Britain

You would be forgiven for thinking that this recession malarkey was likely to curb the success of fairly traded, ethically sourced and organically grown products.

After all, if you’re battling to stay off the dole, and struggling to stay in demand, how righteous your rice, how principled your pumps, or how moral your mung beans are has got to be the last thing on your mind. Surely you’ll just hold out for the latest deals on industrial sized packs of fish fingers and head for shops where you can buy forty jumpers for £5.99. It’s those deals that will see you through the bleaker times is it not?

When faced with the enormity of an issue such as climate change, it is all too easy to feel utterly helpless. As we are force-fed more fatalistic griping about the aggressive advance of climate change, a passive fatigue kicks in and it becomes all to easy to surrender to our bleak fate.

But a new campaign has been launched which aims to combat the sense of feeble paralysis that has the nation in a headlock for too long. 10:10 challenges Britain to cut carbon emissions in the UK by 10% in one year. The brainchild of Fanny Armstrong, filmmaker behind The Age of Stupid, and in collaboration with The Guardian, 10:10 asks individuals, schools, hospitals, businesses and organisations to cut their emissions by 10% in 2010. How? Just by making simple changes to lifestyles, homes and workplaces.

In the ever-present bid to turn ourselves into a greener, cleaner species, there is perhaps no better place to start than the energy issue.

The UK government has of course got stuck in to the debate, forever setting new benchmarks and making inflated pledges about the move towards renewable energy. But according to the WWF, only 2.7% of UK electricity in the UK is renewable, and less than 1% of energy overall. In fact, carbon dioxide emissions have actually risen recently due to the rise in the price of gas, meaning more coal (which produces the greatest amount of CO2) being burned instead.

But while sometimes it seems that the government is all talk and no trousers, as individuals we can’t relinquish our own role in all of this.

Ofgem have announced plans to create four ‘smart grid cities’ in Britain. The regulator have set aside a whopping £500 million from customers’ utility bills and are set to start rewiring the nation’s electricity system. The plan is to move away from the need of fossil fuel powered plants, and start instead to use more localized forms of generation based on renewable energy. ‘Smart grids’ are intended to be able to handle large amounts of power from wind farms, and allow households that have their own micro-generation, such as solar panels, to supply electricity back to the grid.