You might be surprised to hear that the Council is responsible for only two percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the Bradford district.

Despite this, it’s making a strong effort to reduce even this small contribution and set the rest of us an example that should help us behave differently.

Three years ago, councillors unanimously agreed to set a target of 40 per cent reduction of Council carbon by 2020, mainly through using less fuel and investing in renewable energy. And it’s working, as within this short time period they have reduced the carbon emissions by a fifth and the fuel use in Council vehicles by a sixth.

This initial progress in preparing the Council for life in a post-carbon world has been made possible by the setting up of the Environment and Climate Change Unit, which can concentrate on the necessary improvements, and intends to be busy.

They have started with biomass boilers in City Hall and Ilkley Town Hall, and solar panels on St James Market and the Harris Street depot, but that’s only scratching the surface.

Achieving the 2020 target, and making all the Council’s energy use renewable, and so carbon-free, will mean a considerable investment, as well as working out how to influence the many schools that are now divorced from the Council with their academy and free school status.

It’s just a pity that the Council will struggle on a number of fronts, and raising the £2 million a year capital is only one of the hurdles. It should be quite a low one, as within ten years each renewable scheme will be paid for and then the electricity would be a significant saving for the council tax payers, year after year, and independent of the national rising prices.

I expect that a number of the schemes might attract local comment, as with the small hydro electric power station proposed for Saltaire. A couple of large wind turbines that could produce all the Council’s electricity are also unlikely to pass unnoticed.

There have also been murmurings about the energy from a waste plant at Bowling Back Lane, part of the Pennine Resource Recovery plans that could produce electricity for 20,000 houses, and local district heating.

The next step could even be for the Council to provide electricity to the wider district, at lower costs, as it did years ago, and such decentralised networks have proved very successful in the Surrey town of Woking. Bristol is now following the same route and it’s possible that the UK will soon have a number of councils with schemes as good as those in Holland and Denmark.

Bradford needs the determination to be one of them.