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Archive for “Energy” category
Showing results 106 - 110 of 360 for the category: Energy.
8 Jun 2010
When we talked before, you mentioned some practical stories about how people in the US and how people in Transition projects were making use of the Crash Course – could you tell us about those?
Certainly, a number of people have used the Crash Course to great effect. It’s available online for free but not everybody watches 3½ hours of material on a computer, and it really wasn’t my intent for people to sit down alone and watch 3½ hours of stuff on the computer. It’s meant to be shared. So we produced it as three separate discs – they come in a single DVD case – and each of those discs is an hour and a half or less, and that was produced so that people would take that and bring it to their communities, maybe run three separate sessions a week.
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7 Jun 2010
A while ago, Peter Lipman and myself did an interview with Chris Martenson when he was in Bristol as part of his tour of the UK. We did an extensive and far-ranging interview, which was absolutely fascinating. Unfortunately, the memory card in my recording machine was irreparably damaged shortly thereafter and the interview lost, and so, a couple of weeks ago, we repeated the exercise, this time over the phone. This ‘second-time lucky’ interview covers much of the same ground, and proved to be just as fascinating.
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27 May 2010
So the Queen’s Speech has set out the policy priorities for the new government, but were the policies announced a cop-out or do they set out a wartime mobilisation scale of response to climate change and peak oil? These reflections are based on the article about the speech that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian. Plans include setting up a green investment bank, which will make loans available to households for energy efficiency measures and renewable energy installations, the ‘pay-as-you-save’ scheme initially proposed by Ed Miliband. The exact amount of the loans that will be available has not yet been stated, although the Guardian speculates that it could be as much as £15,000. This is a great development, but I wonder if it could yet be taken further? How would DECC respond, for example, if a Transition group were able to get 100 people to take out loans of £15,000 each and club it together as £1.5million in order to finance a community-owned ESCO, an energy company designed to be owned by and financially benefit the community?
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5 May 2010
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)….
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21 Apr 2010
Last week none of us had ever heard of an Icelandic volcano called Eyjafjallajokull, and still even now, very few of us can actually pronounce its name. The volcanic dust spewn forth across Europe as a result of its spectacular eruption has had a remarkable effect, leading to, among other things, the total grounding of the UK’s aviation fleet for several days until this morning. The headline on Metro, the free newspaper the person next to me on the train is reading as I write this, is “Fly, fly again”. It will take days to clear the backlog and to get things back to normal, but let us not pass up this opportunity to meditate on vulnerability and resilience, which led to major disruption to the air freighting of produce from Kenya and other places, thousands of people stuck in their Easter holiday destinations, and Liverpool Football Club having to travel to its Europa League fixture with Athletico Madrid on public transport . But perhaps rather than seeing it as the ‘misery’ most news broadcasts labelled it as, we might see it as good practice for the near future.
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