Transition Culture

An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent

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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.

Archive for “Peak Oil” category

Showing results 586 - 590 of 635 for the category: Peak Oil.


11 Jan 2006

Peak Oil Can Be Fun!

ApoWell, not so much fun as funny. Robert Newman is, alongside Mark Thomas, a new breed of comic. He sees the time he has on the stage with an audience as an opportunity not only to make them laugh but also to make them think. His show, **Apocalypso Now**, recently released on CD, makes geopolitics, US global hegemony and peak oil something you can both be enlightened about while rolling around laughing. I particularly liked

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Categories: General, Peak Oil


10 Jan 2006

The New Caring Sharing Compassionate Deep Green Conservative Party (!?!)

Private Eye CoverI intend, as a rule, to avoid any party politics on **Transition Culture**. However, just as a one-off, I feel compelled to address the issue. ‘Compassionate conservatism’ and ‘Tory environmentalists’ are what are commonly known as **oxymorons**. If you aren’t familiar with the term oxymoron have a look at this. David Cameron, their new leader, is trying to regain the middle ground of people who are naturally Tories, who go to Farmers Markets and recycle their bottles. Nick Cohen in Sunday’s Observer in an article called ‘It’s farcical how Cameron has rescued Blair’s ideas from the rubbish dump’, does a good job of pointing out that somehow it just doesn’t wash. Anyone who lived through the Thatcher years would be hard put to see them as green in any way.

However, some people with green leanings are already talking about going to the Tories as the green party of choice. In the same issue of The Observer

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Categories: General, Peak Oil


8 Jan 2006

The Lessons from Kinsale – Part Five

**Lesson 5. What Could Have Been Done Better…**

Kinsale StudentsThis is not really something I should be writing really, this is more something that the people who have taken the **Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan** (KEDAP) on or the residents of Kinsale should be writing, but I will give some thoughts that I have had on the subject. As previous posts have set out, the KEDAP arose from a programme of community brainstorming, awareness raising, the work of the students and the inputs of various people in the area with ideas to offer. It has gone on to end up being approved by the Town Council, and is leading to some interesting developments. But if we had our time over, what might we have done differently?

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7 Jan 2006

“From Dissent to Descent” – energy descent in context.

UKWatch Here’s a great article called From Dissent to Descent, worthy of mention for its title alone (wish I’d thought of that!), which appeared on UK Watch‘s site, but which also had some very kind things to say about **Transition Culture** and the energy descent planning approach. Did a very nice job of putting this work in a larger context.

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Categories: Energy, Peak Oil


6 Jan 2006

Earth is Too Crowded for Utopia

familyAs Tom Atkins pointed out in his comment on the Catastrophist Apocalyptic Cultists article, overpopulation is one of the issues we have to tackle sooner rather than later. Clearly it is a deeply emotive and challenging subject, but the bottom line is that pre-oil the world never sustained a population above 1 billion, now it’s over 6, so logic dictates that as oil availability begins to diminish so will the population.

BabyThe BBC’s website just posted this rather good article on the subject, Earth is Too Crowded for Utopia by Chris Rapley, which as far as I could see doesn’t bring the peak oil aspect of the argument in, but does provide a very fair overview of the issue. There is plenty of discussion on this subject in the peak oil movement, particularly Stanton’s deeply controversial and, I think, profoundly unskillful article on overpopulation, which has been known to reduce people to tears.

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Discussion: 11 Comments

Categories: Peak Oil