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.


24 Jan 2006

Iran’s Oil Exchange threatens the Greenback

dollars*Here is an article I just came across which struck me as really important, and which you should read in order to make sense of events happening around Iraq at the moment. I don’t make a habit of posting articles from elsewhere, but this is an important piece. International events make much more sense when we understand what is going on behind the scenes.*
**Iran’s Oil Exchange threatens the Greenback** – by Mike Whitney of OpEdNews.com.

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Discussion: 3 Comments

Categories: Economics, Peak Oil, Politics


24 Jan 2006

Local Energy – Local Currency – Local Power

solarI have an idea evolving in my head, and I want to put it out there for your feedback and thoughts. As the ‘Hands’ part of the **Head, Heart and Hands** approach I am developing towards the response to peak oil, I am exploring structures and mechanisms that we can develop for driving localisation. The one I am focusing on at the moment is the ESCO, or Energy Supply Company, which is designed to provide people with the services that energy does, rather than the energy itself. ESCOs are often the tool used to

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Discussion: 4 Comments

Categories: Economics, Energy, Localisation, Peak Oil


23 Jan 2006

Photovoltaics you can wear… however did we get by without them?

solarcoatDepending on how you look at these things this is either photovoltaics making a noble crossover into the Brave New World of the mainstream, or an absurd waste of resources applied to rather pointless aims. A company called ScotteVest has produced a jacket with 52 pockets (!) which are all linked somehow by wires, to create what they call a ‘Personal Area Network’, and you can power the whole thing with a photovoltaic panel on the back, which the promotional literature describes as

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Discussion: Comments Off on Photovoltaics you can wear… however did we get by without them?

Categories: Energy, Peak Oil, Technology


20 Jan 2006

Jeremy Leggett’s Peak Oil in a Nutshell…

wellAs someone who always used to read the Guardian, I have to say that The Independent is really where it’s at these days. An excellent front page piece the other day about the reality of the cheap Chinese goods we now take for granted as we have dismantled all of our own manufacturing, and today, in a truly excellent, heartfelt and unusually indepth and deep article for a daily newspaper,

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Discussion: 2 Comments

Categories: Energy, Peak Oil


20 Jan 2006

If ever a Wiz a Wiz there Woz… The Wizard of Oz and Local Currencies

OzWell you probably knew it already, but it was news to me. Until I attended an excellent talk last night at Schumacher College by David Boyle of the New Economics Foundation, author of The Money Changers, I had no idea that The Wizard of Oz was actually written as an allegory of the gold-backed capitalist monetary system. Apparently although the book was published in 1900, it wasn’t until

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Discussion: 1 Comment

Categories: Economics