks (and bikes) it too! His carbon emissions are 0.5 tonne per year! (that’s better than Nicaragua at 0.7, equal to Angola, and just above Bangladesh at 0.3). Mine is 4 tonnes. AV. UK 9 tonnes; (interestingly the USA is only the 7th worst at 20 tonnes, check it out here:

List of countries by carbon emissions

He leads a normal life, and lives in a solar-powered house in Camberwell. It seemed to me that he wasn’t well-off but had managed to do this. He is attending PeakSpeak2 (UK Event) at BedZed low carbon development on July 15th Powerswitch.org.uk so it will be possible ask more questions about exactly how he does this.

He also said that the oil in 8 plastic bags would drive a car for 1 km!

He started to do an environmental audit on Harriet Harman’s assistant – who’d been volunteered by HH in lieu of her own contribution, but it got so embarrassing he veered off to talk more generally about how to reduce your emissions.

Unfortunately time ran out.

I couldn’t raise Peak Oil as a subject.

The meeting agreed to have another summit. To engage other London councils to form a London-wide crisis steering committee, with the intention of expanding it nationwide.

Conclusion

This was a good – if small – step forward. It had examples of positive things happening at every level, even if our elected representatives seemed to be laggardly on this matter.
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The other place that believes completely in the right to keep and bear arms, particularly to use against foreign invaders and tyrants is: Afghanistan.

Zardoz

All well and good, of course. You have to admire these people's intentions.

However, forgive me for being a wet blanket, but all these efforts and more that are made in the UK will be cancelled out many, many times over by what is going on in China and India. As long as they continue on their present course, any improvements made anywhere else, even in the U.S., are essentially meaningless.
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"Thank you for attending the oil age. We're going to scrape what we can out of these tar pits in Alberta and then shut down the machines and turn out the lights. Goodnight." - seldom_seen

Battle_Scarred_Galactico · Intermediate Crude Joined: Apr 07, 2005 Posts: 970

Rozine Roberts from Greenpeace made the first of her several idiotic interventions; about flying aircraft on biofuels

What an absolute fool.

Zardoz, it's true that China and the US will cancel out any moves many times over, but this type of discussion may move us toward finally realizing we can't carry on like this in the UK.

Hardly likley I know.
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"One minute I held the key, next the walls were closed on me, and I discovered that my castle stands upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand."

NEOPO

Julian - keep up the good work but next time please make sure PO is part of the debate.
At the end of "an inconvenient truth" PO was all I could think about.

Alot of talk about what we can do etc etc yet no mention of the energy crisis which will most certainly effect the environment adversely.

Zardoz - How do you think smaller more aware countries feel about the USA?
I cannot buy into this "we should do nothing because they are doing worse" theory.
As soon as this whole thing more or less "came out" this year it was not two seconds later that someone was pointing fingers at ChIndia.

We must act regardless of whatever the next person,country,company is doing.
We must act and put pressure on the world.

Who better to set an example then the #1 polluters?

I certainly do not feel that our efforts will be "meaningless".
Your frustrations are shared and understandable yet we cannot allow it to prevent us from taking action.

Zardoz

julianj

NEOPO: yes, you're right. I will try to get PO on the agenda of the next meeting. I had intended to bring it up at the Q & A at the end but as it ran out of time, there wasn't one.

I also agree that if the most polluting states don't set an example, then India and China certainly won't. What we can alter is our own energy consumption and pollution output. I do want to stress that I was invigorated by Donnachadh McCarthy's astonishing powerdown
(0.5 tonnes of carbon per year).

here's his website:

D Mccarthy website

If he can do it, anyone can.
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The other place that believes completely in the right to keep and bear arms, particularly to use against foreign invaders and tyrants is: Afghanistan.

Terrapin

Julian.

Thanks for the report and the links. The CO2 emissions were very interesting.

I ordered McCarthey’s book. I admit I am usually disappointed in such ventures but they are interesting to check out.

If those us in the developed world can export consumerism; I see no reason why we cannot export environmental awareness also.

gg3

Re. Terrapin, "If those us in the developed world can export consumerism; I see no reason why we cannot export environmental awareness also."

Consumerism appeals to the chimpanzee instinct to grasp at anything that's shiny and new. Conservation is a form of self-discipline that calls for less grasping at things that are shiny and new.

It takes no effort to convince people to obey their chimp instincts to grasp at things that are shiny and new. But try convincing people to resist their chimp instincts. That takes much effort and has a lower success rate.

Not that we shouldn't try. But also we cannot underestimate the ferocious difficulty of the task. Try it with one or two of the few people on this board who justify their entitlement to as much energy as they can pay for at whatever is the present market price.

Terrapin

Gg3, I understand your point, but there must be another factor that counterbalances the “grab the shiny thing” primitive desires. How else would environmentalism have survived this far in the land of people with pockets full of shiny things? I suspect that this factor (I dare not call it ethics or morals for fear of ridicule) must be at least as strong in those whose pockets are not yet filled with shiny things.

I do agree that it will not be as easy to export as consumerism for the reason you mention and it doesn’t have the advertising budget.