Monthly Archives: March 2009

At our last meeting, we began to get practical. We divided the group into two. One group began thinking about how to raise awareness of climate change and peak oil in St Albans. What kinds of events could we run, where, and how would we organise them.

The rest of us began to brainstorm other groups at work in St Albans. A town as big as St Albans must have plenty existing interest groups, many of which will overlap with our own interests. Current homework is to find as many other groups as we can, everyone from boy scouts to bee keepers, cycling clubs, commuter associations, business groups, everything we can think of. Once we’ve got them all on paper, we’ll begin to get a picture of who’s doing what and what kinds of strategic partnerships we need to start to build.

The Age of Stupid is the first film to dramatize the effects of climate change. A combination of drama and documentary, the film stars Pete Postlethwaite as an old man in 2055, browsing through archive footage and wondering why we didn’t act to save ourselves. The Grierson Award Jury declared it “a powerful and unforgettable film”, while the Ecologist says “Fantastic. Knocks spots off An Inconvenient Truth”.

The film will premiere in Leicester Square on March 15th, from a solar-powered tent in Leicester Square, and it will be transmitted live to 60 other cinemas around the country, making it the largest ever premiere. The more people get along to see the film on its opening night, the more cinemas will consider showing it, so try and get to a showing if you can!

For those of us in St Albans the nearest showings will be either in Watford or Hatfield.

To find out more, read this interview with director Franny Armstrong, visit the Age of Stupid website, or watch the trailer below.

In 2006 Sweden declared its intention to go completely oil-free by 2020, making them in many ways the first (and so far only) transition country. Here’s a little on how they plan to do it.

Five basic strategies will guide the transition:

1. Energy efficiency – the whole society will need to make efficiencies of 1.5% a year until 2020, a 20% improvement overall.

2. Invest in ‘forest fuels’ – Sweden has wood, lots of it, and by 2020 all heating in residential and commercial buildings should be wood-fired. Research is also underway to find ways of creating biofuels from wood. Any unused agricultural land will be planted with trees to increase the wood supply.

3. Sustainable electricity – a series of efficiency measures will reduce the need for electricity, and more will be generated domestically. Wind power is one avenue for investment, and a smarter distribution network will route electricity more effectively to where it is needed.

4. Reduce external dependency – Sweden uses natural gas from Norway and Denmark, with a pipeline from Russia also planned. The commission recommended scrapping those plans, so that there would greater incentives to develop the aforementioned forest fuels.

5. Work with the EU to tighten controls – this is a political one. Aas a member of the EU, Sweden is subject to its guidelines on emissions trading. Since Sweden is considerably more ambitious than the EU, it could find its plans undermined, and therefore aims to raise the bar on EU targets.

Within those five overarching strategies are a whole host of more detailed proposals. On buildings for example, regulations will be tightened so that all new houses will be built without an external heating system, with heat exchange systems, ‘clever windows’, and airtight ‘climate shell’ construction instead. Old buildings will be renovated, starting with government buildings as an example.

The biggest challenge will be transport. Public transport will be improved and encouraged by convenient, universal payment mechanisms. A scheme has been proposed where employers would provide staff with free public transport, and investment in IT for home working will reduce the number of commutes. An improved rail network, with the Stockholm bottleneck removed, will reduce longer journeys and internal air travel.

Many people will still want private cars, and a range of measures will combine to make private motoring sustainable. Car tax will be based on carbon emissions, creating an obvious incentive to choose an efficient car, and hybrids, electric cars and diesels will also get tax breaks. Eco-driving has been added to the driving school curriculum. Car-sharing will be encouraged, and load-sharing in the transport industry will mean fewer empty or half-full lorries on the roads. Overall, transport will be more efficient, reducing the overall load. This will make it easier for biofuels and electric vehicles to gain an advantage, so that oil can be gradually phased out.

There’s a lot more I could say, but you can read the Commission on Oil Independence report for more detail. It’s an inspiring document, and proof that turning a whole country around is not a political impossibility.

(crossposted on MWH)