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 387ppm to below 350, to avoid a rise of 2 degrees and cat­a­strophic cli­mate change.

We ask the Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment to take the lead in the race out of car­bon, by enabling all com­mu­ni­ties to make the tran­si­tion resilience. 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, John Riley Car­bon Neu­tral Big­gar Jane Grey Let’s Live Local, Abi Mor­den Urban Roots Glas­gow, Alan Drever Sleat, Isle of Skye, Alan Brown Lin­lith­gow Cli­mate Challenge

Holy­rood 350 — Recent Events

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