Low Carbon Headington, 2 June 2008:
"Carbon Reduction (Rationing)" Group notes
Key points of discussion
There has been a Carbon Reduction Action Group (CRAG) operating in Oxford for more than two years. Tina Fawcett (and Jill Haas) are members of this. However, the group has been winding down for various reasons. Headington could learn from the original CRAG’s experience and form its own group – without necessarily being bound by the approach taken by the earlier group. Details of Oxford CRAG meetings and experience so far can be found on www.carbonrationing.org.uk.
The majority of the group didn’t like the word ‘rationing’ – so any new group would be a ‘carbon reduction action group’.
Oxford CRAG seems to have found that membership of such a group has a limited lifespan. After a couple of years people may have learnt what they need to from being in a group. Acknowledging this, our group was keen to structure renewal into any Headington CRAG. There would need to be a mechanism for constantly recruiting new members and for reaching out beyond the core members of the group.
We agreed it would be important to make our group fun – but didn’t immediately come up with any brilliant ideas to do so. One suggestion was to tap into local loyalties and curiosity by encouraging street-by-street carbon footprint comparisons.
A useful tool for the group could be www.imeasure.org.uk – a web based tool for recording household energy usage. It allows you to set up a peer group for comparison, which could be very useful.
The easiest part of individual carbon impacts to measure is direct energy use, i.e. household energy use, personal transport and air travel. These are likely to be at the heart of what we target for reduction. However, we should also look at indirect carbon emissions, purchasing habits, other aspects of lifestyle through which we can reduce carbon emissions – even if these are more difficult to quantify.
Creating this group would enable us to swap low carbon tips (e.g. on dimmable energy efficient light bulbs) which would be of interest to the rest of Low Carbon Headington.
A draft list of objectives for this group would be:
- measure our own carbon impact and learn how to reduce it
- find fun ways of encouraging and enabling other people in Headington, whether within or outside the group, to do the same
- create a sustainable group that will be at the heart of what Low Carbon Headington is doing
Actions
Tina to write up notes and circulate.
Tina to arrange date for next meeting, ideally we will meet by the end of the month (Julie has offered her home as a venue).
All – think further about what we want to do with our group (how would you change the draft objectives above?)
All – have a look at http://www.carbonrationing.org.uk/oxford to see what Oxford CRAG did.
Contact: tina.fawcett@lycos.co.uk