Barnet Climate Plan

Update 20 March 2023: item about E3G added below as item 11.

Update 5 November 2022: following on from item 9 below (CAfS), they have made a new web site which shows how the reduction in carbon emissions should be done at the local authority level: https://zerocarboncumbria.co.uk/.

Update 2 February 2022: following our February meeting, we are now concentrating on feeding in to the council’s plan rather than writing our own. The Resources list below can still be added to if you send contributions to the webmaster (address at the foot of every page).

We held an online Climate Plan Workshop (meeting notice) on 16 May 2021 to discuss citizen, business and council climate action needed in the London Borough of Barnet to respond to the Climate Emergency.

Reports

We are preparing reports from the various sessions on different topics from that workshop. So far we have:

Resources

There was some discussion at the Climate Plan workshop of the need to share information. If you have more information that needs a more stable home than Facebook or Instagram, we could publish it as a page on this web site. If you have information already published on the Internet, we could provide a link here. Each link should be accompanied by a couple of sentences of description — enough for the reader to work out whether it is what they are looking for. Contact the webmaster at the address below.

This list is likely to get a bit long and rambling.  Please excuse the idiosyncratic numbering system: having numbers helps navigation, but I want to add new items at the top of the list.

  • 11. E3G is a climate change think tank, which runs London Climate Action Week each summer. But this is not Action in the sitting-in-the-road sense, but something much more sedate, and focussed on business and money, with an international outlook. Like many of these organisations, I only got a feel for what they are doing by signing up for email updates.
  • 10. Another recommended organisation is Citizens Climate Lobby UK (CCL-UK), who campaign for carbon pricing, knowing that it has a better chance of being accepted than many other policies, but is still effective. They released a report in September 2022: Carbon Pricing and the Cost of Living Crisis: A Major CCL-UK Report. Here is an extract:

    It may seem counter-intuitive to tackle high energy prices by increasing taxes on fossil fuels but, as a recently released report from the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL-UK) shows, the numbers stack up. If the revenue collected from carbon-taxes is used to help pay energy bills then the majority of households receive significantly more in assistance than they pay out in increased prices.

  • 9. For an example of how it could be done, see Cumbria Action for Sustainability (CAfS) at https://cafs.org.uk/ . They do all sorts of coordination, education and publicity work to do with climate change and sustainability in Cumbria as well as running a scheme to get houses insulated. They have paid staff funded by grants. To get a full picture of what they do, it’s best to subscribe to their email newsletter which comes out once a month. You can get a fairly good idea from their news page too.
  • 8. Sensible actions to reduce climate change are easy to develop. The difficult part is devising policies that have a chance of being accepted. I (Charles) can recommend Climate Outreach (https://climateoutreach.org/) for inspiration and information on this topic. They have extensively researched how different messages are received by people with different values. And it is the people whose values differ from ours who we have to convince.
    Update 22 August 2023: For those like me [Charles] who have been thinking about how we can improve our messaging, I can recommend this article by staff from Climate Outreach who have been running workshops for small climate action groups: Talking climate at the grassroots: what works and what’s tough.
  • 7. The Climate Change Committee published “2021 Progress Report to Parliament”, it’s annual assessment of UK progress in reducing emissions and biennial assessment of progress in adapting to climate change on 24 June 2021. See https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/2021-progress-report-to-parliament/ . The “Joint Recommendations” document contains several Priority recommendations for action by local authorities.
  • 6. A plan for Croydon Council, March 2021 — the report of the Croydon Climate Crisis Commission https://neweconomics.org/2021/05/the-croydon-climate-crisis-commission-report (New Economics Foundation). The link is to a descriptive page, which includes a link to the report itself (PDF, 2.3MB, 59 pages).
  • 5. Tony S writes: “I found this article interesting and it emphasises the importance of consumer education and information, a point that was made more than once during Andrew’s Waste and Recycling Breakout Session:
    https://socialeurope.eu/ethical-consumerism-meets-eco-awakening
    I thought two points she makes are particularly significant – one is that as consumer demand for climate friendly products increases, some producers may make claims for their products of sustainability that don’t stand up and secondly that sometimes consumers boycott products like palm oil and switch to other products – like soy oil – which are even more harmful to the environment.”
  • 4. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/18/twenty-firms-produce-55-of-worlds-plastic-waste-report-reveals. This article describes which large companies manufacture plastic. If only our single-use plastic were made by craftsmen in the traditional way, everything would be all right.
  • 3. BCAG member Peter Piper’s paper on Air Quality in Barnet.
  • 2. From one point of view it is easy to reduce our carbon emissions. The difficult part is persuading people to support these measures. For some discussion of this, see a recent article in which Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the EU commission, gives his views to the Guardian newspaper “Climate crisis: our children face wars over food and water, EU deputy warns”.
  • 1. Appendix A of Dorset Council’s climate plan with a list of about 150 possible actions that the council could take, tagged by theme, value for money, deliverability etc. PDF, 266Kb, 10 pages. https://moderngov.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/documents/s20921/Appendix%20A%20-%20Climate%20Plan%20-%20110920%20pdf.pdf