Jessica |
 |
Next Monday, 1 October, is our quarterly ‘mandatory’ meeting, to which everyone [in the existing CRAG] is asked to come.
Time: 7pm. Venue: [one of the 2 usual locations, ask John or Jessica]
Here is the proposed agenda for Monday’s meeting. Please email me asap if you have other items you’d like us to discuss.
1. Quick update on how our carbon accounts are shaping up. This is not a settlement meeting (that will be Monday 7 January: please make a note of it now), so you don’t need to bring your accounts. But please can you input recent gas and electricity meter readings into your account on John A’s calculator website? We are trying to get meter readings from everyone at least every three months. If you’ve done more inputting and can talk about your findings, so much the better.
2. What happens when we’ve finished this carbon year, especially to unused credits? Should we start next year with a clean slate, or would this encourage us to have a frenzy of carbon burning in our last quarter? For example, should we allow people to roll over some credits, to encourage them to save up their credits, or should the only incentive to save be that you get some money payment if you come in under target? John, Guy, Doug and I met on 3 September and Doug came up with a draft paper suggesting some options and how they would work (thanks, Doug!), which I attach. Don’t be scared by the graphs – even I can follow most of them.
3. Someone has also proposed that we settle every quarter, so let’s talk around that. Note that this would not affect the carbon year, which will always be a full year. So even though we settled at six months on 31 May, if you still had 3,000 kg credits left on 31 May then you keep those for the present six months (ie, we didn’t all start on a half-year ration of 2,025kg on 1 June).
4. Telling other people about CRAGs. We want to start giving presentations with the hope of encouraging other people to start up their own CRAGs. A new venue in Highgate called The Red Hedgehog has contacted us to say they’re really interested in CRAGs and would like to invite us to ‘link up’ with them and do some kind of evening drinks event. They want to showcase various local carbon reduction initiatives. The venue is an arts/ music centre with ambitions to also be a sort of eco-forum – eg, vegetarian café, discount for people who don’t drive to the venue, etc. Sounds like the perfect excuse for us to put something together.
5. I don’t want us to spend too much time on this, but it has been suggested that, as CRAGs proliferate, and especially as there is another one being started in Islington, we should change our names so that no-one group is hogging a whole area! Perhaps you could start thinking of some new suggestions. John A suggests Green Lanes.
6. AOB, including dates for your diary.
Dates for your diary –
(1) Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 December, London – international climate change demo and all-CRAGs meeting. We’ll be fielding a CRAG contingent at the London demo. It was wonderful last year, and hopefully should be even better this year with craggers coming from all over. We plan to have a big party on Saturday night, and a CRAG network meeting on the Sunday to discuss all things CRAG. We’re organising a workshop sometime before then to make banners and flags – see the posts on the website if you want to join in. There’ll be posts going up on the website soon about organising in general for the weekend, so please contribute in any way you can.
(2) Interdependence Day conference – Saturday 20 October – Guy to explain.
(3) CRAGs conference weekend – 28-30 March 2008, Leeds . Planning in the pipeline – see thread on website. Again, please get involved – it’s our conference so will be whatever we make of it.
——
Other news: NEW WEBSITE! David B of Sevenoaks CRAG has done an amazing job in relaunching the website. It’s bigger, bolder, brighter and looks great. So please check it out if you haven’t lately. www.carbonrationing.org.uk
Especially, have a look at the forum pages (when you register on the website, you can sign up to receive updates and get involved in the discussion threads which interest you), and the ‘people pages’ where some people have put personal profiles. I plan to do so for myself (we talked about this a while ago) and to sort out the iCRAG home pages. So look at the site and let me have your ideas. You can also email David B via the website with any comments on website organisation and content.
Please RSVP whether you are coming or not on Monday or not!
Many thanks. Looking forward to catching up with you all on Monday!
Jessica