Clare Short: Heat pumps are solution

Oct 30 2008 By Clare Short

I have over the last few years been trying to change my life to reduce my carbon dioxide emissions.

There is no doubt we must all do this to prevent the world heating to such a point human civilisation collapses and few humans survive. The dinosaurs lived for 160 million years. We have only existed for 160,000 years. If we do not change the way we are abusing our planet, we will be gone within a few hundred years.

Most people across the world now accept there is a serious problem. What we lack is a sufficient sense of urgency. By 2020 at current rates, we will have gone beyond two degrees of warming. If we stop there, there will be terrible damage but we could live on, in a warmer planet. If we don’t stop, the problem will escalate out of control. All the ice will melt so the one third of solar heat deflected by ice will be absorbed. The Amazon will combust and add massively to carbon dioxide emissions. And the Siberian peat bogs will releases masses of methane to cause more warming. When it gets this bad, it will be unstoppable and very, very hot. The last ice age, when there was a thick sheet of ice above Birmingham and no humans, was only six degrees colder than today.

But it is the economic downturn on everyone’s mind. People will lose jobs and houses. My own judgement is it will be longer and deeper than the terrible times in the early 80s and the 90s.

The crisis has been caused by a massive growth of credit. In the UK, the same old houses increased three times in price in 10 years. People borrowed massively. It was a big bubble that had to burst. And it has burst at the same time across the world. Most banks over-lent and would have gone bankrupt without state help. And confidence has been destroyed, which means a long recession.

We need to use this double crisis as an opportunity to build a new settlement. We need to live more sustainably and this includes investing in the new technologies to create energy without fossil fuels. This is a big opportunity for Birmingham. We have lost most of our manufacturing. If only we could invest in new renewable energy technologies, we could generate good quality jobs.

One of the new technologies that can heat our homes, give us hot water, with cheaper bills and massively reduced emissions is ground source heat. I have just installed it. It meant drilling four holes 40 yards deep and installing pipes that draw heat from the earth. If you have more space, you can lay them in a long trench. This is simply heat from the sun beating on the earth for billions of years. You install a heat pump that concentrates it and connect it to your central heating . It works perfectly. The technology was invented in Britain but developed in Sweden. They now have it all over the country and are no longer allowed to heat homes with gas or oil. Swedish bills and emissions are massively reduced. On November 25th, I am meeting with the deputy leader of the council, with the firm that installed my system to see if we could start to install this in Birmingham. We could start with council housing that needs new heating systems.