Climate Change and Sustainability Day clips and info

A packed house, informative speakers and an informed audience made for a stimulating Climate Change and Sustainability Day on Friday 27 March.

It opened with a pledge from Councillor John Jarvis to set up a screening of The Age of Stupid for Herefordshire Council in its entirety. “You can't change your life if you can't change your thinking. We have to get the message (about climate change) across to the people who manage the budgets,” he said.

Among other green measures, county library services are to make energy monitors and intelligent plugs available for loan while many Herefordshire schools have now achieved their green flag as part of the eco-schools award scheme.

The Age of Stupid (which has had a phenomenal run of five consecutive weeks at the Odeon West End) will be available for independent screenings after its official launch date on May 22. Information about purchasing a license (on a sliding scale according to the size and nature of screenings) can be obtained from the Indie Screenings website from May 1.

Listen to Mark Lynas introduce The Age of Stupid.

And, from the Q&A after the screening, a proposal for a 'War Bond' type scheme for renewables was greeted with much enthusiasm by the audience.

A lively session on Alternative Sources of Energy featured presentations by Richard Priestley on the breakthrough technology of concentrating solar power, Alice Goldstone of Talybont Energy on hydropower and how Talybont is working steadily towards carbon neutrality and Jon Hallé of sharenergy and Energy4All who urged any audience members inerested in setting up or participating in renewable energy co-ops to contact him via the sharenergy website.

Richard was prompted by the potentially large demand from audience members to set up a new course of evening classes Global Problems : Global Solutions at The Barrels pub in Hereford. Details in the comment attached to this post or contact Richard by e-mail or on 01432 358104.

Re local hydropower, we've been contacted by Stephen Ainsleigh Rice of the Herefordshire Hydro Group(see comment attached to this post for more information).

Summing up the energy debate, environmental broadcaster Robert Lamb said that there had been some terrific insights but added a note of caution, "As we've seen from the film this morning, as science shows, we can't wait for attitudinal change. Governments have a huge role to play; at the end of the day they regulate things. They did something about acid rain in the US, governments got involved, ODS (ozone-depleted substances) were made illegal. We have to press governments to deliver. Where things are happening in Germany, Denmark, Spain it's where governments have intervened. We have to recognise that we're a middle-class outfit and that 95% of the people in the UK would not find it particularly shameful to travel on EasyJet."

Following on, here's Joss Garman of Greenpeace and Plane Stupid spelling out why 2 degrees are quite so significant.

Joss's full PowerPoint presentation will soon be available for download.

The session was billed as How Far Do We Go? Speaking after Joss, Trish Marsh, Sustainability Manager for Herefordshire Council argued for renaming it How Near Should We Stay?

TBC..

Energy: Borderlines Debate speakers have their say

Two of the speakers in the forthcoming Climate Change and Sustainability Debate talked to our Press Officer, Bill Laws, last week. Their views diverge. Mark Lynas and fellow panelists including Joss Garman, founder of Plane Stupid, the group responsible for the ‘green custard’ protest against Lord Mandelson on March 6, can expect to field some difficult questions: there has been vociferous opposition locally to a planned wind farm (for and against) in North Herefordshire and an anaerobic digester (for and against) in South Shropshire.

Oxford-based Lynas recently angered other ‘greens’ by declaring in favour of nuclear power (“The environmental community needs to move on on this,” he insists). Mark is expected to remind his rural audiences that their carbon footprint is too high. “There’s nothing green about country life,” says Lynas. “Country people have a higher carbon footprint, mostly because of the transport, than those in towns.”

The Age of Stupid is a wake-up call. “The film,” says Lynas, “is absolutely right for being shown both at the Festival’s village halls and London’s multiplexes. This is not a film for the ‘eco-hippy circuit: it’s a worst case scenario and a film that everyone will want to watch.”

Environmental issues have been temporarily sidelined by the economic recession, says Lynas, “but the planet keeps reminding us that things aren’t right.

“The recent Australian bush fires, for example, have a chilling resonance in The Age of Stupid where the opening images show fires raging around the Sidney Opera House.

“Unless we wake up to the environmental damage we’re causing, those hills will one day burn with peat fires and be home to the prickly pear cactus.”

Former Hereford sixth-former Joss Garman who now works with Greenpeace is a founder of Plane Stupid, the environmental lobby group which recently doused Lord Mandelson with green custard in a protest over Heathrow’s third runway.

Direct action, he says, has always been central to bringing about change. “You only have to look at the women’s movement, the anti apartheid movement in South Africa, and the anti roads movement in the 1990s.”

Climate change is the issue that defines today’s young generation, says the 23-year-old who was brought up in Presteigne. “We are facing the environmental catastrophe of all time. And in such a short time frame: it’s not an exaggeration to be talking about the potential collapse of the biosphere.”

Nuclear power, he insists, is not the answer.“Ten new nuclear power stations would bring down carbon emissions by less than 4 per cent and not until the 2020s. The answer lies with renewable energy and energy efficiency. Last week, for example, Spain, produced more than 40% of itselectricity from renewables.”

Garman is optimistic about what he calls the emerging Carbon Movement. But time is running out: “The effort of millions of people to reduce their carbon footprint is being undermined by major construction projects like new runways, nuclear power stations and coal stations like Kingsnorth. People need to concentrate their energies on these issues.”

Controversy, controversy - nuclear power and green custard

First Mark Lynas (forthcoming Borderlines Debate speaker) comes out in favour of nuclear energy, along with three other leading figures from the environmental lobby. Then on Friday morning the green gunk attack on Peter Mandelson was perpetrated by Plane Stupid activist Leila Deen who has since given herself up for arrrest. Joss Garman of Greenpeace, co-founder of Plane Stupid, ex-Hereford Sixth Form college student and one of The Guardian's 50 people most likely to save the planet, who is also due to take part in our Climate Change and Sustainability Day - aptly enough in the How Far Do We Go? session - writes fluently and persuasively about his generation's stand on global warming in today's Observer.

There is much debate in the press as to whether Plane Stupid's methods are juvenile and justifiable but it seems that the pressing nature of global warming agenda is on the top of everyone's agenda from leading environmentalists like Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace, to Prince Charles - who is to make a keynote speech on climate change in Rio on Thursday - to the Sun - which has launched a Go Green week. And The Age of Stupid's go-for-broke PR campaign to mark the film's launch next week carries similar urgency. The message is loud and clear: Do something now before it is absolutely too late.


Further links: Plane Stupid's flickr photostream
Play Leila Deen - Custard Queen