Transition Culture

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.


3 Mar 2006

The Oil Drum’s 8 Reasons Why Peak Oil is Here / The Fine Art of Falling Off Building Sites.

fallingOver at **The Oil Drum**, Stuart Staniford has written a piece called Why The Peak is Probably About Now which you really ought to read. The Oil Drum is an amazing site, number crunching computer modelling academics (most of them using pseudonyms as they still work in Universities) sift through all the peak oil data and attempt to make some sense of it all. At least half of it goes completely over my head. In this article, however, he sets out the key arguments which for him are the key indicators that we are at or near the peak. This whole peak oil thing seems to have developed a horrible momentum, an inevitability about it which I guess I always knew it would, but now I can actually *feel* it rather than just intellectually *knowing* about it. It brought to mind the time

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Categories: Peak Oil


2 Mar 2006

Eco-Build ’06. Talk No.3. Chiel Boonstra – The Passive House.

passiv**Chiel Boonstra** is a Senior Consultant DVH Building and Industry Sustainability Consultants and a specialist in the Passive House model. His lecture focused on the Passive House, which is a concept for a house which requires no space heating at all. Clearly there is a lot that can be learnt from this excellent model which will be needed in post-peak housing. However, there is a catch.

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1 Mar 2006

Local Solutions Conference, New York.

LS

Well, I know where I’d like to be at the end of April! How about this for the ultimate conference on peak oil and relocalisation as the response to it? The conference is called Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma and has a dazzling array of speakers, including Steve Andrews,
Catherine Austin Fitts, Michael Klare, James Howard Kunstler, Geoff Lawton, Andrew McKillop, Pat Murphy, David Pimentel, Megan Quinn, David Room, Michael Ruppert and Matt Savinar among a much longer list of others, all looking at the practicalities of economic relocalisation as a response to peak oil. Do check out their website and get along and support this event if you can.

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1 Mar 2006

Eco-Build ’06. Talk No.2. Allan Jones – Local Sustainable Energy Systems

jonesAllan Jones is a bit of a hero of mine. I was very excited about hearing him speak and he provided a very interesting talk. He is the Chief Development Officer of the London Climate Change Agency. He is also the guy who set up the UK’s first ESCO and did such amazing work in Woking with decentralized energy systems. Allan Jones has been headhunted by Ken Livingston to achieve a Zero Carbon London, and listening to the no-nonsense way he speaks, you’d think he might actually pull it off.

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Categories: Climate Change, General, Peak Oil, Technology


28 Feb 2006

Eco-Build ’06. Talk No.1. Stephen Tindale – Greenpeace

**Eco-Build ’06. Talk No.1. Stephen Tindale – Greenpeace**

tindale*Over the next 3 days I will report on 3 of the best talks I attended at EcoBuild. While my notes are not comprehensive, I hope they will convey something that you will find useful*. Stephen Tindale is the Executive Director of Greenpeace UK, and his talk was called Tackling Climate Change. Much of his talk was arguing the case the climate change is a reality, which I won’t talk too much about here as I am assuming the if you are visiting **TransitionCulture.org** you are already familiar with the concept. He argued that rather than a long term problem, there is actually a very small window of opportunity in which to be able to address the problem. What interested me most was at the end of his talk when he addressed energy use in buildings.

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Categories: Climate Change, Energy, Politics