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
The winners of the ‘Using Natural Finishes’ competition are Angie C, Tom Atkins, Vivian Hayes, Nick Lishman and Alistair Farrell. They answered correctly that ‘pargeting’ is “the formation of three-dimensional raised designs on external walls, traditionally created by forming relief work in the lime render finish”. Disappointingly no-one got it wrong.
As the UK’s energy crisis unfolds, the first places where an energy famine starts to hurt are becoming clear. The rural poor, those whose livelihoods depends on it and those living in those places designed on the assumption that cheap oil will be here forever, although its impact is starting to be felt across the board. On the train the other day I overheard a woman asking those around her if they took the train often. They replied they did, and she said it was her first time, she always drove, but last week she had sat down and worked out that it was cheaper to go on the train than to drive. More and more stories like this emerge every day as the scale of the credit crunch/recession/peak energy shock begins to sink in.
The International Energy Agency used to have the role of being the energy optimists, reassuring Governments and markets that there would be sufficient supplies to keep the world sufficiently fueled for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is still one of their wildly outdated and wildly optimistic forecasts that still underpins the UK government’s absurb assertion that oil will cost $67 a barrel in 2020.
I have to confess I had never really thought about this before. I strive to be mindful in daily life of not using more heated water than I need to, to keep energy bills and CO2 emissions down, and also of not wasting cold water, particularly for watering the garden, due to its being a precious resource. However, I had never really considered the carbon implications of the water that emerges from our taps.
It is often said that there is nothing new under the sun. As we stand on the collective precipice presented by peak oil and its many companion challenges (recession, runaway food prices, climate change and so on), it is easy to think that we are the first generation to have to face these issues, indeed, for many of us, anything else has not really happened within our lifespans. However, we have been here before, and the idea that rampant oil prices will necessitate a major rethink of society is not a new one. The oil crises of 1973 and 1979, although politically rather than geologically imposed, focused the mind in much the same way that peak oil is starting to now, and there is a great deal that we can learn from the experience of that time.
