Climate Explorer: Oliver Woodford

Hello! I'm Olly, an Engineering PhD student, and committed climate explorer. For my part, as well as discussing with my friends and family how important it is for us reduce our impact on the environment, I've set up a community project to raise awareness on a wider scale. It's called Mpower Oxford, and we run a climate awareness fair in January each year, our first being this year. As part of that I want to create some empowering lesson plans on climate change for schools, and would be interested in hearing from anyone who'd like to help with that. Read about my motivations here.

Contraction & Convergence

In my last blog I spoke about a framework for inter-governmaental action on climate change called "Contraction and Convergence". I think this is a great system - a cap and trade system for the economists out there - and I feel that people should be aware of these potential solutions; it helps people to be more optimistic about what can be done, and also gives them the opportunity to demand this kind of action from their leaders.

With this in mind I recently gave a talk on C&C to the graduate body of my College - not the whole body, but about 15 people, with differing levels of understanding about the climate change problem. By the end, everyone understood the C&C proposal, and we had a little debate about whether this was better than taxing emissions (they are similar but not identical). Feedback was very positive, and I think it helped to not only inform the people there about C&C, but also about the nature of the climate change problem in general.

Al Gore live

Last night I had the privilege of seeing Al Gore give his lecture, "An Inconvenient Truth", live in the Guildhall in Cambridge. Similar in form to his film, the experience was more inspiring still. It was an evening that will remain with me as an outstanding example of oratory that sucks you in and touches your heart. He didn't delve too much into the science, nor did he answer any questions - he merely provided compelling visual evidence for why must act, and anecdotes on why we aren't, simply, humbly, and with a sense of compassion and understanding for all 500 people there, and left it at that. It was of no surprise that the applause that followed was a full two minutes of unbridled admiration for the man, and that the speaker who thanked him was visibly emotional, and simply said what we all felt, which was to thank Al for using his gift for communication on this subject.

I left both angry and sad, but above all with a renewed sense of resolve to not rest from raising awarness and demanding government action on climate change until we have a workable framework in place for limiting carbon emissions to an acceptable level. If you have the opportunity to see this talk it should not be passed up, because, while all to often it can seem like the battle for peoples hearts and minds on this subject is unwinnable, this can give hope that it isn't. More than that, it is an excellent opportunity to take along all those friends and colleagues we all have who are ambivalent or sceptical of climate change.

The Stern Talk

I recently went to a talk by Nicholas Stern, author of The Stern Report, here in Oxford. In it he gave a brief overview of his report, but for those lacking an understanding of the economic terms and ideas it was quite hard to follow. However, he did say that climate change is the "greatest market failure ever seen". He was hopeful that corporate and individual responsibility could play a part in overcoming this, but wasn't forthcoming with ideas as to how we can correct this intrinsic failure in the market, but I guess that wasn't his remit. He gave an amusing commentary on the Blair/Brown leadership, saying he reported separately to them both. I also recently went to a talk on the concept of "Contraction and Convergence", a very simple, elegant solution to the problem of how to fairly cap and distribute carbon rations developed by the Global Commons Institute. The talk was great, and the idea is one that I feel can really change the market failure that Stern talked about into something that balances the interests of businesses and the environment in a global, open market. I'm planning to give the same talk to my College peers - hopefully it will convince them that it's possible to care for the environment and the economy at the same time.

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