Putting people at the heart of the Green Deal

Climate change and resource depletion are global issues, and it will take a global effort, bolstered by human ingenuity and political leadership to solve. It is nothing short of alarming how far away we are from the solution: particularly given that we have the human ingenuity in spades. I find myself putting it out of mind in the same way that I banish existential angst – the idea of a world that we have used up, changed beyond recognition, where people suffer, struggle and die is too difficult to live in, even in my mind. Harder still to think that some people are, to all intents and purposes, already living in that world. We’re running out of time.

This is the context in which many green activists, understandably, operate in – and it influences the way they campaign and advocate for sustainable causes. It makes them dedicated and passionate, eager to discover evidence that helps to bolster their arguments. And as technology improved, the ability of the activists to paint a truly terrifying picture of the future, and the way to avoid it, grew, reaching more people than ever before.

But it hasn’t been enough. As the (excellent) Futerra climate change marketing report ‘Sell the sizzle’ says, “threats of climate hell haven’t seemed to hold us back from running headlong towards it.” Taking a ‘greener than thou’ stance motivates a minority, but distances the majority. I remember attending a Fabian Society panel discussion a few years ago where Eugenie Harvey, the then Executive Director of 10:10 gently remarked that we always had to remember that “no-one did climate change on purpose”. I loved the turn of phrase, because it really captured the other part of ‘marketing’ the alternative to a ruined, changed world – the part where you empathise with the challenges that normal people face, the reasons they do (and don’t) use energy in the way that they do, and orientate your solutions around them.

I volunteer for Sustainable Moseley (SusMo) a place-focused green group, and we quickly learned that homes, health and families were (oddly) far more motivating to our neighbours than fire, floods and disease. We were lucky enough to win the resources to show people how renewables and retrofitting could work in reality, and captured the support of the community by ‘selling the sizzle’ – a vision of a community that is healthy and happy, clean and cheap to run. Furthermore, by working with people in their homes, it was possible to see where domestic, regional and global need came together.

I remember one home in particular where the family could no longer comfortably use the living room. The home was built in the 1890s, and at the time, the water table in that part of Birmingham would have been lower – due to the industrial activity at that time. This no longer takes place – so the cellar that would have been cool and dry in the 1890s was now damp, unusable, and right under the living room. The family needed the space, and the heating was on near constantly in an effort to make the room comfortable. It wasn’t working though, and with elderly and young family members under the same roof, their heating bills were astronomical, and climbing.

It’s fairly disheartening to recognise the handful of experiences we had here are replicated thousands upon thousands of times, all over the country. But working with people in their homes to address issues around energy efficiency is effective, and done correctly, transforms lives.

It’s why the Green Deal has real potential (provided that it sticks to its own golden rule). It could improve the lives of those thousands of thousands – and save a lot of energy en masse. But it will need to overcome some challenges if it is to bring people out of fuel poverty, and further, to have a profound effect on a household’s carbon emissions. These are summarised in ‘Solving fuel poverty: opportunities from Green Deal and Localisation’, a report for Localise West Midlands:

1.  The need for accurate assessment of a home, its occupants and their behaviour in order to make the correct diagnosis of the measures to be installed and the economics of paying for them.
2.  The need to recognise that different customers need different approaches and that the schemes need to take account of the variety of approaches needed to ensure that the fuel-poor benefit.
3.  The need to build trust in Green Deal among the fuel-poor, and overcome the mistrust that many people on low incomes feel towards official initiatives.

The report is well worth reading in its entirety – it brings together the “stunning” theory behind Green Deal with the real and complex needs of people in Britain. As with efforts to tackle climate change, the Green Deal will not work without people’s consent. It will not work unless they can see how the changes will change their lives. It will not work unless it saves people money. But it absolutely can work, for people and the planet. We must make it so.