Vital Trivia

I spent the weekend of the 2-4th Sept 2005 with The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) for their annual members meeting. CAT is located in West Wales, a four hour Friday afternoon drive for me through some beautiful countryside at the site of a disused slate mine. I’ve know about CAT for many years but only really investigated their work and become a member more recently.

A little about CAT taken from the website:

CAT is an environmental charity aiming to ‘inspire, inform, and enable’ people to live more sustainably. A solutions driven organisation, offering practical solutions to environmental problems, our key areas of work are renewable energy, environmental building, energy efficiency, organic growing and alternative sewage systems. We have been in existence for 25 years.

Our services include a visitor centre open 7 days a week, practical and informative publications, a mailorder service of ‘green’ books and products, educational services for schools, consultancy for individuals and businesses, residential courses, membership and a free information service.

On the Friday evening I took part in the carbon gym, an assessment of my personal carbon footprint. Here are the results:

Area of lifestyle	Score /Tonnes of CO2
Heating your home	0.39
Water heating	0.29
Cooking	0.17
Electrical appliances	0.20
Food	1.76
Shopping	0.68
Waste	0.22
Transport	1.10
Air flights	4.20
Total Score:	9.01

The UK average is 10 tonnes per person so unfortunately my personal total isn’t much better than the UK average. However, looking a little closer at the results showed that I was below average in all areas except air flights. Ironically the bulk of the flying this year has been to attend peak oil conferences!

Paul Allen, CAT development director, spoke to us that evening on the recent developments at CAT. Allen concentrated on a major new project for the centre, The Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE). The £6million project is designed to expand and improve the educational facilities to support the growing CAT MSc programme. As well as mentioning climate change he also highlighted peak oil, providing some history and a description of the theory and significance. A brief show of hands indicated maybe a third had heard the term.

Sir John Houghton, former co-chair of scientific assessment for The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) spoke about climate change on Saturday morning. Whilst I expect we are all familiar with the processes and evidence presented for anthropogenic climate change Houghton explained the material with great authority and a matter-of-factness which made it all more serious. He did make one point that stuck in my mind about the quality of the science behind the 2001 IPCC report. He said that the case for anthropogenic climate change is one of the most scientifically rigorous pieces of work ever presented, the broad scientific community are behind this work in a way never before seen. The only reason doubts remain in certain quarters is due to strong and vocal vested interests spending millions of dollar spreading misinformation, there is little doubt of the science amongst scientists.

I asked Houghton about peak oil and it’s impact on climate change after his speech (he had presented several ~50-year graphs and I wondered about their base assumptions). I didn’t get the impression he really knew anything about peak oil, repeating the common arguments of higher prices making more reserves available and “vast amounts of oil in Canada” etc… I don’t believe an imminent peak in oil extraction is on his radar. My opinion is that from a climate change point of view peak oil may very well not result in a reduced CO2 output over the next few decades due mainly to a shift from oil and gas to coal. However I had hoped that due to his broad experience and senior position in the scientific community he would have an awareness of imminent peak.

Collin Challen MP spoke later that day on Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs). In a sentence DTQs are:

A “cap and trade” scheme for greenhouse gas emissions for energy use under which emissions rights are allocated directly to end users of energy – to individual free and on an equal per capita basis, and to organisations by means of an auction.

Domestic Tradable Quotas appear a feasible, affordable and fair way to not only limit CO2 emissions but also effectively allocate a diminishing energy resource in the post-peak era. To quote Dr David Fleming the independent economist who developed the system: DTQs are the only game in town.

I had the opportunity to discuss peak oil and the UK implications of North Sea gas depletion with Challen that evening. I was pleased to learn that a decent understanding of hydrocarbon depletion, timescales and the probable effects are alive and well on the Labour Party back benches!

Stuart Bond from WWF Cymru spoke on Sunday on the Ecological Footprint od Wales. The task was to calculate the Ecological Footprint of Wales for the year 2000, the result was 5.25 area units per capita, slightly better than the UK average of 6 but still well above the average global sustainable ‘Earthshare’ of just 1.9. Their 1.5MB PDF 53 page report can be downloaded from this page: Publications from WWF Cymru.

The CAT site is a fantastic place bursting with ideas, inspiration and interesting people. It’s location is not ideal for a day visit but it is well worth a weekend in Wales to see tens if not hundreds of kilowatts of solar, hydro, wind and woodchip power, vegetable oil vehicles, low energy architecture and organic food systems all working in harmony. One can only hope this represents a glimpse into the future rather than an example of what could have been if only action was taken when we had the chance.

This post was written by Chris Vernon

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Environment, Hydrocarbon Depletion, Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.