Hannah Staab and Jen Cronin: climate change campaigners

Everybody has a story. Although Hannah Staab and Jen Cronin now live in Haringey their campaigning work with Fossil Free Islington has had a massive impact on changing council policy – and led to the council divesting its pension fund. Interview by Nicola Baird. Photos by Kimi Gill 

Hannah Staab and Jen Cronin became friends while working at RES, a renewable energy company near Watford, Hertfordshire. But it wasn’t until they moved jobs and were both living in Islington that they had the chance to try their hand at campaigning. https://www.res-group.com/en Thanks to their tenacity – and the willingness to attend a lot of pension committee meetings in their 20s – Islington’s policy has been changed dramatically. Not only is the council divesting its pension fund, it has now also declared a Climate Emergency and set an ambitious target to reduce the borough’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2030.

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On a Friday evening back in March, over gin and chips at Lantana Shoreditch, Old Street, the pair tell Islington Faces about the positive effect of local campaigning.

Hannah, 28, was born in Germany.  She works in the City at the renewable energy consultancy, Natural Power, specialising in advising investors and lenders in solar farms about technical risks.

Initially Jen was also Hannah’s close neighbour, living on the Islington side of Stroud Green Road. While Hannah lived on an estate in Archway. Both have now moved into Haringey.

Hannah and Jen are hugely knowledgeable about techy-sustainability – professionally they work on projects that also allow them to follow their passion for a healthy environment. Jen is also close to completing a PhD at UCL specialising in Energy Climate Modelling, looking at the role for bioenergy in decarbonising the global energy system –  what types and where they should be used.

It was their shared commitment to tackling climate change that galvanised Islington councillors to rethink their investment policies which led to Islington Council deciding to divest its £1.8 billion pension fund of fossil fuels in September 2018.

Keep it in the ground
Jen, 30, explains that the three-year-campaign for Fossil Free Islington began: “In 2015 when the Guardian was running a campaign, Keep it in the ground. The Guardian and 350.org hosted an event on fossil fuel divestment at Friends House. to galvanise the divestment movement in the UK. The plan was for borough groups to target council pension funds to move them out of fossil fuel companies. “There we met a couple of others from Islington. We put on a film screening of Do the math by the US environmental campaigner Bill McKibben (who founded 350.org) in the Blacksmith and Toffeemaker pub and got a few people to start talking with councillors,” she says.

“It was my first experience of lobbying politicians and found it was really positive,” says Jen. “We’d meet in the New Rose pub on Essex Road and also the Workers’ Café opposite the Town Hall. There was a core group of five or so, and more we could call on who were supporters. We decided to work collaboratively with the council because of our initial conversations about divesting with Cllr Richard Greening and Cllr Andy Hull (both Highbury West).”

Hannah agrees that the councillors were: “Willing to listen and engage. Generally, councillors do understand that climate change is a problem and they do want to do something. The issue was that some felt they should not divest but rather keep their investments and put pressure on companies as a shareholder. We shared data which showed that this was not effective – that the fossil fuels companies are not listening. . There’s the ethical argument that fossil fuel companies are funding the climate crisis. There’s also the financial reason to divest. The energy system is changing rapidly from coal, oil and gas to renewables – so fossil fuel investments are  a bad financial idea! Since the Paris meeting in 2015 there’s now a legally binding agreement to ensure that the world’s temperature does not go 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. This means the fossil fuel companies’ whole business model collapses! Councillors have a fiduciary duty to the pension fund members (because they are entrusted with care of money/property).”

“I felt the councillors were on board with ethical arguments but had to get their head around the finance,” says Hannah. However both she and Jen also had to swiftly figure out the ways Islington council operates. “We went to a lot of pension meetings. We had to understand how the council operated and who the people were.”

Because the pair’s jobs means they think renewables and carbon counting day-in and day-out they were well placed to explain authoritatively what the problems were to the councillors in charge of the Pension Fund at the time, Cllr Richard Greening and then Cllr David Poyser (also Mayor 2018-19).

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Places Jen Cronin and Hannah Staab like in Islington

Jen: “I like Finsbury Park – I walk, cycle and run through it everyday.” During July/August there are many free events to celebrate Finsbury Park’s 150th birthday, see 2NQ and there’s a really good calendar of events at http://www.2nq.uk/events

Jen: “E-mono,is a great kebab shop near Finsbury Park station (Well’s Terrace side), 13 Stroud Green Road. I usually order the haloumi wraps.”

Jen: “I’ve spent a lot of time at the Town Hall where the council chamber is very ceremonial.”

Jen: “Stroud Green Fruit and Veg, opposite Nando’s, 106 Stroud Green Road, is great. It’s run by really nice people – sometimes they give me a lychee!”

Jen: “I like the herb garden outside the Union Chapel. I often take a sprig of mint home to make mint tea.”

Hannah: “I’ve got no interest in football, but the Emirates stadium is quite green. Arsenal has installed a battery to help our grid be stable and manage their own consumption. And they use a lot for renewables.”

Hannah: “Gillespie Park is the best park in Islington. It’s got wilderness, the ecology centre and does outreach and work with kids.” All Sundays when Arsenal isn’t playing at home from April – October from 11am -5pm there is a wonderful cafe, inside Islington Ecology Centre.

Hannah: “The last play I saw at the Almeida Theatre was The Writer about feminism in the theatre.”

Hannah: “I love the Kebab shop at Archway that wins all the wins. I usually have the haloumi and falafel wrap.”

Hannah: “There’s a really good secondhand book stall on Archway Market. Favourite purchase from there was Michael Faber’s Book of Strange New Things.

Hannah: “Candid Café, 3 Torrens Street, does really good cakes.”

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Success
Jen says: “We had a three-year campaign and were successful a getting the council to divest in 2018. We were overjoyed. We asked, ‘Do we stop now”? We’d enjoyed local activism and a growing group of people wanted to take it further – so as a group we began the One Borough One Planet vision for Islington, asking what a carbon neutral borough that’s good for both people and the planet would look like in terms of:

• Clean electricity and heat
• Waste
• Transport
• Green spaces

In October 2018, Fossil Free Islington got 100 local people together in the central council chamber for a workshop to  shared ideas on ways to make Islington Zero Carbon. That’s when we started the campaign for the council to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so we get to net zero carbon emissions by 2030. Local support has grown rapidly. Our group is making links with all kinds of local activists and political parties on how to make our air clean, our streets safe for walking and cycling, our houses warm and efficient, our energy cheap and clean, and much more.

History seems to be with these two quietly-spoken campaigners as within a year of what was surely a massive turning point – divestment of the pension fund – Islington council has declared a Climate Emergency (in June 2019) and committed the borough to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2030.See the cutting from the Islington Gazette. 

There are many campaign organisations that have spent thousands, if not millions, of pounds without the success that Jen and Hannah have managed in just a few years. It may be that the time is right for climate action – and others laid the foundation – but it may also be because the pair tackled the problem in an intelligent, modern way. They knew their facts, did their groundwork, slogged out the meetings, talked to the target councillors at the same time as bringing more people into the campaign. Most of all they kept on attending the Pension committee meetings regularly, something that in busy Islington can be very hard to achieve especially on a wet winter or even sunny summer evening… A huge thank you to Jen and Hannah from us all at Islington Faces

• To add your support to Fossil Free Islington, or just find out more, head to https://www.facebook.com/fossilfreeislington/

Over to you
If you’d like to nominate someone to be interviewed who grew up, lives or works in Islington, or suggest yourself, please let me know, via nicolabaird dot green at gmail dot com. If you enjoyed this post you might like to look at the A-Z  index, or search by interviewee’s roles or Meet Islingtonians to find friends, neighbours and inspiration. Thanks for stopping by. Nicola