Green Energy Republic

Everyday Superhero

By Kate Monson

Even those without a penchant for graphic novels, have answered the question, If you could have any super power what would it be? Invisibility? Invincibility? Telepathy? X-ray vision? Telescopic vision? The list goes on.

It is on this popular literary trope that Good Energy customer Harold Forbes has hooked his book, How to be a Humankind Superhero, and with it he has taken (a small part of) the discussion out of the realm of the hypothetical and into reality. Harold calls his book a manifesto to reclaim a safe climate, and with it he attempts to equip individuals with the tools and knowledge to tackle climate change in their everyday life. “What I intended to do was to write a book that was easy to engage with, fairly quick to read, and gave you some touchstones to making a difference to climate change,” he says.

Aware since childhood of the environmental problems facing mankind, two specific experiences prompted Harold to action. The first was an Ecobuild conference where he listened in despair to a succession of high profile commentators and politicians tell him how pressing the issue of climate change was without being able to provide him with any steps to solve it. The second was experiencing the eerie silence which descended upon the audience at the world premiere of Franny Armstrong’s film Age of Stupid. “It suggested to me that while the [audience] could relate to the question, there was no obvious answer.” How to be a Humankind Superhero is Harold’s attempt at finding that answer. “Once I started to research the area it quickly became apparent that while there is 'an answer' it is so huge and radical it will take an enormous shift to achieve. To get there will require a shift in our shared imagination.”

Harold uses the 12 Labours of Hercules as a framework for the book, commenting that, like Hercules, we as a society need to make a choice. “Hercules had to decide whether to take on the labours and become a god, or continue with an Epicurean life of easy pleasure and debauchery. The biggest thing that people have to get over is that choice. This is something they have to want to get involved in. Society changes because people want it to change, starting with just a few people and building. Politicians will only be as brave as they think the electorate want them to be and that’s why lobbying and making your views known is so important. The difficulty is that people feel they can’t make a difference. But it’s not just about individual action. The Labours in the book are about acting in a community and engaging with governments and businesses.” Harold’s call to action is perfectly aligned with the Good Energy philosophy. Together We Do This.

Harold discovered Good Energy when researching his book, and switched his home supply to our 100% renewable electricity last year. He has since undertaken a number of additional carbon cutting measures in his everyday life, including reinsulating his house, starting a compost heap and growing vegetables in his front garden. Good Energy is proud to have such ambitious, committed and impassioned individuals supporting our mission. But as Harold says himself: “Everyone can make a difference. You don’t need to write a book about it, but there are 12 small things that you can do.”

Free Range Children, Homemade Kids

Good Energy customer, homegrown energy entrepreneur – she has both solar-thermal and solar pv panels  on her North London house - and environmental journalist, Nicola Baird’s latest book Homemade Kids: thrifty, creative and eco-friendly ways to raise children (Vermilion, £10.99) has just come out. Drawing on Nicola’s own experiences as an eco-mum, it’s full of top tips, inspirational ideas and practical advice that will help you raise your child in an eco-friendly way.

Issues addressed range from decorating the nursery, choosing nappies and feeding, to childcare and play – with a whole chapter dedicated to energy efficiency.

Read an extract below:

Give your home a green makeover

Most families with antenatal appointments and a snapshot of their bump cannot resist doing up a room. But do you really need all the paraphernalia that advertisers bombard you with? Is decorating a room for your baby – or is it more for you? It may seem lazy, but doing nothing except insulating your home is the best present you could give any child…

A good tip if you are watching your budget is to concentrate on making the room you use most – perhaps your kitchen or living room – better insulated. Better draught-proofing may be all you need. It’s often more effective finding a friend to help you focus on what might need to be done, and you can even involve young children.

Draught hunting can be fun

Turn your efforts to hunt out draughts into a game with the kids. Explain it costs money to heat space. “Money that could be spent on fruit (or even sweets!)” is one way to motivate your assistants, whose mission is to find all the ways heat escapes from each room. Firstly organise a kit for your energy auditors with a tape measure, notebook, pen and super-sized matches. When it’s breezy outside, look for draughts, flimsy window coverings, gappy floorboards and absent insulation.

A good trick is to light a match to see if the flame and smoke go straight up. If they do it means that part of your home is well draught-proofed. Pay attention when the smoke angles off at 90 degrees as this is a sign of a major draught (front and back doors are often the biggest culprits for this). Get the children to use their fingers to locate the cold stream of air, then measure the gaps so that you can make a draught excluder.

Make a draught excluder from scraps

You can buy fancy designs – snakes, sausage dogs, longitudinal cityscapes – to place at the floor edge of all doors that let a draught in under them. Or you could create one yourself. If you don’t want to sew, stuff a pair of a toddler’s outgrown or your own raggedy woolly tights with scrumpled newspaper balls or unwanted material offcuts or cut-up or worn-out clothes.

What’s up the chimney?

If you’ve got a fireplace get your children to guess where is the biggest place in the room that could remove heat (clue it’s big enough for a child to hide in). When they eventually spot it, suggest fitting a chimney balloon.

Dress the room

Curtains work best if they do not cover radiators and are lined. With your auditors’ help, take notes so you can fix this (pinning lining material to your current curtains with safety pins or staples is an excellent quick fix if you don’t have much time or budget).

Find out more at www.homemadekids.co.uk

'Solar' by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan has just been awarded the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for Solar. As part of this quirky award for comic writing, McEwan will have a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig renamed Solar in his honour!

Here's what we thought of the book...

Reviewed by Sophy in the Good Energy marketing team 

A new novel by Ian McEwan is an eagerly-anticipated event – and when the plot of the novel revolves around finding solutions to climate change, it’s enough to make you pre-order the book from Waterstone’s (a first for me!)

So, does Solar live up to the anticipation?

First off, presumably to lighten what could be (arguably should be) such a serious subject, McEwan introduces humour for the first time into his work – with a series of comedic set-pieces mixed with much darker humour. The main protagonist, physicist Michael Beard, is a man of prodigious appetites – greedy for food and drink, greedy for sex and greedy for critical acclaim. And this unattractive combination eventually leads to his downfall. The analogy with our planet is clear – over-consumption is sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

A source of inspiration for the novel was McEwan’s trip to the Arctic in 2005 organised by Cape Farewell – the charity which promotes a cultural response to climate change, and a Good Energy partner. One wonders what happened to him there to lead to the farcical scenes (suspected frostbite to a very tender appendage, among other things) portrayed in the novel!

McEwan is known for his detailed and thorough research, and Solar deals with some huge scientific ideas and makes them easy for the layman to understand. As someone who works in the renewable energy business I loved how early on in the novel, a plan to develop an easy solution to climate change in the form of a rooftop wind turbine for urban areas gets abandoned later in the book in favour of massive-scale solar power from the desert in New Mexico.

For me, the most resonant part of the novel is when Beard presents to an audience of bankers his thoughts on climate change and the fantastic investment opportunities it presents – a speech I could easily imagine our own CEO making at a similar conference – only to be brushed off by the tall men in suits who are only concerned with the here-and-now and immediate returns.

McEwan chooses not to engage with climate-change scepticism in the novel – throughout the book man-made climate change is presented as undisputable fact. And when one of Beard's colleague’s expresses a concern that perhaps the climate isn’t changing after all, Beard reassures him: "It's a catastrophe. Relax!"

Opinions in the blogosphere are sharply divided as to the overall merits of the book. For me, the novel was not only entertaining but also managed to get a serious message across in a humorous way. But at times I felt McEwen was laying on the jokes with a sledgehammer, when a more subtle approach would have been more effective. Read the book, and make your own mind up – and please share your views with us by commenting on the blog.