English Village Becomes Climate Leader by Cleaning Up Its Own Patch | Hacker News Reader

English Village Becomes Climate Leader by Cleaning Up Its Own Patch

nytimes.com

64 pointse15ctr0n26 comments

Never thought I'd see my dad on HN :)

> Eden Mills, a small community in Ontario, Canada, is one of them. Charles Simon traveled to Ashton Hayes in 2007 to learn how to translate their approach to his town, adopting the apolitical, voluntary, fun method.

> About 200 towns, cities and counties around the world — including Notteroy, Norway; Upper Saddle River, N.J.; and Changhua County, Taiwan — have reached out to learn how the villagers here did it.

Here is a fun math problem. How many people from other towns need to fly to Ashton Hayes for the town's improvement in carbon emissions to be offset by the increased emissions from people taking government funded flights to learn how to cut carbon emissions.

I think a lot of the visceral opposition to fighting climate change comes when people see the elite (leaders and journalists) who adopt a "good for thee, but not for me" attitude as they fly around to different climate conferences (how many leaders and journalists flew to Paris?) where they talk about measures that will significantly affect the "little guy" but not them.

I think a good way for the elite to show just how seriously they take climate change is to have an absolute ban on travel to a climate conference. Everything should be done via teleconferencing alone.

If every leader flies in on the world's least fuel-efficient plane, alone, and the conference is heated by a giant coal bonfire, and they adopt rules that improve CO2 emissions by 0.0001%, it's a big win for the human race.

It's like complaining that you should never invest your money, because it costs money to drive to the bank to deposit it.

Do you put just the flights on the Ashton Hayes ledger? Or do you also put some portion of the carbon reductions done elsewhere on their ledger?

If they get some of the credit for saving elsewhere, the answer might be a huge negative number.

Of course maybe the flights are totally useless, but in that case I'm not sure they deserve 100% of the blame.

> Everything should be done via teleconferencing alone.

So that information can be spread in the least efficient way possible, and no real lessons about combating climate change are really spread around the world.

100 or 1000 leaders filling seats in planes a few times a year is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the actual changes that can result from international cooperation.

This feels like one of the most effective ways to solve climate change. Working at a national or international is slowed way down by a ton of competing interests. Working at a personal level like you're barely making a dent. But working a community level feels right. It's big enough to notice an impact but small enough for individuals to make a difference.

Yeah, except a community effort would have never solved the problem of PFC in the atmosphere for instance.

I don't think all those efforts are mutually exclusive you know :)

24% reduction is something like 2% more than the EU average.

about 1,000 people... reaching its 10th anniversary this year, has led to a 24 percent cut in emissions vs. "The EU(27) even with active legal measures have maintained a fairly level CO2 emission rate but have managed to reduce their CO2 emissions/head by ~22% since 2005. " http://euanmearns.com/the-record-of-recent-man-made-co2-emis...

It feels good, but that's about it. Further, per person they are probably doing more damage than the average person in London or other major city.

I think one of the big problems in the US, is that most of the land and property is owned by someone else.

Trying to work at a community level here will likely get pushback from some property owners (likely remote) who will block any potential or even perceived increase to their taxes/expenditures even if you can prove ROI within 5 years.

The way to generally motivate efficient reduction in CO2 emissions is straightforward - tax CO2 emissions. Raise the tax until it becomes worthwhile for people to change their habits.

Use the tax revenue to subsidize cleaner alternatives, like solar, wind, geothermal.

Yes -- unfortunately, the way to get everyone to agree to implement this tax is not straightforward at all.

Decades late, but some momentum now http://www.carbontax.org/where-carbon-is-taxed/ and an important initiative http://yeson732.org/ in Washington State (U.S.) this November.

732 is certainly a step in the right direction.

Don't need everyone to agree, just a majority. You can't get everyone to agree the sun rises in the east.

The government taxes all kinds of things. Why should CO2 be especially difficult? Especially if the taxes raised get put into green energy?

PV panels are useful but the best way of combating combat change in domestic dwellings, by far, is to improve the performance of the house by improving its fabric.

The tools to do this have been around for 30 years and yet we are still building houses that we'll have to fix in the future.

> improving its fabric. > The tools to do this have been around for 30 years and yet we are still building houses that we'll have to fix in the future.

I'm looking to buy my first house and I've looked at houses dating from the 1890's to finished 18 months ago. While I expect the older ones to have bad energy efficiency (single wall stone cottages) I've been horrified by the standard of the 1990's+ housing.

Sure the ones built 2 years ago reach a 'B' on the UK's energy efficiency scale, but it appears to be by removing breathability while using traditional construction approaches still.

I dream of building my own eco-home. Straw bale preferably.

How do straw bale homes mitigate fire risks?

There are a number of reasons modern builds are still poorly performing.

First, the regs ('code') is still very unambitious.

Second, the assessment process is poor and not rigourously enforced.

Building practices since the war have slowly led to lower intrinsic performance. There are a number of examples. Cavity walls are way over specified and introduce a number of thermal compromises. Plasterboard ('drywall') on bare block is a disaster area. Downlighters acting like chimneys into cold lofts. Dumb extractor fans that leak heat even when not running.

Note that modern house do not have the same 'breathability' requirements as older ones. This is an extremely complex area.

For me it's not so much the eco credentials that matter; it's building something of a high quality that does what it is supposed to do.

Any materials (books/websites/people/organisations) you can recommend to learn more?

Like you it's not so much the eco credentials that matter to me, and I want to improve my grasp on the complexities.

Plus I only knew one of your examples (extractor fans).

Sure, the AECB, Passivhaus, the Green Building Forum, http://www.greenspec.co.uk, http://www.houseplanninghelp.com all useful for starters.

http://www.greensuffolk.org/assets/Greenest-County/SGBN/Sust... is a good overview of common problems.

Lovely but the headline sorta implies that the village has reached balance with itself, which doesn't take into account the manufacture of the panels and glasses and building materials it's using to reduce carbon emissions going forward, nor the production of cars - of which I see at least two of in the picture there.

Laudable, but local closed systems don't mean too much if the macro system's belching out god only knows what to keep innumerable microsystems functioning anyway.

> 500 pounds (about $650) a year for electricity and heating

I wonder how much specifically this is? Maybe if we could start sharing more of this info we could all set some goals.

That's pretty cheap for a UK house. My 2 bed terrace was about £1200 a year, was pretty decently insulated for what is was but didn't have cavity walls etc.

My new 4 bed house is about £1500 a year for a family of 4, and I'm pretty tight with heating and light, so most houses would be more.

If it helps, in the UK (London) we pay 14.15 pence / kWh, which is the equivalent of 16.38 pence if you factor in the 18.90 pence/day charge.

The first figure is probably fairly representative, maybe up to 15 pence.

That's quite high-- I pay closer to 10p/kWh

Bulb energy offers a fully renewable energy plan which is worth looking at. Their business plan is pretty interesting as well

I wonder if they are curbing their consumption of meat?

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