Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Showing results 21 - 25 of 26 for the month of May, 2006.
I’d like you to imagine yourself about 50 years from now, in a post-peak world. We are assuming for the purpose of this post that everything more or less worked out OK, we managed to contract our economy and our consumer addictions to a point where our quality of life is much improved, where we live in local economies, with local food, local products, local currency and so on.
At James Lovelock’s recent talk I attended at Dartington, he was asked by the enraged woman in front of me how he could possibly justify nuclear power in the light of what happened at Chernobyl. She worked with children from the area, and felt he had downplayed the scale of what happened there. He replied rather glibly that only 70 people had died there, and they were mostly the firemen and emergency services people who attended the fire, but that no-one else had died that could be directly linked to the disaster. His point was that far more people died in London in the 1950s from inhaling coal fumes and other pollutants, and that the C02 from burning fossil fuels could ultimately kill us all. This appalling dismissal of extensive human misery has recently been challenged.
My first reason why nuclear power is a non-response to peak oil is that it will take the steam out of the profound and far-reaching renewables revolution which is the only thing that will actually get us through peak oil. In the long run, we need to restructure society so that it becomes more local, with local food production, decentralised energy grids and so on, as has long been argued at **Transition Culture** . This is the ONLY thing that will pull us through. Nuclear power offers the illusion that “something is being done”, and takes the steam and the necessary funding out of the urgency to start the programme of profound change needed.
The term ‘energy descent’ is being used more and more to describe the period beyond the peak in world oil production. The concept is simple enough, the upwards left-hand side of the Hubbert curve we might call ‘energy ascent’, where each year there is more and more oil and gas available. Beyond the peak we can call it ‘energy descent’, where there is less and less available each year. For the paper I am writing at the moment I am looking to define what this much flung-about term actually means. I am attempting to draft a definition, and I would very much welcome your thoughts and input.
An article in The Times last week looked at the fact that coal is starting to be taken seriously again as an energy source now that oil prices are so high. It quoted Gerry Spindler, UK Coal’s chief executive as saying “coal is the rich, drunken uncle at the family party. No one wants it there, but no one is going to ask it to leave because it is going to pay for the party.” If coal is the drunken, rich uncle, nuclear power is an over-exuberant Count Dracula. Every time he is safely dispatched with a stout stake throught the heart, he somehow manages to come back again, and the villagers have to once again start fashioning a new and hopefully sharper stake in order to sort him out for what they hope will be the final time.
