Because, unfortunately, the climate is changing - summers are getting hotter, storms are getting more violent and wildlife is dying out. The change seems slow and the commentary is frighteningly apocalyptic.
Not something we want to happen and worrying for our children and theirs. It's also something that has never happened to human beings before, so it's hard to take in and harder still to know how to adjust.
300 years ago there was no industry, little science and life was hard. All the technology, health and living comfort we enjoy has happened since. Most of us live lives totally unrecognisable to people of the 17th century and before. All of this progress has been made possible by burning coal, oil and gas. That has created a greenhouse around the globe that is heating up everything. Thousands of people are studying the effects that this is having and will increasingly have into the future. Many more have been developing ways to solve the problem.
We have never had to plan for future decades before. It is very hard to take the words of others, especially when told the problem threatens almost everything about the ways we live.
But doing nothing is not an option - we would loose civilisation within a hundred years if we do nothing. That's to say our way of life would collapse as the population shrank and the structures that we rely on could no longer function. Doing nothing would be catastrophic but for the last 30 years we have been trying to reduce the gases we produce that have created that global greenhouse. But, we're told, not nearly enough is being done to avoid future hardship.
Sea levels are rising but cities are yet to be flooded. Droughts haven't yet caused mass starvation. Floods and fires have yet to lead to widespread extinctions. Yet we see these climate events happening more and more frequently and with increasing severity. Climate change happens slowly and so do the effects - we get used to the warnings and find it hard to maintain concern. But we must plan to avoid their inevitability because at some point, whatever we do, it will become too late and some sort of disaster will become inevitable.
Many will argue that the point of no return is imminent; even here already and accelerating. So what has to be done? The answer is to reduce making greenhouse gases, no matter where or to whatever extent. In this country, there is a legally binding commitment to achieve 'net zero carbon emissions' by 2050, meaning we have wean ourselves off all forms coal, oil and gas burning within 27 years and counting.
72% of those emissions are caused by all the ways households live. Heating and lighting our homes is about 25% of that, so avoiding oil and gas boilers is going to become inevitable. New fossil fuel boilers will be banned by 2026. It is possible to insulate houses so that the heat produced by our bodies is not lost at all and no heating is needed, but is hugely expensive, especially for existing buildings. But insulating to save heat is a critically efficient action to take despite being hard to retrofit. Any future low carbon heating solution is made better by adding insulation, in fact it can make the difference between making a low carbon solution work and it not being practical.
The one solution that can replace boilers are clean power heat pumps - imagine a refrigerator in reverse, pumping heat into a space instead of pumping it out. There's nothing new here, the first one was built in 1856. To achieve the greatest efficiency economically, a heat network, like a hot water main fed by ground source heat pumps, using the heat of the earth, is what we propose for Bildeston.
For us in the village, we'd be saving around 2,000 tons of CO2 equivalent a year and could provide all of Bildeston’s heat energy needs. The benefits for all connected to the network include -
• reduced energy bills
• greater price certainty
• better air quality
• greater heating efficency
• lower maintenance costs
• long equipment lifetimes
• better health with higher quality heat
What's being done - https://climateactiontracker.org/
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - https://www.ipcc.ch/
Climate Change 2022 - ipcc report download
Understanding our planet - https://climate.nasa.gov/
Climate impacts - https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/climate-impacts
Hothouse Earth book - https://iconbooks.com/ib-title/hothouse-earth/
There is No Planet B book - https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108900997
Calculating, measuring and reporting your carbon emissions with a carbon footprint app.
