As usual, we had a well attended AGM with an excellent speaker and all posts filled.

Stuart Shales took over as Coordinator from Denise (well done and thankyou Denise - yours will be a hard act to follow!).

Mark is from the Centre for Sustainable Energy and here is a short summary of his excellent and detailed talk on Climate Change: What Next?

• scale is enormous
• exponential increase in CO2 concentration over the last century
  • 290-380ppm (+30%)
• all current talk is about stabilising at current levels
• most carbon offsetting schemes do not even prevent increase
  • planting trees for flights to australia etc are a con
• momentum and inertia within climatic system means warming will continue after levels are stabilised
  • current global warming is due to industrial revolution
  • future warming depends on our emissions now
• predictions over next century is 1.5 - 5degC increase
  • equiv to ice age change, but in 100years not 1000s.
• oceans absorb half CO2
  • but as ocean warms, cannot absorb so much
  • so get positive feedback
• UK target is 60% reduction by 2050
  • difficult!
  • some sources say even more
  • at the extreme we need to get to 1 tonne CO2 per person per year (currently 5)
  • but one flight to scotland per person emits 0.75 tonnes!
  • 0.3Kg per mile for car
  • there are carbon calculators on the web, e.g. here and here, that you can use to see how much you use

• There is huge creativity goes into loads of stuff
  • car design
  • computer design
  • so why not into solving this climate change issue?
• Tax: can we tax our way out?
  • too dependent on economic cycles
  • difficult to predict CO2 levels and therefore effectiveness of tax
  • regressive: tends to penalise lower income people
  • noone votes for more tax: and this will require high taxation levels! Just look at modest fuel duty escalator and how much protest there was about that
• How about Personal Carbon Allowance
  • everyone is given an allowance of carbon (5T say)
  • could have “credit card” or banking type aqpproach
  • more equitable (everyone has same allowance)
  • use this “card” when purchasing petrol, electricity etc and gets deducted
  • engages entire population
  • rewards positive behaviour
  • can only work with political nerve!
  • may be expensive to put in place (but compare with cost of not doing anything)

Where next?

• danger is we procrastinate, don't quite get around to doing anyhting
  • perhaps the rich may just buy more air conditioning etc,
  • but poorer suffer
• may create conditions for uncontrolled climate change

Look at Global Commons Institute website for great graphs and info.

Benefits of acting now:

• more options to act in future
• fitter slimmer healthier population
• stronger local economy
• safer stronger communities

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