19 Jun 2008
Here’s just a quick and not really fully-formed thought for a Thursday morning. I have finally, as part of the Transition Town Totnes Solar Hot Water Challenge‘, signed up to get solar panels put on our roof. Took a while, but I am going for flat bed panels rather than evacuated tubes (to see why read this). The plan is to get them up while there is still some summer sun to take advantage of. The question I find myself asked though when I tell people about it is “but what is the payback on them?” Now I have to say honestly that I have no idea, I haven’t sat down and worked it out, but what intrigues me is that nature of that question.
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17 Jun 2008
Here is an excellent article that appeared in Sunday’s Observer, which discussed peak oil and also mentioned Transition…
Oil Crisis: £100 to fill up the tank? Just get used to the idea.
By Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff, Lisa Bachelor and Tim Webb. The Observer, Sunday June 15 2008
Queues at petrol stations may be a chilling taste of things to come. Prices are soaring, experts warn of shortages ahead, and some say the world is running out of fuel. Already people are getting out of their cars and finding other ways to travel, while less scrupulous drivers are stealing diesel. Has the motor car just stalled - or are our driving habits changing for ever?
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16 Jun 2008
I guess, as what Albert Bates terms a ‘post-petroleumologist’, you would imagine that I would be philosophically opposed to diggers, earthmovers, and other forms of fossil fuel powered equipment. I think it would be fair to say that until I encountered permaculture, I saw them, mostly due to seeing the extraordinary damage that such machines can wreak on road-building protests, as inherently wicked. When I sat down to read Bill Mollison’s Permaculture, a Designer’s Manual, I was surprised to find that a book on earth repair had an entire chapter dedicated to earthmoving. Seemed somewhat incongruous. Now, however, I am a convert, and I was honoured that my garden was visited by one this weekend.
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13 Jun 2008
As the UK’s energy crisis unfolds, the first places where an energy famine starts to hurt are becoming clear. The rural poor, those whose livelihoods depends on it and those living in those places designed on the assumption that cheap oil will be here forever, although its impact is starting to be felt across the board. On the train the other day I overheard a woman asking those around her if they took the train often. They replied they did, and she said it was her first time, she always drove, but last week she had sat down and worked out that it was cheaper to go on the train than to drive. More and more stories like this emerge every day as the scale of the credit crunch/recession/peak energy shock begins to sink in.
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12 Jun 2008
The International Energy Agency used to have the role of being the energy optimists, reassuring Governments and markets that there would be sufficient supplies to keep the world sufficiently fueled for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is still one of their wildly outdated and wildly optimistic forecasts that still underpins the UK government’s absurb assertion that oil will cost $67 a barrel in 2020.
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