how to get where you want to go - part 2

This is an update on my efforts to travel in a low carbon manner.

As some of you may know I nearly got rid of my car earlier this year. But now I am glad I didn't. Why? Because sometimes I am so tired I can't be bothered to cycle, walk, catch the bus, cadge a lift or sit on a train.

The other day I got talking and missed my stop and ended up in Grantham because I forgot to get off at Peterborough and then spent an hour making bunting in the waiting room until I caught the next train back. Also my boss has just told me I am being given a different job that will involve me driving around North Norfolk and visiting people which would be impossible to do by public transport.

I am determined still to use environmentally friendly methods as much as possible. So I have taken my bike to the menders and for £40 I got a new gear something-or-other and a new tyre. I was a bit worried when I went to pick it up because he said there was some extra stuff that he had had to do. I braced myself for the bill which turned out to only be another £9.

The other day I borrowed a friend's electric bike. It was amazing. Kind of how I imagine it would feel if you rode a bike and were really fit. I am going to borrow it a bit more and then maybe buy one.

I also saw an electric scooter on Norwich market. It looked like a childs scooter but had a lead and a plug which was for recharging. It looked like a cheap way to get about but it is probably only legally allowed to be used in your dads driveway between school and bath-time.

Tomorrow - the advantages of going out with someone in NR3

Addicted to love

There is a song where the words go 'whenever I'm alone with you I feel young again, whenever I'm alone with you I feel fun again'. This is all very well Adele but how do you know it is really love and not just some need you are fulfilling? Perhaps even an addiction.
Well I have a love that makes me feel this way, sexy and carefree.
But should I give her up? She is rather, um, 'high maintenance'.
I have been saying I will because I know I should but everytime I plan the end I think 'not yet, just a bit longer, wait til the spring'. Is this the pre-contemplative excuse of an addict?
I spend a day without her just cycling and visiting friends. I feel relaxed.
I look for signs as to the right thing to do. I find a sign and I know it's not time yet.
She passed her MOT

Achtung! Peak Oil Reports and Community Transport

What have a leaked German military think tank report on Peak Oil, a Guardian article stating that for two years the British government (i.e. the Department of Energy and Climate Change - DECC) has consistently played down and dismissed as ‘alarmist’ warnings from its own civil servants about the threat of civil unrest in the face of ‘peak oil’ energy shortages, and Sustainable Bungay’s midsummer bike ride and Green Drinks on Community Transport got in common?

The German report is clear, sobering and well worth reading. It outlines the systemic risks involved in an “unavoidable peak in oil production, which go beyond gradual shifts in energy systems and economies,” and discusses those risks from the standpoint of globalised, industrialised economies – oil being the base for 95% of all industrial output. The paper also addresses energy security and changing international and geopolitical relations – who has the remaining oil reserves and what that means in terms of potential political power shifts.

The Guardian article looks at the DECC report on the risks and impacts of a potential future decline in oil production within the present global context of historic oil price highs ($115 or £71 a barrel). The report had been unavailable to the public until a student gained access to it through a Freedom of Information demand.

Community Transport was the theme for Sustainable Bungay's solstice Green Drinks yesterday as a group of cyclists set off from the Buttercross in the centre of town to St. Peter's Brewery a few miles outside. Margaret Sheppard, SB's own full-on cycling campaigner, organised the ride both as part of National Bike Week and as one of a series of summer rides to raise awareness, show how enjoyable cycling can be and "get bums on bikes."

Some of us chose to go with Richard in the Beccles and Bungay Area Community Cars' wheelchair-assisted van - also to raise awareness of its existence as an alternative to private cars for groups of up to six people for anything from day trips to evenings out. The BBACC also have a network of drivers using their own cars to take people on shopping or hospital trips (this costs 43p per mile). In an area with a large rural hinterland, diminished bus services and many (especially older) people without private transport, this is proving to be an increasingly popular and valuable service.

Whatever the future holds in terms of energy provision, the current trend of rising oil and food prices seems set to last. We need to get more and more into the spirit of sharing our resources - and making it as enjoyable as possible - like cycling (or community bussing) out together at summer solstice for a drink to discuss the practical ways we can go about it.

Pics: Richard, Charlotte and the Community WAV; Bungay bikers at the Buttercross and entering St. Peter's Brewery, Summer Solstice 2011

Transport - Where Are We Going?

What immediately comes to mind when I think of “Transport” are cars. And buses. Mostly because at the moment I don’t own one of the former and so rely on the latter. And in rural Suffolk where I live, the number of the latter seems to be shrinking by the month.

Then I think lorries, trains, boats and planes. Bicycles. Horses. But the theme of transport goes beyond just the forms. It’s about more than whether I personally own a car or have access to a decent public transport system.

Mass transportation of goods (and people) is key to the present globalised industrial economy. Those goods whether they be food, clothes, computers, white goods or cars, already have embedded within their manufacture the use of vast amounts of oil. And that’s before you get to the fuel in the tank (see Rob Hopkins’ recent post on the energy in a litre of petrol).

If we look at the predominant aspirations and narratives of our present culture, they are still predicated on the cheap abundant oil supply we’ve enjoyed for the past fifty years. We can all have a car, own a house, fly anywhere in the world for holidays or special occasions… or dream of it for the future. In theory we can have it all. The recent economic difficulties have yet made hardly a dent in this narrative.

We know all this, you might think. We’re transitioners. But just because we are aware of something doesn't mean everyone is, even other transitioners. I still have conversations where people say that Peak Oil is a hype and that we’re not running out of oil, there’s plenty left. That’s where I need to be on the ball about, yes, there might be half of what we’ve used so far left but where is it? What Peruvian rainforest, Arctic tundra or Canadian boreal forest does it lie under? How easy is it to extract? What’s the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)? What are the environmental and political considerations? Who is being dispossessed of their ancestral lands? What about Deep Sea Drilling? Take a look at Naomi Klein’s extraordinary and lucid TEDS talk on oil and risk.

The fact is that once you start looking at Transport you’re soon looking at the culture as a whole. One car, one person and an i-pod. “We’ve had so much, we’ve become selfish. We don’t really want to share any more. And we’re not really looking at what’s coming.” And that’s from the woman who runs the (very successful) Voluntary Help Centre in Southwold.

One of the best things about being in Transition is the context it provides in which the bigger picture of diminishing fossil fuel reserves, carbon emissions, climate instability and the global economy can be brought to the table and discussed. We can begin in these conversations to forge a different and perhaps more satisfying future. And sometimes we admit, as happened in our latest Low Carbon Cookbook meeting, that we don’t really know what the future will hold.

Back to Transport. Transition Norwich has hosted many conversations about transport in the past few years, here on This Low Carbon Life, in the Transition Circles and as part of Carbon Conversations. A Transport group did form after the Unleashing in 2008 and although currently dormant, acted for a time as an umbrella for campaigners wanting to improve public transport in Norwich city centre and prevent the Northern Distributor Road from going ahead. There are several expert cyclists on the blog team some of whom have led weeks on Cycling, reported on Otesha and been active cycle path campaigners. There are posts about inconvenient carless living, giving up the sexy sports car and its identifications, the trials of rural public transport (as well as its delights) and getting from A to B in Norwich traffic. And our week on Flying last March emerged from a fiery group email debate… whew hot topic!!!

And what about in the broader Transition movement? Have a look at this superb article by Mike Freedman, published yesterday on Transition Voice, Inconvenient Truths about the Coming Transition (see part 3 on Transportation).

Some initiatives have transport-related activities up and running. Transition Town Brixton just received funding for their local cycle delivery service. And Transition Ilkley are part of a chip fat biodiesel project that has been going three years.

I'll sign off today with a mention of Sustainable Bungay's Biodiesel project, which has been taking shape over recent months. No one has gone anywhere yet with the diesel we've made, but it's early days and we're refining (sic) our methods!

And before I forget, Happy Earth Day!

Pics: One Man (with partner) and a Car, Arizona 2001; Making Biodiesel, Suffolk February 2011

Solar sisters in Sri Lanka

Being one of two guests being welcomed by an elaborate ceremony with several hours of performances by all the different classes in the school, followed by a feast of local food with all of the teachers of the school was slightly overwhelming! But I suppose it illustrates how much benefit we were bringing to their village.

Through a brilliant little NGO - the Himalayan Light Foundation* - we were installing solar panels on to a school in the Sinharaja region of Sri Lanka as part of their solar sisters project. This would allow school lessons to continue outside of daylight hours, as currently they had no lights at all in their classrooms.

As I have found, unfortunately, often happens with foreign volunteering we were mostly there for funding the project - paying for the solar panel systems as well as the cost of our trip. However, we were given a days training in installing solar panels and I did help the Sri Lankan technician who was doing most of the work to put a few light switches together!

We were staying with a local family for a week and, besides a few excursions to tea factories and local reserves, we spent most of our time hanging out at the school with all of the children and playing cricket, which they were considerably better at than us!! It was definitely a fairly basic existence and we were staying with one of the better off families in the village. They cooked over an open fire in the kitchen, we washed using water from the tanks out the back and the WC was an experience complete with giant spiders! However, as Jon said yesterday they were all very happy and positive, much more so than most people I know in the UK, and we very much enjoyed our stay with them. I hope that our gift of solar power has helped their village school. I definitely feel that it is one of the main potential benefits of solar power, in providing a small amount of electricity in otherwise very remote areas. It also does highlight for me how little electricity we really need to use and it makes our lifestyles look horribly wasteful.

*More information on the Himalayan Light Foundation can be found here http://www.hlf.org.np/. They can be challenging to get in contact with, but do persist as they are lovely people!

Photos: banner of the welcome ceremony, me fitting a light switch, Sally playing very scenic cricket, Asoka in her kitchen cooking over an open fire.

Public Transport – A Private View

I went up to the Anti-Cuts demonstration in Norwich on Saturday by public transport. When I got on the Anglian bus to Lowestoft, I discovered the return fare had suddenly gone up from £3.80 to £5.20. That’s roughly 40% in one go. The driver gave me the new day ticket for a mere £5. I could now travel all day anywhere within Zone C. But all I actually wanted was a return ticket to Lowestoft. And it was still a costly increase at over 30%.

The drivers on this route are normally cheerful and friendly. It makes a real difference to the journey. Today, this man looked tired. “It can’t be making your life easy at the moment,” I said. “Being the first port of call for the bad news.” He rolled his eyes up and I had a vision of all the drivers in the front line facing the passengers’ annoyance whilst the people making the decisions sat in offices - and not just the Anglian ones - shielded from it.

So I called head office this morning and spoke to Anglian's accountant. He told me some fares in the region had actually gone down (Harleston to Norwich for instance), whilst those from Halesworth to Norwich (bus 588) and Southwold to Great Yarmouth (bus 601, the one I was on) had gone up. The 601 is an unsubsidised commercial route. It does have to do with the cuts and loss of grants and council subsidies.

"I agree yours was a particularly sharp increase," he said. "We've introduced the day tickets. But that's still a £1.20 rise."

He then said that Anglian had increased their fares early in order to shield from further sharp rises in the future, although that wasn't guaranteed entirely. And that rural communities would be particularly hard hit.

"I am surprised by the lack of feedback from the public so far about the changes," he said.

The man at Head Office said he was also perplexed why there were oil price increases now the economy is said to be 'in recovery'. I mentioned Peak Oil and resource depletion (after all it is a bus company I'm talking to), and he told me about the dual fuel buses they are planning to use with methane generated from landfill. These are not in place yet.

There was also no increase in pay for the bus drivers beyond the 2% they received in October.

"Are the drivers unionised," I asked.
"I don't really understand why they would want to be."

So then what about the fact they were in the firing line of passengers annoyed by the fare rises?
"Yes, that's not great, they're a really good bunch of guys."

I looked at Anglian's website afterwards and found only the most oblique reference to the fare changes. About the day passes for Lowestoft, Yarmouth and Norwich: "In some instances a ticket may be cheaper than buying a return ticket !!"

At this transition time of peak resources and climate change we need to be using public instead of private transport, and making sure there is reasonably-priced access to it for people in rural areas on low income. And there are many of us. These fare rises, like the cuts themselves, hit hardest where there is the least leverage.

It takes effort to be bothered about these things. To give feedback. Even when they affect us directly. This does affect me directly and I really didn't want to pick up that phone this morning and call Anglian. I forced myself to. And that's because I really don't want to return to some Victorian world of vast inequality, with a ruling elite who despise the working class and the unemployed underclass are sent to the equivalent of workhouses, providing labour in return for the bare essentials of existence.

And who can't afford to get on the bus to Lowestoft.

Pics: Merry Christmas from Your Local Bus Company Day Ticket; Me on the bus holding The Long Emergency - Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century by James Howard Kunstler and The Rough Guide To Climate Change by Robert Henson. I had intended to review these books this week but I was overtaken by the bus.

From “Oh” to “Doh!”

A big thank you to Erik for putting me straight on the maths!  As he quite rightly pointed out, I’d under-valued the flying as I needed to calculate four flights for four people, but the ferry, as per the cited website, is per car.  So there we have it – my 2010 holiday had a lower footprint than last year’s flights.  Hurrah!

2009
	Miles	CO2e (tonnes)
Flights		1.32
Rail	167	0.08
Car (Eire)	620	0.16
Total		1.56
2010
	Miles	CO2e (tonnes)
Ferry		0.904
Car (UK)	660	0.17
Car (Eire)	620	0.16
Total		1.234

Although I feel much happier now, it does once again highlight the difficulties of making those tricky decisions with the best information available.  Luckily I had someone like Erik to help me out - other people may not be so fortunate.

(All sources as per yesterday’s post!)

Oh… I wasn’t expecting that.

So, this week, I've talked about about my holiday and how good it was to take the car and ferry rather than flying.
Then I thought I'd work out the carbon footprint of both and see how much I saved, to nicely round off my blog week...

2009
	Miles	CO2e (tonnes)
Flights		0.33
Rail	167	0.02
Car (Eire)	620	0.16
Total		0.51
2010
	Miles	CO2e (tonnes)
Ferry		0.226
Car (UK)	660	0.17
Car (Eire)	620	0.16
Total		0.556

OK, so the numbers are only fractionally different, and are based on one set of calculation engines I found on the web. But it does highlight the difficulty of making decisions when the information is not readily available or not actually embedded into our daily decision-making processes. I was pretty gutted when I did these calculations last night.

I can rationalise it. Possibly overall, a ferry lasts longer than an airplane and so the embodied CO2 is less than the plane journey. Maybe the full end-to-end infrastructure of air-travel is overall more damaging than car / ferry travel. Possibly the fact that we have to hire a car in Ireland if we don’t take our own makes a difference. The simple truth is that I just don’t know. And we, as individuals, as societies, cannot make proper decisions unless all the facts are in the public domain and fully transparent.

So, what will I do next year? I’m inclined to still do the ferry / car journey again – it was certainly a better experience for me. The rest of the family may feel differently. We’ll have to see.

Notes: Carbon Footprint measured in tonnes CO2e. Flight & Car carbon footprint measured at http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx. Flights are return Stansted to Dublin and include multiplier for radiative forcing. Rail is return Norwich to Stansted. Ferry is return Holyhead to Dublin. Ferry emissions from http://www.carbontracking.com/reports/irish_ferries_emissions_calculation.pdf

Céad míle Fáilte *

Ireland in the summer is gorgeous. You can never guarantee the weather, and it rained at least a bit most days, but on the very big plus side, this means that every day is beautifully fresh, and the countryside is a perfect irridescent green. Most of the rainy bits were early in the morning, so by the time we were all up and about, it was warm enough to go to the beach, even if we had to take raincoats with us, just in case...

We were lucky enough to be staying in areas of outstanding natural beauty, first in Sligo where so much of the landscape is made famous by Yeats' poems, and then in the wild Burren of County Clare. The girls loved it, especially seeing all their cousins, and driving the tractor on their uncle PJ's farm.

Although I didn't really get to read my holiday books as I'd planned, I instead found inspiration of a different kind. We went to see a house, where every possible sustainable innovation had been designed in to the build. Rain was collected in special gutters and treated for drinking water, the house was warmed by geothermal energy and triple-glazed wondows, the water was heated by solar heaters, the waste water was treated in reed beds, and there was even a wind turbine was being erected. I was in serious eco-envy territory!

Then a few days later we went to visit my uncle who had been building a solar water system from a couple of old radiators! He'd been quoted a few thousand euro to install a professional system and instead he'd got the bits he needed from the reclaimers' yard and built it himself. I was very very impressed, especially as all the adverts I've seen for such systems have been prohibitively expensive.

It got me thinking. I'm sure we have an old radiator somewhere in the shed. Now all I need is some black paint. And a little bit of guidance.

Pictures: Rosses Point, Co Sligo; Uncle PJ's farm, Co Clare; Uncle Peter's solar water system.

*Céad míle Fáilte - "A Hundred Thousand Welcomes" in Irish

En route to the Emerald Isle

Every summer for the last few years, we've flown to Ireland to visit our relatives, who gather together each July to celebrate the family, remember those who have passed away, and, more recently, welcome a new generation of children.

This summer, conscious of the impact of flying on the environment, and, if I'm honest, determined not to give any more of my hard-earned money to Mr O'Leary, we decided to drive and take the ferry. Tully had assured me that it was possible to take a family across land and sea to the west of Ireland and still enjoy the trip. I promised R faithfully that we would stop at regular intervals for a break, and even ask for directions if we got lost; so, with the car packed full of entertainment for the under-fives, we set off on our epic journey.

I had forgotten how lovely England is, how green, and how wild. Something you certainly never see from the window of an aeroplane.

We'd agreed not to stop at motorway service stations or Little Chefs, but to find somewhere off piste for pit stops. And so, just off the A14, we found Manor Farm Shop Catthorpe, a pefect jewel of the English countryside. It's a working farm (they grow the wheat for Weetabix!) and has a farm shop and cafe where everything (bar the coffee, I guess) is either grown on the farm itself, or is sourced locally. It was fantastic, the food was amazing, the staff friendly, and they even had art & craft activities for the kids. R and I both opted for the superb Rarebit with Pear, A was delighted to order herself a gorgeously fluffy omellete with cheese and mushrooms, and G, who normally eats nothing but fruit, tucked into her beans on toast with some enthusiasm. She couldn't eat it all as the portions were so generous, but luckily kind Daddy stepped up to the plate and helped her out.

Not only was it the perfect stop-off, only a mile or so from the A14/M6 junction, it was a perfect example of how a well-thought out, locally-run, sustainable operation can beat the bland, ubiquitous national chains hands down. Well done, Catthorpe, ten out of ten!