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 6 - 10 of 27 for the month of October, 2006.
Thanks to Ben Boyd for pointing out a very nice short piece by Hana Loftus about the Kinsale Energy Descent Plan at WorldChanging.com. It is very enthusiastic about the whole thing, concluding *”I wrote a while back about the big-picture thinking of Mayer Hillman and how we need to radically contract our energy use. Here’s how to do it in practice”*. Thanks for that Ben (and Hana!).
I am delighted to be able to finally make available copies of the dissertation I have been working on over the last 7 months, which is called **’Energy Descent Pathways: Evaluating potential responses to Peak Oil‘**. It is, I think, quite a ground-breaking piece of work, looking at peak oil but also beyond it, which Richard Heinberg has described it as *”an extremely valuable resource for community leaders and other policy makers, all of whom must make the energy transition their first priority in the years ahead”*.
*I have recently started writing a regular page for Connect Magazine called **The Powerdown Page**. This is the first one I wrote, which attempts to offer an introduction to the whole subject for the novice peakoiler. Subsequent articles will go in more depth into different aspects of what people can do to prepare for the peak. The title comes from a talk I gave this summer at the Shambhala Family Camp, where I went to do a talk called “Preparing for Life After Oil”, or somesuch, but on the blackboard outside someone had written **”Rob Hopkins – peak oil, don’t panic!”** which I much preferred.*
**A Review of “Energy: Use Less, Save More” by Jon Clift & Amanda Cuthbert. Green Books, Totnes, Devon.**
This excellent little book’s eighty-four pages offer 100 tips for saving energy around the home. Highly readable, it covers all aspects of energy use in our lives, cooking, heating, keeping things cool, washing the dishes and so on. Its tips are all practical measures that you can go and do as soon as you have finished reading. It is designed to have a mainstream appeal, and its solutions appeal to that market. For example, the section on keeping things cool is full of excellent tips on making the most of your fridge/freezer, but it nowhere suggests that
I just spent a very enjoyable couple of days on the island of Jersey, at the invitation of the Jersey National Trust, Jersey Slow Food and the Jersey Organic Association, taking the message of energy descent and powerdown to the island. Jersey is home to about 90,000 people on a beautiful island near the French coast. My trip was organised by Alasdair Crosby, a reporter from the Jersey Evening Post and founder of Jersey Slow Food.
