Who Are we?
We are currently two interested people putting together the figures and a small group of people contributing all sorts of other skills.
I am a ventilation design engineer for a company specialising in Passive House design and am a qualified Passive House Designer. I am a mum to two primary age children and I have a part time disability. I'm doing this in my spare time.
In November 2015, I just wondered what the remaining carbon budget came to as a per person figure and whether we, as a family, were within that budget. Also, I wanted an app, or at least a spreadsheet, to work out how to best spend that budget. After a fair bit of googling I had not found anything on personal carbon budgets so this is the product of the research I did to find answers. |
Also involved (all voluntarily) are a Graphic designer, Web designer, Philosopher/Economist, Media Officer and anyone else who helpfully replies to our various questions about this.
Who else do we need?
We'd love to have a dedicated team of impartial, scientific trained, paid individuals or organisations who can put serious time and money into developing an easy to use, accurate and fun tool for individuals to plan their way off fossil fuels in a painless and possibly even exciting way.
So if you happen to be such an organisation and see the value in making this happen; PLEASE DO!
Or perhaps this idea and the relevant tools are already out there and we just haven't found them yet. If so, please let us know and we'll sit back and relax.
Otherwise, skills and expertise required are:
So if you happen to be such an organisation and see the value in making this happen; PLEASE DO!
Or perhaps this idea and the relevant tools are already out there and we just haven't found them yet. If so, please let us know and we'll sit back and relax.
Otherwise, skills and expertise required are:
- Technology numpties to test what we've made in the real world and tell us that it is or isn't legible
- Tech geeks to make it work
- Communications / Marketing people who know what turns Joe Bloggs on or off
- Joe Bloggs to get turned on or off and to tell us where we're going wrong
- People who can find money! Could be very useful
- Graphic designers / Artists
- Experts in any and all of the fields: Food, home energy, transport, stuff, societal emissions...
- Policy experts who can help us predict the future
- Famous and respected people to endorse and promote the idea
What needs doing?
We would like to see this idea developed and possibly the above scenario will happen. Great.
Otherwise, we would like advice, help, funding, partners... to develop the idea of personal carbon budgets. We want to create a tool / tools that enable people to understand what their budget is, where their budget is going, what changes are within their power to make and what changes will be required by larger society. Above all we want to make it FUN, EASY TO USE and ACCESSIBLE. |
Why do it?
At the moment governments are negotiating how to prevent catastrophic climate change. With debatable levels of success. But even if our governments were perfect and had a plan for reducing net emissions to zero within the time scales required to make our planet safe, they would fail without the help of individuals.
There are areas of emissions that most governments don't even mention for fear of being unpopular or irrelevant but which need dealing with if we are to stay within our global budget. Diet is one such issue, car and aeroplane use another. We are currently spending our remaining budget blindfolded. Most people, myself included, are unaware what causes a tonne of CO2. To make the transition off fossil fuels, we need to have easy access to the figures. And we need to be able to build that understanding into our day to day lives in the same way that we budget with money. |
Photos used under Creative Commons from JeepersMedia, alwright1