Author Archives: johnbelljubble

Life getting in the way

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I have to admit that I am struggling to keep all of my plates spinning.  The business is being much more successful than I could have hoped, which means that to keep the Transition Town, UK Power Shift, allotment and family nourished of my time requires me working early and late, burning the candle at both ends.

My allotment. The shed is in the neighbouring plot.

My allotment. The shed is in the neighbouring plot.


It is a crucial time of the year for the allotment, with all manner of life enjoying a little more warmth and trying to sprout up.  It is my job to try to make sure that the life that makes the best fist of it is edible.  Last year was my first year with an allotment, and I did a great line in slugs.  This year the plot is surrounded by a wall of garlic, with slug pubs and organic pellets ready to keep out those that make it through.  Slug pubs are glass jars buried in the ground, with a little roof overhead, with a little beer in the bottom – the terrestrial gastropod molluscs can’t resist a tipple.

The weekend just gone saw an all-day open meeting at the local Hospice to discuss community building in Berkhamsted.  The focus was on an interim and then long-term solution for a community centre in the town, which it lacks at the moment.  The centre of the town is also being developed in the upcoming years, with the location of the old Police Station, Library and Civic Centre up for grabs.  We want to organise what is known as a “charrette” (intense design meeting) involving as many of the townspeople as we can muster to make sure that the space meets our needs and not just want the council think it needs.

The other major initiative discussed on the day is called “My Compassionate Street”.  There is recognition that in 20 years’ time there will be as many people who are great grandparents as there are that are children, parents and grandparents combined.  I’ll try to grab the source and graphics on this for a future post.  So who is going to care for them?  My Compassionate Street will help us form those close neighbourly communities where we can help each other rather than rely on assistance from outside.  This will also enable collaborative consumption – where a street might buy a ladder and a power drill, rather than each household forking out and storing said items themselves.

I’ll stop there – I need to get on with some business work.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

My year ahead

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It was the Annual General Meeting of Transition Town Berkhamsted (TTB), and so time to think to the coming year and what we plan to achieve.  We are as always on the cusp of either collapsing due to burn out or on the verge of making that major breakthrough in getting a significant proportion of the people in Berkhamsted behind us.
TTB Logo
In terms of practical achievements that will take us forward, there ought to be a few.  There is the Community Growing Project where in return for volunteering with the local charity Sunnyside Rural Trust people have the use of a large polytunnel and surrounding ground to grow vegetables.  With a partnership with the Town Council to make use of and improve currently unmanaged space we could potentially open this up and start something like Incredible Edible in Todmorden.  This would sit alongside the transition-led Dacorum Local Food initiative, which is mapping out local food and making it more available and attractive for everyone in the area.

At the AGM we heard from TiK (Transition in Kings Langley), who have made some exciting steps forward in creating a limited company GUCE (Grand Union Community Energy) for the locally owned generation of renewable energy.  They have done a quick survey of Berkhamsted and I am excited about the opportunity to build on what they have achieved and bring it here.  There are plenty of potential sites, in particular schools such as Westfield and St Marys.

I’m quite keen to start up a series of competitions, at least among the members of TTB, for our own personal reductions in energy use, driving, consumption etc.

Alongside what we’re doing with our hands is what we are doing with our voices.  There is the engaging of other groups and organisations in the town to find our common aims and to form a community.  The third Building Community day is tomorrow, where we will be discussing the creation of a community centre and the development of the centre of the town to be a hub for people to enjoy.  We will also be talking about a burgeoning initiative called My Compassionate Street, looking at bringing back neighbourly support for those that need it.

There are projects kicking off with the local secondary schools, Ashlyns and Berkhamsted School.  Ashlyns are to start their own active sustainability group and are hosting high profile talks with TTB, one each term.  We’ve got Ian Roberts (author of Energy Glut) lined up for 16 October, and Mark Stevenson (pragmatic optimist) for 5 Feb.  Berkhamsted School has a massive Duke of Edinburgh scheme, and we will be chatting to the Year 9’s as they start out to enrole them in volunteering for TTB – in particular in setting up a series of films.

And then there is the Positive Money talk coming up on 11 June, which I’ve written about previously.

As for me, I have been re-elected Leader of TTB for a second annual term.  I plan to complete the strategy and firm up the structure of the group as soon as possible – I want to start getting my hands dirty.  I’ll be splitting my time between TTB, the Global Power Shift, my business, allotment and family.

Revolution?

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Last night I attended one of the joint meetings between Transition Town Berkhamsted and the transition group in the neighbouring town, Tring in Transition (they call themselves TinT rather than the other obvious acronym).  The meeting concerned what is termed inner transition, which loosely speaking means discussing the softer side of what we do – the mind-sets we face when trying to raise people’s sights over the horizon, plus our own health and wellbeing.

At this particular gathering we watched a video by Joanna Macey about what she calls “the Great Turning”.  She described how human society is currently going through a fundamental change, comparable to the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.  In her words, we are moving from the industrial growth model, to a life sustaining society.

She depicted the reliance of the current system on the resources we take from the planet (air, water, minerals, metals, fossil fuels) and on its ability to clean the waste at the end (be that liquid or gaseous pollution or the products at the end of their “life”).  Perpetual growth is doomed to fail, to self-destruct, because it does not allow for those resources and capacity to absorb waste to be finite.

The future as she sees it is one where financial growth at all costs is a thing of the past, and we have instead reconnected with the natural cycle in some way.

She may be right.  My question is this, though – can the free market and growth model really not cope with climate change and the inherent limits of the planet?

I see a couple of other potential futures.  Could we instead move to a society where at its core we have connected the circle by re-using or recycling all of our waste and pollutants into the next set of products?  The other future I see is where our society has so abruptly and completely collapsed that we have been forced to move back to the cycle of nature itself, and we have no choice but to wind the clock back a few tens of thousands of years to when we lived more simply.

In my eyes this is the single greatest challenge to the free market and perpetual growth models.  Can it (can we) acknowledge and cope with dwindling resources and an increasingly crippled natural world?  Or will it implode.  And how much damage will be caused in the meantime, either way?

It may surprise you to hear that I believe it can.  It would need some fundamental changes to the way we think and the processes we use, to incorporate the costs of our actions into the price we pay and therefore our financial decisions.

My concern, which hits me deep down in the gut as I write, is that if it can it will do so at such a great cost to the beauty of the natural world that generations to come will never be able to witness the wonders that we are privileged to be able to observe: the vast diversity of life on our planet.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

Tragedy of the Commons

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Our local supermarket is Waitrose.  I believe it is the largest of their branches in the UK.  They recently installed new barriers to the car park, which lead to an incident that demonstrates amply the tragedy of the commons.

It was a hazy early Saturday afternoon.  I’d normally do the weekly shop earlier in the day, but it had been more of a lazy start to the day that usual, you know how it goes, especially with three kids to deal with at the same time.  I’m afraid I do shop at Waitrose regularly, and I do drive a car to get there, and so it was that day.Berkhamsted Waitrose Car Park

It surprised me when approaching the car park that the usual lengthy queue was not present.  Where was everyone?  As I closed in on the new barriers, I started to see what was going on.

The car park was jammed full of cars.  Not just in the bays, but grid locked, engines humming, trying to find a space.  The staff were obviously having teething problems with the new barriers, which were up.  The barriers up, everyone had just driven in unthinking, and the chaos before me had ensued.

Not much point in ploughing on in, I thought.  I’ll wait here just outside the car park for a few cars to leave, to ease the situation.  Very sensible.  I switched my engine off.

A few minutes later, with no more cars adding to the mess in the car park, a few gaps in the traffic were starting to appear.  As had a small queue behind me.  I resolved to count five more cars out then I’d go in, and hope that the people behind me were awake enough not to all stream in in my wake.

I’d barely counted a couple of cars leaving before someone approached from behind.  An elderly gentleman leant down to my window.

“Are you having a problem?” he asked.  I explained about the faulty barriers, and my ploy to wait for the situation to ease before going in.  To be honest, I wasn’t surprised by his reaction – he started getting a little animated.  “There’s a queue behind you, you know!” he accurately pointed out.  I told him there should be a queue, if the barriers were working, and I’d wait a little longer.  He went back to his car in a huff.

Slightly to spite him, I waited for another five cars to leave (which was difficult to explain to the small enquiring voices from the back seat).  Found a space straight away.

What this little saga demonstrated to me was how blinkered and unthinking people can be in their daily lives, if all they do is concentrate on their own little piece of the overall jigsaw.  No wonder, I thought, that we are finding it so difficult to make the adjustments necessary to work together to reduce our impact on the future.

If we don’t realise that driving into a car park that is directly in front of us and is demonstrably over-full is a little on the stupid side, what chance have we got of realising that we are all collectively driving a massive wedge into our future and that of our children?

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

Idling our future away

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When it comes to actually making changes to the way we live to lessen the impact we have on the climate, I can typically see both sides of the argument.  Take wind farms as an example.

As a child I used to look round at the views on Anglesey and strain and struggle to find any view that did not contain signs of human activity.  Even looking into the skies did not help as I realised that the slowly dissipating stringy clouds were produced by planes soaring across the heavens.

So I totally get why people would not want our beautiful landscapes further derided by human structures with the erection of turbines*.

What I don’t understand and really can’t abide is where people needlessly waste energy and pollute.

In particular: idling cars.  Bloody people sitting in their cars with the windows down in a car park with the bloody engine on.  What on earth are they thinking?  Really makes my blood boil.Exhaust fumes - do not loiter - smaller

I have at times resolved to ask people, or confront them.  I’ve tried a lot of different tactics.

I might open with “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind me asking, what is the reason for you having your engine on at the moment?”

“What’s it to you?” would come the rather indignant reply.

“I’m worried about the fumes and the effect on the climate, not to mention that it’s wasting your money”

“Good point, thank you” was a recent response from someone sitting in a sports centre car park in their car.  They left the engine running.  I left them to it.

Or I might say “Excuse me, could you please turn your engine off?  My children are walking past your car and I’d rather they didn’t have to breathe in the fumes”.  More success with that one, but people can still get a little uppity.

Not many people realise that you only need to be stationary for 10 seconds or more before you would have saved money had you switched the engine off.  It is almost always worth switching off your motor if you stop at a traffic light (other than a pedestrian crossing – you don’t get much time to walk across the road), let alone when you are waiting outside someone’s home, or in a car park.

If you stop at a traffic light 10 times a day, and sit idle for 20 minutes a day on average, you would save between £180 and £632 per year on your petrol bill (depending on the efficiency of your car)**.  And your engine would last longer.  Imagine how much taxis could save.

I know at some times of the year people have the engine on to run the air conditioning or the heater.  Seems utterly daft to me – running a large petrol engine to heat a car?  Imagine doing that in your home, you’d feel a little daft.  But it’s when people leave the car running for no reason at all that really gets under my skin.
small image - no idling car sign
Oh, and by the way, it is illegal in the UK to have your car running while being on the mobile, even if it isn’t moving.  You need to switch it off and take the key out.

Thoughts on how (or whether) I should approach people much appreciated.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

* The way I think of it, though, wind turbines are temporary.   If we want to cook, heat, watch telly, have loads of lights on in the house – we need electricity.  So we have a choice, do we generate that electricity in a way that will arguably spoil some views for 20-30 years?  Or do we instead burn gas, oil and coal, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to damage our climate – and hence our views – effectively forever?  Nuclear is another matter – I say let’s put a load of reactors round the coast as well as build the wind farms.  Bring on nuclear fusion.

** Calculation: 10 stops of 20 seconds per day = 20 hours per year.  20 minutes idling per day = 120 hours per year.  140p per litre of petrol = £6.36 per gallon.  Saving between 1/5 or 7/10 of a gallon per hour = saving of £180 to £632 per year.

We don’t need to build all of these houses

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I don’t think there is a housing shortage in the UK.  House prices are too high and so there is a shortage of affordable housing.  To help reduce house prices the response has been to try and build more – the bigger the supply, the lower the price, or so the theory goes.  This places more and more pressure to encroach ever further on the precious green spaces within and around our towns and cities.

But the reason our house prices are too high has nothing to do with lack of supply, and much more to do with how money is created by our financial system.  This isn’t obvious and takes a bit of getting your head around.  Transition Town Berkhamsted are hosting a big event with a speaker Fran Boait from the Positive Money campaign to help us all understand.  I’m going to have a go at explaining, but am in no doubt I’ll make a hash of it – so come along to the talk or watch the video at the end…

It’s official, the financial system is broken.  You’ve heard it repeated over and over in the media.  I have recently been made aware of exactly why is it really is fundamentally flawed.  The inevitable consequence are the booms and busts and recessions that we have habitually seen on and off over the years.

The interesting point is that there is a way to fix it.  Not one you’d hear of much in the mainstream media to date.  There is a growing movement called Positive Money that are lobbying and raising awareness of the issue and the obvious fix.

Technical bit – from reading the book Modernising Money: How Our Monetary System is Broken And How It Can Be Fixed, by Ben Dyson and Andrew Jackson.

Ask yourself this – how is money created?  You probably think of the royal mint, or the Bank of England.  You’d be wrong.

97% of the money in the UK economy is created by a bank giving someone a loan.  All they do is open an account for you with a positive balance, and note down that you owe them that balance plus interest.  No physical money needs to exist for this to happen.

The banks want to loan as much as possible, because that is how they make a profit.  And they don’t need that much in reserve to make those loans – if they loan you £100, they need much less than £100 to start with, and they can reduce this further by immediately selling on the fact that you owe them some money to someone else.

And ratio of their capital to the value of loans they make is lowest for mortgages.  So of the money they give out, they want to give as much out for mortgages as they can, so they can loan out more and increase their profits.

Following a recession, banks are less willing to loan out money.  When they loan to people to buy houses, they notice that house prices start to go up, so they want to attract more people to take out mortgages, so they lower the mortgage rates slowly, and people are willing to take out larger mortgages, and house prices go up.  House prices are going up, so more people want to invest in housing, so more mortgages are taken out, and house prices go up again.

In short, house prices are too high because banks create money, biased towards the housing market, which is relatively fixed in size, so the more money floating around the housing market, the more houses cost.

It also leads inexorably to booms and busts, as bank loans tend towards the housing market and financial assets, which creates no real value in the economy.  This creates an asset bubble, and a recession ensues.

The fix is simple, and of course very difficult.  The loophole in the law that was put in place in 1854 to stop banks from creating money is fixed – banks cannot create money by a trick of accounting, by creating a loan.  Instead money is created by a central bank, such as the Bank of England.  Profits from the creation of this money goes to reduce debt or spend on something useful, and the money created is directed towards a productive part of the economy.  Booms and busts are a thing of the past, and asset bubbles cease.

I am in no doubt that this makes little sense to most readers, so come along to the talk, read the book, or watch this video. It’s really good:

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

It’s Started

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I imagine this is how some people felt years ago before going into a battle.  A kind of serene calm has taken hold of me, with the inevitability of what is about to ensue washing over my consciousness.  I know that humanity will eventually be persuaded to take meaningful action on climate change – that is inevitable, as nature won’t let us do otherwise.  What we need to do is all we can to bring that date as near to now as possible, to limit the damage we are causing to the lives of our offspring.

Alongside the work with Transition Town Berkhamsted, I have been networking with members of national organisations to see how I could help direct activity to be more coherent and co-ordinated.

I’ve spoken with and am very grateful for the time of the many people to whom I have spoken and got acquainted.  I am constantly left gob-smacked by the level of knowledge, eruditeness and enthusiasm of the folks involved in helping us move on to a fairer world.  In no particular order, thank you to Melanie Coathe of RSPB, Michael Davies of StartUK, George Marshall of COIN, Guy Shrubsole of Friends of the Earth, Ben Brangwyn of the Transition Network, Ed King of RTCC, Chris Church of the Low Carbon Community Network (LCCN), Becky from 38 Degrees and Nicolò Wojewoda of 350.org.
lccnlogo
There are a couple of very interested leads among there.  LCCN ran a conference about a year and a half ago with the purpose of bringing together these disparate organisations, and are planning on running another in the Autumn.  I have spoken on a couple of occasions with Chris Church, the current chair of LCCN, and I may well get involved in helping to organise this conference.  One of the foci of the conference is to be supporting the leaders in climate action.
350-logo
The other very promising lead is with 350.org.  They are an organisation that grew up in the States, where the focus has been on persuading organisations, funds, cities, colleges etc to divest their investment portfolios from fossil fuels, with the realisation that if climate change is to be defeated there will be £trillions of related stranded assets (i.e. investments that cannot be redeemed, e.g. the perceived value of fossil fuel reserves).

350.org are organising a Global Power Shift – a co-ordinated international grass-roots movement to address climate change and our response to it.  The first phase (to which I will not be going) is a global conference in Istanbul, bringing 500 climate leaders together to determine the strategy for the movement.
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The next phase will be national Power Shifts within individual countries.  I met Nicolò, the UK co-ordinator, at a demonstration ahead of the G8 conference in London (we were attempting to persuade US Secretary of State John Kerry to not approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would link the very dirty tar sands in Canada to refineries in Texas).

Subsequently I have joined the UK national team of 350.org, and will be involved in helping to map the context of the UK, coming up with ideas for campaigns, developing and sharing ideas for regional events and developing a media strategy.  I need to decide which of those areas to focus on – which would I be best at and enjoy the most?
gps-flyer-en
The LCCN opportunity and the 350.org one could work together – the LCCN conference could be a way to launch the UK Power Shift.  We’ll see what doors open.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

I’m an idiot

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On Friday last week I did my first media interview.  One of the two guys who formed TTB in the first place had been contacted by BBC Three Counties Radio as they were running a broadcast from Berkhamsted.  They’d found TTB on the web, and wanted to include us in their show.

Danny wasn’t available, and put them in touch with me.

Nick Coffer

DJ Nick Coffer


So I found myself in The Lamb, a real ale pub at the north end of the Berkhamsted high street, talking to a friend while DJ Nick Coffer and the BBC team were getting on with their broadcast.  My stint was to be 5 minutes long, and the rather attractive producer Emma was to call me over when my slot came up.  There were live bands playing to give a bit of atmosphere, and to promote the second Berkofest that will be held in September.

Emma waved me over, and I went up to the part of the pub where they were set up.  Nick was standing up at the bar had his headphones on and was holding a massive blue microphone.  He had his back to me, and was evidently talking to the main studio in Luton while some music was playing on the station (you couldn’t hear that in the pub).  I waited patiently for him to say hello before our interview, and took the opportunity to strike up a conversation with Emma about the radio business.

All of a sudden Nick turned round and started talking about TTB into his mic, getting some of the facts messed up, and without much warning I was live on air.  Once I’d jokingly cleared up his error, we got on to the serious business of describing TTB to the masses who listen to BBC local radio.

My first mistake was mentioning a low carbon future.  What is that, asks this stranger with a massive microphone.  He had now produced a pen to wave in the air occasionally while I was talking, for what purpose I could only guess.  I felt like I was playing lead violin while the conductor tried to correct my wayward tune.

I had a go at describing that, and I was then asked what we are doing in Berkhamsted.  For some reason, probably nerves, the question slightly threw me.  I half thought he meant what are we doing wrong in Berkhamsted that was causing problems.  I realise with hindsight he actually wanted to know what we are doing in TTB.  So I started talking about austerity and peak oil.  “We are finding ingenious ways to get oil out of the ground” I said to describe peak oil.  Listening back to the show later it seemed very much that I was inadvertently suggesting that the transition movement in Canada were good at boiling sand and bitumen to get the oil out.

We moved on, or rather Nick did.  Next question was a difficult one – “What’s the worst case of what could happen, for the people in Berkhamsted?”.  What could I say?  I said that the worst case I’d heard of was the oceans boiling away, but I didn’t think that would happen.  Of course I don’t.  But I said it in the heat of the moment (no pun intended).  With a bit of time bought I then described another possible outcome, where extreme weather gets worse, commodity prices go up and life generally gets more difficult.

At home later I thought – that doesn’t sound too bad really, as a worst case.  Why would anyone want to change their lives particularly with that as a worst case?  I’d avoided talking about mass migrations, food and water wars, mass extinctions, global starvation because I didn’t want to alarm.  I would have said these things if I had felt confident.  It has crystalized my opinion that without an accessible and trusted place for people to go to and to refer to in conversation or writing about the size and seriousness of the climate change issue, we are always going to be running up hill.

What is it that makes me think this issue is serious enough to spend a lot of my life dedicated to fighting it?  I was worried about abrupt tipping points and boiling oceans a few months ago, but no longer think that is likely.  When it comes down to it I am worried that we are seriously tampering with something that we don’t really understand, and what we do know is that we have pushed the climate system into a new and wholly man-made position, from which it will not recover.  The longer we continue burning, the less we know about the consequences, the more damage we do.

It scares the hell out of me.  But I imagine to others “we’re permanently damaging the climate” sounds quite benign.

Back to the disastrous radio broadcast, I did at least finish with a flourish, coining a new phrase “Fair Future”, which I compared with Fairtrade.  With Fairtrade you are being fair to others on the other side of the planet – with Fair Future you are being fair to the inhabitants of the future.  They may seem distance, but actually they are the people you packed off the school this morning.

The show is available to listen to for people in the UK on BBC iPlayer for the rest of this week.  Fast forward to about 1 hour 14 mins into the programme to hear the whole thing in gory detail.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke

Small Talk

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That was enough doom and gloom for a bit.  So how about a little bit of light-hearted fun for the weekend?  Emily, Maddie and I have recorded little videos of us describing three words (the same three words). The idea is that you post a reply at the bottom with your guesses as to what the three words are.

The twist (wringing hands) is that you only get the videos of Emily to start with – then in a while I’ll add the Maddie videos, and then mine. You need to guess after each set of videos is uploaded. Enjoy!

The first word described by Ems:

And the second word:

Then the third:

It’s happening, it’s us and it’s bad

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Peppa PigThe planet is warming and the climate changing, we are doing it, it is bad and we can sort it out.  I’m worried about this because the people who are going to feel the brunt of this are the same people I have to coerce into getting ready for school in the morning rather than play nurses or watch Peppa Pig.

We know the planet is warming by looking at the combination of surface and ocean temperatures.  If you just look at the surface temperatures it looks as though there are confusing pauses in the warming, but that’s just because the weather is what transfers heat in the oceans to the surface, and weather comes and goes.

A lot of people think that the warming is natural, as we’ve been in and out of ice ages in the past.  Or maybe it is changes in the intensity of the sun.  Unfortunately the earth was cooling for 7000 years before we got in on the act.  It’s not changes in the intensity of the sun, which has been going up and down with its 11 year cycle and been cooling – if it was the sun there would be less warming at night.

In fact, the only explanation out there that fits the observed data is that there are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have come from you and me.  The physics tells us that some heat will be reflected back to Earth if there are more greenhouse gases and the science bods have directly measured that the heat that is escaping is at the wavelengths of the greenhouse gases.

We know the greenhouse gases, the main one being carbon dioxide, have resulted from us because the extra carbon dioxide is the sort you get from burning fossil fuels rather than that naturally abundant in the atmosphere.

Excluding impacts of increased war or exoduses or ocean turning more acid, and considering impacts out to the year 2200 only, Cambridge University in the UK suggest that each tonne of carbon dioxide emitted costs $100 down the line (including discounting the value of the future).  Given we are emitting 35.6 billion tonnes per year, that means that we are causing $3.6 trillion damage per year.  That’s not considering the impacts on the natural world and the mass extinctions we are already perpetrating.

And all we need to do is switch things off, buy less manufactured stuff, spend more time at home and get behind energy sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide for the remaining energy needed to keep us going until nuclear fusion comes along.  It’s not hard, and at the same time it is very hard indeed.

Please do let me know what you think.

John Bell,

Ordinary bloke