Colwall Greener

I have just put a link to our phase one report on the front page.

I was at a meeting of the bridge action group on Monday and they were wondering about what to do to encourage the local traders and suggested a shop in Colwall week. This sounds like a good idea which we could work together on. I wonder what would be the best time - after Easter or later?

To round off the Colwall Festival.
A Glimpse of the Imminent Future
By Colwall Greener

On Sunday 20th July at Threshing Barn, Lower House Farm, Evendine Lane Colwall Greener will be offering Colwall residents an opportunity to see & hear about how some residents are preparing and adapting to the ever tightening pressures of Climate Change and Peak Oil.

There will be:

Displays and short talks about the various approaches residents have taken, in their homes, food and transport.

DVD’s showing solutions adopted in other countries to give us a sense of what is possible and the benefits that come from taking concerted action.

DVD’s showing to explain why we must act if we are to forestall a catastrophic future for our children and grandchildren and why we have to do this in the next few years.

In the afternoon there will an opportunity to form & join small action groups wishing to help the village move on.

Please join us to help build a more sustainable future, in friendship and community.

For more details &/or to get involved contact Robin Coates 01684 540 284 or robin@robincoates.com

These are a few bullet points from our discussion (or at least what I remember of it!)

• Colwall Festival.   We will do something at the tail end of the festival, on the 20th July.  This will probably be an information stall but it would be nice to do some visits to houses with energy saving features.
• The web site.  You’ve found it, hooray!  Now you can register and make some comments and posts yourself.
• Orchards.  The project is going great guns, with several orchards surveyed, some owners contacted, and some noble chafer frass possibly found.
• Local climate impacts.  Helen mentioned this, having been contacted from Herefordshire council.  The idea is to make preparations to counter the effects of the climate change which is inevitable - flooding comes to mind, after all Colwall gets cut off in heavy rain these days.  This could make an interesting school project (hydrography and all that).  There’s a climate impacts web site which is worth a visit.
• Bags.  Still discussing this, but Upton’s plastic bag free activity is very interesting and their web site has some good links too.
• Date of next meeting: 18th February, 7.30pm at Lower House Farm

We had a very interesting orchard survey training day on the 24th, and we all left with a sample of beetle poo to identify noble chafers. Why these beetles particularly? Well, they are rare and if you can make the habitat OK for them, it will probably suit the rest of the beetle tribe too. Anyway, the orchards are very interesting and we have a lot of them in Colwall and we ought to make more of them.

We are now all set to survey the other orchards in Colwall and then take the project on for another year.

While researching the church’s electricity requirements, I have been delving into green electricity supplies and finding it far more complicated than I thought. The problem is the renewables obligation (RO) which requires all suppliers to provide a certain percentage (currently about 6% and rising by 1% a year) of their electricity from renewable sources. The mechanism uses certificates which are produced by the renewable generators and bought by the suppliers. The effect is that the cost of the renewables option is spread over the consumers - it’s like a carbon tax. Green electricity tariffs are larger than non-green tariffs, so the question is, what are you getting for your money. If the supplier only provides electricity out of what it would need to do anyway, the premium on the green tariff is only going towards the company’s profits.

So, if you want a green supplier, you need to find someone who gets their electricity from a generator who does not sell all of their RO certificates for the electricity they sell. This does not apply to most green tariffs, although some of them support green funds and some plant trees. On the whole, I would have thought you either go for a standard tariff or one which is really green which could be 20-30% dearer than the cheapest standard tariff. I am not sure that I could recommend that to the church (the difference is £2-300 a year).

I did a survey of people’s attitudes to climate change during Colwall Fund Day, before having to give up because my survey sheets were getting soaked and all the text was running off! I didn’t find anyone who really was a climate sceptic – I think the message really has got across and people are seeing the effects in the weather they are experiencing. However, I found very few who were prepared to do anything serious about it, and a definite feeling that they were fed up with the whole topic. Perhaps the rain didn’t help! Typical answers included, ‘I’m doing what I can – isn’t this enough?’ ‘I’ m too old for it to affect me’ and ‘This is all being over-hyped’

Generally there seems to be a failure to appreciate the nature of the problem.

However, people are doing things. Almost everyone I spoke to had done something to reduce their carbon footprint, if only from the point of view of reducing costs. This included the straightforward things like changing habits and doing some insulation. I think the message that you need a foot of insulation in the loft has not gone across and some people don’t seem to venture into their lofts at all (where do they put their junk?) They are put off doing other things by cost and the light bulb effect – that is, having a stock of perfectly good light bulbs which they want to use up first.

Almost everyone was doing some form of recycling – kerbside collection really has made a difference and everyone uses charity shops.

Dramatis Personae: Chris, a retired civil servant; Robin, a consultant.

Chris: I was trying to ask myself why I hadn’t got round to changing my light bulbs to energy saving ones.

Robin: And what was your answer?

Chris: Well, one was the thought that I had a box of spare bulbs in the work room and then I found a web site which sold them cheaply in boxes of ten and then I thought, what I need to do is go through the house and make a list of all the bulbs and their fittings and then I shall know where I am.

Robin: Whenever I talk to people in government with some problem on their hands, they nearly always think of doing a survey, which takes them a year and when I come back they are no further forward. You know perfectly well the three lights to change and you will get 90% of the benefit from changing those.

Chris (thinks): Consultants!!! But I must admit, he has a point. (out loud) Thank you Robin!

The chancellor of the Exchequer recently commissioned a review by Sir Nicholas Stern, head of the government economics service, on the economics of climate change. The review was surprisingly positive: avoiding the worst consequences of climate change would not be costly, provided action was taken now. The report makes interesting reading and has very good graphics, including a display of temperature rises and possible consequences which indicates the degree of uncertainty in the predictions.

Generally, people have welcomed this report and the discussion has centred on what the politicians should do about it. But, as ever, there are contrarians in climate change who say either that it is not happening, or if it is happening mankind is not blame, or if it is we can’t possibly do anything about it. The report shows this last position is incorrect, a view supported against the sceptics by Adair Turner in the November issue of Prospect.

George Monbiot has pointed out that climate change is a moral problem, not an economic one. It just does not make sense to talk about making people pay the full economic costs of their actions when the consequences may involve people dying. If air transport cause climate change and climate change cause flooding in Bangladesh, what are we supposed to do, sacrifice an air hostess for every Bangladeshi drowned?

The Stern Review is a very useful document, but any economic analysis is subject to uncertainty, an uncertainty which to my mind is considerably greater than that of the scientific predictions. What if there is a war in the Middle East, cutting of oil supplies and leading to a collapse of the world economy? What is the probability of that and has it been factored in? And the answer is, of course not. The aim of politics is to avoid such terrible consequences - they simply cannot be taken into account.

I was just checking out the Farm website which is very interesting by the way and they had a link to The Meatrix. It’s a little movie which you really must see! Click on it straight away!