My battle to cut carbon: a baffling, frustrating path to a more honest life

It was harder and cost more than I'd thought – but in the end, reducing our household's footprint gave me a sense of hope

Madeleine Bunting
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 6 September 2009 21.00 BST
The thinker Amitai Etzioni comes up with a useful concept in the current edition of Prospect magazine when he talks of "moral megalogues" – mass dialogues over right and wrong. They "involve millions of members of a society exchanging views with one another at workplaces, during family gatherings, in the media and at public events. They are often contentious and passionate and, while they have no clear beginning or end, over time they lead to changes in culture and people's behaviour".
The great megalogue of our age is over the environment, and it's been given a big boost by the debate over the 10:10 campaign (the pledge to cut your personal emissions by 10% in the next year), which the Guardian is backing. Over the last few days this commitment has been criticised as smug moralism, pointless and a middle-class luxury. The criticisms smack of self-justifying apathy – and having spent some time exercising these arguments in my head, I reckon they are all misplaced.
It started a few months ago when this megalogue finally prodded me into belated action. This is not an edifying tale and brings me no credit, but it is probably not that unusual. In as much as I thought about the issue I presumed our family was vaguely environmental; we had had one holiday with flights in the last five years, we cycled and walked, we recycled, we composted, we didn't turn up the thermostat. Pale green, I guessed, except for one awful indulgence. It's the beast that made me fall in love with a draughty old house in Hackney, it's the beast that probably gets more caresses from me in winter than all my family put together … an Aga. George Monbiot probably won't speak to me ever again.
But in June I braced myself. The Aga has prompted the same response from every energy expert and plumber who came to the house: a sharp intake of breath. It crashes all their carbon calculation software programs – the only guidance I can get is from Wikipedia, which maintains that an average gas cooker uses just 2.6% of the gas of a modest-sized Aga annually. Ouch.
At least deciding to abandon the Aga was blindingly obvious. But from then on, I've been introduced to a world of baffling complexity. This is not 10:10 territory – we'd done our first easy 10% a while back – but probably 40:12 (the figures get mighty confusing). Imagine someone who has never heard of money and how it works – interest rates, pensions, mortgages and insurance – and you get a sense of how useless consumers like me (we never read small print, never remember to shop around for utilities) stumble over kilowatt per hour.
So it irritates that almost all energy-saving initiatives promise it's easy. It's not. Take something basic like loft insulation. I saw the ads promising government grants, and thought here's a quick, easy win that pays its way. But the insulation expert took one look at my attic stuffed with boxes and grimaced; to increase insulation to the requisite 270mm and install loft boarding (so you can still use it for storage) is likely to require attic re-engineering.
The truth is that reducing household carbon (by far my biggest source of carbon) is complicated and confusing. Even trying to establish your carbon footprint produces wildly varying estimates (our house produces either 12 or 22 tonnes of carbon a year, depending on the modelling used). There is now no shortage of information around – we got help from the Energy Saving Trust and the London-based Green Homes – but, like pensions, who knows best?
Nor is it cheap. This is the horrifying bit. Our small budget was pathetically inadequate. Boiler upgrades, double glazing, solid wall insulation: these are expensive investments which may reduce energy bills but won't pay for themselves for decades. But the bottom line is that more affluent households have a far bigger carbon footprint and at least some resources to cut it, so they should get on with it.
Finally, you bump into the frustration. Nine million homes in England and Wales have the potential for microgeneration (nearly half) and could generate 30% to 40% of household electricity. Germany cottoned on to this over a decade ago and introduced a feed-in tariff (paying people for the electricity they generate) in 2000 which has doubled the proportion of renewable energy and encouraged the growth of the biggest solar energy industry in the world. But in the UK, solar panels are a luxury for the middle classes, and even after the introduction of a feed-in tariff next year, will remain so. (There is also the dismal prospect that those without microgeneration will be subsidising those who do through rising electricity bills.) It seems baffling that government encouragement is so slow and inadequate.
This may sound suspiciously like a moan but it's rather a plea for more honesty, more government commitment. Tell it like it is. Carbon cutting is not a one-off, it is a process we will spend the rest of our lives on – as will our children. There is going to be a sharp learning curve as the ignorance which saw us cheerfully spew carbon is shifted. In time, we will be as aware of our carbon output as we are currently of our bank balance or mortgage payments.
The funny thing is that this learning curve generates unexpected consequences. It becomes energising along the lines of "if I can do X then perhaps I could do Y". It generates a renewed sense of agency, even a measure of hopefulness. And you begin to appreciate how we have been trapped in a debilitating apathy intimidated by the scale of the problem. Our lives are built on a web of denial about the impact our behaviours have on our environment. When you start to dismantle this, you are stumbling towards authenticity: a reconnection with the basic resources, such as fossil fuels and water, on which our wellbeing depends. Try it and see.
That's why the language of "personal sacrifice" is so wide of the mark. Carbon cutting is about a more honest life, lived not on the wild, implausible delusions promoted by a consumer culture but about recognising the crucial truth about the constraints of the planet and how we need to live within them. As for smug, no aspect of our predicament affords anyone such satisfaction.
So the myriad of tiny daily routines which need to change – such as turning taps off while you brush your teeth – are not pointless but about reconnection and awareness of what sustains your life. It is about living intelligently; AS Byatt quotes a Swedish entomologist in The Biographer's Tale who argues that "we are an animal that needs to use its intelligence to mitigate the effects of its intelligence".
So to return to Etzioni's concept, I would argue that this megalogue is not about morality so much as looking for a life which is more honest and intelligent rather than one resting on a shaky edifice of dangerous illusions. I started out in hair-shirt mode, got buried in some of the finer details of loft insulation and emerged pondering what a (more) honest life might look like. It's been a very disconcerting experience. What's at stake in 10:10 and carbon cutting is not a harsh new morality to preach about and use to pass judgment on, but a proposition of how to live which is compelling.