Wednesday 23 December 2009

Zero Carbon (Schools) Task Force

On 10th December I presented Ed Balls, Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), Secretary of State and his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Diana Johnson, with the main recommendations of the Zero Carbon Task Force I have been chairing for nearly two years.

The Task Force and the officials were expecting him to breeze in and thank us for all our hard work, only to be invited to sit down and explain our thoughts in a robust conversation for some 20 minutes. The Task Force was persuaded early on that Zero Carbon was first about behaviour change, and only then technical, and we adopted the Bill Bordass mantra "halve the demand, double the efficiency and halve the carbon in the supply and you are down to one eighth of the emissions".