Holyrood 350 — H35O

Holy­rood 350 con­sists of peo­ple from across Scot­land who are actively work­ing to reduce their com­mu­ni­ties car­bon foot­print. We are respond­ing to the mes­sage of top cli­mate sci­en­tists that CO2 in the atmos­phere must be reduced from the cur­rent 390ppm to below 350, to avoid a rise of 2 degrees and cat­a­strophic cli­mate change.

As peo­ple from cli­mate active com­mu­ni­ties the length and breadth of Scot­land, we fully appre­ci­ate the ground break­ing Cli­mate Change Act brought in by the Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment and passed by our Par­lia­ment. As peo­ple fully aware of the lack of progress in inter­na­tional nego­ti­a­tions -  at Copen­hagen and then at Can­cun — we are clear that the Scot­tish Government’s  Cli­mate Chal­lenge Fund is a glob­ally unique, cutting-edge way of inspir­ing and help­ing local com­mu­ni­ties to demon­strate that reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions can increase com­mu­nity cohe­sion, infra­struc­ture, energy secu­rity and well-being.

We see the Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment as being in a unique posi­tion to con­tinue tak­ing the lead in the race out of car­bon, not only through ensur­ing that all our energy needs are met through renew­ables, but by enabling all com­mu­ni­ties to make the tran­si­tion to resilience through adopt­ing a clear frame­work in which com­mu­ni­ties can flour­ish. By doing so Scot­land can demon­strate to the world how ris­ing to the chal­lenge of cli­mate change can enrich rather than impov­er­ish us.

A sketch of our draft Resilience Strat­egy for Scot­land is here. (Older back­ground doc­u­ments relat­ing to our pro­posed pol­icy frame­work can be found on this home page).

HOLYROOD 350 is cur­rently co-ordinated by: Justin Ken­rick PEDAL Por­to­bello, Andy Ross Glas­gow CRAG, Mike Small Fife Diet, Lucy Con­way Isle of Eigg, Eva Schon­veld PEDAL Por­to­bello, Rachel Nunn Going Car­bon Neu­tral Stir­ling, Nick Wild­ing Falk­land Tran­si­tion, Jonathan Daw­son Find­horn Ecov­il­lage, Jane Grey Let’s Live Local, Abi Mor­den Urban Roots Glas­gow, Alan Drever Sleat, Isle of Skye, Alan Brown Lin­lith­gow Cli­mate Challenge

H350 is one way for peo­ple who are get­ting on with car­bon reduc­tion and resilience build­ing in our com­mu­ni­ties to say loud and clear that: “com­mu­ni­ties are get­ting on with mak­ing a bet­ter world, how do we get gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate logic to get out of the way, so that we can really let this work flour­ish rather than be mar­gin­alised and appro­pri­ated and dumbed down” … We have spo­ken very clearly through dif­fer­ent media at dif­fer­ent times — e.g. through our excel­lent event in Par­lia­ment — but what is the best way for com­mu­ni­ties to speak and effect change at the national level now?

… let us know your thoughts!

justinken­rick (at) yahoo.co.uk

 

What hopes for Scot­land in 2011?

That 2011 is a break­through year for ecol­ogy and social jus­tice: that we dare to reclaim pol­i­tics from cor­po­ra­tions, and for com­mu­nity; that we replace the boom and bust cycle of the prof­i­teers, and reclaim the econ­omy for the peo­ple. Simple.

All the main par­ties are caught up in the logic of cor­po­ra­tions; all are caught in the mind-set of there being no alter­na­tive. There is.

This arti­cle explores what, and how … It is on the Bella Cale­do­nia web­site

Cap and Share video

As cli­mate nego­ti­a­tions in Can­cun, Mex­ico, tried to res­cue any­thing face-saving from the ashes of Copen­hagen, and as the planet con­tin­ues to heat up regard­less, a sim­ple idea called Cap & Share — which would simul­ta­ne­ously con­trol emis­sions and boost equal­ity – has been gain­ing attention.

Of course, the prospect of cut­ting out all the finan­cial middle-men does not appeal to every­one, as a covert video recently obtained by freakyleaks demon­strates only too well .… The video is avail­able here.

Cap & Share is a pol­icy for cap­ping (lim­it­ing and then reduc­ing) car­bon emis­sions, which was hailed by the UK Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Com­mis­sion as one of its ‘Break­through Ideas of the 21^st Cen­tury’. It is sim­ple, cheap, fair, effi­cient and effec­tive, and can be applied glob­ally or on a country-by coun­try basis.

 

Holy­rood 350 — Recent Events

 

 

Unplug­ging and Recon­nect­ing on Sun­day 10.10.10

 

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Com­mu­ni­ties across Scot­land involved in Holy­rood 350 took part in an ‘Unplug and Recon­nect’ 10.10.10 day (10 Octo­ber) as part of the Global 350 movement.

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350 is the num­ber that lead­ing sci­ent­ists say is the safe upper limit for car­bon diox­ide — meas­ured in “Parts Per Mil­lion” in our atmo­sphere. 350 PPM — it’s the num­ber human­ity needs to get back to as soon as pos­sible to avoid run­away cli­mate change. It’s the 7:84 of the 21stC.

 

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The 350 Move­ment says: “On 10.10.10, we will cel­eb­rate cli­mate solu­tions and send our politi­cians a clear mes­sage: “We’re get­ting to work — what about you?” So, work­ing with the numer­o­logy we decided to try and motiv­ate 10 peo­ple in 10 com­munit­ies to spend 10 hours unplug­ging and reconnecting.

 

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Peo­ple to come up with their own actions, or inac­tions: UNPLUGGING from car­bon con­sum­ing: from screens like this (mobiles, lap­tops, TVs, DVDs), from cars, from all those activ­it­ies that appear to con­nect us with dis­tant oth­ers but often cut us off from peo­ple in the same house and neigh­bour­hood; and RECONNECTING with mem­bers of our house­hold and com­munity, whether through shared meals, shar­ing a poem, plant­ing and tend­ing edi­ble plants on pub­lic land, walk­ing and talk­ing, mak­ing sand sculp­tures on the beach or big chalk draw­ings on the pave­ment of how we hope our com­munit­ies will be in 2020.

 

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The full details of the (non) plans are on the H350 web­site here, and infor­ma­tion on the 350.org webiste is here, a web­site inspir­ingly run by Bill McK­ibben and col­leagues in America!

 

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So on Sun­day many of us Unplugged and Recon­nected: it was extra­or­di­nary to not be work­ing on a screen like this, but actu­ally hav­ing time with fam­ily and walk­ing the beach, see­ing friends, not work­ing flat out against the cli­mate change dead­line. Some of us are won­der­ing whether we should make this ‘down­time’ one Sun­day a month? Call us new­com­ers to being old fash­ioned, but isn’t this what Sun­days used to be for?!

 

 

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Para­chut­ing off the Energy Cliff: Secur­ing Holy­rood Sup­port for Com­mu­nity Resilience — June 5th 2010

On Sat­ur­day June 5th 2010 at the Ren­field Cen­tre, Glas­gow, we held this ‘inter­nal’ H350 event focus­ing on the energy cliff, eco­nomic liveli­hoods, and how to enable MSPs to build on the suc­cess of the Cli­mate Chal­lenge Fund and Scotland’s excel­lent cli­mate change tar­gets, in the con­text of Global fail­ure at Copen­hagen, the eco­nomic crash (our expe­ri­ence of the energy cri­sis), and the chang­ing polit­i­cal land­scape in Scot­land and the UK.

Kick­ing off with pre­sen­ta­tions on energy (Andy Ross), liveli­hoods (Justin Ken­rick) and pol­i­tics (Mike Small) we col­lec­tively, real­is­ti­cally and imag­i­na­tively sought to arrive at a clear pic­ture of how com­mu­ni­ties and their politi­cians can work together to effec­tively and strate­gi­cally build on what cli­mate active com­mu­ni­ties have been work­ing so hard to achieve, and to ensure that the kinds of com­mu­ni­ties CCF Mark 1 has had less suc­cess in reach­ing can be sup­ported in mov­ing towards resilience. An out­line of the struc­ture of the event can be found here. We aim to have a ‘Pub­lic’ meet­ing back in the Scot­tish Par­lia­ment in the Autumn to take this back to the politi­cians in the build up to the May 2011 election.

Scotland’s Civil Soci­ety Sum­mit — 18th Feb­ru­ary 2010

The Holy­rood 350 analy­sis and pro­pos­als were pre­sented by Justin Ken­rick — along­side Chris Martensen’s analy­sis of the loom­ing energy and eco­nomic crash — as part of Scotland’s Civil Soci­ety Sum­mit on Thurs­day 18th Feb­ru­ary in the Edin­burgh Inter­na­tional Con­fer­ence Centre.

Foun­da­tion for the Eco­nom­ics of Sus­tain­abil­ity — 25th Feb­ru­ary 2010

Our analy­sis and pro­pos­als were also pre­sented by Andy Ross on Thurs­day 25th Feb­ru­ary as part of the evening that kicked off the FEASTA (Foun­da­tion for the Eco­nom­ics of Sus­tain­abil­ity) con­fer­ence in For­res. Andy also reports that a ver­sion of one of the 4 key solu­tions to cli­mate change pro­posed by Holy­rood 350 has been taken up by senior fig­ures in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. It is a ver­sion of ‘Cap and Share’ called ‘Cap and Div­i­dend’ (see right hand col­umn for expla­na­tion of how this sys­tem works to rapidly and fairly wean a carbon-obese soci­ety off fos­sil fuels).

A Range of Responses to Copen­hagen here

The Story of Cap and Trade

Although they sound sim­i­lar, Cap and Trade is entirely dif­fer­ent to Cap and Share:

CAP and SHARE (see right hand col­umn) is a sys­tem which can be used to CAP (to limit and dra­mat­i­cally reduce the car­bon com­ing into the coun­try in line with the sci­ence), and to SHARE (to dis­trib­ute the rev­enue raised to ensure peo­ple have the money to cope with the increased price in all goods and ser­vices which have car­bon content).

In con­trast, CAP and TRADE (the EU response to cli­mate change, and the approach pro­posed at Copen­hagen) sim­ply enables busi­ness as usual (soar­ing emis­sions, soar­ing fuel prices and soar­ing prof­its for the heavy emit­ters) to con­tinue. See this superb 20 minute car­toon expla­na­tion of how Cap and Trade works: The Story of Cap and Trade

Reflec­tions on Holy­rood 350’s Event in the Scot­tish Parliament

… on Sep­tem­ber 2009 can be found here. Reflect­ing on what a com­mu­nity approach to pol­i­tics might look like.

… and finally: click here for a com­ment on the scari­ness of Kevin Anderson’s ‘Opti­mistic’ Scenario