The last couple of years have seen huge interest in tackling the energy use and carbon emissions of the UK’s existing housing stock, and it’s been a real pleasure to be a part of that movement. I’ve met some amazing people from the public, private and NGO sectors but few more inspirational than the homeowners who are leading the way.

Since 2009 we’ve been working with pioneers living in a variety of properties with a shared passion to reduce the energy and resource consumption of their homes. Refit West is part of Forum for the Future’s work to make Bristol and the West of England the most sustainable city-region in the UK [http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/sustainable-bristol-city-region], and we want to develop a practical model for ‘whole house’ energy efficiency refurbishment which can be rolled out across the country.

Our approach begins and ends with the homeowner: providing information on the most appropriate and cost-effective options for their property; designing solutions to meet their needs; ensuring suppliers give them quality and value for their money; and making capital finance available at terms that benefit them as owners. It’s all about empowering and supporting individuals as they make decisions and commission work on their homes. Never assume these are just houses we’re talking about – we are extremely emotionally attached to our housing stock.

The information currently available to homeowners is at best complex and at worst contradictory. The homeowners we are working with in Refit West, have committed their time to making sense of it and to take action that will disrupt their homes and lives for a period of time, but this is enough to put many off refurbishing their homes. We’ve helped these pioneers overcome many of the common barriers and it’s significant that, while some of the solutions and ‘whole house packages’ are becoming clearer, no two customer journeys have been the same. We need to learn from the experience of these few in order to stand a chance of building a scheme that delivers for the many. Our homes generate a quarter of the UK’s carbon footprint and making them more energy efficient is one of the most cost-effective ways to cut carbon. Our homeowners’ experience helps to explain why, despite numerous national and local initiatives, residential carbon emissions have only fallen by 6% since 1990. We desperately need to move from making 3% cuts each decade to 3% a year to meet our national carbon targets. The Committee on Climate Change wants the built environment to be near zero carbon by 2050. 

Home energy efficiency is rightly seen as a political priority across all parties, and the forthcoming Energy Bill promises to provide the structures for long-term carbon reduction. But will it really deliver? Will it champion and support those pioneers and early adopters who are crucial in developing and building support for mass programmes that can refurbish a million homes a year? Or will it simply create another market opportunity for large commercial interests to cherry pick the easiest works at the expense of a long-term strategic approach?

The answer is being written in Whitehall right now. I believe achieving the carbon reductions required from our 27 million homes will take a cross-departmental approach to make your head spin...DECC, HCA, BIS, Defra, the devolved administrations of  Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and significantly the Treasury. It’s great to see two parties working on this together but will we see the coalition work right across government to deliver on our national objectives and in our collective interest?

Forget Jesus sandals. The recent surge of interest in biochemist Craig Venter has overwritten time-honoured notions of the earth-born god. Gone is the modest immaterialist: in his place stands a surfing dude with a sailing yacht named The Sorcerer and his eyes set on what he touts as the next multi-trillion-dollar industry. He even has a one-up on water into wine. Thin air into fuel.

Is Venter playing God… is God playing with Venter… The media debate, which peaked for me with the concern expressed by one atheist Guardian-reader "that a crazed evangelist may use the technology to create God", has been a lot of fun.

But it has also missed the point. Which is not whether Venter's synthetic addition to the earth's inventory of species is the eighth day of creation – or whether it is no more than a slightly obscure feat in computer-programming. The exciting part is that Venter wants to harness his creative powers to give the world a biologically engineered, renewable fuel – one he claims could scale up to rival the petrochemical industries.

He isn't the first one to think of harvesting CO2 from the air and turning it into fuel, in the same way that trees and algae do. As Duncan Graham-Rowe explains in this recent feature http://www.forumforthefuture.org/greenfutures/articles/co2_new_green_fuel, the conversion process has already been sussed, and researchers across the world are working on ways to make it more efficient.

As it stands, it's exceedingly energy-intensive – and this is the problem Venter intends to address, by genetically designing bacteria that would convert CO2 into fuels with a higher energy content and at a much higher rate than currently possible.

It's not the stuff of miracles. If he pulls it off, it'll be thanks to everyday, down-to-earth, lab-based science. And it will be just the sort of game-changing innovation that could help to tease us away from our obsession with fossil fuels.

Image Credit - Christopher Halloran/shutterstock

Environment policy didn’t break the surface during the UK election campaign.  How will it fare in a coalition of parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum?

Amongst the many surprises was the near absence of environment from the parties’ campaigns and the first ever prime-ministerial debates.  Does it mean the British care less about the environment than in previous years?  Apparently not: the share of the green vote held up and the Green party won its first ever seat in the British Parliament (Caroline Lucas, Leader of the party and long time Member of the European Parliament, taking Brighton from Labour).

But with the parties fairly close to each other on much of environment policy, there were more points to be scored by talking about social policy (we are bracing ourselves for Conservative leader David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, whatever that means) and of course, dealing with the deficit where we are up there with the European basket cases like Greece, Spain and Portugal.

Having torn lumps out of each other for months on these and other issues, our identikit party leaders now find themselves round the table in Britain’s first true coalition government in 65 years. I’ll spare you the constitutional niceties of how that came about. Suffice to say that political commentators, having had to speculate wildly for several days about what the outcome of the election might be, now find themselves, along with the new government in largely uncharted waters.  In a cabinet of 23, Liberal Democrats hold five posts,  including the responsibility for Energy and Climate Change, which has gone to Chris Huhne, millionaire businessman and one time contestant for the party leadership.   

This appointment throws into sharp relief the strategic and tactical questions this coalition raises for the future programme of the government, not least on environmental policy.  Despite substantial areas of common ground – on the need to cut emissions, boost renewable energy generation, and create a ‘green bank’ for investment in cleantech  for example - the Lib Dems have long been opposed to the replacement of Britain’s ageing fleet of nuclear reactors, whilst the Tories see nuclear as the mainstay of both emissions reduction and future energy security in the UK.  

This issue is such a clear divide, that in the formal agreement about the coalition the issue is dealt with directly, with a bizarre result.   The government (i.e. Huhne) will bring forward a ‘national planning statement’ which would give permission for new nuclear to be built, but then Lib Dems (including Huhne) would be allowed to abstain from the vote bringing it into force.  This in effect means that the Conservatives can push it through on their own, whilst the Lib Dems have (just about) a path of dignity in opposing it and allowing it.

What Green supporters who voted Lib Dem for their anti-nuclear stance will make of this is anyone’s guess.  In any case, both parties are agreed that there should be no public money for nuclear power, and since no nuclear power plant has been built, ever, without such subsidy, it will be interesting to see if any of the utility companies that were lining up to build the new capacity will still find it so appealing.   Lib Dems are presumably hoping not. 

Elsewhere the picture seems a bit clearer, and generally positive for the environment.  Campaigners are elated at the scrapping of Labour’s plans for a third runway at Heathrow.  The coalition agreement makes positive noises about a new high speed rail network – though it’s hard to see how that will be paid for any time soon. Though there’s no new target on the proportion of energy from renewables, investment in marine power and anaerobic digestion also gets a mention, as does a smart grid to link it all up, smart meters to make us all more frugal in using it, and other measures to boost energy efficiency in the home. And along with the promise of public investment in carbon capture and storage and a floor price for carbon comes an undertaking to prevent new coal-fired power without sufficient CCS to meet a demanding emissions standard.  

Some cynics have suggested that Lib Dems have been given jobs that are either so marginal to the Conservative project that they don’t matter, or require them to dip their hands in the blood of ‘dealing with the deficit’ and so alienate their supporter base.   A more nuanced view is that the coalition has enabled Cameron to do what he could not have done with a majority, giving him a reason to be more positive about the environment and Europe and move his party further onto the centre ground.  If he succeeds in finally decontaminating the Tory brand in this way, they argue, he will have laid the foundation for successive Conservative governments for many years to come.

Whatever the motivation, the new team have started with a bang.  Cameron swiftly announced that the government will cut its own emissions by 10% in the next 12 months.  Speaking to staff at the Department for Energy and Climate Change he said ‘I want this to be the greenest government ever’.  Meanwhile Huhne took up the reins at DECC, promising to put energy security ‘at the heart of the UK’s national security strategy’ and to ‘fundamentally change how we supply and use energy in Britain'.  Amen to that.

This blog first appeared in Grist

Last week I witnessed two wonderfully windy ‘inaugurations’.

On Friday, I cycled down to the Springbank Community Resources Centre in Cheltenham to ‘turn on’ a neat little wind turbine, precisely 17.5 metres high. Not much wind to start with, but then (thankfully!) it kicked into satisfying action.

This is Cheltenham’s first wind turbine, located in the middle of a newly-regenerated urban park. The driving force behind the initiative is the Hesters Way Partnership, one of Cheltenham’s most effective community groups. It would have been completely impossible to have made any progress on this without the Partnership’s full-on support.

There were of course the usual worries about the noise the turbine would make. The flats and houses all around the park overlook the turbine, and are very much within earshot. Local Councillors got very positively involved, some ‘seeing is believing’ visits to other projects were arranged, and there was a lot of reassurance offered up over limitless cups of tea.

The result is that the community feels it’s their turbine, and are reinforced in that association by the fact that the energy bill for their Resources Centre will be £850 lower every year.

I’d encountered a rather different community operation earlier in the week – on a visit to Eurotunnel HQ just outside Calais.

Obviously a much bigger operation, with a much bigger investment in three 800kw turbines. (It should have been six, but the local planning committee objected!). Representatives of the local community were there in force, not least because of the decision by Eurotunnel to dedicate 10% of the revenues from electricity sales to an organisation called Secours Populaire France – which works with some of the most deprived communities across the country.

Eurotunnel’s got a really good environmental story to tell anyway – and has had right from its creation because of the strict conditions put upon it both by the UK and the French Government. 

More details of this are available in the Eurotunnel Sustainability Report.   

Interestingly, it had taken Eurotunnel almost exactly the same amount of time to move from initial idea about its wind farm to inauguration as it had taken Hesters Way Partnership! French citizens are no more enthusiastic about wind power than they would appear to be here in the UK – despite having vast stretches of not particularly distinctive landscapes with almost limitless potential for windpower – and I know how popular that statement will make me with the legions of French NIMBYs who sound and think very much like our own home-grown NIMBYs!

But there’s one simple message here: the more actively local communities are involved in new wind developments, the greater the likelihood of their success. Even if things still take a ludicrously long period of time to get delivered on the ground.

On March 2nd, Guardian columnist George Monbiot launched an extraordinary attack on feed-in tariffs and on solar photovoltaics (PV) in particular. Even for George, who has honed his invective skills to a fine point over the years, his language was remarkably intemperate: “pricey conceit… great green rip-off… scam… comically inefficient… squandering the public’s money… perfectly useless…  a swindle… blinded by sentiment” etc, etc.

A lot of this seemed to be aimed, very personally, at Jeremy Leggett, Executive Chairman of Solarcentury. For years, Jeremy has been flying the flag for the UK solar industry and for the benefits for introducing the kind of feed-in tariffs that have transformed the renewable energy scene in many other countries.

Within a couple of days, Jeremy had mounted a robust defence of PV, feed-in tariffs and the importance of maintaining a long-term perspective. Citing 13 examples of inaccuracy, misrepresentation and hyperbole (reinforced by a further 12 points following up on a response from George), he has set out to set the record straight.

Over the weekend I spent a happy hour reading through this four-phase battle, point by point. It matters. There’s a lot resting on the success of these feed-in tariffs, and that in turn depends on trust on the part of the general public. A George Monbiot polemic is purpose-built to undermine that trust.

I really admire George. He’s a brilliant campaigning journalist, and a deep, persistent thorn in the side of today’s political and business elites. I often end up reading his Guardian articles metaphorically punching the air at the blows that he’s landed – on my behalf, as it were. This week’s article on biodiversity here in the UK is hugely impactful.

But I’m sorry to say, on this occasion, that he’s way out of line. Jeremy Leggett’s detailed refutation of so much of what he was claiming in the original article demonstrates just how poor George’s initial research was, and how (on this occasion, at least) his love of adopting deliberately controversialist positions simply overwhelmed basic journalistic standards.

This too is a serious matter. As one or two bloggers have already pointed out, if he’s got it this badly wrong on feed-in tariffs, what’s to say he hasn’t got it equally wrong on other critical issues?

One of the talking points for me was that George declined on a number of occasions to meet with Jeremy and talk all this through – despite knowing full well the impact his article would have. More than anything else, this reveals a streak of know-it-all arrogance that has always been there in George, but which he usually keeps under control.

But rather than take my word, why don’t you check it out for yourself on the Guardian and Jeremy’s own websites. If nothing else, it will help you get your head around the complexities of feed-in tariffs.

George Monbiot's article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/01/solar-panel-feed-in-tariff

Jeremy Leggett's response: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/09/george-monbiot-bet-solar-pv or http://www.jeremyleggett.net/solar-revolution/

George Monbiot has responded to this blog on Jonathon's personal site, read what he says here.

Soaring oil prices may drive politicians to take tough action to create a low-carbon economy while sceptics are still arguing the toss over climate change.

The era of cheap oil is ending and, unless we take urgent measures to reduce our dependence on it, Britain – and by extension other oil-importing countries – faces a crisis as early as 2015, according to the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security.

Its latest report, which calls for a “green industrial revolution” was launched a few weeks ago by a panel of high-profile business leaders: Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, Phllip Dilley, chairman of Arup, Ian Marchant, CEO of Scottish and Southern Energy, Brian Souter, CEO of Stagecoach Group, Jeremy Leggett, chairman of Solarcentury, and Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic.

We’re used to hearing this call from environmentalists and climate change campaigners, but these leaders come to the same conclusion based purely on the availability of oil. The message: regardless of whether or not you believe in man-made climate change, we still have to decarbonise our economy.

The taskforce claims that within the next decade, possibly as early as 2015, we will have reached peak oil - the maximum rate at which we can pump oil out of the ground. It forecasts that prices will soar because demand from developing countries is still growing and because new oil reserves are increasingly expensive to exploit.

Developed world economies have been built on the premise of cheap and plentiful oil, so shortages and high prices are likely to affect vast areas of our lives, causing social, economic and political disruption. We use oil for transport, heating, fertilisers and plastics - so high prices will feed through into more expensive food, travel, utility bills and goods in our shops. The poorest people are likely to be worst hit.

Countries which rely on oil imports will be badly hit. Although North Sea oil is still flowing, the UK has been a net importer since 2006, and the Taskforce warns that it could face a balance of payments crisis by the middle of the decade.

No wonder then that the report is called: ‘The oil crunch – a wake-up call for the UK economy’. It makes an explicit link with the credit crunch and warns that the UK must not be caught out again and needs to take action now.

The report calls for the new UK government, after the election, to work with local authorities, business and consumers to put in place policies to deal with the threat of peak oil. Key recommendations include support for low-carbon transport technology and sustainable bio-fuels; a focus on energy efficiency and the development of alternative sources of energy, including renewables and nuclear; and incentives to encourage the public to adopt greener behaviour.

The danger of framing the argument for a low-carbon economy solely in terms of climate change is that many people remain determined sceptics. The science is complex, scandals like the University of East Anglia emails shake public faith, and many feel they are being asked to take painful action now to avert a distant and nebulous threat.

In contrast, peak oil offers a clear and present danger. Oil is part of our daily life, we’ve all experienced the pain of petrol price spikes and it’s easy to understand the damaging consequences of a sustained increase in prices. Peak oil could just be the unambiguous threat we need to galvanise the green industrial revolution.

I went with anticipation to a ‘Bristol Festival of Ideas’ talk earlier this week, where Stewart Brand, chaired by Brian Eno, was talking about his new book Whole Earth Discipline. I left feeling rather dispirited.

For those of you who don’t know Brand, he is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a grand old man of the US environmental movement.

His central message was that the problems facing the world are so great that we have to do “whatever works” in order to tackle them. That means concentrating people in cities, and embracing GM, nuclear power and geo-engineering. We are changing the earth so profoundly anyway, he argued, that we might as well do more of it.

I am a big technological optimist myself and am certainly on the eco-pragmatist side of the movement. But I found Brand’s recipe – at least as he dished it out in Bristol - unfulfilling.

His was a totally technocratic version of the world, encouraging us to “focus on the numbers” and “just do what works”. There was no room for vision or values, just a managerial approach to engineering the status quo.

Brand told us to “put aside ideology” and ridiculed most environmentalists as luddites who “would have opposed the wheel”.

While I liked Brand’s willingness to slaughter sacred cows, I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Surely we need both technological answers and changed values? Surely the environment movement shouldn’t be shorn of all sense of vision? Is more of the same, just better managed, really enough?

Read more about Whole Earth Discipline (publishers website)