4 Jun 2008
A while ago, on a very hot day indeed, I went to London to be one of the speakers at a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas (APPGOPOG, not to be confused with OGOPOGO, a Loch Ness monster type supposed creature reputed to live in Lake Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada). The meeting was called Becoming a Low Carbon Society, and I was speaking along with Shaun Chamberlin who spoke about Tradeable Energy Quotas, and Simon Snowden from Liverpool University, who talked about, among other things, Oil Vulnerability Audits.
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20 May 2008
With the oil price looking pretty settled at $126 a barrel having reached as high in recent days as $128, what does the UK Government estimate the future oil price to be? Clearly one would imagine that as the most responsible body in the land, charged with making long term decisions that affect us all, they would have their fingers on the pulse of this one. Unfortunately the official position is as insulting as it is pathetic.
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16 May 2008
Clare Short: Birmingham should become a transition city. May 13 2008 By Clare Short. From the Birmingham Post.
Just before Easter, I accepted an invitation to contribute to a course on development at Schumacher College which is situated in the grounds of Dartington Hall, near Totnes. The college is famous for its commitment to environmental sustainability as is the Dartington Trust. On the road sign for Totnes someone has painted “Twinned with Narnia”. It is a beautiful part of the world and large numbers of green minded, alternative sorts of people live there. This has made Totnes the ideal place for the birth of the Transition Towns movement.
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15 May 2008
The Rocky Road to a Real Transition: the transition towns movement and what it means for social change. Paul Chatterton & Alice Cutler. The Trapese Collective. A free download available here (warning: it is a huge file): 2008. 41pp.
It is flattering that so early in a movement such as the Transition movement, people take the time to sit down and write such a detailed critique of it. Trapese Popular Education Collective were previously behind the excellent ‘Do It Yourself Manual’. As the first published external examination of the Transition model it is to be welcomed, and the authors raise a number of important questions. From my perspective, “The Rocky Road…” does a very good job of identifying many of the key areas where Transition is distinctly different from other approaches to social activism.
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28 Apr 2008
Our personal lives can sometimes imitate what is happening in the wider world to an alarming extent. On Friday morning I sat down at my computer to write you a very amusing piece about olive oil (which you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for…), only to find that my computer had seized up, and refused to start. The Microsoft Windows Screen of Death (left) loomed large. I dashed to my local computer repair man, whose first question, on noting the symptoms, was “have you got everything backed up?” Ah. Hum.
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A while ago, on a very hot day indeed, I went to London to be one of the speakers at a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas (APPGOPOG, not to be confused with OGOPOGO, a Loch Ness monster type supposed creature reputed to live in Lake Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada). The meeting was called Becoming a Low Carbon Society, and I was speaking along with Shaun Chamberlin who spoke about Tradeable Energy Quotas, and Simon Snowden from Liverpool University, who talked about, among other things, Oil Vulnerability Audits.