- Brain design and climate solutions.
- Project Drawdown, another source of actions?
- RSPB publishes its tips and Carbon calculator.
- Supplier’s Carbon Intensity.
- Government’s Carbon Budget delivery plan.
- Novel energy source.
- This talk to an acedemic audience is quite accessible. It’s just over an hour long without the Q&A. It goes to the heart (brain!) of how to change behaviour, a topic some of you may be interested in, it’ll help you tailor and target your message. This is what many of us in ACT grapple with.
Try to listen to all of it as it tells a story with many useful and related snippets of insight. You can start at ~7mins to skip the intros on why the topic is relevant. - The Project Drawdown website provides easy to access solutions and their impact.
This looks like an interesting resource for general advice. It gives detailed analysis and criteria used for rating actions.
My concern is that it may be too general for individual cases. Take private ‘electric’ vehicles for example, I was a little surprised that they included hybrid cars, incl. SUVs, as the 17th most effective action. This is ahead of several other actions that would avoid more emissions even in the worst case. It appears they selected this based on the best case. While they do say emissions will vary depending on use, the overall message is that they have many advantages and come “highly recommended”, something I (and many others profoundly disagree with).
I could only find one recommendation to reduce waste (in food). This comes 3rd top CO2e reduction. Confirming some first-hand experience with residential/organisational energy assessment. That is, a large majority (well over 75%) could halve their emissions by simply cutting out wasteful use of energy, almost immediately.
Although ACT strongly encourages looking at how to reduce CO2e emissions on a personalised/contextualised basis, this resource may be useful/informative. A more bespoke resource to check impact of actions is the CFT and its associated list of Carbon Cutting Actions. - The RSPB webpage has a great set of reasons for why its readers need to limit warming to 1.5OC. We can all learn from how to target our message. They also recommend that you start by measuring your Carbon Footprint and include a few general actions people can take.
The calculator they use is a cut above the rest. It uses a very similar approach to ACT’s CFT. Several of their calculations (for 2024) match ours which is always reassuring but not surprising as we use the same source data. There are one or two questions that may not be quite right (e.g CI of electricity supplier and some food items), but they are in the right ballpark. Most importantly, they are on the right track in reporting all greenhouse gas emissions at the point of consumption.
The one advantage over the CFT that I can see is it covers all countries of the world, an impressive feat if accurate enough. Unfortunately they do push their ofsetting scheme, something ACT doesn’t encourage iven when gold plated. - We’ve discussed electricity grid Carbon Intensities (CI), how these are measured, how to use them and how they are greenwashed. This initiative is another take on the same topic, this time it assigns CIs to different suppliers on an hour-by-hour basis. The methodology of how Matched Clear Power Index produces this data is unclear, but they emphasise it uses published REGO data. This in itself suggests the index is an average guess based on historic REGO certificates.
This topic can be quite complicated, so ripe for greenwashing. If you are interested in a better understand or at are looking for a simple guide on how to avoid falling for these sales messages, have a look at our guide on Greenwashing in the electricity grid.
The topic has come up so many times, I’ve scheduled a dedicated meeting on the topic, contact me for the online link on the 20th November 16:30 – 18:00. - The government has published its Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan. This is an ecouraging step with some excellent ambition. We’ll need to see the detailed delivery plans and then see them enacted.
Friends of the Earth, and others, have given initial reactions to this. - Extracting low-Carbon energy from a well known physical phenomenon is not unusual. Osmotic enery looks interesting, but still has many challenges, not least system losses (efficiency) and the volumes of water needed.
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