Transition Culture

18 May 2007

Transition Tales – Introducing Peak Oil into Schools # Session 2.

**Peak Oil Session – Transition Tales.**

Transition Town Totnes’s **Transition Tales** project just did its first workshop with the local secondary school, year 9 students (13-14), which went well. It is part of a 3 session pilot we are doing, this being the middle session about peak oil and the degree of our oil dependency. We began by producing a large bag which contained all kinds of household objects, trainer shoes, hair gel, inner tubes, spoons, and so on, and asked them what all these things have in common. They didn’t get it, the answer being, of course, that they are all made of oil. I then asked them what is the hardest work they have ever done in a single day. Answers ranged from “last Friday, we had English”, to “well, my Mum made me wash up last week”.

I produced a litre bottle of oil, and made the point that a couple of tablespoons of it contained more energy than they could exert in a day, and that their current lives required the equivalent of 50 people in the back garden pedalling frantically on bikes day and night. We then split them into 5 groups and they each went to a table which had a different exercise. Every 15 minutes they moved round to the next table.

**1. The Journey.**

This session was about where does oil come from and what does peak oil mean in practice? What kind of state is the supply we depend on supply in? We had a computer online, logged onto David Strahan’s Oil Depletion Map and gave them a sheet called Depletion map exercise which asked them 6 questions they could only find out the answers to by roving around the map. This gave a good background and got them thinking about what peak oil means and in particular how vulnerable the UK is becoming.

**2. War and Oil.**

We divided the group into two teams, and invited them debate the question, “the war in Iraq was caused by oil?