Government publishes "plan" to cut emissions

So the Dept of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has published its plan for cutting carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 and 34% by 2020 (vs 1990 levels). The "plan" is to create more than 1.2 million green jobs (eg installing insulation), to improve vehicle emissions standards and to subsidise small-scale renewable electricity production through feed-in tariffs.

All good, but it pales into insignificance when set against the current programme for airport expansion, roadbuilding and the like.

What's more the DECC report says a 21% reduction in emissions has already been achieved, but that's complete nonsense - all we've done is export our emissions to China by closing factories here and opening them there. And aviation and shipping emissions are not included in the calculation. If you include our outsourced emissions and aviation/shipping then our emissions trajectory is heading remorselessly upwards.

Can Totnes or London feed themselves?

The Transition Towns movement began as an attempt by communities to work out for themselves how to address the twin problems of climate change and the end of cheap oil. Transitioners believe that life will be better - more local, more in touch with nature, more vibrant, less stressed, less chemical - after oil, and that we will be better prepared to deal with the challenges if we start working together now.

A Transition Town initiative is a group of concerned individuals who use the Transition Model to come up with a vision of how to make their community more self-sufficient, how to prepare an energy descent plan, and how to acquire or relearn the skills we will need in a world without oil. Skills like food growing for example.

The first Transition Town was Totnes in Devon. Over the last few months they've been working on the question of whether Totnes can feed itself. Their final report was published this month and it makes for fascinating reading.

If you assume that every back garden is producing food, and that the people of Totnes eat a lot less meat than they currently do, and drink a lot less alcohol, then the food footprint of Totnes - the area around the town needed to feed its 8,000 inhabitants - intersects with those of Torbay and Plymouth. In other words Totnes can only feed itself if Torbay and Plymouth don't!

The most sobering footprint is that of Greater London, which extends almost as far west as Bristol, and as far north as Birmingham. The report points out that: "Feeding the UK’s cities will be a huge challenge, and raises many questions, including what degree of re‐ruralisation will be required."

Havana should serve as an inspiration to us all whether we like the politics of Cuba or not. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the Russians stopped supplying oil to Cuba and it became the first industrialised society to go through life after oil. Havana currently produces more than 50% of the fruit and vegetables that residents need. Could London do the same? We won't know until we try. And if we don't try now, then it'll almost certainly be too late when we need to find out.

Things that make me smile

Every now and then I come across something really wonderful which gives me hope that the way human beings view the world is changing.

Last week, as I cycled past a mother and her child, she reached up, plucked a fistful of cherries from the tree above her head, and gave them to her son. His face was a picture of delight. Sometimes simple pleasures are hard to beat.

Simple pleasures such as the discovery of how easy peas are to grow on a balcony and how delicious they are to eat skins and all. And how young pea plants make fantastic salad.

Then, on Friday night I was called by a Camden Council officer to tell me how our new policy to encourage food growing is going. An officer giving me information that I haven't prised out like a dentist pulling a deeply rooted tooth - that is so rare that I almost fell out of my chair. What's more, instead of telling me why the Council CAN'T do what I've suggested, which is what most officers tell me, what he had to say put a big smile on my face.

The council has nearly finished mapping potential food growing sites using satellite technology. Meanwhile residents are suggesting new food growing sites every day. Interestingly the two don't always coincide. No matter - it all adds up to a huge increase in food growing potential in Camden.

In return, I was able to tell him that Hampstead Heath is to have some food growing demonstration sites and that the old orchards in Golders Hill Park are to be replanted following a meeting I had with the Chair of the Hampstead Heath Management Committee. There is even an aspirational goal to introduce, or rather re-introduce, sheep on the Heath to replace mowers!

Small steps in the right direction and all things that make me smile.

Meat-free Mondays

I see that Paul McCartney and various other celebrities are urging us all to go vegetarian once a week to reduce livestock-related greenhouse gas emissions. Sounds awfully like a policy I tried to bring in in Camden a while back (Less Meat, Better Meat).

There’s now a Meat-Free Mondays website to help us on our way. See here for coverage in The Independent and The Guardian . And of course the city of Ghent is aiming to go meat-free once a week for environmental and health reasons.

It's time for a review of our meat policy in Camden.

Democratic renewal in Camden

I think it’s high time we in Camden looked more closely at how power is wielded in our community in our name. The current Executive model of politics used in Camden – where ten councillors wield all the power - is unbalanced. We need to decentralise power away from the Executive. Let’s have Junior Executive Members who can share the workload. Let’s give Scrutiny Panels more power.

Above all, we need to find a way to be more receptive to ideas coming from residents or extra-constitutional bodies like the Sustainability Task Force. I’ve seen too many residents frustrated by the Council’s response to their suggestions. When residents and backbenchers are prepared to put hours of time in to help find solutions we need to bring them in to the process not freeze them out.

Full council meetings have become meaningless talking shops so let’s scrap them and instead beef up Local Area Forums. Instead of the public having to listen to councillors talk in the Town Hall let’s have “Peoples’ Parliaments” in every ward where politicians are obliged to listen to residents. Every councillor should have to attend at least one parliament in every ward during the year to make sure they understand Camden as a whole. And these new “Peoples’ Parliaments” should be responsible for real budgets.

Let’s break up council departments that are too big like the Environment Department and create units which are smaller to manage and which have names that residents are more likely to understand. Most of the work of the Environment Dept is actually about parking, highway maintenance and rubbish collection; very little of it is about action to help the planet.

We need to get away from the mindset that big is beautiful and lowest cost is best. If a housing estate like Maiden Lane wants to turn its food waste into compost to use for food growing we should be happy rather than complaining that it’s too expensive and doesn’t fit the one size fits all model officers prefer. As most residents will by now be aware, the jewel in the crown of the Environment Department – the highest recycling rate among inner London boroughs – is actually an eco disaster. Mixing up recycling in the back of waste trucks simply creates rubbish by another name and pushes the problem off to someone else. A solution has been on the table for months – more separation at source - but it’s not coming in until April 2010.

Every report written by a council officer is currently checked by our legal and finance departments. But there should also be a sign-off for climate change and resilience (our ability to cope when cheap oil disappears and supply lines break). Might there be a less resource-intensive way to carry out a particular policy, one which produces less waste or pollution, and one which human beings are more likely to enjoy? At the moment we don’t know because it’s nobody’s responsibility to ask those questions.

Instead of mouthing the words “we are putting sustainability at the heart of everything we do”, we should actually do it. The pace of change in Camden is painfully slow. Tiny steps in the right direction rather than bold leaps forward. I could weep when I read the latest climate change science or when I look around Camden and see how much our lives depend on cheap oil. Let’s get serious about preparing for a world where oil is going to become prohibitively expensive and climate change an everyday reality.

We need a Chief Executive who understands the urgency of these issues and who’s prepared to put what’s right for Camden ahead of what central government wrongly requires. The Leader of the Council needs to be clearer about where we’re going and make more of an attempt to show that, if we prepare for it together, if we are bold, if we accept that dramatic changes will have to be made by all of us, then the future can be a better place.

Could we in Camden even pioneer new ways of measuring human progress; why don’t we focus on wellbeing rather than highest tonnage at lowest cost? As a society we are no happier today than we were in the 1960s. By some measures we’re even less happy. So let’s stop focusing on meaningless economic statistics and the accumulation of stuff. Let’s get real about what makes us happy and plan council expenditure and policies around that.

It’s time for renewal at every level. We should begin by cleaning our own house.

Maybe Boris will make cycling safer now!

Boris Johnson’s recent near collision with a truck is a powerful reminder, as he himself said, that cycling needs to be made safer in London. The Mayor is planning to put in a Paris-style free bike system. I’m a big fan, but my worry is that in London we won’t study the French lesson closely enough. The Mayor of Paris installed not just free bikes, but also properly separated cycle lanes, either by moving out a line of parking to put the cycle lane between the pavement and the cars, or by getting rid of a line of cars altogether.

Ever since I was elected in 2006 I’ve been arguing for properly separated cycle lanes to allow residents to feel safe on Camden’s roads. Some in the cycling fraternity are against physical separation but I’m not really interested in those who already cycle – I’m interested in the people who would like to cycle but don’t because they feel it’s too dangerous.

I’m particularly interested in making Camden’s roads safe enough for parents and children to cycle to school together. If I were in charge of Camden’s transport policy, I would be working with schools to create a network of separated cycle lanes along the main school commuting routes. A few concerned locals and I tried to propose this for Fitzjohn’s Avenue, the epicentre of the school run, but transport planners kyboshed the idea.

Free bikes, properly separated cycle lanes, lower traffic speeds, more car club spaces, fewer private cars, fewer diesel trucks, more trees and more green spaces – that’s my vision of Camden’s roads. And how about scrapping the bulk of the Swiss Cottage gyratory system and turning it into a park at the same time?

David Cameron needs to address the meat issue

The Camden Council all-party Sustainability Task Force recommended reducing the amount of meat on menus in canteens, schools and care homes as part of our 2008 Food Report. We did not suggest that staff should go vegetarian as The Guardian claimed on Saturday. Our view was and is that we all need to eat less meat for environmental and health reasons and that when we do eat meat it should be better quality meat.

The proposal was blocked by the Camden Conservative group on the grounds that informed choice was a better policy than restricted choice.

Since then the NHS has announced that it is reducing the amount of meat on hospital menus for environmental and health reasons. The first report of the UK’s new Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on bringing down carbon emissions, said we needed to eat less carbon-intensive meat like beef. The Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was quoted as saying: “meat production accounts for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse emissions so among options for mitigating climate change changing diets is something one should consider.” And the Belgian city of Ghent has gone largely meat-free on Thursdays.

In 2008 David Cameron gave a thoughtful speech to the National Farmers’ Union on farming and food security. He touched on the issue of meat, pointing out that rising incomes in China and India meant increasingly unsustainable demand for livestock feed, but he failed to take the argument to its logical conclusion. At an individual level eating meat is probably the second biggest impact we can have on climate change after flying.

David Cameron made the right decision on Heathrow’s third runway – he understood that it would be an environmental disaster. Now the man who is increasingly likely to be the UK’s next Prime Minister needs to grasp the thorny nettle of meat consumption as he has done airport expansion.