Grassroots

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10736750

Grassroots

Feb 21st 2008 | WOKING

A MULTI-STOREY car park in Woking, a commuter town just south of London, makes an unlikely totem for environmentalism. Only the chimney on the roof and the faint smell of burnt hydrocarbons betray its status as the centrepiece of Britain's greenest local council. Besides parking spaces, the building contains a 1.3MW gas-fired combined heat-and-power (CHP) plant that supplies electricity and heat (the latter a waste product in ordinary power stations) to council offices, a hotel and several other city-centre businesses. With help from solar-powered parking meters, another CHP plant at the municipal swimming pool and an energy-efficiency drive, Woking has cut its carbon emissions by 21% since 1990, nine percentage points more than the national target.

Other councils are thinking along similar lines. The Isle of Wight, off the south coast in the Solent, aspires to become self-sufficient in energy over the next few decades through a combination of tidal power, a waste-to-electricity plant and efficiency savings. London has set up its own Climate Change Agency headed by Alan Jones, who provided many of Woking's green ideas. It wants to cut London's carbon emissions by 60% by 2025. To that end, its city hall is covered in solar panels and there are plans to fit cosier insulation to local-government buildings, build four waste-to-energy plants and buy 500 hybrid diesel-electric buses by 2010. Over half of Britain's 434 councils have signed the portentous-sounding Nottingham Declaration on Climate Change (or its Welsh and Scottish equivalents).

For local politicians, greenery is a welcome relief from duller concerns such as bin collections, lollipop ladies and parking charges. Fighting climate change allows councils—which are usually kept on a tight leash by an overweening central government—a rare chance to look and sound statesmanlike. Even without central-government approval, money can be found for big projects if the accountants are creative enough. David Pugh, the leader of the Isle of Wight council, is hoping to interest Southampton University, which has a big marine-research division, in his tidal-power plans. Woking's CHP plant was built by Thameswey Energy, a joint venture between the council and ESCO International, a Danish firm, set up partly to get around Whitehall's funding constraints. The company does business outside Woking too: it is planning a 6MW CHP system for Milton Keynes, in Hertfordshire.

Despite all this, saving the planet is not obviously a subject that comes within the purview of local government. The councils' lobby group, the Local Government Association, argues, perhaps optimistically, that councils are in a better position than distant Whitehall to persuade voters to mend their ways. Mr Pugh agrees: “I don't think the big hand of central government is best placed to address this. It's really a grassroots thing.”

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