“Love Your Bike” is loved

Posted on December 10, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

A Manchester-based cycling campaign has won the “Greener Futures” category at an awards ceremony at Manchester Town Hall last night.
“Love Your Bike,” the “Greater Manchester campaign which aims to promote cycling and to help make it an attractive, accessible and fun way to get around,” beat two other other shortlisted organisations to win £300 at the “Be Proud” awards. The award scheme, run by Manchester City Council, has 10 categories, including “blossoming communities” and “unsung hero”. The Green Futures category is described thus – “From encouraging local wildlife and campaigning to reduce CO2 emissions to educating people on climate change, this award champions people/projects working at a local level to build sustainable, green communities of the future.”

Pete Abel, a volunteer with “Love Your Bike” told MCFly “The other projects in our category are really great, so we were very pleased to win. It’s great that our work to increase the number of people cycling has been recognised as an important part of helping to build sustainable communities.”.”

The runners-up were Elaine Gray – “Elaine runs the Growing Faith allotment in Gorton. Bringing together people from the local community, this charity orchard provides free, locally grown fruit and vegetables to vulnerable people’s drop in centres across Manchester” – and The Future Footprints Young People – “Through collaborative music and film projects, this group of Moss Side youngsters have received national acclaim for their work in highlighting the dangers of man made climate change.”
(text from here.)

Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com

[Conflict of interest disclaimer: Marc Hudson is so far in beer-debt to Pete Abel that they’ve both lost count of precisely how many kegs are owed. The idea for this story came, however, from MCFly.]

Posted in Manchester City Council | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Caption Contest: Chris Huhne in Durban

Posted on December 9, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

The latest international talk-fest on climate change finishes today, and the exciting news is there may be a deal for discussions about a roadmap! (Just like the Bali roadmap that lead to the stunning success that was the Copenhagen conference of 2009, perhaps?)
We will be reporting on the conference, and seeking the opinions of various Manchester academics and policy-makers, but while you are waiting for that, you can waste time by coming up with captions for this picture of UK climate minister Chris Huhne (Lib Dem) and members of the UK Youth Climate Coalition. [UKYCC is the same outfit who in November cancelled their conference in Salford at the last minute (poor ticket sales, we’re told).]
First prize- a free subscription to the electronic format MCFly.

A trio of mediocre suggestions to get you warmed up-

“I wonder what movies are showing on the flight back?”
“Kevin Pietersen is actually past his prime, in my opinion.”
“Remember the deal for this photo-op, guys – vote Lib Dem at May’s council elections. It will double our support.”

Posted in humour, International | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Bluffers Guide To…. The November 2011 Progress Report on Manchester’s Climate Change Targets

Posted on December 8, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

 An 8 page report about the progress of Manchester City Council (MCC)  is making with its climate change plans has been released. It will be discussed at the Communities and Neighbourhoods Overview and Scrutiny Committee on the 13th of December (2pm, Commitee Room 11, Town Hall). Following council protocol, the report has been uploaded a week in advance and you’ll be glad to hear that it’s actually readable. (I have definitely seen a lot worse reports coming to the council committees!) To make your life even easier, we have condensed all the juicy bits of the ten-page report into a few paragraphs.

The report is split into two sections: Manchester specific progress and Greater Manchester (GM) progress. As you may know, MCC has committed to cutting carbon emissions 41% by 2020 and they have set out how they hope to achieve this in their delivery plan for 2010-20. Progress made so far include promoting sustainable travel (the extension of Metrolink, various cycling initiatives, teleconferencing), an Eco-schools pilot, the continuation of the Environmental Business Pledge project, commitment to carbon literacy programmes and plans to develop a ‘Manchester Green Infrastructure Plan’ in 2012.

According to the report, the council has managed a 6% reduction in carbon emissions in 2010/11 (the target was 10%) and a strategy detailing how the council will reduce the emissions of its own estate 41% by 2020 has been developed. The MCC Buildings and Energy Strategy 2011-2020 looks at retrofitting, smart metering and other energy saving initiatives. A Sustainable Consumption Plan has also been developed and this includes improving the council’s supply chain and the finalisation of the city’s Sustainable Food Delivery Plan.

Looking at the Greater Manchester picture, the useful background info is that the Greater Manchester Climate Change Strategy was approved in July 2011 and the region was also appointed as a Low Carbon Economic Area for the Built Environment back in 2009. As part of the work on the LCEA for the Built Environment, there are currently 11 energy infrastructure programmes being developed (heat networks, hydro and large-scale wind turbines). Carbon metrics are also being researched as part of GM’s Climate Change Strategy so that the local authorities’ carbon footprint can be tracked and reported more reliably.

Other examples of Greater Manchester progress include the current work to come up with a strategy for its ‘Low-Carbon Housing Retrofit Programme‘ which aims to deliver a 48% reduction in carbon emissions from the housing sector by 2020 and the ‘Get Me Toasty’ campaign to install loft and cavity insulation. The region has also been looking into how to make the most of the Green Deal (see our recent report on a ‘Greening the Green Deal’) and the implications of the government plans to cut the Feed-in-Tariffs for solar panels, which is mentioned as a “lost opportunity to provide more fuel poor tenants with free, renewable energy

Editorial

It’s nice to see the council actually assessing its progress and looking back over the year to see what it’s done and what it still wants to do. It’s even nicer that rather than being written in bureaucratese, it’s in plain English. As you’ve seen if you read this far, there are lots if plans, reports, commitments, studies and strategies  in of the pipeline. And we already know that writing strategies is easier than implementing them….

The deadening and deafening silence is the lack of any analysis of what they haven’t been able to do. Looking at the report you’d think the council had a 100% success rate and nothing unravelled itself as too expensive/difficult or that the strategies that they use just weren’t right or effective.  With luck, the councillors on the committee will ask probing questions about what is missing, as well as what’s gone well so far.  Without admitting mistakes, after all, it’s impossible to learn from them.

What do MCFly readers think of the report?
MCFly will be there, at 2pm on December 13th– who will be joining us?

Arwa Aburawa

Posted in Climate Change Action Plan, GM Climate Strategy, Manchester City Council | Tagged | 1 Comment

Newsflash: Council and campaigners to investigate steady state economy

Posted on December 7, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

Steady-state economics will get a closer examination, in a significant and brave move announced today by Manchester City Council’s “Employment, Economy and Skills” oversight and scrutiny committee.

This follows a brief report on the topic to the committee last month. The shortness of that report inspired a group of Manchester-based campaigners and activists to sign an open letter to the 18 members of the committee. The letter [see illustration] offered to work with the councillors and officers to produce a longer and more thorough report for publication in the new year. This offer has now been accepted, and Manchester Climate Monthly will report on progress as it happens.

The committee has pointed to “limitations of applying it within the context of the local economy” but “have agreed to [the signatories’] offer, and look forward to having a more in-depth discussion at some point next year.”

How the work will be co-ordinated, and when the work will happen (some point next year could be January, or October!) are just two of the many questions that will need to be agreed.

There are risks in this for all concerned. In such difficult times, anti-green campaigners may choose to accuse the City Council of wasting valuable officer time on what they will characterise as “hippy dreaming”. The people who signed the open letter to the Council now have to “put up or shut up.” They have to find the time and energy to engage constructively with the nitty-gritty of local economic policy. They risk exhaustion, and the accusation from cynics and self-styled radicals of being “stooges and fig-leafs.”
Are these – and other – risks worth the possible benefits? In the opinion of Manchester Climate Monthly, yes. But we could be wrong.

Arwa Aburawa and Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com

[Disclaimer: Manchester Climate Monthly editor Marc Hudson drafted the open letter, circulated it and submitted it to the Council on behalf of the signatories.]

Posted in Manchester City Council | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Art Exhibition explores the price of aviation

Posted on December 7, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

You enter a blacked-out room, large projector screens around you. You feel you are in the grounds of a farm wedged between airport runways. A full day of events happens in 15 minutes and it is very very noisy.
But you’re not on that farm, at Narita Airport in Japan. You’re in Manchester, at the Whitworth Art Gallery on Oxford Road. You’re at a free exhibition called “Air Pressure,” which runs until February 5th.

The exhibition has been created by Rupert Cox, from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, Angus Carlyle, a sound artist and Reader at the University of the Arts, London, in collaboration with Professor Kozo Hiramatsu. The latter is Japan’s “foremost acoustic scientist and UK president of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science”.

The exhibition is a hard-hitting expose of the social and environmental costs attached to the expansion of Narita Airport, but the lessons are far broader. Can we continue using up irreplacable natural resources, displacing species that can never be replaced? Can we continue to force others – the stubborn, the poor, the powerless, to pay for the “convenience” of flying?

I hope readers go to this exhibition, and ask themselves these questions

Dama Kudoja, who has started writing for MCFly

References

Picture

https://www.tumblr.com/ummhello/12369093883/air-pressure-documents-the-cultural-clash-between

Recommended Books

Carr, M. (1997) New Patterns: process and change to human geography.

Hall, P.I. (2002) Bamboozled!: how America loses the intellectual game with Japan and its

implications for our future in Asia

Heller, A. M. (2010) The Gridlock Economy How Too Much Owners

Hugo, D. (2003) Japan and United Nations peace making New pressures, New processes

Stanley, B., Cutter, S. and Harrington, W. J. (2004) Geography and technology

Posted in Event reports, Manchester Airport | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stop Press: Climate Plan to come under scrutiny

Posted on December 6, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

On Tuesday 13 December the Manchester Climate Change Action Plan will be put under the spotlight by a committee made up of councillors from Manchester City Council
At 2pm, in Manchester Town Hall’s Committee Room 11, the “Communities and Neighbourhoods Oversight and Scrutiny Committee” will get a chance to ask questions about the progress of the plan to responsible members and officers.

The 8 page report, prepared by Vicky Rosin (Deputy Chief Executive) and Michael O’Doherty, (Head of Climate Change; Buildings and Energy)
is available for download.

The meeting is free and open to the public. If “Everyone is welcome to attend this committee meeting” isn’t an invitation to see democracy in action, what is?

MCFly will be publishing more on this story imminently.

Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com

Posted in Climate Change Action Plan, Manchester City Council | Tagged | Leave a comment

Never Mind The Ballots

Posted on December 6, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

Manchester’s Climate Change ‘Steering Group’ decides to by-pass its own democratic protocol of electing members

Annual elections that would give much needed credibility to Manchester’s Climate Change Steering Group have been cancelled. The Steering Group’s chair, Steve Connor, told MCFly over the phone that “after long debate the group decided that there wasn’t any mechanism for election.”

This decision is in direct contravention of the Terms of Reference of the group which stipulates that three members of the Steering Group must be elected at the annual conference- presumably by those in attendance.  It is unclear who was present when the decision was taken, and whether any member of the Steering Group registered their dissent, because – as previously reported in MCFly – no minutes have been kept of meetings. (1)

Important questions remain over the transparency of the Steering Group– in particular around the decision to postpone of the annual conference. In the same telephone conversation last Friday, Mr Connor informed us that the decision to delay the conference was taken by the Steering Group alone. Noone else was consulted or asked to contribute their views on the matter.

Connor added that following the positive response to the call out for new members (over 20 applications), the Steering Group has now decided to enlarge the group. They will be trialing a total membership of 30 for a year. This, according to Connor, reflects the group’s evolution from a group closely aligned to the council to “one which is more representative of the city of Manchester.”

MCFly has learnt that interviews were not held with at least some of the new Steering Group members.  Once we have the full list of members, we will take a closer look at exactly how representative the group is in its colour, gender, age, wealth and educational attainment.

New Terms of Reference are currently being drawn up to reflect the changes to the structure of the Steering Group and these will be discussed at the next meeting on the 15th of December 2011.

(1) In addition to the election of a number of Steering Group members at an “Annual” Stakeholder Conference, the Terms of Reference state that “agendas and minutes will be publicly available and circulated to an emailing list.”

Editorial

In the short-term the lack of openness and transparency of the steering group hurts mostly itself. How do its members expect people to get involved when the stakeholder conference – which is supposed to bring people together  – is cancelled for the year without any real regard for them? How do its members expect people to know what is going on when minutes, and even “action points” are not pubished, when even short blog posts (as had been promised) summarising meetings are absent?

In the short-term, expanding the group may produce a flurry of activity.  A cynic might call it a ‘diffusion-of-responsibility’ ploy. Surely a steering group is small for a reason, namely to steer, make decisions and take action.

The idea that holding elections is an insurmountably difficult task is baffling..Groups seem to manage to elect members at their annual AGMs all the time,  Manchester City Council holds elections, we’re told. Maybe they could offer their expertise?

In the long-term, the cancellation of elections just breeds cynicism and apathy. Manchester needs to create trust – via democracy, accountability and transparency. Only with these, will genuinely broad engagement and adaptive leadership become possible.

Posted in Democratic deficit, Manchester City Council | Tagged | Leave a comment

The sun also… sets on solar panel scheme

Posted on December 6, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

Plans to install solar panels on 3,000 roofs across Greater Manchester have been cut to just 600 roofs. Move follows the government’s decision to slash the feed-in-tariffs on December 12th.

Manchester City Council’s Director of Housing Paul Beardmore today told MCFly that the new government changes had a big impact on their plans. These plans had made the reasonable assumption that the subsidy for solar panels would be cut in March 2012 not December. “We just can’t make it stack up financially to do them all”, he said. “In fact, we were really lucky to be in a position to get started straight away as we had already surveyed the properties and they were connected to network. So Carillion was able sign a contract straight away and commit to putting up to 600 new panels.”

Back in October, Manchester City Council’s Executive agreed plans that involved at installing solar panels on 2,000 roofs across North Manchester with the help of the providers British Gas and Carillion. British Gas have now pulled out and Manchester City Council is working with Carillion and housing agency Northwards Housing to complete the solar panel work on 600 roofs.

Plans to consider self-funding 1,000 roofs have been shelved completely as Beardmore states they were “too risky for the council to undertake and install- we didn’t go ahead with that option.”

The full impact of tariff cuts will be detailed in the council’s feed-in-tariffs (FiT) consultation response which is due on the 23rd of December.

More on this story soon.

Arwa Aburawa
mcmonthly@gmail.com

Posted in Adaptation, Energy, Manchester City Council | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Carbon Co-op’s reaction to not winning a hundred grand

Posted on December 6, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

First the bad news – Carbon Coop, which made the finals of a competition with £100,000 funding for community-based energy savings to be won, fell at the final hurdle. But there are other irons in the fire…

Manchester Climate Monthly asked Jonathan Atkinson for Carbon Co-op’s reaction to the news.

Carbon Co-op would like to thank all the individuals and organisations who voted for and supported our energshare bid, the People’s Republic of Energy. We had an amazing response with over 1,000 votes in less than 3 weeks but in the end the prize went to a hydro-project in Northumbria who attracted 3000+ votes, we’d like to congratulate them and wish them all the best with their project.

We gave it our best shot with the resources available, one observation is that simple projects with relatively low levels of carbon savings, such as community hydro, seemed to attract support whilst more ambitious projects such as ours found it harder. The questions this raises: how do you make solid wall insulation and tackling fuel poverty sexy? I think we’re not the only ones grappling with that question at the moment!

Are there other sources of funding that you are looking at to pursue the same project/can the project go ahead in a different form?

The People’s Republic of Energy was our way our packaging up and branding the roll-out of a Greater Manchester retrofit campaign in a way we thought would be simple, understandable and engaging to civil society. Our retrofit programme is absolutely our priority but if the opportunity arises to work with a funder or partner to progress it under the People’s Republic of Energy banner we’d certainly jump on it.

What other projects has Carbon Coop got on the go?

Our focus at the moment is the roll out of our community green deal programme. Everyone is waiting for the Government’s green deal to kick in [see MCFly post here on “Greening the Green Deal”] but we have members here and now in Greater Manchester who want to retrofit their homes and reduce their household energy usage by 80%.

We’re concentrating on bringing these householders together to share knowledge, brokering the leading retrofit expertise in the North West to assist them and have developed a social investment vehicle, the Carbon Re-Investment Society, that can finance these works.

We’ve been adapting our model to recent FIT changes and we’ll be launching a community share issue early in 2012 to fund our retrofit model, watch this space!

We’ve also got a number of other projects and plans on the go and we’ll be making announcements as and when they’re ready in the new year.
Oh, and you can buy People’s Republic of Energy posters! We’ve had loads of requests for them so we thought we could sell them as a Christmas fundraiser!

Anything else you want to tell us?

… these competitions are a lot of fun and potentially very useful but it’s important for groups not to burn out and raise expectations too high and that they (and us) need to concentrate on their core activities – for us retrofit and helping our members save carbon.

I also think in the future Carbon Co-op need to put in some hard work to engage with the mainstream media in Manchester and communicate the importance of an issue they are currently for the most part ignoring.

MCFly editorial (i.e. nowt to do with Carbon Coop, opinions expressed ours not theirs): The People’s Republic of Energy was an interesting proposal, which MCFly encouraged readers to support (see here and here). Manchester Friends of the Earth also vigorously supported the bid. Other groups, with even more impressive email lists – like the City Council, Action for Sustainable Living among others – may have formally supported the bid, but they didn’t exactly pull out the stops to publicise Carbon Coop’s bid and the possibility of bringing all that lovely queensie-facey goodness to Manchester. Perhaps they’d like to explain why?
If only there were a group with a remit to steer the enthusiasm and undoubted numbers of Manchester’s climate-concerned citizens at key moments such as these. No, wait…

Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com

Disclaimer: MCFly’s co-editor Marc Hudson knows several of the Carbon Co-op folks relatively well, and has been known to drink beer with one of ’em.

Posted in Energy | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Friends of the Earth “Election” shocker

Posted on December 5, 2011 by manchesterclimatemonthly

After bitterly-fought contests in which mud was slung and babies were kissed … No, but seriously; Manchester Friends of the Earth held its Annual General Meeting and Christmas Social tonight. No mud was slung, nor babies kissed.

The event was held at Bistro 187, a vegetarian joint a tofu throw away from Manchester Art Gallery. After a treasurer’s report (situation healthy), a membership report (situation probably very healthy, though “if your membership is due, please pay up”), elections were held over the starters (the soup was lovely). In the same way that your legs are just long enough to reach the ground, there were just enough candidates for each “seat.”

Group co-ordinators are Colette Humphrey and Cat Thomson (narrowly keeping their jobs(1)), joined by Pete Abel, formerly an employee of Shell Oil Company.

Group Treasurer responsibilities will be shared – until April, by Dave Coleman and Rhian Jenkins.

The membership Officer is Ali Abbas , the newsletter editor is Damian Cross ad the Web Officer is Alex Lee.

After main course (2) the re-elected co-ordinators Cat and Colette gave a quick overview of the previous year’s activities and spoke of the coming year. Nationally FoE are continuing the Final Demand campaign (see guest blog post by Ali Abbas about that here), doing a campaign on bees, and another on greener products.
Locally FoE will continue its cycling campaigning, promoting “Manchester: A Certain Future” and also work on shale gas extraction (aka “fracking hell!!”)
FoE are always looking for new volunteers, and have regular meetings through the month, which you can find out about via the newly-overhauled Manchester FoE website. If you can’t go to meetings, or are allergic to them, then you could always email them…

Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com

(1) Unanimously
(2)The chestnut thingie was nice, but I was reminded of the joke – Waiter: How did you find your steak, sir?
Man: I just moved a couple of peas and there it was)

Disclaimer: To gasps of incredulity – including from himself – Marc Hudson recently became a paid-up card-carrying member of Friends of the Earth. He absolutely stands by all those things he wrote about FoE being “crushingly reformistic,” but it is hardly FoE’s fault that Manchester lacks the radical flank effect that would make the likes of FoE so much more effective.

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