2: COVID’s lessons for the road to net zero

With guests Polly Billington and Jim Watson, the team assess the impact of Coronavirus on the net zero transition. How can local energy help bring about a prosperous and fair pandemic recovery? Polly is a member of Hackney Council in East London and director of UK100, a network of more than 100 UK councils that is committed to tackling the climate emergency. Jim is Professor of Energy Policy at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources.

Essential Reading:

https://www.uk100.org/

Episode transcript

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford.

Matthew:  And I’m Dr Matt Hannon. Welcome to Local Zero. This is the podcast that gives you a guide to taking climate action at the local level.

Rebecca:  In this, our second ever podcast, we’ll explore the impact of COVID on our energy use and the opportunities that COVID might present for achieving net zero in the future.

Matthew:  And that is not a straightforward question. As we’ll hear, it’s not as simple as just saying COVID is helpful in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the question is how many of these trends are just short-term and we might just see a rebound to business as usual tomorrow or the next day. So joining us later will be Polly Billington who heads up the UK’s only local government network focused solely on tackling climate change, delivering clean energy and delivering cleaner air.

‘COVID has given us a foreshadowing of what a climate crisis could be like with these kinds of inequalities and these kinds of economic and health impacts. We’ve really got to dig in and do this properly and that means investment in our communities for jobs and for better health.’

Rebecca:  So today, we’re talking about COVID and net zero but clearly, it’s had a lot of effects very close to home. I know my life has changed considerably since March. How about you, Matt?

Matthew:  It’s been transformational, hasn’t it? It’s affected every aspect of our lives and was felt acutely from the very first day. I remember that kind of ‘Oh dear’ moment. I think it was the day before Johnson announced and I was one of those terrible people online panic-buying left, right and centre [laughter] and did all the things that I was moaning about. The question is how long-term are these changes in our behaviour as well?

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  I haven’t been out in the car – I think I’ve been out once since March and it was to go and get my office chair from the office so I could be more comfortable working from home [laughter]. I don’t think, apart from that, I’ve probably left the five-kilometre perimeter around my household. It’s significantly impacted on my own travel but I’m also one of the luckier few because we’ve got a garden. My kids have been able to play in the garden. We’ve got enough space in the house that we can work. Clearly, it’s affected people around the country very differently.

Matthew:  So as always, we’ve got Fraser Stewart with us here; podcast extraordinaire and production maester. Fraser, how are you?

Fraser:  I’m good. I can echo what you guys have said as well. It does feel like the world has gotten smaller. I feel very fortunate to have had a bike for the majority of this summer, so I was able to get out and see places around Glasgow and just south of Glasgow that I maybe wouldn’t have seen before. On the other side of that, for sure, it’s been peaks and troughs shall we say? Peaks and troughs.

Matthew:  For me, it’s shone a light on what I prioritise. Would I like to go on holiday somewhere warm? Of course, I would but... yeah, I guess you just put everything under the microscope and you think, ‘Can I live with that? Is that a risk I’m willing to take?’ For me, what I wonder is will I just rebound to where I was back in late February?

Rebecca:  But it’s not just us. I was reading a report, Matt, last week that was released by the Centre for Climate and Social Transformations or CAST which is much easier to say.

Matthew:  Or CAST Centre if you’re from the North of England.

Rebecca:  [Laughter] The CAST Centre, yeah. They’ve done a couple of surveys with just under 2,000 people across the UK looking at how this has changed for people around the country. Certainly, for a whole load of people, they’ve seen self-reported reductions in waste, reductions in travel (like we’ve just been talking about) and also reductions in consumption. People aren’t going shopping anymore and instead, they’re focusing their attention on outdoor exercise or gardening. I know that my garden has never looked better. So that’s quite nice to hear but they did acknowledge that there’s a huge diversity of experience which, as you can expect, if you’ve got access to the outdoors, or access to a garden, or access to areas, then you’re going to have a very different experience than if you’re living in a high-rise tower block in the inner city.

Matthew:  You hit the nail on the head there because I think what COVID has done has really shone a light on levels of deprivation. We’ve heard this rumbling going on around things like school meals and what have you but your point about the haves and the have nots I think links back to what we will discuss in future episodes about a just transition and making sure that that move to a different type of economy, a net zero economy, doesn’t leave any one section behind. I think what we’ve seen in this kind of public health transition, a transition forced by this pandemic, is those with the least are the ones that have been most left behind. For me, that’s raised a lot of questions about what we do with climate change and the transition around that.

Rebecca:  Yeah, and how different parts of society can come together to address that in this transition. I think that’s an absolutely critical point that we need to look at more. Certainly, as you said, looking at how we can think about the changes that COVID’s introduced and look to whether we can harness the good that we’ve seen come out of this and mitigate against any of the negative aspects but take that forward. How can we learn from what we’ve all been experiencing over the last six-plus months and grow that forward?

Matthew:  Yeah, and I’m hoping all of this will become part of a post-COVID recovery building back better and that Building Back Better... not just with your Treasury cap on and thinking of jobs and economic stimulus which is all very important but thinking about lifestyle changes and building back better that way leading into a society where there are greater levels of wellbeing across the piece, whether that’s built around active travel or fairer distribution of resource. Sometimes, I get out of bed and think positively that we are going to enter a better world because I don’t think things were especially rosy before March 2020 around that.

Rebecca:  No, I think we talk about our net zero transition and how it can drive a fairer, cleaner and greener society. We’ve got to recognise that there are huge problems in the energy system that we have today. It’s not fair today, so how can we learn from that? How can we learn from everything that COVID has exacerbated? Please do join us in our conversation. Use the hashtag #LocalZero on Twitter and our handle @EnergyREV_UK and send us any questions you want us to answer through this series and we’ll try and get to them as we can.

[Music flourish]

Jim:  Hello, I’m Jim Watson. I’m Professor of Energy Policy at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. COVID has had a very big impact in quite a number of different ways. The obvious one is it’s changed the patterns of demand and overall, even though demand has now rebounded, as I understand it, it’s still a bit lower than it was before the pandemic hit. Clearly, our patterns of travel of changed a lot but also things like using less energy in commercial premises and offices and more in homes have changed. So it has changed for individual actors, particularly many householders who might end up spending more on energy, particularly through the coming winter, but also the flip side of that, particularly for people who might have lost their jobs or who have lower incomes and they’re expecting a lot more people having difficulty paying their bills. That really brings to the fore issues of fuel poverty and what we do about that over the medium to longer term.

Matthew: 

For me, working in a business school, one of the big focus areas is around how permanent these trends are. Do you see some of this stuff slowly shaking out and us reverting back to normal? Similarly, are there some changes that you think are going to persist for the long-term?

Jim:  I think the overall aggregate impact will probably not be as big as we think in the medium to longer term. I think a lot of things will rebound at the aggregate level but underneath that, some persistence of some of these trends, particularly working from home and people not going to offices as much. Certainly, for me and colleagues I speak to, we’re obviously lucky and we’ve got the kind of jobs where we can work from home in most circumstances. Some of that, I think, will get more hard-wired because it will have gone on for probably a year or more for many people. So that has knock-on impacts for things like demand for energy for travel and things like that. But I think, overall, if you look at the graphs, whether you’re looking at the global picture or the UK picture, there’s quite a bit of rebound now in the overall energy picture. If you look at some Asian economies, the extent of rebound is almost back to where it was.

Rebecca:  So going beyond changes to our patterns of use and starting to think about things like efforts to increase the energy efficiency in our homes through insulation, or decarbonise our heating systems or, indeed, increasing the amount of renewable electricity, have you seen COVID having an impact on these kinds of broader ambitions that require perhaps planning, longer-term action and thinking along the supply chain?

Jim:  Yeah, probably two overall things to say. One is I don’t think COVID itself and its impact really helps us in the end in the decarbonisation strategy and reaching net zero. I know it’s reduced our emissions on a temporary basis both, again, globally and in the UK but it doesn’t help in itself. Left to our own devices and hopefully, once we get to recovery, this demand will come back and the emissions will go up again. I think where there is an opportunity is clearly what the response to that is and that’s where it’s really still unfolding.

Matthew:  I just wanted to ask the question about what COVID might mean about unleashing the realm of the possible and what I mean by that is it’s shown us what transformative change we can make in a very short period of time, for instance, people not flying and our skies going quiet all of a sudden. That’s something we thought was just unimaginable. Do you see that as being one of the long-term effects of COVID in actually identifying that if we see something as a crisis in this context of a public health crisis, we can fundamentally transform how we live overnight? Is that something that can translate into the climate change debate?

Jim:  I’m quite cautious about that. I’d say partly and although both are global crises that require urgent responses, they are very different in their manifestations. With COVID, we can see case numbers, hospitalisations and very sadly, death rates and things happen very, very fast. Clearly, climate change has a lot of impacts too on people’s health, on migration and arguably, on extreme weather which leads to people losing their livelihoods and even, in some cases, losing their lives but that connection is nowhere near as immediate. From the point of view of learning lessons, I’m quite cautious about how far you can translate those lessons. I also think some of the things you mentioned there, such as flying, yes, I think there’s a section of the population who probably have thought about it. Awareness is very high and they maybe will fly less than they would have done otherwise once that’s possible but others, for understandably good reasons, would want to still go on their annual holiday or they’ve got hard-wired reasons to fly. Cheap flights have meant you can go and visit relatives or places quite often and you’re asking them to suddenly stop doing that.

Rebecca:  Though stepping beyond that and talking about the energy sector a bit more, what role do you think the energy sector can play in the wider UK’s recovery?

Jim:  Yeah, I mean clearly they’ve got a very big role to play. If you draw the boundary around the energy sector in quite a broad way so it includes the trades that upgrade homes and not just those that build power stations and grids, they have a very large role to play and there are a lot of areas that require decarbonisation where you can marry action by them, job creation and reducing emissions. But I think the important point is that they can only act within the market opportunities that are there. Policy frameworks need to be there to either create or extend market opportunities, whether it be in home retrofit, clean electricity generation or smarter systems. Obviously, for anything that involves consumers, whether it be buying an electric car or upgrading their home, they’ve got to have somewhere an ability to pay for that or a mechanism whereby they can borrow money, access cheap finance or have help if they’re on low incomes. So I think the ability of companies to act is very much a function of the policy environment and so I’d always refer back to that large in-tray in Number 10, Downing Street needing to be cleared a little and some of these announcements need to be made because that will then enable companies to act in the way that we want them to and that’s aligned with net zero.

Matthew:  I think on the finance thing, that’s a really important one and we’ve got an initiative up here in Scotland called Home Energy Scotland where you can take these interest-free and very long-term loans. That seems like an opportunity for some households to do something. Is this the kind of thing you’re talking about or are you talking about more on an industry scale where we’re looking at Green investment bank 2.0 where companies can borrow tens of millions of pounds to deliver major, major schemes?

Jim:  Yeah, I think finance is obviously an important part of the picture and often, when people are talking about the costs of net zero, they’re talking in economic terms rather than financial terms. What are the conditions under which either individuals, communities or companies can borrow money and actually make investments pay? So that is very important and having cheap finance for some individual households is really going to make a difference between them upgrading their homes or not. I think there also needs to be those regulatory backstops, you might call them, or incentives. We have quite a good narrative around vehicles now and 2030 is the date by which you have to stop selling fossil vehicles but we don’t have an equivalent backstop around homes yet. There are some new homes but on existing homes and so on and that’s really required as well as the access to the finance. Of course, again, for some homes and maybe some businesses, direct financial help may be needed.

Matthew:  Absolutely and the focus of the pod, Local Zero, we’re looking at local, community, grassroots, bottom-up kinds of solutions to these global issues. What can we do and if we can’t do it, what can government do to help us do it?

Jim:  Yeah, I think there is a hell of a lot and some communities are doing quite a lot themselves, so the burgeoning community energy scene which I know you, Matt, have looked at in your research as well is an important testament to that. In terms of its tangible impact on our emissions and our energy, it’s still relatively small. I think the local actor that has the ability to coordinate, lead or develop strategies, etcetera, is the local authority. But what slightly worries me about the response to COVID is that the dynamic between central and local government is not a particularly healthy one. You can see it in Test and Trace. You can see it in the way that different types of rules are being either imposed or negotiated with different local areas. If you think local solutions are important, you also need some local accountability and the local accountability, for me at least, needs to involve local authorities and local government in some way, whether it be as developers of strategies, consulting local communities and providing help at the local level to complement what’s available nationally but that also requires central government to let go of some of the power it has, provide resources and all those things. In the COVID version of this conversation, it’s not necessarily going particularly well.

Matthew:  Now we’ve highlighted it, maybe it’s something that the climate agenda can pick up on but thank you so much and we hope to see you again soon.

Jim:  Thanks very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Rebecca:  No, it was great. They were really useful insights and, Jim, you don’t know how beautifully you just teed up our next interview right at the end there [laughter].

[Music flourish]

So Fraser, you were listening really intently and making some notes. What do you think of what Jim said?

Fraser:  I think that the big takeaway, as much as Jim maybe isn’t overly optimistic, is that there’s an important theme here of remembering that this involves the public writ large. It involves people’s lives. It involves understanding their needs and how they have access to any potential changes and making sure that we’re taking people with us on this journey as well. So it’s important to make sure that we’re mindful at every stage from policy and design to implementation and if we’re to take the opportunity that COVID may present now to remember that there’s a temptation to run quickly but we also have to be mindful of taking people with us as well.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  So heaps to digest there. You’re listening to Local Zero with Matt Hannon, Rebecca Ford and Fraser Stewart. Thanks for being with us. Just a reminder that you can reach us on Twitter using the hashtag #LocalZero or by tweeting @EnergyREV_UK. Remember to send us any questions or thoughts that we might be able to address in upcoming episodes. But moving on, the second half of this episode is an interview with someone who’s right at the sharp end of trying to make change happen on climate matters and with real insight into how COVID has impacted that.

[Music flourish]

Polly:  Hi, I’m Polly Billington. I’m the Director of UK100 and UK100 is a network of UK leaders, local leaders, from across local government in the UK who have made a commitment to 100% clean energy by 2050 and we’re the only network in local government that is focused solely on climate, clean energy and clean air.

Rebecca:  How do you think it’s affected cities and communities, not just in the daily lives of the folk living there but also in their net zero ambitions?

Polly:  It’s very easy if you can work from home, you’ve got enough room, you don’t have caring responsibilities, you can afford to keep your house warm as it’s getting colder, you’ve got a garden and you’re within walking distance to somewhere where you can have exercise. A lot of middle-class people are actually quite enjoying this. A lot of other people are having a really, really, really hard time and the great danger is that environmentalists wang on – not to use too fine a point – about how we get these benefits and stop thinking about the other things that people really miss. People really miss social interaction. They really miss meeting people other than the people that they live with. A lot of people are in real economic difficulties and being able to afford to keep a roof over your head and to keep your family fed are bigger pressures now than they ever have been. The idea now of starting to talk to people about paying a little bit more for food that is more sustainably sourced and so forth, these things are a long way away from people’s priorities. So focus on how we can work with what people actually need. What they actually need now is jobs, security, comfortable, safe and secure homes and an environment in which they feel their children and the people that they love are safe and healthy. That is the way you win a climate argument.

Matthew:  When all is said and done on this, do you think COVID is just going to have proven a distraction to local authorities?

Polly:  Well, we’re trying to make sure that it’s not.

Matthew:  Or do you think it could end up reinforcing the climate agenda? I mean I’m looking back... say, we’re in 2025, was it just a footnote or not? I’m talking in the context of climate action.

Polly:  Where people have already integrated it in, you will see climate-friendly actions being used to meet COVID challenges. The low-traffic neighbourhoods are a really good example. You’ve seen some local authorities try them and drop them within a fortnight because they’ve seen it as too difficult.

Matthew:  Wandsworth is an example.

Polly:  Others are absolutely hanging tough on it and saying, ‘Yeah, it takes a bit of time. You’ve got to settle in but it will be worth it in the end.’ To be honest, walking and cycling is the easy bit, particularly for places in London. The idea that walking and cycling is the way to tackle connectivity with work in the valleys of Wales, in Derbyshire and in small car-heavy towns like Peterborough is for the birds. So the biggest challenge, and this is what people aren’t talking about, is how you have a COVID-proof recovery for public transport. We have to get public transport right. If we don’t have public transport in our communities and in the rural communities, we will not be able to meet our net zero targets that we’ve already said to ourselves we should do. We’re going to continue to have congestion. We’re going to continue to have bad safety records for children and so forth and we’re going to continue to have unhealthy communities. When people see the connections between climate and their other objectives, you’re in a much better place. I’ll give you one example. Dr Maria Neira is the Climate Change Lead in the World Health Organization. She’s brilliant because she says you could actually look at all the climate actions that need to be taken in order to be able to meet the Paris Agreement and measure them for their health impacts and suddenly, you will have a different conversation with politicians. Politicians you normally wouldn’t get a meeting with will suddenly say, ‘What do you mean our children will live longer? What do you mean we’re going to be able tackle diabetes and obesity if we do this? What do you mean we’re going to be able to increase the life expectancy of people in places that have been highly deprived because they’re going to have less bad mental health outcomes because they’re going to have work?’ People then get really interested. Where people have had enough time to think about it before this hit, they have been able to see where those things are aligned and they can see where sometimes they aren’t. We know that, for example, lockdown has finished and people are frightened to go back on the bus because they’re worried about public transport being somewhere where you’re more likely to catch it, so people have returned to their cars which is terrible. However, using emergency transport powers, local authorities have been really bold in creating low-traffic neighbourhoods. Now that ain’t easy. Let me tell you, as an elected councillor, where you’ve got a low-traffic neighbourhood, you get a lot of fury from people who are saying, ‘Well, hang on a minute. I can’t drive to my local supermarket and I used to be able to. Why do I have to take quite as long?’ Those things settle down and so we need to acknowledge that those things will change over time. If you think about the economy having tanked, resources having shrivelled, they’ve got massive public health responsibilities and their own staff are at risk and are staying at home mourning people who they’ve lost themselves or looking after people who are ill. Basic delivery of services is adversely affected. You’re not going in to mend your own council houses that need repairing because there’s a risk of contagion. There’s an impact on education for the next generation. They’re thinking about all of that and then if any of us come along and say, ‘By the way, would you like to knock out megatons of CO2 from your economy?’ You’d be unsurprised if you get a bit of short shrift.

Matthew:  For local authorities to get the power, to get the resources and to take the action that you’re referring to, I guess key decisions have to be made by central government. Do you think central government is willing to make that call?

Polly:  Well, I think there’s something that has come out of COVID and admittedly, I’m always going to see this in the political dimension because that’s how I work but I’m sure other people will be able to see the technological advances or backwards stuff but what I’ve seen is a big tension between national government and local government in England. That’s been going on in Scotland for some time. It’s now come to a head in English where there’s been devolution created with directly elected mayors in some of our biggest cities and they’re now saying, ‘No, you can’t do it like that,’ even though we’ve got a point now, probably better than we’ve ever had done on a consensus between national and local government that there is something that needs to be done and they both need to do something about it.

Matthew:  So for me, I guess the follow-up to that is do you see the necessary power and money being developed down to the regional level first and then trickling down to a local level where you can see this kind of grassroots bottom-up action? I think your point there about the analogies between the North of England, for example, and Scotland and this push for this power to make local and regional decisions feels like there’s a template potentially for other regions in the UK to follow.

Polly:  Yeah, but it’s not working right now, is it? We’re trying to establish a kind of parallel conversation [laughter] which is slightly more polite, maybe a bit more diplomatic and maybe a bit more long-term and establishing some kind of political consensus where we say, ‘Right, brilliant. You’ve legislated for net zero by 2050. That’s fantastic! Legislation, as we know from other previous legislative targets like ending child poverty and so forth is only as good as the frameworks and policies you put in place to make them true. So legislating for net zero sends a very strong signal that that’s what you want to happen but it’s not enough on its own. You need to be able to send some other signals.’ We know, as local leaders, that we want to do this. We also know you can’t do it without us. We may well be the transport authority in our local community. We’re certainly the planning authority in our local communities to a greater or lesser extent. We are the ones who decide things like building standards where we are up to a point and that’s where I’ll get to. We also make decisions about the services we deliver and the services we procure. We’re the ones who make decisions about what kind of fleet we have, how we run our buildings and we’ve got a large kind of bully pulpit, which is what the language is in political science, about what we can do within the wider community, both our residents and businesses. In that circumstance, if the government can’t do it without us, the government needs to understand what we can do and make sure that either we have to do other things or that they enable us to do it. Every time local authorities try to do things that are net zero, they bump up against national regulation which gets in the way. So, for example, on community energy, there might be limitations on what OFGEM will let happen. Highways England drives massive, great big urban motorways through a significant number of local areas and if you’re trying to tackle decarbonisation or air quality, Highways England doesn’t have an obligation to do deal with that and so, therefore, you can’t actually deal with the biggest problem. However good your stuff can be, and it is extraordinary what some local authorities are managing to achieve in these circumstances, quite often there will be a particular combination of circumstances which will make their position unique. Nottingham, for example, is one of the very few local authorities that owns its own bus company and so has, therefore, been able to do more on public transport than many other places. Cornwall managed to secure a devolution deal, like Matt was saying, where they managed to get the power to cap public transport fares and, therefore, they’ve actually seen an increase in the number of people using public transport in Cornwall, one of the most rural places in the country. So when other county councils say, ‘Oh no, we can’t possibly do public transport here,’ now you can say, ‘Actually, think about it creatively. There are other ways of increasing uptake on public transport by asking for those powers if you are in the conversation with government about devolution deals.’

Rebecca:  So are we looking at very context-specific solutions for different regions or is there a broader vision that you can see lots of local authorities being bought into in terms of what they’d like to see for the future and how they would like to drive this change forward at local levels?

Polly:  If we keep talking about everything being bespoke, it’s suggesting that everybody is entitled to a Christian Dior gown. Now, I might like a Christian Dior gown of my own but it’s not a practical way of saying everyone can have one. What we can do is make sure there are some standard ways of going about it and it’s a matrix. Everybody likes to think that they’re unique but their uniqueness is the combination of particular circumstances.

Matthew:  That was what I was going to add there, Polly. I think that’s part of the attraction, isn’t it? Part of the sales pitch is that it can be bespoke but what you’re saying is if you treat everything as bespoke, nothing will ever get done.

Polly:  You can learn from each other.

Matthew:  You can’t scale up and you can’t learn from your neighbours.

Polly:  Exactly. Blackpool, Eastbourne and Brighton have more in common with each other as seaside towns than they possibly have with places very close by but they will also have some shared interests because they’ve got geographical proximity to places right by them which have got different political environments and so forth. You’ve then suddenly realised what is their energy resource. What are their social needs? What are their economic needs? What are their ambitions in terms of what they want to be able to design for their town? The biggest lesson I would say for anybody working in energy and climate who hasn’t really thought about their local council, apart from the fact they pay their council tax and whether they empty their bins, is they have a set of immediate pressing priorities, even without COVID, that they have to deliver. They have to deliver Adult Social Services. They have to deliver care for young people. They have to empty your bins. They have to keep the lights on and those kinds of things. If you’ve got climate-friendly solutions to those challenges, you’re more likely to get traction inside local government rather than if you come along and say, ‘Hello, I’d really like your help in saving the polar bear,’ because a polar bear is not in their list of priorities.

Rebecca:  So one thing I’m really hearing from you, Polly, is that local authorities have a central role to play but certainly, they’re overburdened and need support and more than that, it’s not just down to them. It’s working in collaboration with others like the regulator and with each other. Who else do you think needs to be part of that picture in driving change?

Polly:  Well, I think obviously national government needs to be but I think businesses have got a really important part to play. The energy sector generally, has got to do some really serious engagement with local authorities. I think somebody once told me that up until now that National Grid only really saw itself as having six customers because they were the big generators and they were the ones they had to deal with. Obviously, when we’re going to a multi-generator situation with a decentralised energy system, then you’ve got loads more people you have to engage with and that’s not really how our energy system has worked. In 2026, it’s going to be 100 years since the National Grid was established. The National Grid was established having built up from a set of small decentralised energy systems and they thought, ‘Actually, this is no good. These are great where they are but we need to standardise this (like Matt says) and make sure everybody can benefit.’ So we don’t know what a national grid should or could look like that will be suitable for a net zero world yet or if somebody does, they haven’t explained it yet to the kind of people who make decisions and that’s a really key thing.

Rebecca:  So bringing it all together, do you think that cities and communities will be able to step up to the challenge and play a role in the Green recovery if we can start to align these outcomes?

Polly:  Given encouragement and given the sense that this could be the national purpose that brings us together, I think COVID has had some opportunities to bring us together as well as drive us apart. What people really need is some hope on the other side that we can reset things a little bit. I think that’s where local leaders and national leaders could come together and say, ‘Okay, we need to bury our differences on these things. We know we’ve got to tackle COVID but COVID has given us a foreshadowing of what a climate crisis could be like with these kinds of inequalities and these kinds of economic and health impacts, so we’ve really got to dig in and do this properly. That means investment in our communities for jobs and for better health.’ A lot of this will need to be done at local level, partly because local leaders are the ones who are better placed to build a public consensus and support for tricky things. The place in which you live is so important to your own wellbeing that when somebody starts mucking about with it, you want to be able to go and knock on their door and bother them about it and that’s what local government is for.

Rebecca:  So working together, building community, building bridges, creating jobs and that little bit of hope that you mentioned earlier is critical.

Polly:  Yeah, we definitely need a bit of that.

Rebecca:  Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much for your time, Polly. That’s been absolutely fantastic.

[Music flourish]

Matthew:  And now it’s time for a final segment, Future or Fiction. In this segment, Fraser pitches an exciting and innovative net zero technology idea and Becky and I have to decide if we think it’s the future of the planet or if it’s completely in Fraser’s imagination.

Fraser:  Thanks very much, Matt. Yes, so last episode, I want to note just for the record that both of you guys got the question wrong. We were talking about space-based solar which is, in fact, the future allegedly but this week, we have something a little closer to home. This week’s technology is called human energy. Humans move all the time and use increasingly small devices that require very little power to operate, like smart watches, etcetera. With this in mind, scientists have designed a wearable microsystem that turns human movement into energy to power things like smart watches. Future or fantasy?

[Music flourish]

Matthew:  Mmm.

Rebecca:  So I actually know a little bit about this [laughter]. I know that this is called the Pieozelectric Effect and it’s where you turn compressions or tension in a material into energy. This is one of the very few things that I learnt during my PhD which has turned out to be quite useful [laughter].

Matthew:  Right, so she’s done a PhD on it. Great, okay. I’m at a massive disadvantage here.

Rebecca:  I mean I’ve not seen it applied in a real context. I’ve seen it applied in little things where they’ve had piano steps on the walkway, people tread on them and it generates sound and similar concepts.

Matthew:  Don’t they have something similar with a dance floor as well where the kinetic motion would set off the lighting?

Rebecca:  Yeah, and do you know why I got really interested in this? It’s because when I started my PhD, I desperately wanted to become a ski designer. Clearly, something happened along the way [laughter] but the reason I learnt about this technology was that there was talk about it being applied in skis so that the faster you were travelling and the more vibrations, you could then harness that energy and use it to create additional tension in the skis. That’s why I learnt about it in the first place. I’ve never seen it being applied in the context that you’re talking about, Fraser, but I can’t imagine it’s too much of a leap to say that it is, indeed, the future.

Matthew:  Hang on, before we go to the big reveal, you were saying for what type of application, Fraser?

Fraser:  In this case, we’re talking about a microsystem as in a wearable system, something that you would have about your person, that would convert your movements into energy to then be used to power small appliances about your person.

Matthew:  Okay, but for instance, I know that they did this... it wasn’t Rolex but it was another watch company who did this with kinetic motion and I think it would charge the watch battery.

Rebecca:  I think you’re right.

Matthew:  I’m potentially talking rubbish here [laughter]. I ought to fact check myself there [laughter] but I seem to remember it’s one of those things where you look through the catalogue on a plane journey, although it was years ago when we used to go on those things... is this ringing a bell for you guys or not?

Rebecca:  I feel like it is.

Fraser:  I don’t want to give the game away [laughter].

Matthew:  I wondered why you were looking at me blankly [laughter]. Right, I’m going for a yes but for the electrical items you’re talking about, I don’t think it’s commercially viable today but I’m sure people are looking into it.

Fraser:  So that’s a future from Matt. Is it a future from Becky?

Rebecca:  Yeah, yeah, a future from me.

Fraser:  Very unsurprising since we somehow have an expert in this field as well [laughter].

Matthew:  And was going to be one of the engineers doing this for skis [laughter].

Fraser:  In this incarnation, researchers in the UK have developed a knee brace that collects electrons while you walk. As your knee bends, metal veins vibrate like a guitar string to produce electricity that can then connect to a small watch or a small battery to power small physical appliances.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  Thanks, Fraser, for that and thanks to everyone else for being with us. We release new episodes every second Thursday. Today is Thursday, 19th November and so the next episode will be in your feed on the first Thursday in December. Please subscribe so you get Local Zero automatically downloaded to your feed. Spread the word and tell people around you about this exciting new podcast and everything that you’re learning from it. Also, we can answer your questions. Contact us on Twitter with the hashtag #LocalZero and @EnergyREV_UK with anything you want to know about climate change, energy and local solutions and we’ll do our best to answer all your questions in future episodes.

Matthew:  Next time, we are looking at the path to net zero at the city level. We’ll be focusing on Glasgow which is an especially interesting and pertinent case to us, so join us then. Goodbye.

Rebecca:  Bye.

Fraser:  Bye, bye, bye.

[Outro music]

Transcribed by

PODTRANSCRIBE