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.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Showing results 291 - 295 of 635 for the category: Peak Oil.
Monty Don is the presenter of BBC’s ‘Gardeners World’ programme, as well as a prolific writer on organic gardening, including the book ‘The Complete Gardener’. Recently he heard the talk I gave at the Prince of Wales’ Food and Farming Summer School, and was quite moved by it. The result, once the mental dust had settled, is the following article, which is an edited version of one that appears in this month’s Gardeners World magazine.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a link to an interview with Klaus Harvey about what has happened in Kinsale since the Energy Descent Plan produced in 2005. More recently, RTE Radio, on their ‘Green Light’ programme, presented a feature about Transition Towns, which included their sending a reporter to Kinsale, doing an interview with me, and also hearing about what is happening in Newbridge in County Kildare, which is working along similar lines. The presenter was clearly very enthusiastic about the concept, and the result is a really clear and useful overview of the subject and the issues. To hear it, click here, then scroll down from the link, the programme is that of 11th October, third one down.
I had just about got over the sense of outrage and indignation caused by reading John Vidal’s piece, Labour’s plan to abandon renewable energy targets, which revealed Gordon Brown’s administration as truly nailing their colours to the economic growth mast rather than the responding to the climate change one by withdrawing his support for the European target of 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020. Just about. Then, the next day in a follow-up article, was a quote attributed to energy minister Malcolm Wicks, which read*”at the end of the day, renewables is a means to an end. The end is bringing down carbon emissions”*.
Since the visit of Richard Heinberg to New Zealand, the place appears to have gone into a Transition-frenzy. James Samuel ran two workshops on the Transition approach after Heinberg’s talk at the EcoShow in Taupo, which apparently went very well. Also, Jo Duff of the Hawkes Bay Trust recently posted an excellent presentation she gave on the Transition model at an event there, which is a really heartening example of how people are taking the model and just starting to put it out there. The first part is below, the other 3 parts link from this.
In the Transition Network we are presently working on how best to support these nascent initiatives from lil’ole Devon, and given that we don’t fly. We are developing Transition Training materials, a presentation people can be trained to deliver and soon, of course, The Transition Handbook (the name has changed from ‘Small is Inevitable’) which will be out in March ’08. Who needs aeroplanes?!
The Big Melt report that caused me sleepless nights last week showed that climate change is happening far faster than anyone, the IPCC included, had predicted. Over the last week the peak oil argument has similarly sped up, exceeding predictions almost on a daily basis. It crashed through the $80 a barrel ceiling, which set experts talking about $90 a barrel sometime next year, but before the end of the week, there it was. Now the mythical $100 a barrel level could be as little as days away. It is worth remembering that when prices are adjusted for inflation, the highest oil prices we have ever had were during the last oil crisis in the 70s, and were around $102 a barrel, and that caused a major recession. Beyond $102 we are into new terrain; all bets, as they say, are off, with regards to what we might find when we get there.
