Zero Carbon Caravan newsletter #4

Chris Keene , January 29, 2010.
The Zero Carbon Caravan finally made it to Copenhagen – see the blog zerocarboncaravan.blogspot.com (although it isn’t quite complete yet – we still have some audio recordings of meetings to upload).

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We got quite a bit of media coverage, they say  – three TV interviews and four on radio, mentions in the Times, Independent, Guardian and Telegraph and dozens of local newspapers, and lots of coverage on the internet.

We visited lots of interesting places showing solutions to climate change – in transport, energy, buildings, lifestyle and food production, as well as interviewing lots of people and visiting some really inspiring places demonstrating such ideas to the public.

We had four zero carbon concerts – two acoustic, one using solar electricity, and the other using electricity generated by a bicycle, and we held an international telephone conference at the University of East Anglia, as well as numerous public meetings.

In Copenhagen, the information collected on the journey was put onto datasticks and presented to two parliamentarians, Colin Challen, the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group in the UK, and Ingrid Nestle, the spokesperson on energy economics for the Greens in the German Parliament.

Unfortunately we failed in our objective – to get a good deal in the Copenhagen climate summit. But all is not lost. The Kyoto Protocol doesn’t end until the end of 2012, and there is a chance to influence the negotiators before the next COP (Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol) in Mexico starting in late November this year.

AND THIS TIME WE NEED TO MAKE SURE WE SUCCEED in replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a new treaty which is adequate to the challenge of avoiding runaway climate change (like the situation at the end of the last ice age, when temperatures suddenly shot up 5C in 20 years – contrast that with the global warming we have had so far – less than 1C, which has already led to massive instability of the climate) and which is also fair.

So we’ve come  up with an idea which should get more attention than the caravan – a zero carbon world concert for a zero carbon world, some time in autumn 2010. Below are a few ideas we’ve had about how to organise it.  Tell us what you think of them – they are by no means set in stone yet, and it would be nice to get some more input into our plans.

The concert would be run over a 24 hour period, moving around the world as the day progresses (starting New Zealand, finishing Alaska?). All musicians would use only renewable electricity, and we could have a variety of different kinds, solar power, wind power, bicycle power etc, so it would be an opportunity for the different suppliers of green energy to showcase their products.

We would also use renewable electricity to put the concerts on the internet (there are internet service providers who use renewable electricity), so it would be a world concert, which would reinforce the idea of international solidarity, and the fact that global warming is a global problem which needs a global solution.

It would be nice to have 350 of something (different bands, or musicians, or, if we are able to manage it, different venues) to bring the public’s attention to the 350 ppm CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, which is the maximum safe level <http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf>. I believe it would be useful to have some celebrities involved, in order to get maximum attention (though when I spoke to Bill McKibben of <http://www.350.org> in Copenhagen he said they didn’t work with celebrities).

Any celebrities participating would need to be very green in their lifestyles in order to avoid the accusations of hypocrisy levelled at the super rich celebrity rock stars with massive carbon footprints who took part in Live Earth, but we wouldn’t need many of them (assuming they each played for 2 hours it would just require 12 acts to cover the 24 hour day).  And I think needing to be super green could be useful to persuade people to take part – they would be seen to be the greenest musicians in the world, which would be very useful for their branding.

Getting the equipment to the venue in a zero carbon way is likely to prove difficult. They could use biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil (though definitely not palm oil, or anything else especially grown for fuel), though the trouble with this is there is not nearly enough for everyone to adopt this alternative to oil.  The truly progressive way forward for transport is to use electricity (see www.zerocarbonbritain.com), but as far as I know there are very few electric vehicles capable of carrying large loads (though I did investigate one, the cargo hopper in Utrecht, http://www.cargohopper.com/ on my zero carbon journey cycling and sailing to Copenhagen).

Finally,  watching the concert on the internet has to be done in a zero carbon way, and this is very easy to do – simply switch to a renewable electricity provider (it’s simple in Britain, though I’m not sure of the situation elsewhere).  In my view the best is Good Energy <http://www.goodenergy.co.uk/> but there are a number out there. Let me know what you think of the others.

ANY THOUGHTS, COMMENTS ON THE IDEAS ABOVE, CONTACTS (WITH MUSICIANS, ORGANISERS, RENEWABLE ENERGY SUPPLIERS ETC) OR ADVICE ON THE CONCERT WOULD BE VERY WELCOME

Please email me at  chris.keene at tiscali.co.uk or phone 0044 (0) 1603 614535 or 0044 (0) 7801 250982

Chris Keene
Coordinator, Zero Carbon Caravan <zerocarboncaravan.net>