Month: August 2021

Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht

Posted on August 19, 2021August 19, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Dithered black-and-white image of bubbles.

Earlier this week, a friend and former colleague asked on a Slack channel for resources to help plan the next five years. Along with others, I suggested the ikigai method, but then this morning explored further and came across this resource. It’s seems pretty good.

Planning for the future is something that I should be doing both personally and professionally. It’s something I’m used to doing. Something I help clients do.

I made a start but then kind of ran of steam. I wondered why. When I talked to a friend about it we agreed that it’s difficult to make plans when everything’s so uncertain. But then not to make plans makes us feel like we’re bobbing along a river, carried along by whichever way the currents take us.

Later, I read an article that came my way via a newsletter. I stopped planning. We need to give ourselves some space and not dive right back into the way things were. As the author says, we need to recharge.

I think the real problem is that life is still exhausting because the pandemic was and remains exhausting in so many invisible ways — and we still haven’t given ourselves space to even begin to recover. Instead, we’re just softly boiling over, emptying and evaporating whatever stores of energy and patience and grace remain.
[…]
So the first step is recognizing that you, too, need rest. Don’t just want it, don’t just fantasize about it, don’t just talk about it and then deny it, but need it, require it, in order to keep going. The second step is advocating for the structures that make it possible — on a personal, professional, and societal level — so that others can ask and receive rest too.
Source: Culture Study

My wife’s currently working full-time through the summer months on a contract that’s allowed her to change careers. It’s a wonderful opportunity, but she’s not worked full-time since before our 14 year-old son was born, and (as a former teacher) she’s never worked through the summer.

Although it’s disrupted our routines, what her contract has allowed me to do is to gently take my foot off the accelerator pedal for a moment. It’s not time to put it back down again for a few weeks yet.

English translation of title: “Man Plans, and God Laughs”. Image from an original by Karen Bailey.

Hang on to what you’ve got?

Posted on August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Dithered black-and-white image of a car exhaust

Three years ago, when we came to the end of our lease of a Toyota Auris hybrid, we tried to get another one. For one reason or another (poor customer service, delays on shipping from Japan) that didn’t happen. So we bought a 2013 diesel Volvo V60. It’s a lovely car, but it’s now at the age where it’s started to need things doing to it. Things that cost £££.

Given the climate emergency, our reflex was to investigate leasing or buying a new hybrid. Over the long-term, that is obviously the right thing to do. But for us right now I wanted to do some investigation. After all, cars don’t appear out of thin air, and manufacturing them causes carbon to be emitted. Living near the centre of town and working from home we don’t use our car for commuting or taking the kids to school. So should we switch? Or should we repair what we’ve got?

I used a carbon calculator to work out that driving 12,000 miles in our car emits 2.96 tonnes of CO2 per year. As we don’t have a drive and there’s no EV charging points on the road where we park, we’d have to go for a hybrid such as a Toyota Corolla. We literally couldn’t plug in a fully-electric car.

Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manufacturing an equivalent gasoline vehicle. For larger, longer-range EVs that travel more than 250 miles per charge, the manufacturing emissions can be as much as 68 percent higher.
Source: The Green Age

From what I’ve read, it can take up to two years or 50,000 miles for a fully-electric vehicle to ‘pay off’ the increased manufacturing emissions compared to cars with internal combustion engines. For hybrids, that figure will of course be higher.

So although we’d love a new car, it doesn’t make much sense to get a new one right now. We’ll be hanging onto our Volvo V60 for the foreseeable, even if it does have a diesel engine. Sometimes the best thing for the environment might to hang on to what you’ve got and keep it going.

Of course, the ideal scenario thing would be for forward-thinking councils and governments to show leadership in this area. To re-instate subsidies. To install more than 12 EV points in an entire county in a year. To encourage transport via mass transit such as buses and trains. To create more bike lanes for safer cycling. But while we’re atomising our transit choices, and paying for it all individually, these are the trade-offs we have to make.

Image adapted from a photo by Matt Boitor

It is a folly to expect men to do all they may reasonably be expected to do

Posted on August 17, 2021August 17, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

I live in Northumberland, one of the most sparsely-populated counties in England. In fact, at a mere 64 people per square km, there’s only five places less populated. To put that into perspective, areas of London tend to have between 10,000 and 15,000 people per square km. Yet both Northumberland and London are aiming to achieve ‘net zero’ by 2030. One of these targets is ambitious.

You’ll forgive me for looking at Northumberland County Council’s (NCC) Climate Change Action Plan 2021-23 and raising my eyebrows at the list of the ‘progress’ made since the last report:

Decarbonising council fleet vehicles (without explaining what this actually means)
Installing 12 public EV points
Giving away 15,000 free trees

Fair enough, there has been the Covid-19 pandemic to deal with. And yes, there are a mere 322,000 people living in the county. But still, this is unambitious in the extreme. If you weren’t, like me, seeking out this information, you would be living your life oblivious that the council declared a climate emergency two years ago.

As I shared on extinction.fyi earlier today, BBC News reports that many councils who have declared a climate emergency have policies inconsistent with their goals. Here in Morpeth, the county town of Northumberland where I live, a school was knocked down and replaced with a car park. All parking is free here, so parents drop their kids at school and go shopping. Rural buses are noisy, antiquated, polluting vehicles that people avoided even before the pandemic.

Perhaps I’ve missed the meaning of ’emergency’?

Last week, the IPCC report painted a stark picture for human survival on this planet. A few days later, an NCC climate change newsletter included this as its second paragraph:

According to the report the Earth is projected to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2030, a full decade sooner than previously thought. If we do everything right, we can go back down to 1.4°C by 2100.

I’m not sure how someone can read the IPCC report and have that as their main takeaway. The main suggestion in the newsletter is that Northumberland residents take a look at a dashboard that NCC has created in Tableau. For my postcode, it’s suggested that the average house would need to plant 34 trees. The trouble is, of course, that carbon offsetting doesn’t work. Also, the other proposal, that we replace our combi gas boiler with an air source heat pump, would not only cost us thousands, but would need a backup in cold weather.

So I’ve been in touch with the climate change programme manager at NCC expressing my dismay at the tone of this newsletter and the paucity of ambition. Counties like Northumberland should already be carbon negative and certainly need to be by 2030. To have the same goal as huge cities like London (to be net zero) by 2030 shows a real lack of leadership.

As a side note, I’ve tried to find other non-council bodies doing work in the North East of England. There’s Climate Action Network Northumberland which put pressure on NCC to declare a climate emergency. Sadly, they seem to only exist on Facebook and (from what I can see) talk about recycling and sharing news from elsewhere. Then there’s Climate Action North East which have zero upcoming events listed on their website — although they did get back to me via Twitter DM to explain how Covid has affected their organisation. Other than that, all I can find is Blyth Valley Climate Action via the Friends of the Earth website who merely have a contact form.

When I got in touch with NCC I made it clear that I’m willing, presumably along with plenty of other people, to invest time and energy to helping Northumberland get beyond net zero. In my case, a day per week. But without an architecture of participation, everything is down to ‘engagement’ with the council which is a codename for ‘controlled interactions’. Having a climate champions programme might sound useful, but in reality it acts as a bottleneck to action. As I sometimes ask new clients, especially charities and NGOs, “what would you do if a thousand volunteers showed up tomorrow?” The trouble is that too many organisations, NCC included, wouldn’t have a clue.

There’s an NCC climate event at the end of September which I’ve been asked to wait for so that I can be be told how I can get involved. I’m used to working with others at the kind of pace where, in five weeks time, we could have a whole new network up and running… 🤔

Dithered image based on an original by Karsten Würth. Quotation-as-title by Archbishop Whately.