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.
Have spent the day writing a ‘Transition Take on the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan’, which I will post soon. One of the things it commits the Government to is a five-fold expansion of wind power over the next 10 years. We have reported on many of the more colourful reasons people give for an expansion of wind generation being a bad idea, from the danger to them from flying cows and UFOs to the danger from terrorist attack. A piece over at New York Times online, reporting on the UK government’s plan, produced a comment so astonishingly stupid that it ranks now even above those previously mentioned.
A WHILE AGO, I heard an American scientist address an audience in Oxford, England, about his work on the climate crisis. He was precise, unemotional, rigorous, and impersonal: all strengths of a scientist. The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”
For those of you who have been following the spread of Transition in New Zealand, you might find this interesting. Last week I took part in a discussion about Transition on Radio New Zealand, along with James Samuel (who has done so much to catalyse Transition there) and Gabrielle Young (of Transition Waiheke). The discussion looked at Transition in the NZ context and was, I think, rather interesting. You can listen to the piece by clicking here.
You won’t believe this one. How do you make a new generation of coal, traditionally seen as dirty and decidedly unglamorous, not to mention the fact that it is climate suicide, attractive again? Riding to the salvation of the coal industry is Carbon Capture and Storage, a marvellous technology the puts all the carbon dioxide produced safely underground somewhere. Only problem is that as a proven technology it still barely exists, and you need to burn a third more coal in order to power the thing. Still, doesn’t stop the coal industry (in this case GE Energy) using the oldest tricks in the advertising book to convince us the our future lies in coal.
Well, you try taking a photo of tankers out at sea on your mobile phone from a moving train at dusk...
I travelled on the train the other day from Exeter back to Totnes, and one of the greatest pleasures about that trip is the stretch of track between Exeter and Newton Abbott, when it goes along the coast near Teignmouth. Many people travelling from London to the South West remark on that stretch of the trip and their first sight of the sea. Now however, that vision is augmented by the unusual sight of 10 oil tankers, moored together just off the coast.
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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Have spent the day writing a ‘Transition Take on the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan’, which I will post soon. One of the things it commits the Government to is a five-fold expansion of wind power over the next 10 years. We have reported on many of the more colourful reasons people give for an expansion of wind generation being a bad idea, from the danger to them from flying cows and UFOs to the danger from terrorist attack. A piece over at New York Times online, reporting on the UK government’s plan, produced a comment so astonishingly stupid that it ranks now even above those previously mentioned. 
