10:10 campaign bracelets coming out of the machine that is recycling them from an old 747.
10:10, a campaign to get individuals and organisations to reduce their emissions by 10% in 2010 is launched today, 1 September. The idea is simple and has proved surprisingly easy to communicate so far. Of course it has helped that the human tornado Franny Armstrong has been pushing it.
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I think 10:10 will work because people instinctively know that they can make some small(ish) changes, reduce the amount of energy that they waste and spend a few hundred pounds getting more efficient equipment around the house. A 10% emissions reduction (whether in a school, an office or a semi-detached home in Oxford) is possible and yet meaningful. 10% is more than recycling your potato peelings but a lot less than going to live in a cave. It therefore appeals both to eco-doomsters who think that humankind needs to make massive changes within a decade and to practical householders who simply want to do their bit and save some money.
In the Guardian today, I’ve written a piece that lays out how people might choose to make cuts that get to a full 10% of total emissions, including those things that no one is directly responsible for, such as the electricity for streetlights, the gas needed to heat the offices of the Inland Revenue or the concrete going into a new bridge. I tried to present these options as an à la carte menu but the Guardian’s layout doesn’t really make this possible. So I’ve put the table here. If you are a typical UK resident, you need to choose a sufficient number of options to get up to a saving of about 1.5 tonnes. I’ve offered three columns – one for technology, one for waste avoidance, and the other for lifestyle changes, not least because I find people tend to gravitate towards just one of these options in their own thinking about emissions reduction.
10% is just the start. To get to the 80 or 90% reductions we eventually need is going to be more difficult and will involve fewer easier choices. Societies will find that they need to take every available option in all three columns, even those they find uncomfortable or unattractive. To put it at its starkest, we are probably going to need most of humankind to swing towards largely vegan diets at the same time as constructing 1,000 nuclear power stations across the world. But the people who instinctively see the case for veganism are those who are most opposed to nuclear, and vice versa. 10:10 will work as a campaign, but each succeeding percentage reduction is going to be more difficult.
View the table here.
Tags: 10:10, carbon footprint, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, Franny Armstrong
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Taking small actions to reduce your carbon emissions like buying energy efficient equipment and switching to energy saving bulbs will undoubtedly do a great deal to reduce each individual’s carbon footprint. However, there needs to be more action on a grander scale to help individual measure, monitor and reduce their individual carbon footprints by 10% by 2010. Being able to measure your energy use is the first step to help people better control and understand their impact on climate change.
Installing Smart meters in each household is a crucial step to achieving this aim. You can’t manage what you can’t measure! Smart meters supply real-time, accurate figures on a household’s energy use both to the household and to the energy supplier. Of course, whether or not any energy is saved depends on whether the consumer acts upon the information that the smart meter supplies.
But the results from research and pilot studies look good. Research published last year in Finland found that in-house displays brought average energy savings of 10.3%. A number of other pilots have demonstrated that households reduce their energy demand at peak times if that peak energy was more expensive than off-peak energy.
On the other hand, this doesn’t necessarily mean that households will reduce their energy use- they will just switch it to the cheaper hours. For example, you might run your dishwasher overnight instead of during the early evening, but you will still want to run it.
But, smart meters help as, by flattening our spikes in energy consumption, the overall demand for energy drops. UK power stations are always ‘on’ to cope with these peak demands. This is a completely inefficient system, because at off peak times this energy production is wasted. Reducing levels in peak demand and spreading energy use more evenly improves energy efficiency, meaning that the UK will have less need to build more power stations and can reduce overall energy demand by 5% according to some estimates.
A Smart meter may cost anywhere between £30 and £150, depending on their level of ‘smartness’. These are built to last at least 20 years for the most expensive meters, which works out at under £10/year. The DECC estimates that this could save households over £50 per year.
In sum, small steps do energy saving DO make a big difference, but the real struggle is getting people to understand how they can manage their energy use better. Smart meters will go a long way to helping households manage their footprint and should be prioritized as an energy saving method to help them reach their 10%.
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I think there’s a huge amount that individuals can do in the UK. It starts at home where it’s fairly easy to cut energy bills by 50% through small energy efficient investments. They can then reinvest the savings into larger energy efficient investments like replacing the boiler, internal wall insulation etc… I think that it should be made compulsory for landlords to make the homes they rent energy efficient because there’s no such law in place at the moment and even with the tax incentives, they’re not doing much to improve the energy efficiency of rented homes. Rented properties are amongst the most inefficient and not much needs to be spent to improve them.
There’s also a lot of mileage in reducing the amount of cars on the roads through car clubs, car sharing, better public transport and campaigns to encourage people to holiday in the UK rather than abroad.
And there’s our food: we can farm fish, we can create urban farms, we can convert backyards into mini farms, we can eat more organic food, we can ban the use of harmful pesticides and herbicides and switch to more organic forms of agriculture. There was a very interesting documentary on the BBC on the future of food that featured a Cuban farmer who managed to drastically improve his farming yield by planting multiple crops instead of mono-crops and he used very little fossil fuel. That’s the future of food production.
Finally, there is what people can do outside of their homes in their professional lives and through their consumption.
The state can tax imports from China to reflect their carbon costs and build renewable energy capacity with the proceeds (it is shocking that 200 million tonnes of the UK’s carbon emissions come from Chinese imports)
People can set up green businesses: on my website I have 40+ green business ideas and I’m in the process of adding another 35. People can run small green businesses and have a positive environmental impact in the same way as traditional business can save money and reduce their footprint by reading your book.
People can also give to green charities and we can start implementing measures to protect forests, bury charcoal on our farms etc… It’s shocking that only 2% of charitable donations go to green charities.
I really don’t think it’s that difficult to make these changes, it’s the culture that’s a problem: people need to start caring. We need to change the way we think: that’s the most important thing we have to do. People need to watch documentaries like the 11th Hour to acquire a higher level of understanding. Why is it not being broadcast more often on TV? Why is the Planet documentary not being broadcast more often?
We need businesses to start educating people about mindful consumption instead of green washing. It doesn’t help when EDF launches a green Britain day but they themselves have one of the country’s most polluting fossil fuel mix. This kind of hypocrisy is intolerable. The same applies to the Government’s plan to expand Heathrow. We need society to get serious about the business of cutting down carbon emissions. 10:10 is a great start. -
If we all go out and replace our existing boilers, fridges, washing machines etc., with new energy efficient ones, would the disposal of all the old ones not result in enormous landfill problems, as much of this stuff doesn’t get recycled.
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In all the comments about reducing a persons carbon footprint no mention is made of the use of heat pumps.
If you refer to the DEFRA pamphlet published in 2006 comparing the amount of carbon produced using different methods of space and water heating you will see that Ground source and air source heat pumps reduce the carbon foot print by far more than the 10% being asked for in the 10/10campaign -
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/
10:10 is a great target. Use a tool like this Footprint one to get a sense of the relative impacts of different parts of your lifestyle, and think about which ones are the most effective or easy ones to go after first.
For my part, I’m not wealthy enough to pursue the last hard-nut 20% of my impact, and I’m probably not going to give up either home-brewed caffeine or the Internet in a bid to reduce my electricity use further. Keeping that in perspective, I still have far larger fish to fry in my personal lifestyle, and I hope I can convince others to join the 10:10 goal.
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Interesting concept. My feeling is though that we need to be thinking of cutting our emissions by at least 20% in order to make up for the vast majority of people who simple won’t do anything at all.
I guess the need here to reach a critical mass of people who are commited to this action.
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On the COP15 webpage, Michael von Bülow has borrowed a November 2008 Guardian article from Chris Goodall at the below link.
http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=577
Since that time, Mr Goodall has changed his views somewhat – particularly with respect to nuclear power (i.e. energy Myth 4). In addition to the words above, in the links below, Mr Goodall expresses his support for Nuclear Power:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/nuclear-power-yes-please-1629327.html
I would be grateful if Mr Goodall would please consider submitting a revision to COP15.
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