I attended a gathering of the Oxfordshire Green Construction Network earlier this week in Bicester.  The network's strapline is "Building a Greener Tomorrow - Today" and it does what it says on the tin.  It's a network of members who are local businesses in Oxfordshire who all have an interest in the building sector and who want to see more sustainable building design and construction practices.  More information will be made available on a website coming soon.

Some details of the gathering can be found via this link (opens in new window)

I like what Repowering London had to say at this conference at the  Birmingham NEC today.  They are doing great work in implementing community renewable energy.  The picture is of one of their slides which highlights the main outcomes from their .  I think in the bottom-right of the slide there is a small typo - "50 kWh" should be "50 kWp" (ie the abbreviation should be the one for "kilowatt peak" not "kilowatt hours").

Highlights from one of the seminars at this conference (not the one pictured above):-  From about 70,000 Green Deal Assessments completed this year, only 12 have so far resulted in financed Green Deal Plans.   The two main barriers to uptake appear to be complexity and insufficient financial incentive.  This might change - if energy prices increase over the next few years (as expected) then Green Deal Plans will become more attractive financially.

Carbon Brief have published the diagram above, which shows how the Carbon Price Floor, implemented in the UK from March 2013, is expected to provide an incentive to shift to a low-carbon primary energy industry.  I think this is a great idea, as the effective price of carbon through the EU ETS has made Europe a laughing stock over the last couple of years when it comes to talking about effective actions for creating a low carbon economy and tackling climate change.  The floor price is likely to lead to an effective price of carbon of £30 per tonne by 2020, £70 per tonne by 2030.  Now, that's more like it!  Here's a link to the original article.  Apparently, the consumer group "Which" suggests scrapping the floor price, on the grounds that the measure is too variable in the short-term to incentivise shifts in investment patterns.  However, I think it's exactly the sort of measure we need to be in place to overcome the many barriers to creating a low carbon economy. If' like Which, people think it is too variable, then the answer is to strengthen the measure, not scrap it as Which suggests.

Carbon Brief have also published in this linked article an excellent infographic (below) which sets out the expected net reduction in average household energy bills in 2020 caused by current policies, compared with the same future without those policies being in place.  This is an effective counter to the often ill-informed "this will increase bills" objection to moving to a low carbon economy.

I attended a talk by Michael Wilkins from Standard & Poor's yesterday at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment which summarised the result of their work on carbon constraints, as published recently in a report on the Carbon Tracker website. 

Here's a link to the referenced report "What a carbon-constrained future could mean for oil companies' creditworthiness"

It appears that, because of various reasons including the European ETS carbon price having 'tanked' (ie hit rock-bottom) and the impact of the economic situation on Government priorities, it is unlikely that the "unburnable carbon"  agenda will result in significant credit downgrading of major oil companies for a few years to come.  The scenario modelling S&Ps had used for their analysis arrived at a Brent crude oil price of $65 per barrel by 2017, based on assumptions about Government-led demand reduction initiatives kicking in (thereby depressing prices because of the supply-demand dynamics).  During the discussions that followed the talk, I became gripped by a thought - what would be the impacts of both  such demand reduction initiatives AND a stringent carbon tax?  The former would tend to reduce price at equilibrium, the latter would tend to increase it (all other things being equal) - so off the top of my head I was struggling to reconcile the net effects of these if they occured together - would they be complementary or would they fight against each other and result in unintended consequences?

Having pondered further, I think that the situation would be as shown in the diagram below.  The demand reduction initiatives would shift the demand curve downwards, and the carbon taxation would shift the supply curve downwards (because, at every volume, it would become more expensive for the suppliers to supply with the tax in place than if the tax was not in place, so that, for any given volume, they would need a higher sale price than before in order to be happy to supply that volume). 

The opportunity this offers is to arrange matters such that the two effects, taken together, reduce equilibrium demand but leave equilibrium price about the same.  This strategy would reduce the risk of the effects disproportionately disadvantaging the poor, by keeping prices stable.  Therefore, the two policy objectives of tackling climate change and addressing poverty could be addressed at the same time with this approach.

I'm trying out some of the newest low-energy LED light bulbs available in the mainstream market.  I'm replacing some earlier-generation bulbs (1 or 2 Watts) with new ones, because my wife is complaining that the existing ones don't throw enough light.
The picture on the left shows one of the new bulbs, in GU10 fitting - I've bought some 4W bulbs and some 5W.  Both the 4W and 5W units look very similar to each other.  The strategically placed cat's paws give a sense of the scale.  The picture below shows the new bulbs in action (again, with the cat getting involved to help dress the scene).  The old bulbs are now in other parts of the house, replacing older 50W bulbs. 

Phil Wynn Owen from DECC (seen in the picture on the left) outlined some key challenges in keeping climate change to under 2 degrees.  We need to do better in the UK to move to lower carbon energy, especially beyond 2022 at a time when a lot of existing energy generating capacity will have been decommissioned.  Developments that will help are carbon budgets, the Green Investment Bank, smart meters, RHI, EMR, £110billion of infrastructure investment.

The next opportunity to facilitate international co-operation will be the COP18 meeting in Doha (Qatar) in Nov/Dec 2012.

I attended this event last week.  The picture is of Miriam Kennet (co-founder of the Institute) with Clive Lord, who was receiving an award.

The conference was an amazingly diverse collection of people from all corners of the World.  What united participants was their concern for how to respond to the challenges of supporting planet, people and all other species in a World where traditional economics seems to be struggling to find viable answers. This is where Green Economics is increasingly gaining support in challenging traditional views and using inclusive approaches to expand the dialogue and seek new answers to old questions.
  
Miriam was kind enough to ask me to be one of the speakers at the conference and I was delighted to do so. My talk was entitled "Reflections from a sustainability newbie" - attached below.

PV panels on the roof, as well as generating FIT payments, are enabling us to make significant savings on our electricity usage from the grid compared with last year, as shown by these latest figures.  The percentages show the size of the reduction

Below are some excerpts from an example GD Advisor's report (with fictitious, rather than  real data).  This shows how the GD Advisor will be listing each energy efficiency measure he/she will be recommending, the costs and the benefits in terms of both the financial savings and the impact on the efficiency rating of the house.