Feature

Between Denial and Despair: Communities Cooperating to Solve Climate Change

By Robin Oakley
 

"There are many people who go from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually solving the problem."--Nobel Prize-winning climate change campaigner Al Gore

Ninety-eight percent of the energy needs of this building and offices in Malmö, Sweden, are provided by renewable energy  [Greenpeace/Reynaers]

Climate change has been called "the greatest threat humanity has ever faced" by sober and conservative global leaders. It forces us to face some of moral philosophy’s greatest challenges.

It might be easy to characterize climate change as a crisis beyond humanity’s ability to solve, or to see the end of society as we know it: the dawning of a new age of human struggle; of extreme weather, disease, hunger and economic collapse. Calls for international action and global political leadership have been sounded repeatedly, but the collective position of international climate diplomacy is "after you." It’s almost as if there were some other set of people hidden away somewhere and about to emerge to take up office and save us, in a heroic transformation of our governments and corporations from being the cause of the problem to being part of the solution. But it is entirely possible that we have been looking for them in the wrong places.

In communities, towns and cities worldwide, a growing number of "ordinary" people have taken a thoughtful pause in that space Al Gore talks about, between denial and despair, looking at what they are able to do, together. Where cooperation between nations is proving to be agonizing, fragile and slow, cooperation between people in local communities is by contrast emerging as vibrantly creative, powerful, determined and effective, bringing power back to the people--quite literally.


Doing It for Themselves

The causes of climate change are as easy to identify and characterize as the crisis itself. Smokestacks billowing filth above a dirty coal-fired power station illustrate the cover of Gore’s climate change film An Inconvenient Truth. It is the fossil-fueled energy system we rely on to power our lives, warm our homes and drive our cars and planes that has caused this problem. It is in the transformation of how we think about these needs--of warmth and cooling, of mobility, of light and electricity--that we can find the solution.

A small geothermal heat pump (GHP) provides heat, electricity & cooling to 3 large office building, a school  and a small residential area  in Amsterdam, Netherlands.  [Reynaers]

The small town of Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, U.K., is home to the Wasteless Society. Formed in the mid 1990s by a group of local folk concerned about the issue of waste--in this case rubbish--and the fact
that there is too much of it, the society started with the obvious: recycling. Cooperating amongst themselves to make collection of green waste easier for everyone in an era when little government help was on offer, they learned that acting together they could make a positive difference; a neighboring farmer’s anaerobic digester could be fed with waste and also produce clean energy. Bishop’s Castle’s local authority is now the U.K. leader in waste management using this technique.

It doesn’t stop there--if they could tackle waste, could they also do something about climate change? A Waste Less Energy project led to a carbon footprinting exercise. The society now runs energy advice programs for local people and has conducted surveys for over 400 homes, offering plans to cut their energy use. A drive to increase the use of solar power was launched and an Energy Club was established to help residents actually make the changes to their homes. A fuel pump now operates in Bishop’s Castle supplying 100-percent locally sourced waste vegetable oil biodiesel. Four other local towns are now following this lead. The realization that people have the power to decide locally to change direction on their energy provision and can cooperate to cut the community’s climate change pollution, while benefiting the community itself, has emerged all over the U.K.


Ecocities

In 2005 a permaculture graduate called Rob Hopkins moved to the town of Totnes in Devon and saw how local communities could wean themselves off fossil fuels and respond to climate change in a practical and achievable way. His "Energy Descent Action Plan" looks into the future and helps communities see a clear path of how to get where they want to be. Totnes became the first U.K. Transition Town. There are now 30 English Transition Towns including Bristol, Bath and even the Isle of Wight. A handful of towns in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia and New Zealand have made the idea international. Each has defined its transition away from fossil fuels in its own way, but underlying it all is the desire for warmth, power and mobility without waste, pollution and fuel dependency. Efficiency programs, ultraefficient local power plants and local renewable energy projects are taking off in spite of, rather than because of, central government and energy utilities.

Children playing adjacent to a combined heat and power station supplying local businesses and residential premises in Southampton, U.K.  [Greenpeace/Davison]

To some, though, these apparently novel ideas are very familiar. Denmark generates over half its energy through ultraefficient power stations. Over four-fifths of Copenhagen is heated through this method. The city boasts the most efficient power plant in the world, which can use five different fuels, including three renewables (waste wood, straw bales and biogas) and delivers energy from them with over 90-percent efficiency. Traditional coal-fired power stations favored by big power companies generally waste over half of the energy they generate.

In Sweden this philosophy has reached its apotheosis. The Swedish government has effectively declared itself a transition country by setting a target to be free from fossil fuels and nuclear power and replacing them with renewables by 2020. It’s already being proven at a community level. In the city of Malmö, the Western Harbor development (Vaestra Hamnen) already boasts 100-percent renewable heating, cooling and electricity as well as some of Sweden’s most iconic architecture. The redevelopment has delivered a new residential shoreline community whose motto is sustainability. Futuristic buildings glinting with solar panels stand alongside green courtyards and traditional Swedish houses.

The decentralized model has delivered for Malmö. A biomass-fueled combined heat and power unit warms all the buildings through a district heating network with warm water heated in solar thermal collectors. Wind turbines and solar power cells add to the power station’s electricity and the ultraefficient design of the buildings means that the development is self-sufficient. It is living, working proof that the zero-
carbon communities that must be our future, if we are to have a future, can be made real today. It is also a model that communities, towns and cities worldwide can emulate without waiting for their national governments to also emulate the Swedes.

Self sufficient, zero fossil fuel energy developement; a wind turbine and solar panels fitted to a residential block in Bow, London, UK.  [©Greenpeace/Kate Davison]

Awareness of the need to cooperate is growing internationally and while the global challenge of climate change cannot be solved solely by communities acting for themselves, these exciting and vibrant developments provide momentous proof that these solutions work. This also has the power to remind our international negotiators that they too must cooperate. The hypocrisy of developed world governments who point the finger at industrializing nations such as China for their excuses is exposed by the fact that it is cooperating grassroots organizations, not national governments, who are often leading in the developed world. In fact, the biggest ecocity in the world is now planned for China using these very concepts. The Dongtan development, sited next to Shanghai, has as its vision a city on the scale of Manhattan with zero-waste and zero-carbon emissions. It is hard to imagine wasting less than that.

In the words of scientist Buckminster Fuller, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

[Cobb/Greenpeace] Robin Oakley works for Greenpeace in the U.K. and China, now heading the Greenpeace U.K. climate and energy team. He has also worked for Campaign Against the Arms Trade and for Index on Censorship.

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