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
28 Nov 2005
**A Review of “Energy and the Common Purpose – descending the Energy Staircase with Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs)” – David Fleming. The Lean Economy Connection (2005)**
*Here is a review of David Fleming’s new book. It is highly recommended.*
On the surface, the issues of climate change and peak oil call for very similar responses. It is, after all, about reducing the use of fossil fuels. However, there are differences, highlighted in the Government’s recent announcement that it will begin a new programme of nuclear power plant building. On the face of it a good solution to climate change, it brings the UK’s carbon emissions in line with international agreements and business-as-usual can continue. From a peak oil perspective however, it is no solution at all. Nuclear power plants take 20 years to come on stream, peak oil is
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27 Nov 2005
Contrary to what I wrote a week ago, I have now obtained and posted pdf. versions of **’Woodlands for West Cork!’** and **’Permaculture – a new approach for rural planning’**, both of which I wrote quite a while ago, but which you may find of interest.
Thanks to Philip Beck for suggesting that I could get them scanned! You will find them in the **pdf. downloads** section.
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24 Nov 2005
**The Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan** is now available on this site as a pdf. file. This plan was produced at Kinsale FEC by myself and the college’s second year students, and was, as far as we know, the first attempt by a community to design an intentionally designed way down from the oil peak. You can read more about how it was carried out in the article called **”Designing Energy Descent Pathways”** in the Articles section on this site. We printed 500 copies, and they are already very scarce.
We heard the other day that the Action Plan has been awarded Cork Environmental Forum’s prestigious **Roll of Honour Award** for 2005. It is wonderful for the Plan and for the town of Kinsale to be recognised
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24 Nov 2005
**The Hubbert Peak**. It’s that thing you draw on napkins in cafes and gesticulate wildly in the air when trying to tell people about peak oil. You know the one, looks like a nice gently curving hill, up one side, down the other. It is of course a stylised version of what the peak will actually look like, but it gets the idea across. It turns out however that it may not actually end up looking quite like that. Colin Campbell has estimated that once decline sets in it will be at a rate of 2-3% each year. That is an alarming enough prospect. A new report just published deeply questions this, and makes for more sobering reading.
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23 Nov 2005
This isn’t really a book review, more a brief slating of a book I just ordered thinking it would be useful but actually somehow sums up a particular school of thought I strongly take issue with. **’Wake Up! Survive and Prosper in the Coming Economic Turmoil’** by Jim Mellon and Al Chalabi.
Starts off promisingly enough, funky cover, identifies problems like peak oil, growth of the Chinese economy, resource scarcity and so on quite well, and then looks at the fragile state of the world economy. All well and good. But what do we do about it?
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