PEDAL’s suggested community CO₂ reduction plan:

Love it? Want to change it? Let us know what you think!

1. Our houses:

   • Mass insu­la­tion pro­gramme: 1000 – 2000 house­holds would have their houses insu­lated to reduce their emis­sions by 20%, sav­ing money and energy.
   • High spec. insu­la­tion pilot: help­ing to move tech­no­logy for­ward: 20 build­ings would be insu­lated using up-to-the-minute tech­no­logy to reduce their emis­sions by 70%, with sol­ar thermal heat­ing fit­ted where possible.

2. Our transport

   • Portobello Car Sharing Pool: we would set up a scheme to make it easy to car share, and provide loc­al maintenance.
   • Local Electric Bike Pools: much easi­er to cycle into town on a loc­ally main­tained elec­tric cycle, with sev­er­al sta­tions around Portobello. In addi­tion, pla­cing on-street covered and secure bike racks for people’s bicycles would make using one’s own bike much easier.
   • Portobello Local Office: would you work one day a week in a com­fort­able, flex­ible, loc­al office space?
   • Holiday Time-Share Co-op: how about a week or two a year in Portobllo’s own wind-powered Highland Cottage?

3. What we eat

   • Portobello Patchwork Farm group: run by an organ­ic gardener/farmer, who would work the land and involve loc­al people in grow­ing food, tend­ing hives, etc. The pro­duce will feed into the Portobello Community Supported Agriculture scheme.
   • The Portobello CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) scheme: work­ing with, orsup­port­ing, loc­al farm­ers to provide loc­ally grown, organ­ic fruit and veg on a weekly basis.

Let us know what you think by:

1. Dropping in to our office, 90 Portobello High Street – we can help with energy sav­ing advice (and give you a free energy sav­ing light bulb while stocks last!) and listen to your views on how Portobello can best tackle cli­mate change.
2. Coming along to a pub­lic plan­ning meet­ing in February/ March
3. Filling in our ques­tion­naire either with one of our door-to-door research­ers, here on-line (com­ing soon!), or from the lib­rary or the PEDAL office.

 

Immediate simple actions we can all take …

… to con­trib­ute to redu­cing our com­munit­ies emis­sions (and our bills!)

• Change your light bulb: switch­ing to energy effi­cient light bulbs uses 80% less energy, lasts for years and saves you money. PEDAL are offer­ing 1000 free energy sav­ing light bulbs to people who want to join our ‘Community New Year’s Resolution’. Portobello can lose 3 tonnes of Carbon in 3 months if 1000 people pledge to install a light bulb* this January.  Although 3 tonnes is just a frac­tion of our com­munity’s Carbon foot­print, it would be almost impossible for an indi­vidu­al to lose that much in 3 months on their own.  We want to show how effect­ive we can be if we work togeth­er as a community.

we could lose tonnes more CO₂ if we all tried a couple more ideas:

• Reduce car use: jour­neys under 2 miles are the worst offend­ers, so try walk­ing, cyc­ling or tak­ing the bus. If you need to take a car, share lifts (www.liftshare.com). Also con­sider using the City Car Club (www.citycarclub.co.uk)

• Unplug and turn off: almost £800 mil­lion worth of energy is wasted in the UK each year by leav­ing things plugged in and switched on at the sock­et – so turn TVs, games con­soles and mobile phone char­gers off at the mains. £140 mil­lion a year is wasted through leav­ing lights on in unused rooms, so turn them off on your way out!