Nottingham city council climate protection strategy

(a) measured against the latest scientific thinking on the nature of the climate crisis the proposals of Nottingham City are too little too late.
(b)Although there are many proposals, some of them quite good, the big spending departments in the city - education, leisure and community and social services - appear to be dragging their feet - the proposals as they effect social services and leisure and community are weakest of all.
(c) Many of the policies do not appear to have been thought through and there is little evidence that the city is aware of the complexities and complications - e.g. the proposals to extend the Nottingham in Bloom initiative into arrangements for bio-fuel.
(d) Even the most dramatic policy proposals - carbon neutrality in 10 years for the council as an organisation - is too slow and it is not clear that the city realises what this would entail  as carbon neutrality is not explained.  
Carbon neutrality has many implications in regard to carbon offsetting arrangements that need to be explored. The issues are more complex than meets the eye
(e) The idea that planting trees absorbs CO2 and hence is a climate crisis mitigation measure is one of the ideas that is used uncritically. Planting trees is a good idea but the climate issues are more complex
(f) Energy efficiency improvements will be overwhelmed by growth and the city's growth orientation will undermine its energy and carbon reduction achievements. This contradict the the promotion of the city as a regional shopping paradise and the policies for a 24 hour city (both of which will generate plenty of greenhouse gases). The recent building boom in the city has and will lead to increased emissions - even if future new developments have some energy efficiency and embedded renewable energy features (as is proposed).
(g)There is a mistaken emphasis on large organisations, on high technology and high science based solutions - the key solutions are those involving low and intermediate technologies. A strategy to ecologically restructure the city would provide many manual and skilled manual jobs - the employment that the city has lacked for 30 years as a result of the decline of its manufacturing industry. This would help resolve the city's social crisis on its sink
estates.
(i) Many holistic community level projects involved, for example, in urban cultvation have made a start in a community level response to climate change - their role is not acknowledged or recognised in these policy proposals -
nor their importance in simultaneously helping deal with the social and health crises in the city. This is a particular failing here in the social services inability to recognise the importance of these projects.
(j) The city council appears to have no recognition of the interconnection between the climate crisis and oil and gas depletion - a gas crisis in the North Sea in the last year has only been partially 'averted' by more electric
power generation using coal supplies - this pushes up carbon emissions - and carbon prices on the European Unions Emissions Trading System - leading to increased electricity prices. Depletion in oil and gas pushes up energy
prices in their own right.
(h) The city (and social services in particular) appear not to recognise that adjustment to the climate crisis (and to oil and gas depletion) will put huge burdens on the city's most vulnerable people - for example in rising fuel
prices - or possibly an unemployment crisis as rising energy costs undermine the economy. It proposes no policies that would anticipate and help the vulnerable people in the city cope.
(i) The city council claims that it is proud and ambitious in its policies. These policies are not ambitious enough - though many individuals involved with the city may have caused to be proud of what they have done about the
climate crisis, the city as a corporate organisation does not.
(j) It has 5 years to set things right.

(A longer paper which evidences each of these points at length is available on request to  Brian.Davey@cooptel.net

Brian Davey
Feasta
www.feasta.org