Oxford's 2050 Pathway (created 2014-15)

I'm giving the Charles Simonyi Annual Lecture tonight (14 November 2014) and during my talk about Why climate change action is difficult, and how we can make a difference, I will mention the 2050 Calculator, a tool to help people have constructive conversations about Britain's energy options, and to support consensus-building.

The options in the calculator include lifestyle changes, and all sorts of technologies for saving energy and sourcing low-carbon energy. I would love to help Oxford crowd-source its own 2050 pathway, but there won't be time in this single lecture to do it; so here is the plan: I'll come back to Oxford in March 2015, and, with Mark Lynas and other celebrities at the Oxford Literary Festival, we will find out what pathway the Oxford audience would like to choose, to keep the lights on, have energy security, and meet the UK's legal climate change targets . To ensure that we have a really good deliberative discussion, the Oxford community is welcome to use the comments area of this blog page as a place for discussion.
Commenting rules: Please discuss options in the calculator, and what you would like the UK to do. Please don't have a pub brawl. Please discuss pathways that add up. It's fine to say you dislike an option, but you should feel an obligation to describe how you would propose to get by without that option, taking into account other people's views about the other options.
At the Oxford Literary Festival event we will take all your comments into account and use them as a springboard for a really constructive discussion. Thank you for joining in!

You may be interested to see what pathways other cities chose, when they took on the "British Energy Challenge" - here are those cities' choices, and my reflections on the British Energy Challenge roadshows of 2013 and 2014.

I look forward to listening in and supporting Oxford's energy pathway discussion in 2015!

My Simonyi lecture slides are here, and Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is free online too. The 2050 Calculator also contains lots of well-written documentation [click on the blue "i" icons] to help guide your decisions.