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 other week I did a chat with Karen Rybold Chin for ‘The Nation’ as the final part of a thirteen-part series called “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate”. Here it is….
Following it, Walter Haugen at Local Harvest wrote a post questioning my “1 litre of oil equals 35 days of human work” figure. My source for that was from the end of a report done by FEASTA a few years ago which concluded that “a 40 litre fill-up at a petrol station is the equivalent of about four years of human manual work”. Walter’s calculations, which argue that my figure “overstates the energy value of a liter of petrol by almost a factor of four” are here. Be great to hear your thoughts on this. Not being a mathematician or an engineer myself I’d value your thoughts/analysis….
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:
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.
Just back from a fascinating couple of days away. I went to an Ashoka Fellows retreat in the beautiful village of Great Missenden (home to the Roald Dahl Museum and many beautiful half-timbered houses), which brought all the UK Ashoka Fellows together to meet each other and for an intensive session of workshops. The distance I had to travel meant that I arrived half way through the first day, but there were some great workshops on, among other things, social franchising, communications and recruitment. Also got to meet some of the new Ashoka fellows, some amazing people doing remarkable work.
On Richard Heinberg’s recent visit to Totnes, which included a talk on ‘The End of Growth‘, myself, Ben Brangwyn of Transition Network (BB) and Frances Northrop of Transition Town Totnes (FN) did an interview with Richard. Part 2 will appear here tomorrow….
Welcome to Totnes, lovely to have you here again! The first question is: your new book is about economics and the book before was looking at coal….but in terms of the peak oil question that underpinned your previous books, what’s your assessment of where we are now? Is it still as much a part of your overall analysis as it was….?
Oh yes, very much so. The new book, The End of Growth makes the case that world economic growth is effectively at an end, both for reasons internal to the world financial monetary system and also for reasons external to the world financial monetary system and the primary factor outside the monetary system is oil.
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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