I DONT CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF ME BUT WHAT I DID I DID FOR LOVE AND NOTHING ELSE

I don’t read such books for fun, the topics under discussion are too serious for that.

I apply two tests to such books. Whether the revelations within are believable or not, are these revelations backed up by facts and research? If authors don’t provide the proof of what they write, then it is always possible that what they write is not accurate and true.

I reckon Vernon Coleman clearly fails this test.

The other test is – as applies in the ‘Gordon Brown Is A Moron’ publication – that when subjected to public office, politicians sometimes have to act in dubious ways in order to reconcile conflicts of interest between persons and groups.
So how do we know whether other power brokers in the same role would have behaved any better?

Russ

You state:
[quote]Clearly we cannot expect Gordon Brown to leap to a programme of Powerdown, it is up to us, but not on our own, rather building relationships with those around us. We can create a wave of momentum that will make it easier for government to make these difficult (and, at present, unelectable) decisions.[/quote]

What are individuals or communities engaged in ‘powerdown’ or transition to do when faced with Gordon Brown or his government acting as the primary obstacle – actively denying their attempts to prepare for change?

The UK is at great risk from the post-oil era because of the population density. Currently we do not feed ourselves, so we are presumably assuming that in a post-oil world either a good number of us are going to starve to death or vast tracts of land in the UK currently given over to horse racing, out of town shopping malls, shooting estates, sprawling Barratt new towns, half empty science parks, acres of biofuel crops, acres of pasture for livestock, motorways and service stations and so on will be turned around with wartime urgency into producing cereals to feed the 60 million residents.

Before any of that happens, just try getting the local community together to buy a parcel of land for local permaculture, or (as in Scotland) attempt to use the Land Reform Act to make a community land purchase – You rapidly discover that the planning departments, landowners (banks usually), local authorities and central executive branches of government are the primary obstacle to transition. In an overpopulated island, with an overheated property market, and a legislature heavily biased towards corporate interests (those with the deepest pockets), 99 times out of 100 a community’s attempt to wrestle the most miniscule atom of power over their own geography and destiny will always come second fiddle to the Tescos, Asdas, Business Parks, the out of town shopping centres, the cement works, open cast mines, vast incinerators….. and it’s no coincidence that these are the very ’stakeholders’ funding Gordon Brown’s political party.

I’m sorry I can’t be more optimistic but we have a clash of civilizations coming, and it’s not the one everyone expects – that between the developed world and the developing world. It’s going to be between those of us trying to salvage a future out of an apparent endgame, faced off with those who will throw their arms in the air and say “Hey, the world is ending, I’m gonna get mines” grinning, dribbling as they shop for the latest fucking iPhone while the sky falls down.

Our biggest challenge will not be inventing vaporware like the fantasy Hydrogen economy, it will be figuring out how to herd the other 59 million sheeple away from the edge of the abyss as our government drives, quite literally, over the edge.

With the price of oil today at $143/barrel and never going down again, oil running out is a massively scarey thought. The price of food is going up.

Car and truck drivers have had their petrol/diesel stolen. Friends of mine with allotments are becoming concerned that someone may hop over the fence at night and steal their vegetables. It doesn’t take much for the fabric of society to break down as we saw in the New Orleans floods.

We are all in a quandary about what to do about oil running out – and I’m convinced that the problems will be upon us sooner rather than later.

Unless the much promised ’safe’ slef-contained backyard generators do materialise, there is no guarantee that in an oil-less future, nuclear power will not be used as an excuse for a permanent dictatorship.

48 died directly, but the legacy in terms of cancer and massive birth defects continues to this day. Nuclear leaves a terrible legacy – some of the radiation from Chernobyl was carried in the wind and deposited across europe. For me at least, Nuclear has no place in the world.

Of course, it still remains a finite resource as does just about everything else. As Mark Twain said, 150 years ago, “Buy land, son, they’re not making it any more.” Only things like energy from the sun are, for pratical purposes anyway, limitless. But the wokrings of the market-place, whatever you think of it, meant that it will never actually “run-out”. It will just become too expensive to burn in inefficient units like car engines which only convert a surprisingly small amount of the energy into actual locomotion.

I’m not a great believer in the so-called “technological fix” for the world’s ills; we definitely need to make some changes in our lifestyles and I agree with you that governments the world over are being spectacularly pusillanimous and short termist about doing anything about it. But new hydrogen based (for heat and power)and silicon technologies (for lubrication) are not far away. And nuclear power is a reality which, once you strip away the eco-dogma (much of it well intentioned, but wrong – how many people really died at Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear disaster? The answer is 48, less than a third of those killed in the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion whose 20th anniversary is being marked this week) can actually get us over the short-term hump.

Please keep this debate going it can only be a good thing that more and more views are heard and fears put out in the open. More importantly positive constructive views expressed would give inspiration to us all. Forget the book or how it was written the point is that this is a real issue and its coming our way sooner or later.

Just because Coleman is an arse doesn’t mean he is all wrong. James Lovelock, the Gaia guy, who has gone from total maverick to pretty respectable scientist over the last 25 years, thinks that planet earth can comfortably sustain around 1bn people in the long run, so Coleman’s 5bn casualties is not so weird as all that. (I reckon diseas will get a lot of us before starvation, just as spanish flu killed more people in 1919 than the whole the first world war put together). Its pretty clear that some of our behaviour will have to change but there are reasons to think that it will anyway. It has been fascinating to see car usage drop dramatically in the face of the recent rapid rise in petrol prices, for example. Remember back at the beginning of the 20th cenutry, experts were predicting that London would be knee-deep in horse droppings in 20 years unless “something was done”. The something was the motor car. Funny how things turn out.