Climate Jury Session Three

Preston People's Climate Jury Session 3

The third session of the Preston People's Climate Jury took place on Wednesday 21 February.  The topic for the evening was 'carbon footprints'.

Presentations and discussion focussed on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions linked to the activity of our daily lives and, at a national level, to the UK's energy system.

Professor Mike Berners-Lee

Professor Mike Berners-Lee from Lancaster University described the source of emissions for the average 'carbon footprint' for an individual in the UK. These were split roughly into four quarters:

• What we eat;
• Our housing;
• How we travel around
• 'Catch all' quarter for non-food items we buy and the services - including public services - we use.

Exploring this in more detail, Mike explained that meat and dairy products, and food air freighted from abroad, have a much bigger carbon footprint than plant-based foods, especially local ones.

At home, how we heat our houses has a big impact on our carbon emissions, but so does the attention we pay to energy efficiency - 'leaky' homes have a much larger carbon footprint. On travel, personal air travel alone accounts for 9% of the average UK carbon footprint because of the intensity of emissions it causes, whilst public transport accounts for just 2%.

Diana Ivanova

The jury heard next from Diana Ivanova, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds.

Diana explained that the carbon footprint of the average individual in Preston was very similar to the average for the UK. This is because the biggest factor determining the size of your carbon footprint is not where you live in the UK, but your income. There is a very strong link between what you earn and the size of your carbon footprint: the more money you have, the more goods and services you are likely to buy. This is especially true for some of the most carbon intensive activities of all, like travel, especially air travel: people with the highest incomes have a carbon footprint for air travel which is six times the size of those on the lowest incomes.

Robin Jones

The final speaker of the evening was Robin Jones, the Lancashire Area Lead for the Northwest Net Zero Hub.

Robin provided an overview of the UK's energy system including a breakdown of the sources of energy powering the National Grid, the network which transports electricity across the UK. This showed that nuclear and renewable sources of energy already account for almost three fifths of our electricity supply. As wind and solar are consistently the cheapest forms of energy generation, this share has the potential to grow rapidly. Gas still delivers the biggest share of power generation and is also the main source of heat in our homes and businesses.

Getting off gas will require a switch to alternative technologies including electric heat pumps which are already manufactured locally in Lancashire.