Small success highlight the failure at governmental level

Faced with the scale of the climate change threat, one imagines that only governments working together can solve it. But the meagre progress since the 2015 Paris Agreement shatters that hope. Meanwhile, however, small community-based projects are doing their bit to sculpt a sustainable city, often melding environmental solutions with social justice.

Many people feel overwhelmed by climate change. As one of 70 million people in the UK, what can we do? Maybe recycle properly, cut down on the foreign travel and take up cycling to work. But it won’t make much difference as the big decisions are made by the giant energy and industrial conglomerates who can behave as they — and their shareholders — wish, while making the right noises for governments and protest groups.

On the other hand, 70 million people acting together could make a substantial difference and even 70 would make some inroads. One example is a couple in Walthamstow, northeast London.

Inspired by the title of a chapter heading in a book co-written by the economist Ann Pettifor, artist and filmmaker Daniel Edelstyn and partner Hilary Powell decided to try to turn every house on his street into a power station.

After investing time talking to his fellow residents, he used imaginative techniques such as creating banknotes to sell as artworks and sleeping for 23 nights on the roof of his home in the winter of 2022, he and his friends raised more than £100,000 to buy solar panels. So far Power Station, working with Octopus Energy have installed 15 rooftop panels while a local school has been wired up thanks to a separate fundraiser.

As well as generating renewable energy, the cheaper price charges have brought relief to a street where many residents are impacted by the cost of living as well as the climate crisis. As one resident told Edelstyn in his film about the project, he was using a blanket for warmth at night because he couldn’t afford to pay the bill in the wake of surges in domestic energy prices that are forecast to continue into 2024.

The original ambition has been to turn the street into a grid to send a message of what the government could and should be doing. However, different housing tenures – especially rentals and council tenancies – made that impossible. Ironically Walthamstow was in the first wave of boroughs to supply electricity with Walthamstow Power Station supplying power between 1901 and 1968.

In Lawrence Weston, a housing estate on the edge of Bristol, Ambition Community Energy has built a 150 metre high wind turbine after seven years of fundraising, meetings, and complying with planning requirements.

It estimates the turbine will generate electricity equivalent to Lawrence Weston’s domestic use, around 3,000 homes, and save 120,000 tonnes of CO2e over its lifetime. ACE estimates that about £100,000 a year could be provided as a donation to be invested back into the local community.

Away from energy and Too Good to Go is one of many apps aiming to tackle the shockingly large amount of food that goes to waste by showing users local restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores where they can buy “surprise bags” filled with whatever remaining fresh food was left over at the end of the day.

However, to deliver mass-scale change will involve radical reform of how the entire, say energy system, is owned and governed. According to People's Power : Reclaiming the Energy Commons, a book by US author and activist Ashley Dawson, there needs to be a “shift” from thinking of energy as a commodity and instead conceiving of it as part of the global commons.

His vision is to bring power under public and community ownership or control. But with the COP28 climate summit being chaired by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, that seems well off the radar. For now environmental and social justice campaigners will have to carry on looking for the small wins.