An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent
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.
The second half of the oil age will be very, very different from the first half. It is truly, to coin the term usually used to describe football, “a game of two halves”. The first half was awash with cheap, easy-to-find and easy-to-produce oil and gas. The second half will be the story of expensive-to-produce hydrocarbons, from increasingly inaccessible places, with a rapidly falling energy return on investment and an increasing impact, both environmentally and in terms of carbon emissions. It will be (unless we are able to break our addiction to hydrocarbons sooner rather than later) a wretched and increasingly desperate time of squeezing fuel out of anything we can. It will be the societal scraping of the barrel. If you want to know what that looks like, ‘Gasland’ offers a powerful, chilling, and enraging insight. Here is the trailer:
In 2010 Transition Linlithgow (TL) began ambitious bulk buying project for solar thermal heating systems (STH). The project involved selecting a manufacturer and installer, and negotiating a discount to encourage participation. When selecting the hardware we have looked at all aspects of manufacturing and environment (green manufacturing process with minimum waste), manufactured locally (no large carbon footprint due to shipping from somewhere in the world to Scotland). Other key criteria are performance, lifespan (guarantees) as well as ethical business approach.
It’s the end of the month again, which means it’s time to bring you a taste of the wonderful Transitioney things that have been going on around the world. We’ll start in South America with some very exciting news from Colombia where they recently held their first three Transition Trainings, and here’s a report with a few pictures. And then there’s news of Chile’s first Transition Town at El Manzano in the BíoBío Region, started by three brothers who also established the Ecoescuela where they teach sustainable lifestyles.
The role of the arts in helping to inform and inspire people around the issues of peak oil and climate change is one we have explored here at Transition Culture before. It was fascinating to read about a recent project by ‘sonic artist’ Janek Schaefer, and his original installation produced as artist in residence for the IF:Milton Keynes International Festival 2010. ‘Asleep at the Wheel’ created a ‘ghost road’ of cars in an abandoned supermarket, and introduced people to thinking about peak oil and related issues in some intriguing ways (you can read more about it here). Here is a short film about the installation:
One of the things with climate change as an issue is that when you’re trying to work out what your position is on climate change, there is a scientific consensus and there’s a body of research there – there’s certain criteria you can use when you come to it to work out if this is valid or not. In terms of economics it’s a grey area, in that there’s so much opinion – so for those of us who are coming through the work that you’ve been doing to trying to get our heads around what’s happening on a global scale, what should be the criteria be, do you think, that we should use when looking at different people’s takes on the economy, as to whether they’re valid or not? What was the criteria that you used when researching on the book?
That’s an interesting question; that’s a very good question.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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The second half of the oil age will be very, very different from the first half. It is truly, to coin the term usually used to describe football, “a game of two halves”. The first half was awash with cheap, easy-to-find and easy-to-produce oil and gas. The second half will be the story of expensive-to-produce hydrocarbons, from increasingly inaccessible places, with a rapidly falling energy return on investment and an increasing impact, both environmentally and in terms of carbon emissions. It will be (unless we are able to break our addiction to hydrocarbons sooner rather than later) a wretched and increasingly desperate time of squeezing fuel out of anything we can. It will be the societal scraping of the barrel. If you want to know what that looks like, ‘Gasland’ offers a powerful, chilling, and enraging insight. Here is the trailer:
