Here are some photos to accompany the podcast….

Information about the Tres Hombres

Captain Jorne Langelaan telling the assembled visitors about the ship.

Exeter Brewery's beer stowed safely in the hold.

http://vimeo.com/21206037

“I was invited to make an installation on the theme of ‘cars’ in the city of roundabouts. Through thinking around and beyond this theme, I learned a lot about the implications of the way we live, and how our ravenous culture is feasting on our own planet. Pumping ourselves to a peak. I created a ‘ghost road’ of cars within a vacant supermarket as an informative portrait of that mind set, and how we can change it. The exhibition reveals how I became enlightened towards making a difference personally, and also waking up those around me to move to a more sustainable way of living and thinking. I am not perfect, but I am now awake.

Asleep at the wheel… is a metaphor for how we are culturally careering down the fast lane of life in charge of a lethal weapon with our head in a daydream and our foot to the floor with the expectation that the road goes on forever.

The exhibition is a thought provoking and immersive sound installation for multiple car radios, that contemplates our future. Exhibited in a vast disused supermarket, three-lanes of cars dissect the darkened interior, as the multiple hazard lights illuminate the space, revealing the finite road of our consumer driven daydream. ‘More more more’ is no longer a desirable destination.

You are invited to be a passenger in the back seats, as the in-car sound systems broadcast a collage of moving music and motivating sound-bites. On the return journey the Lay-by Library area encourages you to explore positive ways to improve our future together. Society’s pedal to the metal attitude to our world is not sustainable and is running out of road. We need to change gear, before we overtake ourselves . . . our windows of opportunity are slowly winding shut. Come and celebrate new beginnings”.

Here’s the trailer:

Some have arrived at the idea from working on traditional farms, and others from a commitment to farming as sustainably as possible, but all share a sense that the farming of the future will be smaller scale, more closely linked to their community, and will involve, in part at least, working horses.  One of them, when asked why he likes working with horses replies “because it just feels right, it just feels good – when everything’s clicking together”.

Until the 1930s, the horse was an essential part of any farming operation.  Then as tractors arrived, they vanished within a very short time period.  The knowledge, the infrastructure, the skills that made horsepower possible largely disappeared, surviving, in the US, only with the Amish, a handful of enthusiasts, and historic ‘museum’ farms run as tourist attractions.  The film follows three quite different young people, all of whom have come into contact with working horses and feel that learning to work with them is an important thing to do.  It visits them over the space of the year as they try to work out, through hard work, early mornings and frustrating relationships with farm-owners, whether this is what they really want to do.

It is often said that in Cuba, during the Special Period, the country went from needing 1% of its population working in farming to 20%.  If the same thing is applied to the UK in the event of an energy famine, we would need around 8 million new farmers.  There are already a number of young farmers inspired by the possibilities of more localised food production and by the idea of rethinking farming for a leaner future, but there need to be a lot more.  What needs to happen, it seems to me, is for farming to become something that young people care about, are inspired by and intrigued about.  That, for me, is the most moving aspect of this film.  These are ordinary people, seized by a deep sense of what farming could be.

‘Escape from Suburbia’, the sequel to ‘The End of Suburbia’, followed several people through their own peak oil preparation efforts.  For me, the problem was that apart from one, within the first few minutes of the film I found that I wasn’t really engaged by them, and not really that interested in their stories.  ‘The Farmer and the Horse’ is very much the opposite, each of the people followed are fascinating in their own way, and Flesher leaves in enough detail about their lives to keep the viewer intrigued.  I found by the end I cared very much about them and what they did next, because I felt like that had put so much effort and passion into learning these skills that I actually wanted the farming of the future to stand on them as foundations, with their passion, commitment, determination that smaller scale, lower impact farming can be viable, and with their dedication to acquiring the skills and to seeking out those who can teach them.

This is a film that doesn’t romanticise horsework.  One of the most memorable sections is from a horsepower course somewhere where we see a number of people having their first experience of ploughing with horses with hilarious results.  All of the people in the film know that working with horses is hard work, that they have good days and bad days, and that getting into farming in a way that is viable is going to be hard work.  But in a world where getting into farming requires not just land, but a huge amount of start-up capital, working with horses offers a lower-cost way in and makes the difference between being able to get started or not.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough.  As a reality TV show following three people in pursuit of a dream understood by few of their family and peers it is compelling, as a vision of how farming might be in a lower-energy world as a new generation of young farmers come to the fore it is fascinating, and as a chronicle of how cheap energy has changed and indebted agriculture it is sobering and thought provoking.  I enjoyed every minute of it, and it certainly presents the story of what farming may well look like in the future, as well as what the first steps towards getting there might look like, in a very entertaining and accessible way.  It felt like a film you could show to anyone, interested in peak oil/Transition/sustainable farming or not, and they would find it fascinating and thought-provoking.

You can order DVDs of the film here.

Copies of the report were distributed to the Town Council and last week I attended a meeting where I gave a brief presentation about it, following which the Councillors talked about how proud they were of TTT, and then unanimously passed a resolution supporting our work (here is a report from the local press).  The resultant report can be downloaded here (it’s a big file, about 5.5MB).  As TTT is a community organisation with no core funding, we are offering this report for free, but we hope that having read it you might feel inspired to make a donation to support our vital work:

My favourite bit of the report, the Executive Summary, sets out in numbers the impacts of TTT thus far:

People visiting Totnes to find out about Transition have brought an estimated £122,000 to the local economy • over 300 people have visited the town to undertake Transition Training • TTT raised the funding for the 74 solar panels on Totnes Civic Hall which will generate around 13,000kWh (a third of its demand, leading to the Council saving over £5,500) • 186 hybrid nut trees have been planted throughout the town • over 4000 Local Food Guides (in 2 editions) have been distributed • our Garden Share scheme means that now 30 gardeners in 13 gardens are able to grow food, providing food to over 50 families • over 70 businesses now accept the Totnes Pound • organised over 140 public events • more than 1,000 students at King Edward VI Community College have now participated in our ‘Transition Tales’ programme • over 75% of people in Totnes and Dartington are aware of TTT’s work • more than 600 people attended 4 workshops on renewable energy • there are now 59 ‘Transition Together’ groups in and around the town, who will each reduce their carbon emissions by 1.2 tonnes, each saving £601 per year • over 50% of those households are low-income • ‘Transition Tours’, a structured tour designed for those who want to visit the town to learn about Transition has, so far, had a local impact of £52,166 • The work of TTT  has inspired an international network of thousands of Transition initiatives • TTT has formed partnerships with 25 other organisations • the creation of the Energy Descent Action Plan engaged over 800 local people, gave talks to 35 local organisations and held 27 public meetings • 50 people have learnt to garden through our basic gardening course • over 400 people attended ‘Winterfest’, a one-day celebration of the work of TTT • 3 annual ‘Edible Garden Crawls’ have been attended by over 500 people • the 2010 ‘Energy Fair’ was attended by over 400 people • TTT’s email newsletter is received by over 2,000 people • TTT’s Garden Share scheme was the inspiration for Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall’s national ‘Landshare’ campaign • Produced 10 short films about various TTT events • ‘Estates in Transition’, a day conference co-organised with Dartington, brought 65 local landowners and managers together to explore the impacts of peak oil and climate change • 57.2% of local people feel TTT’s work is either ‘highly relevant’ or ‘relevant’ to their lives • the Heart and Soul group provides support to 15 people working in TTT so as to minimise incidents of burn-out • TTT’s website has over 4,500 registered users • our annual Seedy Sunday events each attract at least 200 people • a recent grant of £75,000 from Community Builders is supporting our efforts to bring the derelict Dairy Crest site back into community ownership • TTT has generated a great deal of media coverage, including BBC’s The One Show, Al Jazeera TV, ‘In Business’ on Radio 4, and pieces in most daily papers, as well as regularly attracting international media attention….

Owing to its size (475 pages) and to printing costs, it is being made available only in PDF format (3.7MB) which will be sent out by email.  Some tasters from this thesis have already been posted here at Transition Culture, such as Local Food and Relocalisation, and Localism or Localisation?.  More will be posted over the coming weeks.  Personally speaking, I am delighted to have completed it, and even more delighted to be able to make it available, as I think it is something that explores Transition in a depth which people will find really useful.  I tried very hard to write something un-dusty and un-overacademic, and had a wonderful compliment the other day, when a local historian who had contributed to it, told me that he was two-thirds of the way through the book and that he found it ‘rivetting’.  Not many PhDs out there that find themselves attached to that particular adjective.

Here is the Abstract, which gives a more detailed overview of what to expect:

“This thesis provides a critical review of the Transition movement, a grassroots response to peak oil and climate change, co-founded by this author. It focuses on two key aspects of the Transition approach, resilience and economic relocalisation, with the aim of analysing whether and how they can be implemented in a locality based on the Transition approach, and assessing what socio-economic and community-related structures would be necessary to implement such a process. The focus of the research is Totnes, Devon, which because of its status as the UK’s first Transition initiative and the longer history of various initiatives to promote local resilience, offers a valuable case study of attempts to practically implement resilience and localisation. A variety of research methods were employed, including surveys, focus groups, oral history and in-depth interviews, as well less conventional public participation methods such as Open Space and World Café.

The first major finding was that Transition Town Totnes (TTT) has become a significant organisation in the town, with a high level of popular support. It was also found that the obstacles to resilience and relocalisation lie not, as was hypothesised, in a lack of skills or an absence of community cohesion, but in issues of governance and the need for increased social entrepreneurship. It was found that what researchers call the ‘Value Action Gap’ (i.e. the gap between people’s declared sympathies and intentions and their actions) exists in Totnes as much as anywhere else, but that some of TTT’s projects, such as Transition Together, are working imaginatively to overcome this and to reduce emissions.

From this evidence is it concluded that Transition’s approach towards relocalisation and reducing carbon emissions can be argued to be effective in, generating engagement and initiating new enterprises. Like other ‘green’ initiatives, it struggles to engage those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, but some of its initiatives are showing promise for overcoming this. Its primary contribution is in suggesting a redefining of resilience, not as a state of preparedness for disaster, but as a desired characteristic of a sustainable society. A more resilient community, it is argued, would be one more in control of its food and energy production, as well as being one that enables inward financial investment. It also argues that the government focus on ‘localism’, the devolving of political power to the local level, ought to be expanded to include ‘localisation’, the strengthening of local production to meet local needs, a shift which would financially benefit local communities. It argues that the key challenge for Transition initiatives such as TTT is going to be scaling up from being ‘niche’ organisations to become economically viable organisations with a broad appeal and engagement, and also articulates the need for ‘Resilience Indicators’ which would allow communities to measure the degree to which their levels of resilience are increasing”.

We can expect dramatic changes in the energy sector in the coming decades. This report encourages businesses, both in the energy sector and beyond, to look at how this will impact on their firms. The transition towards a lowcarbon economy and the interim volatility in traditional fossil fuel markets presents businesses with numerous risks but also opportunities. In order to reduce potential vulnerability and seize opportunities, business should be aware that:

1. Energy security is now inseparable from the transition to a low-carbon economy and businesses plans should prepare for this new reality. Security of supply and emissions reduction objectives should be addressed equally, as prioritising one over the other will increase the risk of stranded investments or requirements for expensive retro-fitting.

2. Traditional fossil fuel resources face serious supply constraints and an oil supply crunch is likely in the short-to-medium term with profound consequences for the way in which business functions today. Businesses would benefit from taking note of the impacts of the oil price spikes and shocks in 2008 and implementing the appropriate mitigation actions. A scenario planning approach may also help assess potential future outcomes and help inform strategic business decisions.

3. A ‘third industrial revolution’ in the energy sector presents huge opportunities but also brings new risks. Of particular importance for new technologies is the risk of constraints on raw materials such as rare earth metals, as scarcity may drive up costs. The rapid and  widespread diffusion of some new technologies may also incur negative environmental implications.

4. Energy infrastructure will be increasingly vulnerable to unanticipated severe weather events caused by changing climate patterns leading to a greater frequency of brownouts and supply disruptions for business. This throws out a critical challenge to energy providers, investors and planners in terms of choosing the location of new infrastructure and fortifying existing plants and networks.  Those businesses for which uninterrupted access to energy is of fundamental importance should actively consider investing in alternative energy supply systems.

5. Increasing energy costs as a result of reduced availability, higher global demand and carbon pricing are best tackled in the short term by changes in practices or via the use of technology to reduce energy consumption. The wider use of renewable energy and even self generation, bring added price and supply security benefits.

6. The sooner that businesses reassess global supply chains and just-in-time models, and increase the resilience of their logistics against energy supply disruptions, the better. The current system is increasingly vulnerable to disruption, given the trends outlined in this  report.

7. While the vast majority of investment in the energy transition will come from the private sector, governments have an important role in delivering policies and measures that create the necessary investment conditions and incentives. If the global carbon market is to become a reality then government action must be taken to bring additional price stability and transparency. Investing in a secure, low-carbon energy future may have higher upfront costs, but will deliver lower cost energy in the future.  Sound renewable energy and demand side measures are crucial elements in delivering the necessary energy services for businesses and the expected return on investments.

Ladies and Gentlemen.  It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website.  The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.  It is the creation of the good folks at LumpyLemon, to whom we are greatly indebted.  Highlights include the oral history section, Liv Torc’s poem in the section on stories, the Totnes Energy Budget, the photoshopped visions of the future and, if one might suggest a sample chapter, the food section.  Copies of the printed EDAP are available here, and will be formally launched on Friday (do come).  God Bless Her and All Who Sail in Her (sound of tinkling glass as champagne bottle is smashed against the side of the website)….

Two days ago, 400,000 Britons were stranded around the world, 268,000 across Europe, the rest mainly in the US, Home Secretary David Miliband calling for the ‘great British spirit’ to be invoked by stranded tourists.  The navy fleet was on standby for a Dunkirk style ‘rescuing’ of Brits from the European mainland to get them home.  A Royal Navy ship picked up tourists from Spain, the captain saying “it’s a warship so the civilians won’t be used to the austere conditions, but they will get fresh rations, fish and chips for dinner tonight and curry tomorrow.  We will provide as many camp beds as we can, but it’s not a 5 star hotel.  An Englishman who organised a flotilla of boats to sail to Dunkirk to pick up tourists in a restaging of the Dunkirk evacuations of World War 2, was turned back by French authorities who told him that such behaviour was anti-commercial and could affect the viability of French ferries (at least that’s the story as it was told to me, true or not, it’s a great story).

Kenya’s horticulture industry, mostly flowers such as roses, grown for the UK market, has been losing $2 million a day in exports, with tonnes of roses and other fresh produce being thrown away each day (at least they were ‘composted’, according to the Guardian).  One of the tabloids headlines yesterday was “TFI Flyday!” such was the media jubilation at the return to the skies.  However, as Heading Out at the Oil Drum notes, this might just be the beginning of a series of eruptions, this may be just the beginning, rather than just the end of a week-long interruption to business-as-usual.

As a result of the grounding of the UK’s planes, Europe’s carbon emissions from aviation fell by 60%.  This great graphic from informationisbeautiful.net answers the question of what produces more CO2, the volcano, or aviation?  In spite of the huge amount of carbon pumped out by Eyjafjallajokull, aviation is still a far greater polluter.

Of course that was partly offset by the rather large amount of carbon belched forth by the unpronounceable volcano, but I spent Monday reading a fascinating piece of research by Meinshausen et.al.(1).  It puts into context what ‘misery’ actually means, and it goes way beyond a few days stuck in a foreign airport or composting roses.  Runaway climate change, accompanied by 2 metre sea level rise, crippling impacts on agriculture and most other aspects of modern life, would be utterly catastrophic.  While not wishing in any way to denigrate the experience of those who have had a stressful, costly and disruptive few days, perhaps looking at this experience as a dry run for an oil-strapped near future might be healthier.

Of course we have had these ‘wake-up’ moments before.  In 2000 the lorry drivers went on strike, blocking refineries, and the UK was a few days away from a major food crisis.  The same thing was threatened a few years later when Grangemouth refinery was blockaded.  Then there was the oil price spike of July 2008, and the impacts of the oil price rises.  There was the snow of last winter, many communities cut off and distribution of essential goods made rather tricky.  Oh and I think there was the world nearly coming to the brink of economic meltdown quite recently if I remember rightly, although I’m told that is all fine and sorted out now.

Now we have the grounding of the entire UK air fleet, and still the press coverage focused on newly-weds stranded in their honeymoon locations, or school choirs stuck in the US, rather than questioning how utterly reliant we have become on aviation, and how perilously unresilient we have grown as a culture.  One minor interruption and everything starts coming unstuck at the edges rather quickly, developing countries find their agricultural sectors on the edge of bankruptcy, school exams might have to be scheduled, we will be short of fruit and other imports, etc.etc.

Meinshausen et.al. look at what level of cuts in emissions we need to make if we are actually going to avoid runaway and catastrophic climate change.  They estimate that there is about a 70% chance of staying under 2°C if global emissions are cut by 50% from 1990 levels by 2050, and that emissions would need to have peaked and started to decline by 2020, and that they would need to continue being cut beyond 2050, and would need to have reached zero before 2100.  A cut of 72% by 2050 would give us an 84% chance of avoiding runaway climate change.

They suggest that a programme of reductions capable of producing cuts in emissions necessary to avoid a 2°C rise, would mean that by 2050, the annual UK personal carbon allowance would need to be between 1.96 and 1.10 tonnes of CO2e per year, a cut of between 86% and 92% on 1990 levels, a level of emissions similar to that of Mozambique today.  In this context, there really is little or no place for aviation, and that’s before we add in the question of what, by then, planes would even be running on.

We are talking about reducing emissions, personally and societally, by over 90%.  Personally I don’t think future generations will be especially bothered that I had a few days over Easter chilling out in Rome or snorkelling in Thailand as they come to grips with the irreversible nightmare they have inherited from us.  They will almost certainly look at any interruption to our “Fly, fly again” collective madness as having been a good thing, and would have hoped that we might have learnt something instructive from it.

Profoundly thought-provoking though the implications of Meinshausen’s study is, it is seen by some as being the optimistic scenario.  A different study by Helm et.al. argues that even this scale of cuts is unrealistic, because presently the emissions of different nations are based on production rather than consumption, that is, they don’t factor in the carbon emissions that go into making imported consumer goods, which could be seen as ‘outsourced emissions’.  If emissions were allocated to countries on the basis on consumption rather than production, the UK’s emissions would increase by 50%.  Then there’s the fact, as set out so clearly in the recent Climate Safety report, that we haven’t even reached 2°C yet, we have gone up 0. 8°C and are already seeing feedbacks starting that the IPCC didn’t think we’d see for many years yet.

A re-immersion in the climate change literature is always a chilling experience (the word ‘sobering’ doesn’t somehow feel anywhere near strong enough). We are talking about a profound shift, such as that set out in the excellent forthcoming ‘Zero Carbon Britain 2030’ report, that takes as its basis the need to cut emissions to zero by 2030.  In that context, in spite of all the wonders that aviation brings to our lives, whether it be 2 weeks in Rome over the Easter hols or early spring broccoli, roses and green beans airfreighted from Kenya, we are going to have to let it go.

The Department of Transport argue that air passenger numbers will have grown by 200% by 2030 (this is, of course, the same government that argues that peak oil won’t be a concern until 2030 at the earliest), and 21% of all the UK’s transport emissions come from aviation.  It is, however, the key element of our transport infrastructure that defies decarbonisation.  The aviation industry is already nearly as fuel efficient as it could become, electric planes are a non-started, hydrogen powered planes put 2.6 times the water vapour that ordinary planes put into the upper atmosphere, and biofuels for planes would be a humanitarian disaster, hitting food security hard.  We have no option than to consciously, intentionally and urgently design for the end of the aviation industry.

Listening to 5 Live yesterday morning the speculation was all about whether or not planes would get into the air today, like a ‘which-airport-gets-planes-back-in-the-air-first’ competition.  Gave me a mental picture of Boeing 737s on runways up and down the country, white knuckles clenching joysticks, revving their engines ready to reconquer the skies as soon as they get the green light.  The sky with no planes is clearly seen by some as abhorrent, like a football match with no players, or, in my own case, a garden with no vegetables growing in it.

Alain de Botton wrote a beautiful piece for the BBC, a Transition Tale in effect, writing about life in 2050 with no planes, and people thinking back to the day when people flew.  Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, George Monbiot wrote that “over the past few days, people living under the flight paths have seen the future and they like it”.  Would it really be that bad to have a vastly scaled back aviation industry?  Of course not.  I haven’t flown for four years, and it has had no adverse impact on my quality of life at all.

In talks I sometimes use the analogy of the 7 League Boots, how people in the world before oil couldn’t imagine being able to travel long distances in any way other than by foot or travelling on an animal.  Now we have lost any sense that distant places are, well, quite distant.  The Canaries is actually a long long way from the UK, it’s an island in the middle of the sea.  New York is also really a very, very long way from London.  Cheap oil and not giving a toss about our carbon emissions has enabled us to shrink distances and as George Monbiot put it yesterday;

“it made everywhere feel local, interchangeable.  Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation.  We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all”.

Rather than seeing the past few days as an interruption to our inherent right to go wherever in the world we want to whenever we want to, perhaps we ought to reflect on the awesome power that fossil fuels have brought, albeit temporarily, to our lives.

Helm et.al. argue, as does James Hansen, that the ‘tipping point’ for the Earth’s climate was a 0.5°C increase on pre-industrial levels.  Given that the global climate is already committed to a 1.4°C increase, this might seem an impossible task.  As Spratt & Sutton write in ‘Climate Code Red’, “the fact that we have long passed this point in no way detracts from its importance as a policy goal, and a state to which we should wholeheartedly endeavour to return the planet”.  The Climate Safety Report and the forthcoming second edition of Zero Carbon Britain argue that this means nothing less than a target of zero carbon within the next three decades, a target clearly far in advance of current UK government policy, which, as set out in the 2008 Climate Change Act, is to cut UK emissions by 34% by 2020 and at least 80% by 2050.

Is such an ambition feasible without some major rethinking of many of the assumptions that underpin a business-as-usual approach?  I for one struggle to imagine that aviation has any place whatsoever in a world of volatile oil prices, liquid fuel shortages, where biofuels have taken a backseat to actually feeding the world’s population and where avoiding the undermining and irrevocable destabilisation of the world’s climate systems is afforded the seriousness it deserves.

As Rosie Boycott wrote in today’s Guardian, #

“… perhaps this cloud of ash will have a genuine silver lining.  Maybe we’ll wake up to where our food comes from, the real price it costs to get here, and the vulnerability of the systems in place.  By ramming home the message that what we eat is now at the mercy of acts of God – as well as dwindling resources such as oil and the threat of climate change – I sincerely hope we’ll all start to reconsider how and what we eat”.

Indeed.  As George Monbiot concluded yesterday in his typically forthright style:

“we have a choice.  We can start decommissioning this industry (aviation) while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it.  Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means”.

Designing creatively for this inevitable transition will require a shift in our expectations, shifting what we think of as being the best thing to do when the kids have 2 weeks off school, and what we expect to find on supermarket shelves.

However, as Rafa Benitez, Liverpool manager, told 5Live yesterday after expressing his disapproval with UEFA for making them play their tie in Madrid in spite of the flying ban, and contemplating a very long journey made up to coaches, trains, and at the end, a plane, “we will adapt”.  Of course we will, and be healthier, leaner and better connected for it, and we may just, still avoid runaway climate change.  Let’s just not have a bank style bail-out for airlines please.

References.

(1). Meinshausen, M. Meinshausen, N. Hare, W. Raper, S. C. B. Frieler, K. Knutti, R. Frame, D. J. Allen, M. R. (2009) Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 degrees C. Nature 458, 1158-1162

Hi Rob;

This is really a difficult one, as we both are fully aware of the necessity to reduce our carbon footprint and that flying has enabled a whole new level of energy and carbon over use. I don’t fly for pleasure or holidays; the only exceptions I make are what George Monbiot calls ‘love miles’ However as far as Transition Network goes should we ban flying? I will lay out the pros and cons as I see them….

Allow flying:

* We can do things that would not be possible without it.
o A good example was our world tour. We couldn’t have done that in a sensible time frame by any other transport option. And our strategy worked! We enabled more training to happen faster and we have stopped the steady stream of people from abroad who came to the UK to do our training.
* It makes us more effective, we can do things in less time.
* It enables face to face meetings which maybe have unquantifiable benefits over and above video conferencing or other forms of communication.
* It forces us to live in the world as it is facing the myriad, often bad, choices that everyone has in everything we do. This in turn gives us an opportunity to face ourselves and the choices we make (while we still have choice) and live with the moral consequences thereof.
* Allow the field to self organise. The banning route would lead to hierarchical control a bad precedent and in a almost paradoxical way leave us open to not walking our talk.
* High carbon
* Leaves us open to we are not walking our talk finger pointing.

Ban flying:

* Lowers our carbon footprint
* We walk our talk, leading by example.
* It stimulates us, and those we work with, to be more creative and or cutting edge in our use of technology such as webinars or video conferencing.
* Take choice out of our hands a big brother approach – David Holmgren calls this the brown tech path.
* Hinders our efforts in ability to have face to face meetings and makes us less effective in the ways listed above in allow flying.

Where this leaves me is that to be a truly alive organisation we need to be living Transition, and that means we- all of us- having to face making the sorts of (often) least bad choices in living everyday life. I would hope we all have the awareness and understanding that this is what ‘living Transition’ means; at least while we still have choice. When we no longer have a choice then Transition turns into something else.

I personally think that there are times you should go somewhere and speak even if it means flying, as you can be very inspirational (as it is having a deeply held belief- as you do- that you don’t fly) but that’s only my opinion and any case I can see the pros and cons. As Joanna Macy says, “That’s how it goes in the Great Turning!”

Naresh

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Dear Naresh,

Thanks for your thoughtful opening to this discussion. Your arguments, many of which I agree with, seem to me to boil down to arguing that of course we ought not fly, but for Transition Network to say that no-one who represents it should ever fly is a draconian removal of free choice, and that there are times when it is the most effective thing to do. I would seek to disagree with that (this wouldn’t be much of a debate if I didn’t!), and here’s why.

I haven’t flown since I formally decided to give it up 3 years, 1 month and 20 days ago, having resolved, mid-’An Inconvenient Truth’, that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t rule it out for life and death situations, but in all other circumstances, that’s it. At least twice a week I get requests to travel to different parts of the world to teach, give talks, meet Transition groups. Any that would necessitate plane travel are politely told that I don’t fly, but we would be delighted to set up some sort of video link, or to use the technology we have now. Of course, as you say, it’s not quite the same quality of experience as my being there in person, but it does, for me, have the strong advantage of being low carbon, replicable, far less time consuming than flying (given that travelling by train taking longer is a reason you give for flying), and it sends a powerful message as well as setting an example.

I clearly don’t try in any sense to fool myself that my giving up flying is going to reverse climate change. I don’t think as I cycle to work or as I stand on Cologne train station that by doing so somehow some miraculous process is taking place, ice sheets magically refreezing and glaciers expanding. For me, the question about not flying is not so much one of thinking that by giving up flying I am having a big impact on the world. Rather it is underpinned by Vandana Shiva’s thought that “these systems exist because we give them our support, and if we withdraw that support they can no longer function”. My not flying makes little difference, but Ryan Air no longer existing would make some difference. It’s the bit I can do. Withdrawal of support is a powerful tool the impact of which we often underestimate.

Recently I was a finalist in the CurryStone Design prize (see below), and they initially wanted me to go to Kentucky for the award ceremony. When I said I didn’t fly, they went off and thought about it, and came back saying that all the finalists would now be presenting by videolink. That meant 3 peoples worth of CO2 saved, enough for 3 people living within their carbon allowance for a year as well as, I got the impression, quite a strong learning experience for the organisation (plus we didn’t actually win!).

I am writing this on my way home from a meeting of European Ashoka Fellows in Austria, I travelled there and back by train, the only person who did. Everyone attending had been told in advance about this mad bloke who was travelling there by train from England, and it was the subject of a lot of conversation, with lots of people really admiring the stance.

The key point here, it seems to me, is that what Transition is about, at its core, is preparing, positively and imaginatively, as well as with a considerable sense of urgency, for a world beyond fossil fuel dependency. Therefore, it feels to me that we need to be modelling, as best we can, that organisational infrastructure now. As Heinberg puts it, the sooner we start living as though we were free from oil dependency, the easier the Transition will be. That, for me, is why not flying sets an important example. Of course, as you say, our daily lives are full of choices, and is often a process of seeking the ‘least bad’ option, but flying is a real biggie, and I think that is a key point here.

We can compromise on not buying local food, take the odd unnecessary car journey, leave lights on, have baths, but one return flight to the US wipes out all the good we may have done elsewhere in our lives, emitting carbon equivalent to 2 year’s carbon allowance in terms of what we should be emitting. This idea of striving to live as though we were already there feels like an important one to me, and that we get ahead of the curve in terms of thinking and modelling how an organisation might work which has an international reach but in which no-one flies. I don’t know of another organisation that does that, but it feels like a vitally important thing to model. Surely your argument that everyone ought to be able to do what feels like the right thing to them, and that we ought not intervene, is a bit like corporations arguing at Copenhagen for voluntary cuts in emissions?

Of course, were we to decide collectively that no-one representing the Network should ever fly, we would need to wear that with pride. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody sees it, it may just as well have not bothered. In the same way, if I spent hours on trains to Austria and back and don’t tell people about it, it has a fraction of the impact. I heard from several people who saw the talk I did by DVD at the IGF conference in Washington who told me afterwards that they had given up flying as a result. If the Network decides collectively to have a no flying policy, it should be writ bold and large that so concerned are we about climate change, and so determined to start modelling post-oil practices today, that we have collectively decided not to fly, and how it has improved our quality of life as an organisation. We would be like the organisational equivalent of The Man at Seat 61, our experience of how to function effectively without flying would be a first, and would be very inspiring.

I find myself increasingly disillusioned by the army of climate experts and sustainability advisers who are continually flying from conference to conference. Surely Transition Network should be modelling a different approach, if for no other reason than because nobody else is? I feel we need to set an example. Saying “we think in principle that flying isn’t great, but everyone should be able to decide on a case by case basis” is reminiscent of lots of corporate green wish lists, voluntary green commitments, ‘carbon friendly’ type greenwash. It can be used to cover a multitude of sins, and it hardly represents the best practice that Transition Network aspires to. Surely we can do better than that? You argue that such an approach ‘forces us to live in the world as it is’, but to me that feels like a cop-out. We all live in the world as it is on a daily basis, but that ought not be an excuse for not leading by example and walking our talk.

What I am suggesting isn’t a ban, rather it is that those who currently represent Transition Network, whether the core organisation, the Training and/or Consulting arm, or whatever, decide collectively that we need to lead by example. You wrote that “I would hope we all have the awareness and understanding that this is what ‘living Transition’ means; at least while we still have choice. When we no longer have a choice then Transition turns into something else”. I disagree. It is the setting of an inspiring example now while we still do have a choice that is where the leading by example, the breaking new and innovative ground happens. We have a position of considerable thought leadership at this stage, and, I feel, a duty to be bold and deliberate. That is, after all, why Transition has generated the respect it has so far. Of course your Training Tour was great, and set up a great infrastructure, but had we decided to try and do such things without flying, might we have been able to apply some innovative creative design and resilience thinking to the question, and come up with something actually more innovative, replicable and appropriate than the flying around the world model.

If we take this decision, it needs to be writ large, and we need to discuss how else we got places. It needs to be a central aspect of Transition Network, one we are all capable to wear with pride. Having already dipped my toes in the life-after-flying pool, I can confidently say “come on in, the water’s lovely!”

Rob

***************************************

After this exchange, Naresh got in touch to say that he pretty much agreed with the points I had made, and that it would be good to throw it open for wider debate.  So, what do you think?  Would a decision to no longer fly make Transition Network naive, ineffectual, less effective, more isolated, or alternatively, more effective, more inspirational and enable it to do some powerful walking of its talk?

Michael Portillo

One funny thing happened while we were waiting for filming to start.  I was stood chatting with his researcher, and I gave her a copy of Transition Handbook to give to him.  As we were talking, a somewhat gruff elderly gentleman who was passing by stopped and looked over his shoulder.  “What’s the name of that book?” he said.  She showed him, and he said “I have something to say, but carry on”.  We continued our conversation with him standing right next to us, following the conversation, clearly with something important to say.  It made me feel very nervous, expecting him to say, “let me tell you young lady, this Transition thing is all a load of old rubbish”, and to launch into some great tirade about what a malign influence TTT is on the town.  Eventually we finished our conversation, and she turned to him and asked him what it was he wanted to ask.

“I’m from Braidwood, New South Wales in Australia”, he said, “I am part of the steering group of Transition Braidwood, can you tell me where the TTT office is please?”  Instantly from making a potentially dreadful impression, instantly she had a sense of the scale of interest being generated in other places, and how people visit the place because of its Transition status!  ‘Great British Rail Journeys’ is due to air January/February next year.

How, and how far, will we travel if we make the changes we need to in order to thrive in a carbon constrained society? For a range of interlocking reasons, the conclusion of this paper is that we will be happier, healthier and more resilient if we radically change from our current patterns to ones that fit into a relocalised world. In that world we will travel far less far and fast, overwhelmingly walking, cycling and using public transport.

Background: why do we make the travel choices we do?
Underlying our choices about how to travel is why we choose to travel at all. Although some of us on occasion travel for its own sake, in fact the majority of the trips we make are to access something we need (schools, shops, workplaces, parks etc). A quick trawl of travel data from the National Travel Survey reveals that we are not going anywhere different from where we used to 50 years ago, but we are travelling further to get there. A case in point is the school journey; as the government extends our choice as to which school is attended, we end up with less choice on how to get there – the average school journey has increased from 2.9 to 3.3 miles in the last few years.

This means that if we want to move to a world in which sustainable modes of transport dominate, we have to ensure that the locations we all need to access in order to prosper and thrive are within reach by foot, bike or public transport. At the same time we have to think very hard about the kinds of physical infrastructure we create, as the environment we create impacts enormously on the choices we then (feel able to) make. And, of course, we need governments to have coherent, joined up policies that address people’s needs rather than just national budgets. A survey by Which? showed that, overwhelmingly, when it comes to health care people don’t want to travel a long way to get to a better hospital – they just want good provision nearby.

If, in addition to having a long way to go to reach our destination, we encounter a hostile environment when we step out of our front doors, we’ll tend to react defensively, often retreating into what seems to be a safe refuge of a car. On the other hand if we emerge into a space which welcomes people generally (not just travelling but also for example socialising and playing) then we’ll tend to react expansively, feeling able to walk or cycle. But of course it won’t help if that welcoming environment comes to an abrupt stop at the end of our street – so it needs to continue all the way to our destination.

What are the results of our current travel infrastructure and choices?
The climate change implications of our travel choices are clear. In the UK car use alone accounts for 13% of our total CO2 emissions and the forecast around the world is for transport emissions (even ignoring aviation) to continue increasing. This stands in very stark contrast to the emerging scientific view that targets for safe levels of greenhouse gases must be lower even than becoming carbon neutral – we actually need to lower existing concentrations of these gases from the atmosphere.

Climate change emissions resulting from actually moving people and goods come overwhelmingly from oil. As well as these, if we examine the entire manufacturing chain for transport, from building and maintaining roads, through to mining raw materials for making cars, and the running of factories and everything else along the supply chain, we find that coal is a another significant contributor to climate change emissions in the sector in addition to oil. And our dependence on oil for travel is another huge concern. The implications of this are explored further below in the “energy and money” section; in short we’re significantly far down the depletion curve for North Sea oil (with it having peaked in production a decade ago), meaning that we are going to have to import an ever increasing proportion of whatever we use.

Getting people out of cars and onto their feet, bikes or public transport doesn’t only reduce climate change emissions and our reliance on imported oil. Other additional benefits include increased health and also cleaner, safer streets, more freedom for young people to roam and communities less divided by roads.

Are there technological solutions?
Dramatically cutting emissions while still continuing to travel further and faster demands a technological fix. When the International Energy Agency (“Energy Technologies for a Sustainable Future: transport”) reviewed this subject, it concluded that such a fix would have to be one or a mix of:

“… there are only 3 basic approaches to achieving a transport system with very low emissions of greenhouse gases and low reliance on fossil fuels:

… a hydrogen fuel-cell system,
… a purely electric vehicle system, or
… relying on liquid fuels … derived from biomass”

Any system based on one or a mix of these measures would take time to implement, when the need for very significant reductions is urgent. In addition, technical solutions may create new, even worse problems. For example, demand for agrofuels as the substitute for oil based fuels plummeted as it became clear how they compete with food production. in 2006, the first year in which the US turned more of its corn into ethanol than it exported, tortilla prices in Mexico tripled, and food riots followed. Similarly, the switch to agrofuels led to a rush to establish palm plantations for purportedly “climate friendly” palm oil. The result was very significant rainforest destruction, and all that implies for biodiversity, and enormously increased (up to 15 times) overall climate change emissions from the clearing and burning of the forests.

Similarly visions of enormous fleets of “clean” electric or hydrogen or hydrogen fuel cell powered cars raise a range of questions, such as just how much extra energy will be needed to construct the necessary new infrastructure? A truly clean car would require all stages of its life to have been powered by renewable energy from the mining of raw materials, through its manufacture, shipping, sale and disposal, as well as for each and every electric charge used to power it. In an energy constrained world would we really choose to power cars over hospitals and homes?

All of these questions ignore another crucial issue – investment and purchase of all new technologies will inevitably include a front-load of fossil fuels. Do we know whether this could actually just be the final straw which pushes us over the edge of a climate tipping point?

Underpinning it all: energy and money
If we are to build new zero carbon transport infrastructures like that envisaged in the Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zero Carbon Britain then we need to be sure that we have sufficient energy and money to do so.

As North Sea oil and gas are rapidly depleted, the UK will move, in about a decade, from importing about 20% of our total energy to about 80%. How will we afford to pay for this? Interestingly, no other major industrial nation imports such a high proportion of its energy needs other than Japan. Japan of course is in a very different position to the UK; it has a healthy current account and balance of payments and a heavily export focussed economy earning, in theory, plenty of currency with which to buy energy.

As international fossil-fuel energy supplies become increasingly expensive and scarce and have to be sourced from either currently or potentially hostile geographic and political environments, how will the UK fund a rapidly growing deficit in its energy balance of payments? Until recently the Government argued that it did not matter that the UK economy has lost much of its manufacturing export base that once enabled it to pay its way, as our financial services sector would earn sufficient to balance the nation’s books. Recent developments in the financial services sector make that look like a particularly unrealistic and, frankly, dangerous position.

Energy literacy
Understanding national energy security issues and taking into account the total embodied energy in any system as well as its running costs is only a first step towards the energy literacy we need to acquire if we’re to make truly informed decisions about our future. We also need to become literate regarding energy returned on energy invested (“EROEI”).

EROEI is a simple equation. If it takes one barrel of oil in energy to produce 100 barrels (because all you need to do is drill a hole in the ground for the oil to gush out), then the EROEI is 100:1. Historically we’ve worked our way through easy to access or high grade supplies first, and, as you would expect, as we move to the less easy and lower grade supplies, the EROEI on fossil fuels is falling. For example, the EROI of oil and gas extraction in the U.S. has decreased from 100:1 in the 1930’s to 30:1 in the 1970’s to roughly 11:1 as of 2000.

This has serious implications, well beyond just understanding that we’ll be using ever increasing amounts of the energy we produce to get more energy, trapping ourselves in a cycle of using more and more energy to produce an ever lower energy surplus. Applying this to the classic peak oil Hubbert curve yields interesting results:

“…The Hubbert curve represents the total gross quantity of energy available, and, as it is calculated, there are equal quantities of energy available on the left and right side of the peak. This, however, is only true in a gross sense. The net energy available (i.e. discretionary energy) is less. In other words, declining EROEI means that there will be much less net energy extracted post-peak than pre-peak on the Hubbert curve. … Due to declining EROI, by the time peak production is reached, 73% of the net energy available is already used …” (ref)

The energy and financial position we now face in the UK doesn’t just come down to an increasing energy balance of payments deficit at a time of declining EROEI and rapidly falling net energy availability, as these factors will both impact greatly on economic growth. In fact, an energy literate analysis of US economic growth found that that increases in energy productivity were responsible for 70% of economic growth. If this applies to the UK, then the circumstances we face mean no foreseeable end to our current recession; where then will we find the funding to completely transform our car fleets?

Relocalisation
Around the world, on average people make about 1000 trips (eg from home to work – that’s one trip) per person per year. Travel behaviour research from across Europe, the United States and Australia consistently shows that 10% of people’s car trips are shorter than 1km, 30% are shorter than 3km and 50% are shorter than 5km. This large number of small trips means that, even before relocalisation really starts to take hold, we have the potential to immediately intervene to support more cycling and walking trips – much more quickly than for any technological development and at a fraction of the cost. In fact, even under current conditions about half of the car trips we make could we switched immediately to sustainable modes (ref).

A transformation moment for transport
There are simple and transformational decisions which we could take. We could decide to invest in local sustainable transport and improve the physical infrastructure of our environments to make walking, cycling and local public transport the obvious, easy and safe choice.

If however, we are to consider technology based solutions, we need to learn to ask ourselves far harder questions than we’ve managed so far, including:

• what is the full energy cost of this transport intervention, including all of the embodied energy in the infrastructure needed as well as that from running the system?
• how long will it take to implement; could carbon reductions be achieved any faster with a different intervention?
• do we, as a society, have enough energy overall to carry through our decision?
• similarly, do we have enough money to carry out our decision?

Applying such an analysis might result in a transformed UK, in which we’ve maximised the use of our existing infrastructure and:

• nearly all urban trips are on foot, by bike or by bio-gas fuelled public transport
• rural trips which can’t be done on foot or by bike are mainly by community owned demand responsive vehicles, again bio-gas fuelled
• longer trips are mainly on an electrified rail network or by coach.

We don’t know whether humanity’s climate change emissions so far have caused a soluble problem or an insoluble predicament. We may already have pumped sufficient carbon into the atmosphere to have triggered feedback loops which will lead us well beyond a 2 degree temperature increase – and even a 2 degree increase could turn out to be far more dangerous than mainstream climate literature predicts.

Accordingly, applying the precautionary principle and minimising unquantified risks, we should be seeking urgently to move to zero carbon travel, which could happen fastest in a relocalised world. Does this mean forgoing the attempt to somehow find a technological fix through which we could continue travelling as far, and as fast, as we want? While that might seem hard to contemplate, we probably don’t have the choice – and in addition, we’d also address the fact that a result of current travel patterns is that we’re rapidly getting less healthy and less, rather than more, happy.

(Peter Lipman is Policy Director of Sustrans and Chair of Trustees, Transition Network)

The ‘P’ Word

While the terms ‘Transition’ (with a small T) and ‘climate change’ are used liberally, the term ‘peak oil’ never makes an appearance.  Clearly this Plan is based on the assumption that economic growth is still feasible and that the cheap energy exists to make it possible, and that a gentle descent of the UK’s oil dependency is possible.  In this context, peak oil is a bit like the drunken ex-partner who turns up at the wedding, who everyone tries to ignore, but their being ignored doesn’t mean that they aren’t there, or that they aren’t going to do something mortifying at some unspecified moment.  However, given that the UK Government seems to have an inbuilt inability to ever mention the ‘P’ word, it does open the Plan with a sentence which comes as close as we seem likely to get;

“In Britain, as our own reserves in the North Sea decline, we have a choice; replace them with ever-increasing imports, be subject to price fluctuations and disturbances in the world market and stick with high carbon, or make the necessary transition to a low carbon, right for climate change, energy security and jobs”.

The focus seems to be, however, purely on the depletion of North Sea production, not global production.  This is in spite of the IEA’s recent upgrading of global depletion rates, which the Government, which bases its take on peak oil on the IEA, has yet to respond to.  The impact of the depletion of North Sea gas is also clearly at the front of the authors’ minds, although their take that by 2020 imports will have risen to 60% (although supposedly reduced to 45% by the actions of this Plan), is an optimistic take on previous figures produced by the Government.  The 2007 White Paper on Energy stated that by 2020 80% of the UK’s gas would be imported, yet no explanation is given for this somewhat revised and more optimistic figure.

Another aspect that is not given consideration in the Plan’s assertion that “the immediate risk to oil production is not how much oil is left in the ground, but the world’s ability to convert these reserves into production now and in the future”, is the issue of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested.  As David Murphy has so brilliantly shown over at The Oil Drum recently (see left) the energy we can extract from fossil fuels on the downward half of the Hubbert Curve are far lower than what we extracted on the upside.  The implications of this are alarming for the assumptions that underpin this document.

Peak oil is conspicious by its absence, as a result of which the Plan misses many opportunities.  While strong, ground breaking and ambitious in its carbon reduction strategies, it is in failing to address issues of resilience building that the Plan falls short. It states that over the coming months, former UK Energy Secretary Malcolm Wicks (who once famously ended a reply to a question about peak oil from ‘Last Oil Shock’ author David Strahan by saying “but when it’s going to run out, do you know, can you tell us? I mean, I don’t know”) will prepare a report on how the UK is going to secure its energy supplies during the transition to a lower carbon economy.  Don’t hold your breath.

1 out of 10.

Energy

There is, as one might expect, much to praise, but also a good deal to damn. Much has been made in the popular press of this Plan leading to hikes in energy bills, but of course, as George Monbiot has pointed out,  it is remaining dependent on imported fossil fuels that will lead to the real price volatility.  The target of 40% of electricity from renewables by 2020 is ambitious, and is to be welcomed. The creation of an Office for Renewable Energy Deployment is also a good idea.  There are great initiatives around retrofitting existing houses, a target of all houses in the UK to have their cavity walls and lofts insulated by 2015 is admirable (my kitchen still needs doing guys when you’re passing), the commitment to investing £120 million in offshore wind is great, the commitment to feed in tarriffs by 2010 is long overdue, and the placing of smart metres in all homes by 2020 and the schemes to roll retrofitting up into peoples’ bills is a good idea.

There is little talk of microrenewables however, and certainly no whiff of any possible new support for that, although the economics of domestic scale generation are now significantly improved by the feed in tarriffs, meaning that a 3Kw photovoltaic system could earn around £1000 a year for the owner, significantly reducing payback times.  The Plan also puts, alongside the rollout of wind, nuclear (which it calls a ‘clean source’, and also refers to as ‘affordable’!) and Carbon Capture and Storage (which, just to remind you, doesn’t actually exist yet).  Given the precarious nature of the UK’s energy supplies, I would think that any reliance on Carbon Capture and Storage, given that the Plan merely promises the development of demonstration examples, is going to be woefully insufficient, and can only serve to increase our dependence on imported coal, as well as lead to the kind of disastrous new open cast mining we are seeing in Wales.  Also, the diagram showing how CCS works (see right), shows it being pumped underground in order to enable enhanced oil recovery, which surely makes a mockery, at least in part, of its role as a low carbon technology?

A key failure for me is around how the increase in wind is to actually be achieved through the planning system.  Here in Devon, all but a tiny minority of planning applications for wind turbines are routinely refused. Although the Plan outlines how the planning system will be changed in order to steamroller nuclear power applications through, there is little talk of something similar for wind.  Many of the wind turbines proposed are off shore, which are considerably more costly than putting them on land.  It is a particular bullet this Plan avoids biting.  There is also no talk of community ownership of wind and other renewables, or the role of locally owned energy companies, which could do a great deal to make onshore wind more acceptable. The Plan also reiterates the Government’s brilliant plan of inviting communities to ‘express an interest in becoming nuclear waste sites’.  I’m fascinated to know how that particular list is coming on.

7 out of 10.

Transport

Much is made of the role of the electric car.  20% of the cuts in emissions are set to come from the transport sector, with an anticipated 40% hike in the efficiency of new cars in 11 years time.  This is very ambitious.  It talks of installing an “ultra low carbon vehicle infrastructure” and spending £30 million on several hundred low carbon buses.  6 cities are set to have the infrastructure for electric vehicles installed.  There is some support for cycling and walking, but the focus is on an electric car revolution.  Although the vision set out here is bold and ambitious, I would have very real concerns about its viability.  In the current economic climate which looks set only to worsen, how achievable is an electric car network beyond those 6 pilot cities?  And where will the electricity come from?  Running all the UK’s cars on nuclear generated electricity would require 64 new nuclear power stations, yet I would be very surprised if more than one or two ever get built.  Also, by focusing the 6 pilots in the cities, where there should be a strong public transport infrastructure, ignore rural areas, who, it could be argued, have a far stronger case for saying that their car use is essential and unavoidable.

Little is written here about reducing the need to travel.  There is nothing in the way of guidance for planners about designing towns and cities so as to obviate the need for car use.  There is nothing about out-of-town shopping, or the need for planners to place all key needs within walking distance of peoples’ homes.  By 2030, we are to presume, we are all still whizzing up and down the country in our electric cars, passing the electric lorries that are still bringing us cheap trainers and toothbrushes, as well as thousands of tons of food we could just as easily have grown ourselves.  As Richard Heinberg is fond of saying, we need to be exploring “not alternative cars, rather alternatives to cars”.  There is no talk of Alan Storkey’s idea, which George Monbiot promoted in his book ‘Heat’, for coach lanes on the motorway, which always seemed like rather a good idea to me.  Private car ownership remains sacrosanct.

It is interesting too to see how little talk there is of biofuels.  In an intriguing statement, the Plan states that it won’t support biofuels that “excessively compete for land with existing food crops”.  The word ‘excessively’ is open to all kinds of interpretation.  Either biofuels compete with land for existing food crops, or they don’t.  The other really weak point here is aviation.  The Plan believes that it can cut carbon emissions from aviation while at the same time growing passenger numbers.  This is surely a nonsense.  Aviation, when the continued economic contraction and peak oil are factored in, is a dying industry, not one that need draw any more of the country’s precious resources.  Shipping is also expected to grow in terms of emissions, due to “the ongoing increase in demand for global trade”.  This is where the failure to factor peak oil into this Plan from the start is a problem.  By assuming continued economic growth, more trade, more demand, more of everything, and then trying to satisfy it, there is a surrendering of control to what it sees as inevitable market forces.

4 out of 10

Housing

The Plan restates 2016 of the date by which all new housing will be zero carbon, which is entirely laudable, although Wales has actually managed to introduce this 5 years earlier, by 2011.  It might have provided a good push to this had it been brought forward to, say, 2014.  Much of this part of the report is as you would imagine, but it does contain the intriguing statement that “the Government is investing up to £6 million to construct 60 more low carbon affordable homes built with innovative, highly insulating, renewable materials”.

Does this mean that there is now £6 million for hands-on research into strawbale, hemp construction, earth plasters and so on?  Or does ‘highly insulating, renewable materials’ refer to Kingspan and other industrial oil-derived building materials?  At the moment ‘zero carbon homes’ refers only to a building’s performance once built, not the embodied energy of the materials it contains.  The role of local and natural materials in strengthening local economies is key.  This Plan also doesn’t question the idea that we have to build homes to meet the insatiable demand for housing, something that in the current climate is increasingly looking like an utterly redundant idea.

6 out of 10.

The Role of Communities

Given that Milliband has clearly explored the Transition approach, and told me at the Transition Network conference that he has a copy of the Transition Handbook by his bed, the elements of the Plan that address community are strangely disappointing.  While it is extraordinary that after less than 3 years of existence as a concept, Transition has spread so far as clearly having an influence on a Government Secretary of State, he also still doesn’t quite get it.  The Plan states;

“It is not always easy for people to see how small individual actions can make a difference.  Sometimes people can be more effective by working together as a community”.

Indeed.  They also state;

“the Government wants to take community transition to the next level, announcing £10 million for ‘Green villages, towns and cities’– a challenge for communities to be at the forefront of pioneering green initiatives”.

Here is where my frustration comes in.  In Scotland, the Low Carbon Communities Fund, which has been allocated £23 million, is what funds, among many other things, Transition Scotland, and a range of other community initiatives.  What the UK Government is proposing is £10 million in a pot that communities across the UK will be invited to bid for as a competition, somewhat akin to the very frustrating Big Green Challenge.  While Government tends to love this approach of getting communities bidding against each other, it is a deeply flawed approach.  What Transition and Low Carbon Community groups need is support for core services, and for specific projects.  They don’t necessarily need vast pots of money, if the community responses to climate change are to be resilient and able to do what they aspire to, they need  something closer to the Scottish model.  Transition groups need some core funding and support, funding for trainings and inputs of skills that they identify that they need.

This competition model is not the way forward, and is a huge missed opportunity. It does not ‘help communuties to act together’, it means that community groups use huge amounts of time and energy going through a convoluted application process where they are pitched against other equally noble community groups, and the vast majority of them end up losing out and feeling embittered by the whole thing (that was certainly many peoples’ experience of Big Green Challenge).  Something more like the Local Food Fund would have been a far better model.

2 out of 10.

Food and Farming

Although it is good to see food and farming being given consideration in such a document, this is probably the most disappointing section of the whole thing.  It sets the target of getting agriculture to reduce its emissions by 6% by 2020, but does so in such a hands-off, uninspired way that one can imagine the meeting with the NFU where it was made clear that agriculture was largely offlimits for this Plan.  The UK Cabinet Office wrote last year that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource constrained-future”.So what might that ‘pattern of food production’ actually look like?  This paper offers no vision or consideration of this.  Much of the reduction in emissions is expected to arise from “encouraging farmers to take action themselves to reduce emissions”.  The bite and determination of other chapters of the report evaporates here, the onus being left to farmers, with some training and support being offered, to magically come over all dedicated and get on with reducing their emissions.

The word ‘organic’ doesn’t appear once, in spite of the fact that any dependable system of food production will, at the very least, be organic in a low carbon future.  Does the Plan really believe that our dependence on nitrogen fertilisers, with their major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and their draw on the depleting natural gas resource, is actually sensible and/or feasible?  There is also nothing about the role of local food, urban agriculture, (and this in the week that the Mayor of San Francisco ordered an audit of all possible food growing spaces in the city, including rooftops and windowboxes), or community supported farming.  It does acknowledge the role of soils as carbon stores, but then says nothing about how organic farming is a more reliable way of ensuring that it stays there.  Peter Melchett, Policy Director at the Soil Association, put it beautifully in his analysis of this part of the Plan, “the Government are certainly understating the case when they say that, for farming, they do not yet “have all the answers””.

1 out of 10.

Overall?

Overall, I think this is as bold and brave a plan as could be expected given the circumstances under which it was no doubt written.  Here is a government approaching an election, having been in charge during a spectacular economic unravelling, with Milliband having to fit within and keep on board a Cabinet obsessed with economic growth (the Mandelson/Brown effect).  The brief set for it was to create a low carbon economy in the context of economic growth, in complete contradiction to all the indications to the contrary.  I think Milliband is a dynamic young politician who wanted to do something very far-reaching here, but he has had to do so in a very difficult context.  Within the context of what he can actually do, I think it is very good.  In terms of being a plan that will enable and underpin this country’s inevitable energy descent and relocalisation, it is inadequate.

Praise where it’s due; on the positive side, the Plan takes many decisive steps forward and puts mechanisms in place to ensure that the various Government departments actually carry them through.  It is nothing if not ambitious, although its starting assumptions are such that it is designing for a world that will almost certainly not be possible.  However, it is, of course, the victim of a degree of inevitable compromises (especially in the farming area) which hamper the effectiveness of such a wide ranging proposal.  I do think that as a plan produced by government it is as good as we are likely to get, indeed some parts of it are much better than one might have expected.

From my perspective, it throws the challenge back to Transition groups and others.  The Government has set out an unprecedented dedication to the low carbon agenda, and thrown considerable weight behind it.  The role of communities is seen as being vital, and encouraged, but the ball is in our court. We often say communities can’t do this on their own, they need Government working to support the low carbon agenda.  Now they have gone some way towards that.  What is missing from this Plan is the local detail, the stuff that central Government can’t do;  the locally owned energy companies, the local food networks, the groundswell of desire for change, what Jeremy Leggett calls the ‘scaleable microcosms of hope’.  This is what Transition can do, and I feel, having read this report, and having heard Milliband’s endorsements of the Transition Network, that the door to real and deep change feels significantly more open than it did last week.

Overall 6/10

Back in the 1970s, a 13 acre site stood derelict. Commercial developers proposed a development of offices which , like most of the other riverside development in that part of London, would have cut the surrounding community off from the river, keep all the added value of the development for themselves, and add nothing of value to the community.

The Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre

A community campaign was launched, which ran for 10 years, initially opposing the proposals, but then proposing its own scheme for the site. Their vision was for a mixed use development of housing, workspace, open spaces and community facilities. Much of the momentum came from some dedicated and visionary campaigners, who drove the campaign forward with a complete self belief that it would happen. They managed to obtain a £100,000 grant for a feasibility study, which paid for design work, planning and so on. This was risk investment, if the project failed it was written off, and if they were successful it would be rolled up into subsequent loans.

Following 2 year-long public inquiries, CSCB was granted planning permission for their scheme, but so had the developers. But CSCB had also gained considerable political support. The Greater London Authority were initially opposed to the idea, but changed its mind, and in 1984, the site was purchased. The first development was a park, a new open space in a part of London with very little in the way of parks. There are now 4 social housing co-ops on the site. Coin Street set them up and then withdrew, just taking the role of landlord and, in 3 of the 4, provides management services.

CSCB has also done a lot of work in ‘branding’ the area. Although it is hard to imagine now, in the 1970s, the ‘South Bank’ wasn’t really a recognised part of London. CSCB did a lot of work creating that ‘buzz’, running annual festivals and other events. In the early stages, the festivals were also vital in keeping up the spirits of the campaigners. They also formed the South Bank Employers’ Group, bringing together local employers such as Shell, IBM and the local hospital. They contributed to a fund which improved the public realm, bus routes, sign posting, the marketing of the area and so on.

CSCB has striven to be self funding from the start. When they first acquired the derelict site, income was generated through temporary uses including car parking. They have always striven to be self financing. Now school numbers in the area are rising, a leisure centre is planned to start being built soon, the Coin Street neighbourhood centre offers a mixture of office space for Coin Street staff, a nursery, meeting and conference space and other training and support services. CSCB employ 60 people. They are now a vital community resource.

Why, I asked them, were there not CSCB type projects across the country? Firstly, they told me, it is because planners still don’t see it as a serious alternative, not seeing that there is another way of doing development. Also, because if a community decides it wants to organise a similar sort of development, raising the finance to enable the first stage work, feasibility studies and so on, is very difficult. Without it, projects struggle to get off the ground, and are at a great disadvantage to larger developers.

CSCB see their work as being to provide environmental, social and economic regeneration. This has been very successful and they now have a broad portfolio of properties (including the landmark Oxo Tower Wharf) and a diverse base of incomes sources. Their early stages in the 1970s mirror in many ways the work being done by Transition groups some 40 years later; forming in response to a threat, responding positively with a vision, forming a number of working groups, consulting with and engaging their community, catalysing community change. There is much we can learn from them.

CSCB run a consultancy service for community groups looking to start such projects. Sara Neuff of CSCB will be a workshop presenter at the 2009 Transition Network Conference at Battersea Arts Centre, London (one third of the places are already gone, so don’t hang around in booking your place). If your community contains a site which you think needs to be developed by the community, it will be a workshop not to miss. You can find out more about CSCB here.

It maybe useful first of all to set the scene.  We live about 2.5 miles from the centre of Totnes, and about the same distance from the different schools my kids go to.  We live in a small cul-de-sac of houses, and there is a general store with a post office about half a mile from the house.  We have 4 kids, all at school, and I work in Totnes.  We had a car until just after the summer, when the car we were car sharing stopped being available.

We decided at that point that we would just see if we could make it for a week without having to buy a new one.  This goes back to the alcoholic thing.  If we were to decide to give up having a car for ever, that would be too much, we would have panicked and bought one.  So we just decided to see if we can get to the end of each week without one, and when we get there, to look to do the same the following week.

My eldest kids walk or cycle to school, and the youngest two go on the bus, walk, or get lifts from passing parents of kids who go there too.  I cycle to town and back, and if I need to go further afield I go on the train.  Some things are easy to do, other things harder.  So here, as a condensed overview, are the Transition Culture Pros and Cons of Not Having a Car.

The Pros

• Obvious things like it saves you money, makes you less carbon intensive and is better all round for the environment and society (but you knew all that stuff already…)
• You no longer find yourself dashing about to places just because you can
• None of that messing around with tax renewals, spending hours on the phone to insurance company call centres and so on
• Walking and cycling mean you get to see more of the world around you, feel more connected, and have good space to think and form thoughts ( I find that cycling to town and back is when I get to think through talk I need to give or things I need to write)
• Children walk and cycle without moaning now, because they know that it is not going to make any difference!

The Cons

• Some things become very difficult.  In terms of children socialising after school, you become quite dependent on the parents of the other kids in terms of dropping kids home again.  It also is very hard to do drops-offs and pickups of ‘stuff’, i.e. taking stuff to the recycling centre, picking up manure and other materials for the garden, stuff we need for the house and so on.  What increasingly happens though is that car-owning friends let us know in advance when they are going to certain places and we get lifts with them
• Getting to the beach in the summer will be a great deal harder (although not impossible)
• Getting shopping back to the house can be difficulty, as we are about half an hour’s walk from the shops.  Big shops tend to come home with my wife in a taxi or on the bus
• The weather.  The cold is really more of an enemy than the rain.  Rain is far less of a problem than many people think; over the whole of last year, there were probably only 3 times when I got soaked cycling in.  Getting kids excited about walking to school when it is freezing is much harder.  Luckily there is a country bus that goes from very near our house up to near the primary school
• Visiting friends in surrounding villages, which means we tend to invite people to visit us more, as they still do have cars.  Clearly this is not a long-term solution, as it would not work if they also gave up their cars.  It also means we tend to do more of the cooking, and hosting of get-togethers, which has its own pros and cons (although fortunately we rather enjoy doing that…)

I never really suffered from the Clarkson-esque male torment about not having a car.  I don’t associate with my car, it has never been something I have become especially attached to.  I hate driving, and I always have.  A car has always been purely a way of getting from A to B, one which, in an ideal world, has a good stereo in it.  I know for some, the idea of driving much less feels almost like a personal insult, an affront, a diminution of one’s masculinity, which would of course make giving up the car much harder.  All those records about driving south on Highway whatever do very little for me.  I consider myself lucky to have never suffered from that one myself.

At the end of the day, not having a car affects me less than it affects my wife.  For me, the main impact is that I cycle everywhere, which I did mostly anyway, whereas my wlfe looks after more of the home matters, shopping, children etc, and even sourcing things for the building work/retrofitting we have been doing recently which can prove to be quite tricky, in fact some elements of it would have been nearly impossible were it not for one very helpful friend (with a car) who has been very generous with her time driving around collecting stuff and sourcing materials (thank you Nina!).

In times like this it is very useful to have some support, some words of wisdom.  Mine came in the form of a book I have had for years, and which I blew the dust off recently, Anna Semlyen’s Cutting Your Car Use, a good, concise, practical guide for the aspiring car rejecter.  In it she writes;

Planning is vital to success.  Look at your lifestyle.  Is it feasible to give the car up?  Look at alternative ways to do things, including work, shopping, leisure and escort journeys.  Do you have everything else required at your fingertips?  An umbrella, waterproofs, alternative travel plans, good shoes, taxi numbers, public transport details, the relevant maps and car hire details etc.?

It is this aspect of being organised that is key to it, I think.  When you have a car, the car gives one the freedom to be less organised.  You can, on the spur of the moment, decide to go somewhere or do something having done absolutely no planning in advance for it. You can just pop to the shops because you need a pint of milk, nip to to Moors for a walk, pop to meet a friend for tea in the next town.  It requires no advance preparation.  Yet when you have no car, you need to think ahead.

One of the things that has been coming across time and again in the oral history interviews I have been doing over the last month or so, which have focused on the period from 1930 to 1960, has been the degree to which less energy availability, more localised economies, and the lack of personal transportation meant that people were far more organised in their daily lives.  People had their days quite tightly timetabled, people outside towns only came in once every week or two, and needed to make sure their shopping was done in such a way that they didn’t need to ‘pop out’ for stuff.

Being organised doesn’t come easily to us, but we are having to learn.  Doing a weekly big shop, planning meetings with friends, pick ups, drop offs and so on.  It certainly makes life harder in some ways.  Yet, as Richard Heinberg argues, the sooner we start learning to live without oil, the easier it will be when it simply isn’t an option.  In my family’s attempt to cut our carbon by 9% a year, having already stopped flying, then the car is the next thing to drop.

The other great thing in Semlyen’s book is the section that invites you to calculate how much having a car actually costs you.  We had sat and done something similar, thinking to buy a second-hand car large enough for my family might cost, say £4,000, which would last us 4 years, so let’s say £1000 a year for the car itself.  To tax it for a year would cost £120, and to insure it, say £300.  There’s the MOT too, I can’t remember the cost of that.  Then say £1000 a year for fuel, £400 for repairs, that’s £1,820.  That’s about £35-40 a week.

By our reckoning we spend about £8 a week on bus fares, which leaves us the possible use of 4 or 5 taxi rides a week if necessary (in reality we rarely take more than 2), and still staying below the £35.  Of course all this changes if we take longer trips, but having a family railcard and buying tickets in advance helps greatly with that, and it is a much more relaxing way to travel with children than all being squished in a car.

The thing that will make it all much more effortless would be to be part of a car share scheme, something like this one.  That would mean that on days when we fancied a trip to the beach, or needed to haul stuff around, we could.  There are moves afoot to start one here, I think it would be a key factor in lots of others letting go of their cars.  We are also still keeping the option open of going on a friend’s car insurance, in order to have access to occasional car use.  So, for now, we are taking it a step at a time, but with each week that passes, the resolve grows stronger that actually we really don’t need a car after all, and that perhaps we might actually manage without one.  It is still early days, but from here, life without a car doesn’t look too bad.

Each episode of ‘The A-Team’ that required them to fly somewhere usually had a scene where one of them would tell Mr T that they had to fly somewhere, to which he would reply “I ain’t getting on no plane, fool”.  At that point they would tell him that they were fully aware of that, which was why 20 minutes earlier they had dosed his lunch with crushed up sleeping pills, and 30 seconds later he would dutifully keel over backwards at which point they would carry him to the plane and put him in the hold.

It might have been more impactful had he said “I ain’t getting on no plane.  Do you know that if we fly to Auckland we will use aviation fuel 9.14 times my bodyweight, with carbon implications of over 9 tons?  For heavens sake guys, don’t you read James Hansen’s papers? Sorry, but if these jobs you keep arranging for us can’t be reached by public transport you’ll have to count me out.    Fool”.

Tricky, I imagine, to be an underground mercenary force with a low carbon footprint, but actually The A Team would be great to have on your side in the rapid Transitioning of your community, given their ability to do great appropriate technology with whatever they had lying around.  In most programmes they would vanish into a shed for a few hours when it looked like all was lost, and build a tank out of welding together a lawnmower, some string and a few old dustbins, which was then used to whup the baddies.  A machine to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it up permanently?  No worries.  A desert reforesting device?  Mr T’s working on it right now, should be ready before lunch, just don’t interrupt him, you know what his temper’s like.

For anyone who hasn’t a clue what I’m on about, or for anyone who has just come over all nostalgic, you might want to check out the original trailer for The A Team.  By the way, they didn’t have those T-shirts in my size, or I may well have been wearing one at the next talk you happened to see me at.  After all those years watching the A-Team as a child, I never did find out what the T stood for.  Perhaps, if a new series (given that remakes are all the rage these days) were able to focus more on his device building abilities in the post-carbon context, rather than duffing people up, we might then be able to assert that the ‘T’ stood for ‘Transition’?

Take a look at this recent TV commercial he did, and consider how quickly we might get things moving in the world if Mr T was the US head negotiator at the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks.  Come on Obama, you know it makes sense!