Welcome to our new website. I am delighted that you have chosen to take a look at what we are doing here in Harbury to cut carbon emissions and work towards a sustainable future fit for our children and grandchildren.
These are big aspirations and sometimes you don’t fully realise the implications of what you are saying, when you write easy words such as those. It comes from the heart rather than the head. I think that if I did contemplate the full implications of a world fit for our children, I would quickly be overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge, so I don’t do too much thinking. Instead I focus on the near horizon, look straight ahead and do whatever looks useful, possible (and exciting). It all seems a lot more likely to deliver positive outcomes than the climate talks in Paris at the time of writing.
Harbury Energy Initiative has made a point of acting rather than discussing, although, of course, action comes with quite a lot of chat and thinking. Other people hold excellent seminars, conferences and workshops, so we feel it is our role to act. There are also plenty of forward thinking and well resourced national organisations, full of people who know what they are talking about, so we stick to working locally, using the tools that these organisations offer.
In the few years since we started in January 2010, we have gone from a small group of enthusiasts to an active group of 12 with two major projects and a growing list of small successes for our community. This year we started an electric car club, working with E-Car Club, one of very few village-based electric car clubs in Britain. From this we have created a social transport system delivering food to food banks and offering a free, green transport option to users of the local social agencies and surgeries. We can do this thanks to support from Big60Million, E-Car Club and the Heart of England Community Foundation.
We have gained funding to enable internal wall insulation for our community library, cavity wall and roof insulation for our rugby Club, provided a monitor for the village hall to show the generation figures for their solar panels, delivered two public events at the school and provided energy options reports for most of our community buildings.
Next target in our sites is LED lighting for the school and then we will tackle the church.
And now, marking our transition to maturity, we have a website!
I’ll be back from time to time with more news.