27: COP26 diaries: week 1
All of our COP26 coverage, in one handy place.
First Impressions and PlanetPod’s Amanda Carpenter
Matt's first foray into COP26 was into the Green Zone on Finance Day. This mini-episode gives a flavour of talks he attended, and the atmosphere around Glasgow. There's also a chat with Amanda Carpenter from the excellent www.theplanetpod.com
How bad are bananas?
On Energy Day, Becky hits the Green Zone and plays 'How Bad Are Bananas?' Matt is talking heat innovation and geoenergy at a showcase run jointly by the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise.
Contributors:
Prof Malcolm McCulloch, Oxford University Energy and Power Group
Dr Mauricio Zaglio, Hank Torbet, Victor Aguilera and Andrew Bissell from East Lothian based East Lothian heat battery innovator Sunamp
Nicole Figueiredo de Oliviera from Brazilian climate change campaign group Arayara
David Townsend of TownRock Energy
Jodie Evans from Future We Want
Snapshots from Friday’s youth march
COP26 day 6 saw thousands of young people marching through the streets of Glasgow - with Becky, Matt, and Matt's family all among them.
“This is our fight” - Fraser shares a stage with Greta Thunberg
Fraser Stewart reflects on sharing a stage with Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and indigenous peoples from around the world - after giving a climate justice speech at the Fridays For Future rally in Glasgow's George Square. "From Dundee to Dakar, Aberdeen to the Amazon, this is our fight".
Episode Transcript:
[Music flourish]
Matt: Okay, so I’m here. I’m on the bus on my way to COP26. Firstly today, we’ll be heading to the Green Zone to be checking out a whole range of events and today is all about finance and exploring how finance is going to help us tackle the issue of climate change but also how to deliver a fairer and more just transition to a net-zero strategy. There, you can hear the electric bus rolling over the streets of Glasgow on the way to the SEC (Scottish Event Campus) and for me, the Science Museum today. We look forward to catching up with you there and learning a little more about how money can help us get closer to a cleaner, fairer economy and society. Wish me luck. I hope I’m on the right bus.
[Music flourish]
So we arrived. We made it and so now I’m with the hoards and the masses going through security to try and get in. Today, we’re at the Science Museum. Typically, this is a place you’d take the kids on a rainy Sunday, which I’ve done many times, to entertain them when everything else is sopping wet which is not infrequent in Glasgow but today, they have converted into the COP26 Green Zone which will be managed by the presidency of COP26 which will be, in this instance, the UK Government in partnership with Italy. We can see just over the water there the Titan crane, the UFO shape of the Hydro and the SEC Centre there. That’s the Blue Zone. These two zones are linked umbilically by the bridge that crosses the Clyde but the Green Zone is open to anybody. You don’t need to be a UN observer. You don’t need to be a negotiator. If you’ve got your ticket, you can just rock up and that’s what I’m doing today, so wish me luck and you’ll hear more when I’m inside and have, hopefully, cleared security.
[Music flourish]
We’re through security and we’re now in the Green Zone. We are on the other side of a tremendous number of barriers and barricades. Once you’ve got through, you’re kind of greeted with a heady mix of low-emission vehicles and school kids which is great to see. There are probably as many kids here as there are adult delegates. Schools have come here for the day and I just think that’s so important that they’re coming here to be part of this. They can tell their parents [laughter]... they’re all getting very excited now. They can tell their parents and their friends where they’ve been today. They can always look back on 2021. It’s kind of two visions of the future at once really. You’ve got these hydrogen vehicles and electric vehicles and even aircraft and pickup trucks and then you’ve then got tons and tons of kids all running in very excited and probably heading straight into the Science Museum for some of the activities they’ve got geared up for kids, so really excited. I’m just about to enter and I’ll tell you more once I’m inside.
[Music flourish]
I’m joined by Amanda Carpenter who is the host of PlanetPod. My voice is a little muffled because we’re in the Green Zone and we’re both wearing face masks but welcome, Amanda.
Amanda: Thank you. Great to see you.
Matt: Welcome to Local Zero. You’re a fellow podcast host who is also trying to capture what’s going on at COP26, so how have you found it so far?
Amanda: Well, fascinating. Busy. Quite hectic. I’ve spent quite a lot of time talking to colleagues of yours, fellow academics, and activists about different aspects of the conference. We’ve been talking about what we can hope for and what we can expect.
Matt: Today, of course, is finance.
Amanda: Today is finance and it’s a really big day, obviously, with the Glasgow Finance Initiative being announced and the extra funding. What we want to know is how will that actually work its way down to the communities that really need it. If we look at some of those really vulnerable, small-island states, for example, where the loss and damage issue is significant and they are being impacted far more by climate change, what does that money mean for them? I think our job, as reporters, is to keep the pressure on the politicians, keep the pressure on the policymakers and keep the pressure on the bankers and the lawyers to say, ‘You made these commitments. You need to follow through. We need to see evidence.’ So really, for me and I guess for you too, the work of COP actually happens on 15th November onwards when everything has finished.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So your feelings about the conference so far or the summit so far, are you feeling positive vibes or negative vibes? What are your hopes maybe if we were to chat again in ten or 11 days?
Amanda: I think, like lots of people, I flip-flop [laughter]. Some days, I feel really depressed by the whole scale of the challenge and then I get the chance to listen to inspirational speakers like Christiana Figueres or the young women activists who were on stage last night at the TB Macaulay Lecture hosted by the university and I think there’s hope because we’ve got young people who are energised, young people who will not give up and young people who will force us to take the action that we need to take. We’ve got good noises coming out with more money, deforestation agendas and lots of things happening but whether they get the follow-through is the question, isn’t it?
Matt: Absolutely.
[Music flourish]
Male panellist: [Speaker fading in] ...how you feel about something and that’s important because every day, money is going into companies and those companies around the world are doing things that are bad and things that are good and ultimately, people are responsible for that.
Female panellist: A very big piece of the work that we do is engaging women on their economic power. It wasn’t three years in that I realised that my bank was investing in the fossil fuel industry.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Okay, so we’ve spent the day in the Green Zone for COP26 and the theme today has all been about finance and it really covered some interesting topics. We had a fantastic talk where we had representatives from NatWest, WWF and other organisations like Count Us In, Make My Money Matter and all of these speakers were asking the question of what we can do with our wallets. How can we shift our money around and concentrate our money in particular investments that are going to make the world a greener and fairer place? It was fantastic to see so many people in there and many were asked about their pension provider, ‘Where is that money going?’ The amount of people who were scratching their heads, including me, were thinking, ‘Where is that money going?’ I think that the sentiment was that it’s all well and good you channelling £1 into something that’s green, that’s eco and more socially just but if there’s another £100 or £1,000 elsewhere in terms of your investments that are doing the diametric opposite... well, we’ve got a problem.
Female panellist: How counterproductive is it when we love the Earth and we’re working really hard to cut pollution out of our daily lives and we use every dollar that we spend or we don’t spend for the good of the Earth when, at the same time, our banks and our financial institutions are using our money investing in the fossil fuel industry?
Matt: The point being that if the UK tots up all of its pension funds into a single piggybank, at this talk, we were presented with the singular figure of £2.6 trillion. If you look at the emissions associated with that, the UK pension fund would easily fit within the top 20 most polluting countries in terms of emissions. So all of us need to pause and think a little bit more about where our investments are going. There was a fascinating website, which I’ll be sure to visit, that was called Switch It which will give you a sense of which banks rank best in terms of sustainability and eco credentials.
Male panellist: We forget that when the financial system was first created, people were a lot closer to their money and the impact that was having. Over many decades, there has been an intermediation process that has distanced people from the actual impact their money is having on the planet.
Matt: I thought that was a really interesting talk and one of the things that each of us can do is to contact our pension provider and our employer and ask, ‘Where is this money invested? What are the top ten holdings that this pension fund is supporting?’ What we were essentially told by some of the panellists was that we can each lobby our own organisations not only about their financial practices, where they invest and the types of pension providers that they use but in a broader sense. What we can do isn’t just limited to our household, our own wallets or our communities but also links into our workplace.
Female panellist: That is an invitation but maybe something a little bit more urgent than an invitation for you all to think right here and right now, in your organisations, how can you find ways to convene people within your company to have these conversations we’re having right now? We’ve got to take it to the top within our businesses. Find ways to access the people that have the decision-making power and find ways to influence them.
Matt: I thought that was really powerful. Lobby from the inside and make the change whilst at work. I think that was a really powerful statement. I really enjoyed that from the Green Zone. I thought beyond the Green Zone was maybe a little bit... more underwhelming I would say. I suspect the organisers have struggled to know exactly who would have arrived for COP26. Everything has been so up in the air with Covid. That aside, there was really good energy across the space and fantastic numbers of school kids there as well learning so they can put these ideas into practice. That’s all from me. Long day and time to put my feet up and get rested up for tomorrow which is all going to be about energy. We’ve got events lined up, certainly from my angle, on heat. We’ll be teaching you a little bit more about heat and the energy challenge for net zero in due course. Over and out.
[Music flourish]
Energy Day: How Bad Are Bananas?
Rebecca: So it’s Day Four of COP and the focus today is all about energy and for me, what’s even more exciting is I get to go. I feel like I’ve been benched for the last three days after hurting my ankle at the end of last week and being back on my crutches. I am finally mobile enough to be up and about and so heading into the city centre and out to the Green Zone to see who I can talk to and what’s going on all around our energy future, so I’ll see you on the other side.
Matt: So the COP26 wagon rolls on. It’s the second day that I’ve been really involved in the events here. Today, for me, is all about heat and so we’re at Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Government’s joint event today which is going to split into two. One is Heat Innovation for a Cooler Tomorrow and the second is looking at heat along the Clyde and understanding, on the Clydeside, what we can do to capture all these untouched resources, whether that’s from the Clyde or whether that’s mine water geothermal. There’s a whole host of opportunities that stretch way beyond gas or heat pumps but a way of actually capturing heat from our waters and doing something with that. I’m really excited about this. In fact, we’ve probably got some of the most important people in the heating sector in a single room here from Scotland. I’m hoping to learn a lot more. Right, we’re being called in. Over and out and I’ll maybe reflect a little bit later about what we’ve learnt. Okay, see you soon.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So I have finally made it into Glasgow City Centre which is pretty busy. I haven’t seen a huge amount of stuff relating to COP other than the shuttle bus that just went past absolutely rammed. I don’t know how I’m going to get on that to get out to the venue but I’m now standing in the city centre with Professor Malcolm McCulloch who has been at COP for the last few days and has been having an absolutely fantastic time launching the...
Malcolm: The International Community of Local Smart Grids.
Rebecca: Okay, tell us more about what this is going to do and how this is going to change the world and help deliver net zero.
Malcolm: Well, it’s going to change the world in a small way but the idea is that the grids around the world are all facing similar challenges as we decarbonise. They’ve now got to do lots of different things from, in the UK, running lots of electric vehicles and now we’re going to probably put in a lot of heat pumps to places like Australia where not only do they have a lot of solar but they’ve also got to deal with a lot of wildfires and now it has a lot of flooding. The idea is that this community of people, which is both DNOs and local communities, can kind of share learnings from each other. It’s all about saying we’re all on a journey and we’re going to make mistakes but from those mistakes, we’re all going to learn and the idea is we share those learnings so that not everybody goes through the same mistakes to get the same learning.
Rebecca: Very, very exciting and you launched this on November 2nd in the Blue Zone in the UK Pavillion I believe. Have you had much interest so far?
Malcolm: Yes, we’ve had a lot of interest from that and what’s kind of cool is that Patrick Vallance was in the corner watching us and stayed the whole time. He didn’t run away [laughter]. That was great. Shoutout to Patrick and thank you for that.
Rebecca: Stepping away from that, today is 4th November and Energy Day. What are your hopes and dreams for what can be achieved at COP beyond these initiatives that you’re involved in?
Malcolm: To me, the exciting bit is just hearing around the place that a lot of the companies and organisations are actually ahead of the governments rather than behind them in the sense of their aspirations and actually doing this. We’re all recognising stuff has to get done. I think this decade is going to be the biggest decade where we see our energy system change dramatically and to me, it’s going to be really exciting times. Yes, they are going to be problems and there are going to be mistakes made but hopefully, with every mistake made, a lot of learning we’ll gather and we can make it much better and more efficient. I suspect that by the time we get to 2030 or so, the world will be unrecognisable in the energy space which will be fantastic and hopefully, it will be a lot better. I think we’ll then move on to the next big challenge which is to say once we’ve got energy sorted, that allows us to then start to talk about the circular economy and things like that because if we can get energy under control, we can then look at materials and how we work with that. The other great thing is that coupled with the technical transition is also a recognition now that it’s got to be a just transition. We’re hoping that this change in the technology space will also help gently nudge the just transition which would be great.
Rebecca: Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Really useful insights. Let’s see what the rest of the day brings.
[Music flourish]
Matt: I’m in The Lighthouse in Glasgow City Centre. We’ve had a fantastic set of talks this morning trying to understand how we can change the way in which we heat our homes and our workplaces to deliver net zero. I’m joined by none other than four of the most senior individuals who work for a company called Sunamp. Sunamp is a revolutionary energy and heat storage technology company and we’ll hear a little bit more about what the technology does in a moment. I’m joined by Maurizio Zaglio.
Hank: Hank Torbert.
Victor: Victor Aguilera.
Andrew: And Andrew Bissell.
Matt: Thank you very much for your time and welcome to Glasgow if you’ve made the journey. If we can briefly begin for our listeners, they’re all interested in what they can do as individuals, as households and as communities to go low carbon and heat is a massive, massive portion of that. What does your technology do and how could it potentially unlock zero-carbon heating?
Andrew: What we make is an extremely compact way of storing heat and what that means is that we can store the same heat that would be in a 200-litre hot water tank in a space that’s smaller than a half-width dishwasher. What does that enable? It enables you to put a heat pump in a house where, otherwise, you wouldn’t have room for the hot water tank. That is probably our most direct enabler of a fully-renewable technology.
Matt: So if I can summarise it in layman’s terms, what you have is essentially a really high-tech equivalent of a water cylinder but it’s far, far more efficient if I understood your talk earlier, Andrew. Is that right?
Andrew: It’s about four times more energy dense and if you think about what that really means, it means that properties that were designed to take combi-boilers, that never had the room for a cylinder, can accommodate a direct replacement with something that needs the equivalent of a hot water cylinder but it does it by using the heat battery to fit in the same space. Our products are designed to fit that space.
Matt: Okay, and just fill me in a little bit more and the listeners how this phase change technology actually works. I understood it up to the point, basically, where it’s a little bit like hand warmers if you imagine those things where you crack them in your gloves when we could all go skiing once upon a time pre-Covid if we were lucky enough. Am I on the right track or is it something far more complicated?
Andrew: You’re absolutely on the right track. There are two types of hand warmers actually. One is one-use and one is reusable and we’re like the reusable ones but with a typical reusable handwarmer, you can use it five times, ten times, 20 times and maybe if you’re really lucky, a hundred times. That’s not enough because, for hot water and space heating, you need almost infinite reuse and recharging. What we’ve cracked, working with the University of Edinburgh and some really clever chemists, is how to make it last tens of thousands of cycles. That’s certificated and it’s patented as well but we’re making it widely available through licensing. We call that technology platform Plentigrade and you can see where it comes from; plentiful heat energy.
Matt: From your talk, you said this thing can last 50 years with 40,000 cycles twice a day for 50 years.
Andrew: With over 95% capacity left and then we can restore it to 100% again when we reuse it to make another product at the end of its life.
Matt: So what’s next for Sunamp? To what extent do you need the stars to align? What do you need from government, from industry and from the building sector? What do you need to get Sunamp into the stratosphere?
Hank: We need ongoing support from the building community and obviously support from the government in terms of encouraging people to switch over to our solution. It’s very simple. That’s what we need.
Matt: Well, thank you very much, guys. Thank you, indeed.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: I am now standing outside of the Green Zone. It’s a beautiful sunny day. I’ve just got through security in record time which I was not expecting. I’m standing here with Nicole who is from Brazil. Nicole, tell me what you’re excited about and why you’re here.
Nicole: I work for Arayara which is an NGO which is 30 years old. It’s a Brazilian NGO and we work on defending life in all of its forms either by doing energy just transition, defending human rights or racial equality.
Rebecca: Our podcast is all about local climate action and so a lot of the issues are caused by big companies and national-level decisions but what you’re doing is really trying to engage citizens and local communities but in different ways, right?
Nicole: I’m really glad you asked that because sometimes we feel powerless because the problems are so big and uplevel that we feel distanced from them as normal citizens. What we do at Arayara in Brazil is engage everybody in cities and we believe that power is really through local change. I can give you a few examples. This year, there was an oil auction and they auctioned blocks for oil drilling on the coast of Brazil in the Northeast and in the South. They auctioned very, very sensitive areas of biodiversity where whales mate and where a lot of fishing communities depend on fish. They wanted to drill on top of coral reefs...
Rebecca: Wow!
Nicole: ...the most important ones. So what we did is we engaged the cities where the oil blocks were in front and we mobilised the local community. We did public hearings and we did around 50 public hearings. We also litigated. Even though the citizens and the cities didn’t have anything to do with the big oil auction that was being done by the federal government and foreign companies like Shell or Total, they passed motions. The city mayor, the legislators and the communities together said, ‘We don’t want oil here in front of our shore.’ They passed motions saying that they didn’t want it. The federal government only did one public hearing for this auction. We took all these motions and litigated against the federal government saying that they didn’t consult the communities properly. This is being discussed in courts...
Rebecca: Wow!
Nicole: ...but it’s very likely that we will cancel the block offers because of this. The other example I can give you, which is much more practical, is about fracking. The government auctioned fracking blocks on top of very important areas and also where people farm. We taught the farmers what happens with fracking and since the underground belongs to the federal government, the local government cannot do much but we found loopholes in the legislation to prevent fracking trucks, for example, carrying all the chemicals or for water usage. This can be banned locally. We approved more than 400 city laws stopping the trucks from carrying these on municipal roads. This was done by local mobilisation. We talked to the church, schools, the whole community and local power who approved these laws. It’s a good example because since 2012, they have been trying to frack Brazil and they didn’t do it because we resisted so much.
Rebecca: That is an amazing story. It’s so lovely to have these positive examples and then also examples of where coming together through organisations like yours helps give people a voice and stand up for what they care about, so thank you so much for sharing your story.
Nicole: Thank you for sharing stories about local power [laughter].
[Music flourish]
Matt: We have just been in the heat session on Clyde-built heat and trying to understand exactly how the City of Glasgow and its environs will be able to take heat and decarbonise it for a net-zero future. I am joined by none other than David Townsend of TownRock Energy which is trying to take heat from former coal mines. What is the technology and what can it do for the future?
David: TownRock Energy is an award-winning consultancy based in Edinburgh and Aberdeen and we do geothermal energy consulting in one of the fastest growing spaces in the UK for renewable heating from the ground, which is essentially what geothermal is, and cooling, of course. Mine water geothermal is essentially to do with all the flooded coal mines that have been rebounding with water since they stopped pumping when the mines closed. This is all warm and there are huge volumes of it. There’s so much heat stored in these mines and it’s also getting naturally recharged from the geothermal energy being provided by the core of the Earth.
Matt: So, essentially, all these mines that we once relied on to mine the coal that heated our homes and drove the industrial revolution are now flooded and they’re flooded with water which is between 10-200C warm give or take.
David: Sometimes warmer, yeah.
Matt: So that gives us the thermal lift and we can borrow some of that heat to then drive that to the surface, we run that through a heat pump, we draw that heat out and we can pump that into our homes. Is that about right?
David: Yeah, exactly and the benefit is that the temperature is stable. Of course, if you start extracting large quantities of heat, you might start changing the temperature underground and that’s something that we model really carefully and monitor but it’s stable. Whereas, if you’re using an air-source heat pump, which would be the simple equivalent that doesn’t use the ground, you’re relying on sucking heat out of sub-zero air when you need heating the most and the heat pump efficiency really struggles and so you have a much higher electricity bill than you would have if you were using a ground-source heat pump or mine water.
Matt: I’m assuming that water in these mines is a nice stable temperature. If you want to dip into it in December versus July, it’s the same temperature, right?
David: Exactly, yeah. There will be small fluxes but it will never go below 100C.
Matt: Fantastic. So let me ask you are we doing this already and if so, where? Where have we actually been making this work?
David: In the UK, the hub of mine water innovation and development is in and around Newcastle and Durham. The first multi-megawatt mine water energy scheme was built by a wine company called Lanchester Wines to heat two of their very large warehouses. They came online about three or four years ago but as a result of that private company that took the risk and did this really innovative new project, the local authorities in the area are now building their own multi-megawatt schemes. We’re sharing data between the projects and it’s been very collaborative. The key regulators, the Coal Authority and the Environment Agency, are very party to this whole discussion because this being the cluster is where the regulation for this will be refined to make sure that the sector can grow across the entire country.
Matt: So with the projects that have already happened in the UK, are we talking just commercial? Are these leisure centres and warehouses or are they actually linked to homes? Our listeners will be thinking, ‘Could I be heating my home using mine water?’
David: Yeah, there are two little schemes in Scotland; one in Shettleston just outside Glasgow and one in Lumphinnans in Fife. Both were built about 20 years ago by our engineering associates, Stan Johnstone, and they’re heating about 20 flats equivalent for social housing. The key thing is when you think about the cost of a boiler for your house, you think of a few grand and a borehole into a mine is going to cost tens of thousands. So for an individual house, you’ve got to have a pretty big house to justify the cost of a borehole and a heat pump. You’re talking probably £30,000 or something for a minimum scale system. Ideally, you do it for multiple residencies in a single building or you link different buildings together but if there are a couple of millions out there with mansions, we’re happy to speak to them about it [laughter].
Matt: Obviously, not all of us live in said mansions [laughter] but what’s holding back mine water geothermal from ruling the world? I mean these mines have been sitting there flooded and disused for decades now, so why haven’t we done this yet?
David: Actually, interestingly, some of the mines are still rebounding and so even though they’ve been closed for 30 years, the water is still coming to the surface.
Matt: Wow!
David: There are areas where the Coal Authority is having to mitigate that with new treatment schemes. The reason why is that we’ve been competing with gas on the open market for heat provision service forever and gas gets heavily subsidised and is extremely cheap for heat. The sunk cost of infrastructure to distribute that gas is already there. You can’t put mine water geothermal through a gas pipe. You’ve got to build your own heat network and so there’s a huge capital cost which needs to have a strong business case. When it’s purely evaluated against the cost savings of not spending money on gas but you’re still buying electricity to run the pumps and the heat pumps, it’s very marginal. The projects that have been built to date have predominantly been supported by the Renewable Heat Incentive to make them cost-effective against gas. That’s gone now and we’re kind of watching this space but we’re also innovating really hard to see how we bring the costs down of this, how we have multiple scales of this type of system for different types of customers and where, of course, we do heating and cooling together, you have double the revenue for the same sunk cost and there’s a lot of business model innovation that’s going into this.
Matt: We were shown a fantastic presentation just now at The Lighthouse in Glasgow. I think it was you who showed a map of all the old mineworkings and overlaid that onto the map of the Central Belt. We could see that the biggest towns and the biggest cities in Scotland, the most population-dense areas, tend to be sitting on old mine workings. Is it fair to say that the demand for heat is actually pretty closely co-located with where these mine workings are and where the heat is just locked up underground?
David: Yeah, it’s almost perfectly matching. As cities build heat networks, as they realise that gas is not a viable option and that hydrogen is not a commercially viable option compared to just using heat pumps and heat networks, then mines are going to play a really important role both as a source of heat and also for seasonal thermal energy storage.
Matt: Brilliant. Well, listen, thank you very much. I think you’ve explained an extremely complex topic and hopefully, something that we’ll become more and more familiar with as the years go by, so thank you and enjoy COP.
David: I appreciate it. Enjoy COP too.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Hey there, welcome back. I am now in the Green Zone and I am on the amazing UKRI stand talking to heaps of people all about energy, carbon, climate action, net zero and lots of other exciting things. I am with Jodie who has just been showing me the most amazing game called How Bad Are Bananas? It’s a small carbon footprint game. Hey, Jodie, welcome. How’s your day been?
Jodie: It’s been amazing just talking to so many people and seeing their shock when they play the game. It’s incredible.
Rebecca: Okay, so you’re going to have to tell us a little bit about the game but then mostly, what I want to hear about is how people are reacting to that and how it is changing their entire world.
Jodie: The game How Bad Are Bananas? is a simple comparison higher or lower carbon footprint game based on the book How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee. We take things like a kilogram of bananas versus a kilogram of tomatoes grown organically in the UK in March and we ask people where they think the carbon footprint comes from in each of them and what they think contributes mainly to it. With bananas, you’re looking at the shipping across from South America over to the UK. With tomatoes, you’ve got them being hothoused because being in the UK in March means that a lot of fossil fuel is being pumped into them so they can grow. A lot of people, when they do that one, find it really shocking that the tomatoes are actually...
Rebecca: Wait! Guess. Here’s your chance. Do you know what? I should tell you actually that on Local Zero, we run a regular slot called Future or Fiction? which is guessing game where we have to guess and I always get it wrong. I think it’s fair to acknowledge that I got this one wrong as well, didn’t I? [Laughter] Tell us which is the worst in terms of carbon footprint.
Jodie: The tomatoes. They’re actually 42 times worse than the bananas because of the hothousing. We take an average of the hothousing across the UK because obviously, some people do it renewably and some people do it with fossil fuels. That means that it’s 42 times worse just because of the amount of energy put into heating the hothouse. A lot of people are shocked by it. When I first played it in 2017, I was so shocked by how bad red meat actually was for the environment that I ended up giving up red meat. I haven’t eaten it for three and a half years and I’ve taken half a ton a year off my carbon footprint just by giving up red meat. My family have then linked to that and they still eat red meat, which I’m never going to tell them that they need to stop, but they’ve reduced the amount they have in their diet. We used to have it twice a week and now they have it once a month and it’s just incredible having a conversation with people, seeing their reactions and then just the shock and they say, ‘This is something really small that I could change. I could just do a little reduction here. I could buy my tomatoes in March from Italy instead of the UK and I can have a lower carbon footprint just by thinking about these things a bit more.’
Rebecca: I think that’s a really good point. I love the fact that you didn’t work in this field. You’ve come to this and you got super engaged by the game that now you’ve come out and you work with this company which is amazing and to see the changes that you’ve made just from that education. I can’t believe that I got it wrong and it just highlights to me that there is so much that we don’t think about in all of this. It’s amazing. Thank you so much.
[Music flourish]
Matt: That was my day at The Lighthouse in Glasgow covering all things heat with a big focus on Scotland, the Clyde, Glasgow and, indeed, beyond. What did I learn? Well, [laughter] I’ve got pages and pages of notes here. I guess the key point from me is that these technologies and how they’re being used are very much real. These have been built. They are heating people’s homes. They’re heating people’s workplaces. These are not simply on the back of a fag packet or in the drawing room which is really encouraging to see. There are also, for me, a couple of open questions. One is should we be thinking more about locating our heat demand where the most renewable and cheapest sources of energy are? Typically, we’ve done this the other way around. We’ve located our housing and our workplaces in particular locations for reasons other than that being where the heat source is or normally, that would be the case. We have channelled heat into those properties normally in the form of gas but also electricity and oil. We have whole gas networks that satisfy that. Maybe when we’re thinking about redeveloping our towns and cities, particularly in the brownfield sites or even when we’re building out on the fringes, how can we locate those sources of demand closest to where the heat is? Finally, we must think about the churn of these technologies, particularly at the individual and household levels. When you’re swapping out your boiler for a heat pump, it’s normally going to be when your boiler has packed up and that is what was referred to today as a distress purchase. We’ve all been there. Our boiler has broken typically the day before Christmas and that is the very definition of stressful. So how do we make this cheap, easy and stressless for people to swap in a lower-carbon form of heating? A really, really exciting day and credit to Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise for organising a fantastic session. I really enjoyed it and I’m on to the next event [laughter] before I break down and have a snooze somewhere on the street.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: I’m back home now after a really exciting day at COP. We did it all really; chats in the city centre and out to the Green Zone to see what was going on and some really inspirational conversations there. We really unearthed a whole load of topics and if anything, I would say I’m feeling positive and absolutely excited for what’s to come over the remainder of COP. I’ve left Matt in the city off to the pub and hopefully, he’ll still be on top form for tomorrow but for me, I’m going to see my family, have a roast dinner and get myself re-energised to do it all again tomorrow.
[Music flourish]
Snapshots From Friday’s Youth March
[Music flourish]
Matt: So what’s your name?
Eddie: Eddie!
Nelly: Nelly
Matt: Nelly, and you are my kiddies, aren’t you? What are we doing today?
Eddie: Going to a climate march.
Matt: Let me ask you, what is a climate march?
Nelly: It’s people who shout at people who have been littering.
Eddie: People shout, ‘Stop littering!’
Matt: Well, we don’t need to shout yet because we’re not on the climate march, are we?
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Good morning. It’s now Friday, 5th November and we are almost at the end of the first week of COP. I can’t believe it. It’s flown by. I’m at the train station just ready to head in and see what the day has to offer. Listeners that have been with us for the whole year might remember that today is my birthday, so I’m really excited for the day and excited to go and have some more interesting chats, meet more people and really to just see how things are unfolding almost halfway through COP.
[Music flourish]
Matt: So what do your signs say? Because we’ve made some signs, haven’t we?
Eddie: Don’t rise.
Matt: Yeah, almost. Yours says ‘No More...
Eddie: ...Rise.’
Matt: What does yours say, Nelly?
Nelly: ‘Save Our Planet.’
Matt: Save Our Planet, okay. Why do we need to save our planet?
Nelly: Because there’s litter everywhere on planet Earth.
Matt: And are you going to be marching with lots and lots of other kids today?
Eddie: Yes.
Matt: So shall we check back in later and tell everybody what the climate march is like, yeah? Are you going to say bye-bye?
Eddie: Bye-bye.
Nelly: Bye-bye.
Matt: Yeah, we’ll see you soon and let you know how we get on.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: I am now in Glasgow Central Station. You can hear the buzz and I wish you could see just the number of people walking past with placards. I’m here today with two folk who are just about to head to the march. What are your names?
Lynne: Isla and Lynne.
Rebecca: Hi, Isla. Hi, Lynne. I love your placard. Are you excited about the march?
Isla: Yeah.
Rebecca: Why do you want to go? Why is this really important to you?
Isla: Because I think it’s just sad that the world is changing and the polar bears are dying.
Rebecca: I agree. My children think so too. They’re a bit small to go on the march. So you’re going to march along and you’re going to shout. What do you hope will come of it? What do you want to achieve?
Isla: I just want it to be a better world so that people like me, when they grow up, can live a better life.
Rebecca: Amazing. Hang on a minute, hold old are you?
Isla: Eight.
Rebecca: Wow! I wish I was that smart when I was eight. You must be super proud.
Lynne: Yeah, really proud. Yeah, Isla is very interested in making a difference. She was really, really keen to come today and so I’m really proud of her.
Rebecca: Amazing. Well, I hope you have a fantastic time. I won’t stop you any longer. Thank you so much.
Lynne: Bye.
Matt: So guys, where are we now?
Eddie: In a tunnel.
Matt: What are we on?
Nelly: The train.
Matt: Where are we going? You can’t shrug your shoulders.
Nelly: The march.
Matt: That’s it, to the march. Okay, and how many people do we think are going to be there?
Eddie: 600.
Matt: 600?
Eddie: 16.
Matt: Okay, well hopefully...
Eddie: 100.
Matt: 1,600.
Eddie: No, only 100.
Matt: Well, we’ll be there soon and we’ll let everybody know how many people we count, okay? Are you going to say see you soon?
Nelly: See you soon.
Eddie: See you soon!
[Music flourish]
[People chanting slogans]
Rebecca: I am now here with Ashlyn from the University of Edinburgh. This is your first day today at COP. How are you finding it so far?
Ashlyn: Well, I’m heading to the Green Zone later today. I’m hoping to really just dive in and see what it’s like. I’ve been watching from afar and I think I’ve been the same as everyone else. Some days, I feel inspired; other days, I feel depressed and so I’m hoping that actually being here will give me that bit of hopefulness that I’ve been lacking over the past few days.
Rebecca: Is there anything in particular that you’re interested in following or checking out?
Ashlyn: Yeah, I work in both the energy sector but also the built environment and working in construction as well. I’m really passionate about youth empowerment. I really want to see young people involved in what’s happening. I want to see how engaged they are in the process and for a learning experience for myself as well just to see how this plays out on the world stage. I’m just really excited about it.
Rebecca: Amazing. Is that your biggest hope for COP to really see this kind of momentum galvanised?
Ashlyn: Yeah, I feel right now that there is a divide between the people inside the venues and the people outside and I really hope that the momentum outside will give people the momentum to make more progressive decisions and to take more action. So I’m really hoping that there will be a cohesiveness at the end of the event in the coming week or so.
Rebecca: Amazing. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Look at the polar bears! Are you going to high-five? Brilliant. So we’ve made it and we’re here at the march. We’re right at the front. What can we see?
Kat: A lot of people.
Matt: That’s Kat. So I’m here with my wife and kids and we’re right at the front. You can hear them all. I’ll just let you listen.
[Marchers chanting slogans]
You can hopefully hear the chopper above us which is kind of just a constant drone in the background. I mean there’s just a sea of people all driving forward. They’re going from Kelvingrove, marching through the park here and all the way to Glasgow Green. The signs here say ‘Stop Cambo,’ ‘Respect Mother Nature.’
Kat: ‘Hotter Than Your Mum.’
Matt: ‘Hotter Than Your Mum’ [laughter] which is a good one. ‘Who Gives A Crap?’ Yeah, this is great. We’re going to file in and follow on.
[More marchers chanting slogans]
We are joined by Alastair and...
Sasha: Sasha.
Matt: Okay, and a whole group of you guys. You’ve been walking all the way from Kelvingrove on the march, have you?
Alastair: Yeah.
Matt: What brings you here today?
Alastair: To support why everyone else has come out... for the climate crisis.
Sasha: Yeah, we just don’t think COP is doing enough really. They’ve pledged to end deforestation so many times and they’re acting like it’s groundbreaking.
Matt: So you’re wanting to make a bit of noise and to remind them that something needs to happen.
Alastair: No, you can’t make promises and not follow through on your promises.
Matt: What’s your name?
Leomi: Leomi.
Matt: Nice to meet you. What brings you to the climate march then?
Leomi: It’s just trying to do a wee bit and feel a little bit less helpless. With the climate doom, you feel really hopeless about everything, especially with COP26 and all the world leaders sitting around.
Matt: You’re doing something. You feel proactive.
Leomi: Just so I feel like I’m doing as much as I possibly can which is still not very much. I don’t know. It’s just good to be out here and to try and find a bit of hope in seeing all the thousands of people...
Matt: Yeah, it’s great.
Leomi: ...that are out here and hopefully, some change comes of it even though it is looking pretty grim.
Matt: Are you enjoying it?
Leomi: Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing. You’ve got people singing. You’ve got the samba bands and people on stilts. Yeah, it’s totally amazing.
Matt: Will you be walking all the way to Glasgow Green?
Leomi: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: Well, I hope you’ve packed some sandwiches [laughter] and a stool.
Leomi: Yeah, I know. It’s going to take hours. It’s like five minutes down the road from our house and it’s taken half an hour to walk here but it’s great to be here.
Matt: Well, thank you so much and enjoy the march. Okay, take care.
[Marchers chanting slogans]
[Music flourish]
So we’ve done the climate march now.
Eddie: We’ve been to a climate march.
Matt: We have, haven’t we? How long was it?
Nelly: It was about this long.
Matt: [Laughter] Which is very long. Are you all tired now?
Nelly: About 16 minutes.
Matt: Well, it was longer than that but we had a long march and what did you think of it?
Nelly: 16 hours.
Matt: We’re heading now, aren’t we, because we’re all tired? Are we going to put our feet up? Yeah, exactly. Let me ask the last question. Would you do another climate march?
[Sounds of snoring]
Matt: [Laughter] Okay, maybe we’ll leave you at home next time [laughter]. Well, we all had fun, didn’t we? You had a good time too?
Kat: Oh, it was brilliant. Fantastic.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Eddie is already asleep, so we’ll be quiet and let him doze. Okay, speak soon.
‘This is Our Fight’ – Fraser Shares a Stage with Greta Thunberg
[Music flourish]
[Crowds chanting slogans]
Fraser: From George Square to Georgetown, Kilmarnock to Kampala, this is our fight! From Dundee to Dakar, Aberdeen to the Amazon, this is our fight!
[Applause from crowd]
[Music flourish]
So it is the morning of Saturday 6th November. It’s the day of the Global Action for Climate Justice March in Glasgow. Events are happening all around the world but this is the big, big march for climate justice today in the city in the middle of COP for all the activists, workers and delegates everywhere. Yesterday, was the really massive Fridays for Future March in Glasgow which was led by Greta Thunberg and by those global activists that we all know like Vanessa Nakate who came to Glasgow and gave some incredible speeches after a march from Kelvingrove Park which was estimated to have almost 25,000 people on it in total.
[Drums beating in the background with sound of helicopter above]
It was big. It felt powerful. It felt like that’s where real change was going to come from if it was going to come from anywhere. I marched up there with some friends, some activists and some people that I know from around the city. I was lucky to march alongside the trade unions and striking workers in Glasgow with an Italian delegation. It was lively. There was music. It was really, really a festival and I’m excited for today. At the end of the march yesterday, I was privileged and genuinely honoured to get to give a speech on the stage to about 10,000 people in George Square in Glasgow, again, alongside people like Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and indigenous peoples from places like West Guinea. It was sensational and I was so, so, so fortunate and felt so proud to get to stand alongside them and give a speech about how climate is a fight for everyone; about how climate justice is social justice; about how these things are inseparable; about how we can have justice and real change but only if stand together and demand it.
[Fraser speaking from the stage]
Fraser: This is not just a crisis of climate or emissions. This is a crisis of justice, of inequality, of poverty, of racism, of classism, of workers’ rights and women’s rights and every intersection in between in every single corner of the planet!
[Applause]
And this is why we say that climate justice is social justice and why we bring these struggles together because these are not separate struggles because building a greener and fairer world that supports communities and people and nature everywhere means uprooting the same broken system together.
[Applause]
They say that working-class people know nothing and care less about climate justice but there is one thing that we do know for certain the working class and marginalised people know better than anywhere in the world. We know that there is power in solidarity. We know that there is strength in uniting our struggles to force real change. We know that we all can have justice but only if we are willing to stand together and demand it. So to everyone here today or watching at home from the suburbs to the schemes, from the North to the South, I say this... this is our fight! From frontline activists to frontline workers, this is our fight! From George Square to Georgetown, Kilmarnock to Kampala, this is our fight! From Dundee to Dakar, Aberdeen to the Amazon, this is our fight! Because climate justice is social justice because together we are powerful and because together we can demand a safer present and a fairer, greener future that all of us deserve. Thank you very much.
[Music flourish]
It seemed to go well. As you can hear, probably, my voice is a little bit hoarse from it. I’ve got to do it all again today. I’m excited to do it today. This is where power comes from. This is where change comes from. If you’re in the city and you see any activist events going on, come along and join it because this is where the party is happening.
[Music flourish]
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