Reboot Britain

90% of all investment in solving climate change is going towards technology innovation and dissemination, yet research suggests that behaviour change and cultural change could double the effectiveness of these measures (in meeting urban carbon reduction targets for example). This session will explore the power of Creativity Vs. Climate Change and serve as a call to arms to get serious about the potential for our world-class creative industries to reach the parts of climate change that technology cannot reach. It will be useful for the world, useful for the UK and a lot of fun. This session is chaired by Andy Hobsbawm of Do the Green Thing.

The global food system is intimately connected to the greatest challenges of our time: health, climate change, poverty, environmental collapse and water stress. It is also a model based on closed knowledge systems - opaque supply chains, closed intellectual property rights, and patents on life forms. We might buy Fairtrade coffee but when it comes to most of our shopping basket, consumers have little idea with regards to the social and environmental impacts that have or haven't been caused along the way. But this is all set to change. As we exploit the potentials of networked collaboration, the whole world could become the social and environmental auditor of the food industry: transparent supply-chains and crowdsourced 'ethical' evaluations of food products would be just the start. Come and discuss these issues in a highly participative workshop with the Earth Open Source Institute, a new organisation in the process of creating a collaborative platform that will support the development of "open source"

Finding ways to visualise energy is critical in solving the behaviour change problem. Climate change in general and (energy use in particular) are such amorphous, invisible, abstract concepts. Everyone understands pollution is bad because you can experience it, but what about the rest? As social networks, web APIs, and open data become more pervasive, a new breed of technologies is appearing, dedicated to putting people in touch with the energy they use. From monitoring devices to pervasive feedback, from simple graphs to an online energy identity, this session will describe some of the projects that are coming together to change the way we understand, interact with, and reduce our use of energy. This is your one-stop shop, a tour of the visualising tools of the future.

Energy is responsible for 60% of the world's CO2 emissions. Generating clean, renewable power is far and away the single biggest solution in the fight against climate change. This could be the cornerstone of how we re-build our economy, yet Britain's energy policy is up the spout and we have no plan for how to cut CO2 emissions and stop the lights going out. When it comes to energy, everyone seems to have different sets of lies, damned lies and statistics. So Robert Webb, founder and Chairman of Quiet Revolution wind turbines and new startup cleansource.me, will lead a discussion grounded in physics and hard facts. How can we speed the rapid construction of a renewable power infrastructure when we know for a fact that humanity can provide abundant clean energy to all, affordably and quickly, with current and proven technologies? Robert is joined by Stephen Tindale, a climate and energy expert who has been an executive director of Greenpeace and is co-founder of www.climateanswers.info. The discussion will explore how to give the facts and data to the people, how communication and enrollment are essential to enabling the transition and how real and virtual networks can help.

After arguably a lost decade or two, legislation to tackle climate change now appears to be coming thick and fast. As the race to invent ways of cutting emissions seems poised to start in earnest, this session will consider what these new policies provide us in terms of information about what we are doing to the planet, how accessible it will be and what can be done with it to speed the pace of change. Join this interactive session to explore how the immense power of our interconnected world can brought to bear on the subject. Topics covered will include - who owns my energy data? What are the up-to-the-minute developments (literally) in carbon calculators? How do actions we as individuals can take compare? What do we know about the world's biggest industrial and commercial sources of emissions? How can we use, scrutinise and play with the available data to force the pace of change?

Could this be the future of cars? Come meet Hugo Spowers from River Simple and decide for yourself if we have a truly revolutionary business model on our hands. Here's how it's different: 1) The hydrogen-powered technology 2. A lease vs. buy model. 3) The company structure is a negotiated power-sharing system based around four key stakeholders groups: investors, workers, the community and the environment. Each group signs up to the company's values and gets a seat on the board 4) The firm's intellectual property will be freely available to all under an open source license. This means that anyone can re-use and build upon the technology as long as they license their new works back to the wider world on the same open terms. 5) They're are aiming to create a network of small, local factories close to demand and local markets - what they call a "distributed, human scale manufacturing' system. The session's focused on a short presentation from Hugo, after which 40 minutes in which you can ask as many questions as you like. It's the Reboot Britain Car, people!