October Newsletter

Welcome to our October newsletter! This month we have

I. Events coming up

All events free unless otherwise stated.

Please book your place by contacting Sally or Siobhan on 01223 971353.

Monday 5th October, 7.30 – 9.30pm

Eco renovation: Getting Started with Tim Acheson, Green Hat Construction, Andy Brown, Building Services Engineer & Swati Ogale, Architect, Ecoways Consulting Ltd
If you own your own home and want to embark on eco-renovation, then this is the workshop for you. Our experts will introduce you to the principles and planning behind successful projects, explain what may be appropriate for different types of house and guide you through systems, materials and technologies. If participants wish, this can become an ongoing workshop.
Venue: St Luke’s Church Centre, Victoria Road

Tuesday 13th October, 7.30 – 9.30pm,

‘Curious Climate’: A Communication Workshop with Stephen Peake, Climate Scientist & Senior Lecturer at the Open Univ. and Fellow of Judge Business School
A workshop to help you feel confident in talking about climate change. We’ll explore creatively what the science tells us, what it does not and how to get your point across.
Cost: Free to CCF Volunteers, £5, to members of other charities/voluntary groups, £10 to others.
Venue: St. Luke’s Church Centre Victoria Rd

Tuesday 20th October, 7.30 – 9.30pm

Emotional Responses to Climate Change, with Rosemary Randall, psychotherapist and director of Cambridge Carbon Footprint
Denial, doubt, grief, anger, confusion and apathy and are some of the many feelings that spontaneously arise in response to climate change. This workshop will explore what we can learn from psychotherapy that will help us deal with our own feelings and those of others as we work towards a low-carbon future.
Venue: St. Luke’s Church Centre, Victoria Road

Monday 26th October, 7.30pm – 9pm

DIY! A Practical Workshop on Home Energy Improvements with Martin Roach
Interested in enhancing your home’s energy efficiency, but wishing someone would show you how? This workshop will guide you through the process of making your home snug and carbon-friendly for the winter. Martin instructs you on the practicalities of pipe-lagging, draught-stripping, lightbulbs, etc. in an actual home.
Venue: 253 Hills Road

Thursday 29th October, 6.30 – 8.30 pm

Copenhagen Briefing for Communicators and Activists – Let’s get clear and ready.

Martin Harper, RSPB’s Head of Sustainable Development, and Chair of the Stop Climate Chaos coalition’s planning group will brief us and update us on:
· the Copenhagen negotiations and their context
· the policy issues (UK and global)
· the range of demands being made by different groups
and we’ll explore how best to communicate, campaign and act on this.
Venue: Friends Meeting House, Jesus Lane

Monday 2nd November, 7.30pm – 9.30pm

New Volunteers Meeting
Want to get active in creating a low-carbon future? Meet us and find out more about the host of projects you can be involved with. All are welcome!

Venue: CCF office, Citylife Centre, 190 Newmarket Road

Monday 9th November, 7.30pm – 9.30pm

Grow Your Own: Preparing for Spring, with Keith Jordan, local gardener and allotment holder
All levels of gardening experience are welcome! Special to this session: Time for planting garlic, sowing broad beans and other preparations for next spring
Venue: Ross Street Community Centre

Tuesday 10th November, 2-5.30 pm

Green Enterprise: How to turn your green idea into a social enterprise or commercial business with Anne Miller of The Creativity Partnership and George Ruddock, of Citylife.
This half day workshop is for people who are unemployed or underemployed (eg recent graduates unable to find an appropriate job), who have an idea for a way to make the world a slightly better place and want to explore entrepreneurial ways to make it real.
Venue: Arbury Community Centre, Campkin Road
To book or learn more, contact Naima Islam 07545 269034.

Tuesday 17th November, 7.30 – 9.30pm

Talking One-to-one: A Communication Workshop with Rosemary Randall
What happens when you focus one-to-one on climate change? This workshop will help you listen at different levels, find your way round objections and enjoy your climate conversations. We will look at how to use our carbon calculator and other tools to initiate good conversations.
Venue: St Luke’s Centre, Victoria Road
Free to CCF Volunteers, £5, to members of other charities/voluntary groups, £10 to others.

Friday 27th November, 7.30pm – 9.30pm

Climate Change and Copenhagen Question Time
David Howarth MP (Lib/Dem), Richard Normington (Cons), Daniel Zeichner (Labour), and Tony Juniper (Green) will answer your questions about climate change and Copenhagen. Come and hold our politicians to account and press the importance of the UN Copenhagen negotiations.
Venue: Emmanuel United Reform Church, Trumpington Street

II. Ro’s reflections – whole people vs. behaviour

There’s lots around at the moment about the importance of changing people’s behaviour – a huge report from the American Psychological Association and a conference coming up in London in late October from the British Psychological Society. This follows the main trend of psychological work on climate change – it is being done by those from a background in behavioural and cognitive psychology and the focus is on how to people from a shift in attitude to a shift in behaviour.

Although there is much of value in this work, I prefer to think in terms of whole people and the complexity of our responses – emotional and spiritual as well as cognitive and behavioural. We need to understand ourselves as driven by conflicts – between our desires and our intentions, between our social selves and our spiritual selves, between our needs and our aspirations. This is essentially the human condition – the dilemma that Freud and a thousand writers before him understood. When Ovid wrote “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor” (I see and approve the better course but I follow the worse) or when St Augustine prayed that God should make him holy but not yet, they spoke of the divisions of the mind that a deeper psychology can help us understand. .A focus on behaviour alone reduces us to mechanical, controllable beings, who can be manipulated or nudged into the correct responses rather than living, breathing, complex individuals who can love, understand, struggle and choose.

III. Politics & Campaigning by Tom Bragg

Even China’s vague promise to reduce its carbon intensity by a “notable margin” at the UN Climate Summit in New York wasn’t matched with much more than rhetoric by other world leaders. Does the mere presence of so many leaders & their expressions of concern make it harder for them to allow the Copenhagen negotiations to fail? I hope so, but the lack of visible progress is very worrying. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/sep/22/climate-change-hu-jintao
Join us in demanding a Fair, Ambitious & Binding result – see Copenhagen events

The 10:10 campaign was launched in September, where you can pledge a 10% footprint reduction in 2010. http://www.1010uk.org/ It’s the initiative of Franny Armstrong, director of “The Age of Stupid” & has amazing sign-up: all the cabinet & shadow cabinet, Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Carbon Footprint, etc, etc. But it’s had little support from campaigning NGOs, as it may lend green credibility to climate villains like E.On, who’ve also signed. http://www.wdm.org.uk/ed-eon-and-everyone Most people need time, support & creativity (way beyond pledges) to devise & realize their own low-carbon lives and our Carbon Conversations are ready to help.

IV. October Gardening – keep planning ahead by Keith Jordan

The growing season is starting to wind down in October but there is still much to do and plan. Harvesting and storing crops, clearing up dead plants and weeds are a priority before the autumn rains finally come and the soil becomes too sticky. The seeds catalogue from my allotment society dropped on my door mat in September and by the first week of October I, and fellow allotment holders, have to decide what varieties to grow next season (scheme via the NSALG – the national allotment society – www.nsalg.org.uk – non-allotment holders may be able to join or become associate member of your local allotment society). It might seem early, but in many ways it is a good a time to plan ahead while this years season, with its successes and failures, is still fresh in your mind. Maintaining a succession of crops requires thinking several months to a year ahead. ??Seeds that you can start sowing in October, for the new season, include hardy varieties of broad beans (e.g. Bunyard’s Exhibition) and peas (e.g. Meteor, Feltham First). Sow outside in a site that will remain well-drained and sheltered throughout the winter. They should produce the first pods in May/June and should miss infection by Pea Moth maggots (a problem with late spring sown seeds). It’s till time to plant out strawberry plants (bought or from your own ‘runners’) – the earlier you plant the more likely you will get a crop next June, but don’t expect a big crop until the second year. Strawberries, like many other plants, start developing their immature flower buds the season before they flower. They are present but not visible on strawberries now, but take a look at a wild hazel or cultivated cobnut tree and you will find the small, condensed catkins on the stems already – nature plans months ahead as well!

V. Must Try Harder… – by Martin Roach, House DIY

I try to reduce our home heating costs but how well am I actually doing? My total energy bill at around £1,200 per year is in line with the national average but maybe this is just down to having found a better energy deal. How much am I actually using – or in fact wasting?

Well from my energy bill I know we use 765 units (00 cu ft) of gas per year
Of this 18% is for hot water so subtracting this leaves 625 units for space heating – this maybe just a red herring and I should perhaps keep water in the calculation and look at total heating costs but let’s keep going.

Now I convert this to Kilowatt hours by multiplying by 31.6, so that is around 20,000 Kwh per year or 54 kWh per day.

So what do I compare this with?

The Carbon Trust looked at 12 identical houses in 2007, each with 86 sq m floor area, and calculated an average household heating use of around 27 kWh – half mine
Crikey! – I am not as good as I thought! OK, I could console myself from the fact that our floor space is greater than this and we have 3.3 people in the house (the 0.3 person comes and goes) plus the rooms have high ceilings.

But these are really just excuses. The fact is that my house consumes far more than the average. It’s ironic that I may look smugly on someone driving a big 4×4 SUV but then return to my large inefficient house which is even more profligate with the Earth’s resources.

So what’s to be done? Sell up and move to smaller accommodation? Yes, but that may just be passing on my leaky house problem to someone else. Take in some lodgers to use the heated space more efficiently – good idea, the extra rent is always useful. Or keep finding ways to reduce the amount of heat we use. Prof. David MacKay in his book (Sustainable Energy – without the Hot Air – well worth reading and on display in Heffers) says that he has cut his home heating use by 75% over the past few years, down to 13 kWh per day in 2007 and on track to fall even lower.

Meanwhile mine is down by a half but still four times higher. These comparative figures show that there is clearly lots more work to do.

VI Ask Andy: Two Questions

Can you recommend a small heater for just one room (which is really cold in the winter) for one or two hours a day? Also where can I buy plastic film on the windows?

The plastic film insulation is called Stormguard Seasonal Double Glazing Film and is sold in Focus on Tenison Road. Draught sealing and double glazing your room will save heating and make the room feel a lot warmer, but if you have an open gas fire, you must leave the fixed ventilation in place. Heavy curtains that rest on a window cill or shelf will make the room warmer too. I would recommend an oil filled electric ‘radiator’ type heater: although electricity is a carbon-heavy form of heating in these circumstances, particularly if you are only using it for short periods, it is the best option. Look for one with a thermostat control. If the heater does not have a built in timer, it may be worth getting a plug in timer( from Gees on Mill Road). Electric radiators are quieter than fan heaters and the radiant heat will ‘feel’ warmer when the air is cooler.

Don’t forget to turn it off when you are out. It will use more energy keeping the room while you are out than it will warming the room up again when you get back. I would not recommend paraffin or bottled gas ‘flueless’ heaters, especially if you have started by draught sealing and double glazing your room. They need fixed ventilation to be safe, as they put a lot of water vapour and carbon monoxide into the air. I would recommend an oil filled electric ‘radiator’ type heater: although electricity is a carbon-heavy form of heating in these circumstances, particularly if you are only using it for short periods, it is the best option. Look for one with a thermostat control. If the heater does not have a built in timer, it may be worth getting a plug in timer( from Gees on Mill Road). Electric radiators are quieter than fan heaters and the radiant heat will ‘feel’ warmer when the air is cooler.

VII Opportunities

Train as a Volunteer on our new Climate Friendly Homes Project

We have a new project starting. In collaboration with Cambridge University Environmental Consulting Society, we are helping people reduce their household carbon footprint by getting trained volunteers to talk them through their options.

We are currently recruiting volunteers with friendly and practical dispositions. We ask for a commitment to do 5 or more home surveys over the coming year. We offer high quality training in home energy issues and effective communication and a chance to make a real difference. Expenses paid.

Interested? Come to the Introductory Meeting on Sunday 18th October, 11 am Contact Sally or Siobhan on 917353 for details and an application form.

Carbon conversations – hosts needed 13/14/15th November

Another exciting development is our first training weekend for Carbon Conversations facilitators from outside Cambridge. It’s taking place on 14/15th November and we are expecting people from Edinburgh, Oxford, and further afield. Could you help by offering accommodation at cost to anyone for the three nights they will need to be in Cambridge? Some of the participants are particularly interested in staying with CCF folk so as to hear more about what we do from enthusiastic members who have already taken part in the groups, either as participant or facilitator. If you could help, please email sally at cambridgecarbonfootprint or phone the office on 01223 971353.

Support our work on climate change

Would you be willing to become a paying supporter of CCF? We’re looking for people who could take out a monthly standing order to help fund our work. £2, £5, £10 – whatever you can afford – would help us respond to the increasing demand for our work – and if you are a UK taxpayer, you can gift-aid your donation and make it worth more. £2 a month would pay for 1000 leaflets, the room hire for 2 Carbon Conversations groups, or the art materials for our children’s workshops. £5 a month would buy two energy monitors for the Climate Friendly Homes project, pay the expenses of running several stalls or fund advice to someone in fuel poverty. £10 a month would buy 3 sets of materials for our Carbon Conversations group, run our office for a week or support 10 hours of outreach work with disadvantaged groups.

What’s in it for you? Free entry to all the events on the calendar plus the warm glow of knowing you are supporting a really worthwhile cause.

If you’d like to take out a standing order phone Sally or Siobhan at the office (01223 971353) or email sally at cambridgecarbonfootprint or donate on line.