Local Government
Woking, Stoke-on-Trent and Haringey are just three of the local authorities taking charge of their own energy supplies
As fuel prices rocket and climate change sets in, many local areas are taking steps towards energy self-sufficiency. Councils are hoping to reclaim the glory days of the 1870s, when the likes of Joseph Chamberlain, mayor of Birmingham, revived his local economy through the municipalisation of local energy and water.
New financial institutions and instruments created by cities such as New York, Melbourne and Berlin have made it easy for large building owners to retrofit their properties without impacting their bottom lines, as Julia Thayne from The Global Urbanist reports.
Buildings contribute approximately one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. They use about 40% of the world’s energy, 25% of its water and 40% of its resources. In fact residential and commercial buildings alone consume approximately 60% of the world’s electricity. As much as I would like to believe that turning off the lights for an hour every Earth Day (as I used to do during my elementary school years in the US) is more than just a symbolic gesture, it’s not; we will not only have to alter our behaviours fundamentally, but also upgrade our buildings’ energy systems, if we want to decrease the built environment’s impact on the physical environment.
