Jacqueline Sheedy has turned the former coal barge where she lives into a shrine to energy efficiency: She reads by candlelight in midwinter, converts the waste from her toilet into fertilizer, and hauls fresh water home on a trailer attached to her bicycle.
Now Sheedy has set herself a new goal: to stop burning coal for heat and instead use wood from renewable sources.
"I'm scared of the cold this winter," said Sheedy, 42, who earns her living teaching urban gardeners to grow food. "But it's going to be difficult for everyone else to cut their carbon footprints, so I should also keep on setting myself personal challenges."
Sheedy is in a CRAG, or a Carbon Rationing Action Group, based in Islington, North London, whose members have pledged to live low-carbon lives.
Like-minded groups are slowly springing up across Britain, with about 160 people active in some 20 CRAGs. While that is not a large number, the craggers, as they are known, are an example of how the phenomenon of low-carbon living is spreading in Britain, where politicians, companies and communities are competing to be the greenest.
breaking it down
Craggers calculate their personal emissions from things like natural gas and electricity bills, car emissions and airplane travel. The Islington CRAG has imposed a yearly limit of nearly 4,000kg of carbon emissions on each member.
As an example of the constraints this imposes, a round-trip flight between London and Hong Kong would burn up more than half that allowance, generating 2,200kg of carbon emissions, according to an online calculator available through the British Airways Web site.
The group holds its members to account by imposing fines on those who fail to keep their emissions under the yearly limit. Those who emit progressively less each year can earn money from more profligate members, who pay into the system.
The members say they are willing to make personal sacrifices, from turning down the heat at home to giving up driving to work, to prove that emissions cuts are feasible without expensive new technologies.
"The public perception is that you've got to be rich to be green," said Andy Ross, 39, an engineer in Glasgow, who helped to found one of the first CRAGs last year.
"But it's not the amount of money you've got to spend on fancy micro-renewable energy kits," he said. "It's identifying the size of your footprint and adjusting your lifestyle accordingly."
Craggers also say they want to be trailblazers for low-carbon models that could be adopted by people who drive a car or take that flight. In that way, CRAGs offer some hope for high-carbon sinners willing to make some of the sacrifices necessary to tread a cleaner, more saintly path.
"If somebody shows up to a meeting and says they plan to fly to such-and-such a destination and the group disapproves, then that is touching on the most sensitive area: people's lifestyles," said John Ackers, 54, of the Islington CRAG. "But that is actually our goal."
This issue does sometimes lead to sharp exchanges of views between CRAG members. Alison Dines, 45, a member of the Islington CRAG, was keeping to her target until it came to her vacation flight to Mauritius. That sent Dines, who works for the British health service, far above the group's limit.
She willingly paid her fine -- about US$200 -- which was then donated to the Camp for Climate Action, a group that has protested a planned expansion of Heathrow Airport in London. She wants to fly again, and espouses letting members roll over the credits they accumulate during a low-carbon year to allow for occasional high-carbon indulgences.
DISCIPLINE
But other members of the group favor disciplining each participant to do more to stay within their annual targets.
"I don't want our credits to be like taxes that we only think about once a year, but I want them to be the lifeblood of the way we operate every day," said Lucy Sommers, 45, a garden designer. "A limitless rolling over of credits would be morally unacceptable."
As CRAG members work out their differences, skeptics warn that their ambitious quotas and voluntary approach to lowering emissions are an unrealistic way of involving people hooked on high-carbon lifestyles.
Matthew Prescott, the director of CarbonLimited, which studies systems for capping personal carbon emissions, praised the craggers' efforts. But he was dubious about the long-term impact of grassroots efforts, saying that only a system of linking regions or nations would convince the wider public that individual efforts were worthwhile.
"If people want to drive a Hummer, we don't think we can tell them not to," he said.
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