The value of an 80% carbon reduction

Few people seem to appreciate the scale of change that is required if we are going to meet the carbon reduction targets needed to prevent climate chaos.

When Rosemary and I founded Cambridge Carbon Footprint (CCF) in 2005, we were aware that in spite of some thirty years of government advice on saving energy, (whether to conserve oil reserves, control pollution or delay climate chaos) little has been achieved, particularly in the domestic sector.

Tackling carbon reduction in your home is clearly a complex task, involving both understanding of the technical working of the building and appreciation of your own and your family’s feelings about your home. What has been clear in the work of CCF, is the difficulty of focussing on the latter and the ease of slipping into detailed discussion of the technical details, kilograms of carbon and rates of return.

There are a number of reasons why this can be counter productive. To begin with, I suspect a lot of talk about details is prevarication, avoiding the actual work of making reductions. While it is important to get things right, it may be more important to make a start! I also think that concern for the details can also be a way of avoiding thinking about the size of the task.

Diminishing returns

We talk in Carbon Conversations about the need for 80% savings, which is no easy project. We help participants create a plan that may have to span several years to make it both possible and affordable. In making plans, it becomes obvious that the conventional rhetoric about saving energy and saving money does not hold water. In fact it gets progressively more expensive as the project goes on.

Of course there is the low hanging fruit, with little or no cost and significant savings. How many times are we told about over filling our kettle!

Then there are a number of things that have payback times we can relate to. But if filling cavity walls is such a winner, why are there still several millions houses still needing to be treated?

With the help of subsidies, some of the more expensive projects are promoted as having payback times of ten to fifteen years. The sums are not easy and they need to be weighed up with other things we may also not fully understand, like pensions and mortgages.

But more importantly, there are still a load of tasks that make no economic sense at all. While the cost of replacing the windows may be compared with the future value of the house, how do you cost the disruption of lifting and insulating below the floors? To achieve the 80% savings we need, we are up against the laws of diminishing returns. And while the costs are immediate and ours, the benefits are less specific and well in the future.

One response to these arguments has come from the theorists of Social Marketing. In CCF we found it helpful to listen to people who told us again that we must know our audience, that we must address their concerns and talk about things that matter to them. We recognised that we could talk about the status that might accrue from the solar panel on your roof, or the importance of recognising actions that fitted with the expectations of your friends and peers.

We have spent some time learning the techniques of motivational interviewing to help us scratch below the surface and work with people’s less overt desires and concerns.

Common Cause

But I am still nonplussed when friends and colleagues repeat that we just have to get over the message that saving carbon will save money and people will sign up to the 80% agenda.

So it has been a delight to find the Common Cause report, published last September by Tom Crompton, Change Strategist at WWF. It joins together two threads: values and messaging. I draw three points from it.

• We have to be careful what we wish for. If we sell actions on the principle that it saves money, we will attract people who want to save money. They won’t then want to hear that they have to spend money to reach the next goal.
• We have to realise that everyone is concerned about ‘bigger than self’ issues. The research on values shows that people are complex and often hold conflicting values at different times. While opinion surveys regularly throw up about 30% of the population who say they are not concerned with things that do not benefit them or their family, more careful research shows that they will hold more altruistic values too, although with less conviction or for less of the time. In the long run, we will achieve more if we speak to and reinforce this aspect of people’s values, than promoting the short term goals of small personal gains.
• We have the same agenda as lots of other civil society organisations. Many of the other campaigns we support are also promoting ‘bigger-than-self’ values. While many other organisation’s concerns may not be environmental, they are as significant and intractable as climate chaos and it may also be the case that we have to solve these problems together.

I am convinced that we will make more progress if we make ’common cause’, speak the same language and reinforce the same values. So we have to promote eco-renovation because it matters; to the environment, to other people, to the future, but not to our bank balance or our image.