It may be the level of alcohol I consume but in a typical week I swing from bouts of acute depression, thinking that we will never solve the climate crisis, through to optimism. On Wednesday hope kicked-in as I was on the judging panel for a major company assessing the environmental ideas that had been developed internally.

A lightbulb moment

Initial dread that I would be bored stupid listening to 16 different presentations was quickly replaced by pleasant surprise at the quality and variety of the ideas. In particular it was massively encouraging to see how close we are to a commercially viable new generation of LED lighting.   

The new bulbs are predicted to save one tonne of carbon and £500 over their lifetime. I have put one in at home. It works perfectly on a dimmer switch, the quality of the bluish-white light is far better than the harsh yellowness of a CFL and, unlike a CFL, it doesn’t contain any mercury. It is possible that the introduction of the bulbs could be supported under one of the Government’s energy efficiency initiatives making them easily affordable. 

We are going to add one of the bulbs to our Energy Bike display to demonstrate their energy efficiency and the quality of the light they produce. Yet another good reason to hire our EcoInteractive displays!

10:10

Last week I committed to participating in the 10:10 initiative and have decided to measure my personal carbon footprint. This week I started on the process by looking at what should be the easiest bit, the carbon produced from my use of electricity.

The first step is to discover how carbon intensive is my electricity supplier. My supplier is Good Energy and I visited www.electrictyinfo.org to see how much carbon is produced for each kilowatt of electricity I use.

The great news for me is that Good Energy is the only supplier which gets all its electricity from renewable sources (the average for most suppliers is just 5.9%) and as a result my emissions from this source are counted as zero. The average across all the other suppliers is 0.460kgs per kwh. A good start, next week I will look at my gas use.

Nuclear

I started my time in the environmental movement as being passionately anti-nuclear, a position that was reinforced by the Chernobyl disaster.

I am still convinced that if Government had made significant investment in our energy infrastructure over a decade ago we could have had a diverse and de-centralised energy infrastructure that would not require nuclear.

However, this investment was not made and in the intervening years the scientific evidence around climate change impacts has become more robust and worrying.  Given these two things I am now a reluctant nuclear convert and therefore support the Government’s announcement to build 10 new nuclear plants. 

Obviously the announcement poses many questions.

• What is the public appetite for nuclear?
• Will the fact that the Government has ‘cleared the planning undergrowth’ enable them to build the plants quickly?
• How is the Government going to be able to hide the level of public sector subsidy that will be required to build the plants?
• And will we suffer from short term supply problems and rising energy costs because of the slowness of the decision-making?

Compact awards

On Tuesday I spent a surreal evening at the Dali Museum on the South Bank which was the venue for the Compact awards.

The Compact is a brilliant concept that is designed to help improve the relationship between Government and the voluntary sector. Unfortunately the idea has had as much traction as an eel on skates and I sense a diminishing level of enthusiasm for it.

For four years I co-chaired DEFRA’s Compact Group which was why I was invited to the awards dinner. Much to my amazement DEFRA won the Central Government award.

I do feel that the Department has achieved some good things largely due to the dedication and enthusiasm of a small group of volunteers, but I do find it concerning that it was sufficient to win and suggests that other central government departments need to do more.

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