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Cindy, Angela, Mark, Daryl, Russell, Andy and Kat met at Kat’s on Thursday 15th January. Thanks to Kat for doing the tats and everyone else for bringing eats and drinks. Welcome to Mark and Angela who came for the first time. Thanks for apologies from Jake, Irene, Sunny, Iain, Lusi. Will are you still in/around?
The main purpose of the meeting was to review our carbon year and decide what we would do in 2009.
The 2008 carbon accounts have now been uploaded to the web page. In summary, we averaged 2.6t over the 20 participants (including family participants) which is much the same as last year. This is roughly half the national average for the things we are counting. 9 of the 20 managed to stay within the 2008 allowance of 2t. Congratulations you folks! You had three things in common. These were (1) you avoided flying, (2) you did without owning a car and (3) you share your living space.
Debts outnumbered savings by 2:1 and a total of £575 is due to be paid into the carbon fund. The destination of the carbon fund was not finalised at the meeting but it has since been decided to split it between a local tree planting charity (25%), an anti-airport expansion group (25%) and an overseas appropriate technology charity (50%).
Given that debts outnumbered saving, Andy suggested the cost of holding debt should double to 10p per kgCO2 in 2009. Most of us were clear that our carbon reduction efforts this year were made independently of the 5p carbon penalty. Some also felt that they were beginning to reach the limit of their ability to make further carbon reductions without reducing their quality of life irrespective of the cost of emissions.
Andy also suggested an allowance of 1750kg for 2009 in order to keep us in line with the 80% cut in global emissions by 2020 proposed by Lester Brown http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/80by2020.htm. Brown maintains that such a cut would prevent CO2 concentrations exceeding 400ppm. I am assuming that this is consistent with eventually getting back to the “safe” level of 350ppm that Hansen and others say is necessary (see http://www.350.org/understanding-350#1). Kat expressed a preference to maintain the same allowance as last year due to the difficulty of reducing further given today’s infrastructure.
To put the proposed 2009 carbon penalty into some sort of perspective, it is the equivalent of putting £1 on the cost of a Glasgow to Edinburgh train return that is bought after one’s allowance is fully used up. If you were to use your allowance only for travelling by train between Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1750kg would last you for 175 returns trips! Alternately, 1750kg compares with 2400kg which is the average Glaswegian’s home energy emissions (http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/globatmos/galocalghg.htm).
A change was suggested to the way we count children’s allowances. We discused a 50% allowance from 0 to 15 years and 100% from 16 up. The debate continued on the emails and Cindy set up a poll. http://www.doodle.com/participation.html?pollId=fwtpgk36c3sudphg. To date 5 have cast a vote – all in favour of retaining the 100% and none for the 50% proposal. Lusi suggested a compromise of 50% up to 5 years old and 100% thereafter.
We decided to count public transport journeys of more than 10 miles in single trip length. This was to bring people’s train commutes and other regular medium to long distant trips into the picture.
Cindy was keen to explore how she could count her food footprint and since the meeting has been in touch with the Edinburgh CRAG which is trying to do this. The Alnwick CRAG in Northumberland is also trying to include a food element. In some national carbon rationing frameworks, emissions related to food would be captured in its price as producers and distributors passed on their own emissions costs to customers. Carbon labelling of individual products has turned out to be much more complicated than some supermarkets first thought it would be when they considered adopting it back in 2007.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jan/19/ethicalbusiness.supermark….
Our next meeting will be in mid-April.