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The gas price crisis – in a hole, stop digging, here’s how to climb out…
Does it seem odd that in a gas price crisis, there are people arguing we should dig ourselves deeper into the grip of that particular fuel? We’ve been here before – and it never ends well. A poorly regulated banking system crashes and its defenders say that even less rules are needed to recover. Or, house prices go through the roof and instead of controlling property speculation, more money is poured into the market without building more homes.
In the grip of yet another fossil fuel price crisis, there are already voices saying that we need more of what got us into the mess in order to escape it. It’s like thinking, ‘my head hurts because I knocked it, if I hit it even harder the second knock will take away the pain of the first.’ When it comes to the energy issue, some seem incapable of even imagining a situation in which economies stop hitting themselves on the head with further fossil fuel addiction.
And, that’s a shame, because there’s an abundance of evidence of the ability to shift rapidly to much less economically and ecologically painful energy systems.
Collaborating with UK research body Nesta, the Rapid Transition Alliance looked at several cases of successful escape pathways from dependence on gas, with all its pollution and price volatility.
The first flush of transition
Gas is still a very common fuel used for heating homes, being literally plumbed into our daily lives. The idea that this could change quickly is hard to grasp. But it’s easy to forget how recently and radically home life has changed in many European homes. Only two generations ago, one in four homes in England and Wales still lacked an indoor shower, bath or toilet. In just over two decades, that number fell to 1%.
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The jump to pumps: how Finland found an answer to heating homes
How to heat homes and workplaces without relying on fossil fuels is one of the more difficult challenges for moving rapidly to zero carbon economies. Within the European Union (EU), the heating sector is the most energy and carbon-intensive, accounting for nearly 50% of the total energy demand in the EU, 75% of which is met through burning fossil fuels. Globally in 2017, just 10% of heat demand was met with sources of renewable energy. But, as the United Kingdom declares an intention to remove domestic gas boilers, in chilly Scandinavia, Finland has shown the extraordinary potential of one of the less visible renewable energy technologies – heat pumps.
Individual householders identified the suitability of this technology early on and invested in learning from each other. When government regulation caught up and began to support the technology with legislation, the market was already well developed and local heating engineers relatively skilled up. This illustrates a problem that many other countries will face – having sufficient knowledge among engineers and installers to make a heating rapid transition possible.
Finland has historically relied on burning biomass and oil for heating, being a country with a relatively small, thinly spaced population and large forests. In 1970, 90% of its space heating supply came from timber and oil. However, by 2012 the heating supply mix was almost unrecognisable. District heating, where heat is transmitted from a centralised source through a network of insulated pipes to multiple buildings, accounted for 40% of the supply mix, with electricity providing 21%, biomass 21%, oil 11%, heat pumps 6%, and gas contributing only 1%.
Although regulation has driven the scale of this transition, individual households have also played a key role. Much of the huge investment flowing into the purchase and installation of heat pumps in Finland has come from regular homeowners using their own cash, with limited or no government support…
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Unnecessary travel? The return of breathable air and rethinking transport in a crisis
Unnecessary travel? The return of breathable air and rethinking transport in a crisis
Bowing, perhaps to inevitability, the group of scientists responsible for assessing ways to cut the pollution that causes global heating, working group three of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, announced in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, that for the first time it will hold one of its major meetings ‘virtually’, avoiding the need for polluting travel. Over 270 experts from 65 countries would instead gather online. At a stroke they had been compelled to find a way that would set an example by cutting their own emissions. In doing so they revealed that this had, in fact, been an option all along as the technology to do so already existed.
One of the first things people in cities noticed as the coronavirus lockdowns started to be implemented and travel quickly reduced was the change in pollution levels. The sky was clear and contrail-free, and the air was cleaner. In some Indian cities, where air pollution is among the world’s worst and a major cause of death and disease, “people are reporting seeing the Himalayas for the first time from where they live,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
India’s hastily imposed shutdowns have been devastating, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrant workers without homes or jobs. But in Delhi, where air is normally choking, levels of both PM2.5 (small particulates) and the harmful gas nitrogen dioxide fell more than 70 percent. In China, the drops in pollution resulting from coronavirus shutdowns likely saved between 53,000 and 77,000 lives—many times more than the direct toll of the virus—according to calculations done by Marshall Burke, an Earth system scientist at Stanford University. Air pollution accounts for more than 1.2 million annual deaths in China.
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Zero carbon Britain: Rising to the climate emergency
Zero carbon Britain: Rising to the climate emergency
A new report out today from Rapid Transition Alliance founding member the Centre for Alternative technology (CAT) looks at how the UK can cut energy demand by 60% and reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions using current technologies, without relying on unproven carbon capture.
By modelling the changes needed to energy, buildings, transport, industry, diets and land-use, ‘Zero Carbon Britain: Rising to the Climate Emergency’ clearly demonstrates that we already have the tools and technology needed to play our part in leaving a safe and habitable climate for our children and future generations.
Addressing climate breakdown
People all over the world are feeling the effects of climate breakdown, from unprecedented heatwaves, droughts and massive wildfires to some of the most damaging floods and storms ever seen. The warnings from the scientific community are now becoming real life experiences.
The current UK greenhouse gas emissions target of net zero by 2050, though ambitious in comparison to some other countries, does not offer rapid enough reductions to provide a good chance of avoiding extremely dangerous climate breakdown. Neither does it adhere to what might be termed the UK’s ‘fair share’ of the remaining global carbon budget.
Zero Carbon Britain and… A series of independent thought papers on rising to the climate emergency PDF document, 4 MB Download
By making changes to our buildings, transport systems, land use and behaviour, and by investing in a variety of renewable energy technologies, we can achieve a zero carbon transition while building in a wide range of additional benefits.
CAT’s new report provides a blueprint to open new conversations around the scale and speed of change we need to deliver if we are to rise to the climate emergency. It can be used as a template to help citizens and local and national policymakers develop and deliver zero carbon action plans.
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How learning to share again cuts waste, and makes more resilient communities
How learning to share again cuts waste, and makes more resilient communities
Sharing is one of the very first things we are taught to do as children, it’s almost the defining difference between being ‘good’ or seen as selfish. But from the moment we become adults the focus quickly shifts in modern economies to everyone having their own things and protecting ‘private property’. Not only does this exclude people with little money, it leads to a lot of environmentally wasteful over-consumption as households duplicate often underused items. If we shared more in modern life it could cut waste and bring us together. Now a movement is emerging to rediscover the benefits of sharing.
The Share Shed is a library of things in the town of Totnes in the southwest of the UK (also home to the Transition Town network). People can donate useful items to the library – like ladders, drills, carpet cleaners, camping, cooking and gardening equipment, and sewing machines – and others can borrow them for an affordable fee. This enables locals to borrow items rather than buy them for themselves and then leave them unused in a shed or cupboard for years. The aim is to build a more resourceful community, allowing people to connect with each other and share things they may need just once in a while, helping people to save money, space and resources.
Share Shed was set up in Totnes in April 2017 by the Network of Wellbeing, with the help of Totnes town council and Lottery Fund support. It was inspired by a similar initiative in the UK West country town of Frome, where the sharers had helpfully designed a kit to encourage others to set up sharing schemes.
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New money meets the cost of change: how local currencies save economies and communities, and help them flourish
New money meets the cost of change: how local currencies save economies and communities, and help them flourish
In times of crisis and other upheavals, local communities have discovered that one answer to being failed by the mainstream economy is to print your own currency. Responses also range from age-old barter systems to time-banking and modern digital currencies. They demonstrate the kind of re-imagining of the economy needed for rapid transition, and show how people and communities can reveal their greatest strengths when times are hardest and most uncertain.
Spurred by lessons from successful initiatives, now some major cities and regions are seeing permanent benefits from having their own money or exchange system. Local currencies can strengthen neighbourhood ties and allow people to make friends – they are a focal point for the community-minded. In the US, for example, California alone has 19 city currencies, many formed after the financial crisis of 2007 – 2008. Lending to small businesses plummeted, with impacts particularly hitting African Americans, women and Latinos – people from historically marginalised groups. Community currencies empowered people to have more say over where money circulated, giving them a greater stake in their economic future. A different approach, Time Credits in the UK – a national network of time banks – has been effective in addressing many different types of need, from eldercare and schools to drugs and alcohol misuse.
But with financial crises becoming seemingly more frequent and extreme, the speed with which communities in one European country devised its own solution during the Eurozone crisis, stands testimony to the potential for rapid economic reinvention. When trouble hit Greece, in the port city of Volos, people turned their backs on the failed mainstream economic system to grow their own parallel economy. In 2011, eggs, milk and jam could be bought at market using a new, informal barter currency, a Local Alternative Unit, or TEM as it is known domestically.
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