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Stepping up the campaign
As you know, TEQs has long been an outstanding policy option.
Until now, we at the Fleming Policy Centre have focused our attention on discussing, debating and refining the system, but now we feel the time has come to push hard for implementation.
So we are building our campaigning nous both through training and through adding new team members, as well as forming new partnerships with other organisations that bring greater resources and influence to the cause.
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TEQs team grows again
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Roger Higman (pictured above left) is an environmental campaigner with great experience, who has joined us to support TEQs and to mentor our young team members as we revise our campaign strategy.
Tom Pashby (pictured above right) is a young campaigner who is joining us with great enthusiasm for TEQs and no small campaigning experience of his own. He is initially training with the Sheila McKechnie Foundation (see below), and will be driving forward our new campaign strategy from January.
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We are grateful to the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, who are supporting our campaign by providing valuable training opportunities at subsidised prices.
Tom (above) has secured a place on their five-month Influencing Change training programme, while our director Victoria attended one of their Campaign Masterclass days in July. Matt will be attending their "Using The Web To Win" session in November.
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Get involved!
Our callout in the last newsletter led to a number of useful connections. Thank you to those who got in touch!
At present we are particularly keen to strengthen our relationship with Friends of the Earth, so if any of you have useful contacts there, we'd love to hear from you.
We also have supporters interested in producing video materials and a radio show in support of TEQs, so if you have appropriate skills/ideas and would like to get involved, let us know.
To make contact, just drop Shaun an email. |
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Outstanding article
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We stumbled across this excellent article by Richard Heinberg, which we thoroughly recommend. He makes a similar argument to that drawn out in our recent academic paper. We argued, as he does, that political reality and physical reality (as revealed by climate science) must be reconciled, but Heinberg takes it one step further, making the case that economic growth is incompatible with addressing the destabilisation of our climate.
This is an important discussion, although TEQs' importance is not dependent on the position taken. TEQs provides the method for actually implementing the ambitious climate policy that is currently only talked about.
It would force human ingenuity to finally confront the challenge of creating thriving societies which do not destabilise our climate. Whether that transition is compatible with 'economic growth' (however defined) or not, it beats the option of a dead planet, hands down.
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Lean Logic, the masterwork of the late Dr. David Fleming - our founder, and inventor of TEQs - is currently available for just £15 a copy.
Get it while it's hot!
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Please follow our new Twitter account: @TEQsUK
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TEQs supporters become Members of the European Parliament!
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This year's European elections saw Dario Tamburrano, who translated the Parliamentary TEQs report into Italian, elected an MEP with the Italian 5 Star movement.
And Molly Scott Cato, a green economist with long familiarity with TEQs, was also elected a new Green MEP, representing the South West of England.
Both are keen to bring discussion of TEQs to the heart of Brussels, in partnership with our allies at the Resource Cap Coalition (RCC).
Meanwhile:
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Shaun travelled up to Blackpool for August's Reclaim the Power anti-fracking camp.
His workshop on TEQs was predictably popular there, with TEQs' approach of supporting and enabling reductions in energy demand representing the natural, positive alternative to the fracking approach of increasing energy supply at all costs.
The TEQs workshop appears briefly in the below video from the camp, from 2m14 onwards:
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Update from Dr. Chris Shaw, Oxford University Environmental Change Institute
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"My research collaboration with the Fleming Policy Centre (FPC) is allowing me to extend my networks of actors and organisations that have direct experience of the practical and political challenges to developing low-carbon behaviours. This is helping us develop and share a deeper and broader knowledge base for assessing the possibilities and limitations of alternative strategies for building public engagement with this aim.
I am happy to report good progress so far. I now have the assistance of Emily Cox, who will be working as an intern on this research. Emily is a PhD researcher from the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex. Emily's breadth of experience and expertise in low carbon energy transitions is a real boon to the project, and we are very pleased to have her on board.
I am also coming to the end of a series of interviews with a range of representatives from the networks we are engaging with. This process has produced invaluable insights into the current public engagement landscape. We will be using this information as we begin planning stakeholder workshops, due to run between March and June 2015."
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