Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh

In Time for Tomorrow is being published on the 14th Jan. Rosemary and I will be speaking about Carbon Conversations and signing books at at least 3 events in February:

Cambridge: Monday 9^th February, 6pm – 7.30pm.
Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.
In time for tomorrow: Why is climate change so easy to ignore? A talk and reception.
Further details from Rosie Amos ra395@cam.ac.uk.



Oxford: Thursday, 12th February 2015, 7:00 – 9:00 pm,
Blackwell’s Bookshop, 51 Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BQ.
To book click here

Edinburgh: Thursday, 19th February 2015, 5.00 – 7.00 pm,
Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI), High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ.
To book  click here.

In time for Tomorrow?

"One of the twenty most promising solutions to climate change..." The Guardian

Why is climate change so easy to ignore?

In Time for Tomorrow? offers empathy, encouragement and a practical path to anyone who feels concerned but lost, angry or powerless about this urgent topic. Rosemary Randall and Andy Brown help us confront our everyday denial and collective resignation. Written as the handbook for the ground-breaking Carbon Conversations groups, In Time for Tomorrow? will help you minimise your impact and give you the courage to speak out.
 "...explores the landscape of hope and generates lasting enthusiasm." George Marshall

Publication date: January 14th 2015
Price: £11.99
212 pp, full colour, illustrated with more than 80 stories from people initiating change in their personal and collective lives.
Available to pre-order from: info@surefoot-effect.com
The Surefoot Effect Community Interest Company, 17 Victoria Place, Stirling, FK8 2QT
www.surefoot-effect.com www.carbonconversations.org

Values and Frames

A short explanation given for the Alternatives to Economic Growth, Cambridgeshire Green Parties, 18th February 2012.

While there is nothing ‘new’ in this approach, a number of threads have been bought together by WWF and Oxfam and others. I’m an engineer, but I am going to tell you about a social psychology experiment.

Tim Kasser, Social Psychologist at Knox College, http://www.knox.edu/tkasser.xml, Intrigued by a flyer for a college car share scheme, which talked mostly of saving money and time, set up a small experiment to probe the values involved:

He took 3 groups. One shown a flyer with all the positive reasons: meeting people, helping others etc. (but nothing environmental), selfish reasons: saving money, time etc. and a mixed control group. After asking the subjects to design a logo Tim watched where they disposed of their paper. A higher percentage of the students who had had intrinsic engagement put their paper in the recycling!

I am no psychologist, I am an engineer. I have worked in the area of energy in buildings since the 70’s because I thought it was important and that things should not just be done better, but in some way done right. I spent a lot of time thinking that if people were given good advice, they would make the correct decisions. We talked about ‘whole life costing’ or ‘cost benefit analysis’ An information led approach. But did clients and developers build any better buildings?

The 80’s and 90’s, saw a changing ideology driven by Thatcherism, New Labour and Neo-liberalism stressing the power of the market. Did a market based approach to housing development make any difference?

Cambridge Carbon Footprint initially drew on advice from social marketing experts and worked on training volunteers to think about the audience in terms of marketing typologies and targeting messages to their concerns. If your contact is acquisitive, stress the money saving from not overfilling the kettle.

But we also realised that to change the way people behaved also needed them to change the way they saw things. That they could only deal with frightening ideas if they felt that others were there with them. Persuading people how to fill the kettle was not going to lead to cultural or systemic change. Carbon Conversations was our contribution.

The work of Tom Crompton, (from Oxfam) shows how values may lie at the heart of much of how we act. http://valuesandframes.org/download/reports/common_cause_report.pdf Values are our guiding principles. Research has shown that there are a number of clearly identified values that are common to a wide number of societies and cultures and that their relationship to each other are also common. The big map(below) shows how this works.

Interestingly, we also see that people hold all values to some extent , but the relative importance may change with time and context. But all the same, if one value is being engages, the associated or adjacent values may also be engaged and of course the antagonistic values will be subdued. The map shows the groupings that have been identified and the pie chart –the circumplex – shows another way of thinking.

The key concept is that on the top right we see labels Universalism and Benevolence, grouped as Self-Transcendence by the academics and Intrinsic by campaigners and ‘bigger than self’ by engineers like me.

At the bottom left is self enhancement, or extrinsic values related to power and achievement.

Linked to this is the concept of ‘Framing’. Here we are recognising that all communication puts the subject in a conceptual frame. George Lakoff in the evocatively titled Don’t think of an elephant (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Think-Elephant-Values-Debate/dp/1931498717/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329592290&sr=1-1 )reminds us how the metaphors we use frame the values that we link to the concept.

National insurance contributions vs. taxpayers money
Tax relief vs. tax cut
Charity, Rogue trader

And the metaphors: Nanny State Mother Earth

So my message is to be careful of what you wish for.

If we sell insulation because it saves money, we have activated frames and values to do with money and self interest. The same frames used by cheap airlines.

Andy Brown, andy@goldfin.co.uk

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.

Ventilation for Fires

It' another "Ask Andy" for the Cambridge Carbon Footprint newsletter
Question:
Our builders are insisting that we install a ventilator in the living room, as we have an open fire. We don’t want more draughts. What should we do?
Answer:
Your builders are correct. Requirements for ventilation are set out in the Approved Document J “Combustion appliances and fuel storage systems” of the Building Regulations and applies to alterations. It says you need a "permanent open air vent" and that the vent should be at least half the area of the 'throat' of the fireplace chimney. That would be an air brick in the wall or a grille in the floor. It’s a lot of ventilation, but would be justified if you have gone to a lot of effort to seal your windows, doors and floor. I have done this myself and found the room filling with smoke when the fire was lit, as the chimney would not draw properly from the sealed room!
Open fires can look lovely and become the central attraction for the home. But they have two problems. When the fire is not lit, the flue will continue to suck valuable heat from your home, and cause draughts in the room. This is easily solved with a ‘chimney balloon’ or an old pillow in a plastic bag. At the same time, you might place some temporary obstruction over the fixed vent.
When the fire is lit, the amount of air drawn up the chimney is huge. A modern fire place with a properly deigned ‘throat’ at the base of the chimney will control this, but it will still draw much more air than is needed to ensure efficient burning of your wood. This will also cause a draught from the fixed vent, so the best place for it is in the floor near the fire.
If you replace the open fire with a stove, you remove the need for a ventilator and you still have a wonderful feature for your home. A stove with less than 5kw output does not require fixed ventilation, and when the fire is not lit you can close the vents and the room is well sealed. Some stoves have efficient “air washers” on the window, so you can see the logs burning. On ours, we leave the door open if we are wanting to enjoy the fire, but actually closing the door makes it easier to control and uses less wood.