Posts Tagged ‘zero carbon’
Peter Harper: ‘Zero Carbon Britain 2030′ in Melbourne & Sydney
Posted in Events, Research by Kate Archdeacon on March 18th, 2011
Peter Harper is the Research Director of the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales UK and one of the three coordinators of the Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB) 2030 project.
ZCB 2030 is a positive, realistic vision for an energy progressive society free from fossil fuels. At a time when governments appear to be paralysed and unable to act, ZCB 2030 has demonstrated that alternative plans for the future can be developed through the cooperation and good will of volunteer researchers and experts. ZCB 2030 completed its three years of work in mid 2010, presenting the plan to the UK parliament. It provides political, economic and technological solutions to the urgent challenges raised by climate science.
“The great transition to a zero-carbon Britain is not only the most pressing challenge of our time, it is also entirely possible. The solutions needed to create a low-carbon and high-wellbeing future for all exist, what has been missing to date, is the political will to implement them.” Dr Victoria Johnson, New Economics Foundation
Peter will deliver lectures about the project in Melbourne on April 13 and in Sydney on April 19. These lectures will be surrounded by other smaller events to examine the ZCB plan and to compare its approach and conclusions to that for Australia being developed by Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) in the Zero Carbon Australia project.
In Melbourne: BMW Edge 13th April
In Sydney: Sydney Town Hall 19th April
More details will be announced here as they become available.
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Burning Wood: Not So Carbon Neutral?
Posted in Models, Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on March 1st, 2011
Source: The Ecologist
Image: Shandchem via flickr CC
From Turning our Victorian Terrace into an Eco-Home part seven – Heating by Sue Wheat:
Sue Wheat thought a wood-burning stove was the greenest way to heat her house until a chat with authors, Nick Grant and Alan Clarke, made her think again. The biggest crisis of her eco-refurb so far? You bet it was!
With the cold weather closing in, it was time to think about green ways to heat our home. We chose a Stovax multi-fuel stove, which we were lucky enough to get from friends.
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In a city where every other house seems to be having its kitchen or bathroom ripped out, there is vast amounts of burnable scrap wood lying around waiting to go to the dump, which could instead be heating your house. Paying for wood to burn seems positively stupid when you can pick up a week’s supply from neighbours, most of whom are all too willing to let you have it. I can’t see the logic in buying wood that’s been transported hundreds of miles either, so I’ve become something of an eagle-eyed wood-spotting obsessive. We look for wood that’s unvarnished, unpainted and untreated, and either carry it home, or rope in friends with cars or vans to pick it up for us. I’ve also got a few friendly builders who drop off scrap wood to us (thus saving them dumping fees), and a supply of off-cuts from a furniture repair workshop. To build up next year’s wood store, which we made from scrap wooden pallets covered with tarpaulin, we’re planning to buy some logs from a local tree surgeon and season them for a year, by which time the excitement of dragging wood out of skips and yards may well have worn off.
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As I basked rather smugly in the warm glow of our pretty, near zero-carbon heating system, for a good few weeks I was unaware that things were about to get tricky. Then with one click on the mouse, I stumbled across a website which catapulted me into my biggest eco-refurbishment crisis yet. It seems, according to some of the eminent researchers at the Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders [AECB] that burning wood is not carbon neutral after all. I was gutted, to say the least. I emailed the AECB in a panic, who put me onto the authors of Biomass: A Burning Issue, Nick Grant and Alan Clarke. Their paper concludes that while it’s true that trees do absorb carbon dioxide when they grow, it doesn’t mean that the best use for the wood biomass is burning it. Burning, say Grant and Clarke, produces more carbon emissions than burning gas. Disaster.
Instead, they argue that timber should be left unburnt, thus imprisoning the carbon, and put to other uses; for example, as structural timber, insulation material or furniture. As owners of low-energy houses fuelled by wood burning stoves, they are both gutted too. ‘We don’t want people to hate us,’ Nick told me. ‘Please don’t shoot the messenger.’ The unfortunate result of assuming that wood-burning is carbon neutral is that it has been promoted by just about everyone, which has meant, as they point out, that wood is now being burnt faster than it’s grown, leading to rising prices and unsustainable burning practices to start.
Read the full article by Sue Wheat, and check out the comments section which has some useful links posted by the author.
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Zero Carbon Britain 2030: Report
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on June 22nd, 2010
zerocarbonbritain2030 provides political and economic solutions to the urgent challenges raised by the climate science, outlining how we can transform the UK into an efficient, clean, prosperous zero-carbon society. Covering energy, transport, land use, the built environment and industry, each chapter of the report has been written by bringing together the UK’s leading thinkers in their field including policy makers, scientists, academics, industry and NGOs.
zerocarbonbritain2030 is a fully integrated solution to climate change. It examines how we can meet our electricity and heating requirements through efficient service provision, while still decreasing carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other emissions.
The report starts by examining the current “Context” in the Climate Science and Energy Security chapters. It then moves on to how we can “PowerDown” heat and electricity demand largely through new technology, efficient design and behaviour change. The “Land Use & Agriculture” section considers the tremendous potential of the land not only to decrease emissions but also to sequester residual emissions. We then move on to how we can “PowerUp” through the use of renewable technology. Finally we examine the policy that can help bring this about and the job creation that will come with it, in the “Framework, policy and economics” section.
A full copy of the new report is available as a free pdf , or buy a printed copy from the Centre for Alternative Technology.
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