Monthly archive for March 2014
Showing results 6 - 10 of 23 for the month of March, 2014.
26 Mar 2014
To situate this blog post, we’re in Kitchener-Waterloo, two cities that act as one, but can never quite become one because of decades or maybe even centuries of bickering. We are in southwestern Ontario, or west of Toronto for those who don’t really know Canadian geography. We like to call ourselves KW. What does this new climate look like in KW? More intense rain events, less rain overall, and more hot days. This past year is a pretty good example of what we can expect going forward in this area.
All year we’ve been whomped with very wacky weather in Southern Ontario, cold and miserable and snowy. (not that we’ve been the only ones!) Unfortunately this weather killed a bunch of the tree cover across the area, which won’t be nice once the mid-summer heat is upon us.
We lost a large number of trees during a huge downpour with heavy winds at the end of June. It rained intensely for a few hours, at one point convincing me that it was the end of the world. All I could see from my apartment window was water and cloud. KW flooded briefly in a few different places.
In those few hours of intense rain, 500 trees were damaged in Waterloo region. Our neighbours in the big city of Toronto fared much worse. They had heavier rains (exceeding the 100-year rainfall amounts at Toronto international airport), and had to cope with old inadequate infrastructure beneath very busy areas. The main transit hub, Union Station, was flooded! Social media had fun with it, though, using the flooding photos to mock the internationally infamous Mayor Rob Ford (see right).
The next tree-destroying event was a major ice storm a few days before Christmas. The region was pelted with 25 mm of freezing rain and 37,000 people lost power. When this hit us, we were planning on having a Christmas dinner with friends. But our hosts were without power, as were many of the guests who planned on cooking dishes for the dinner. As friends do though, we banded together, and decided to relocate the Christmas dinner to a house that did have power, and have people over earlier so they can help cook. We almost didn’t have our communal Christmas dinner, so many of us were without power. Luckily, power finally came on in some places and we managed to get everything cooked in the end. We were lucky. A lot of suburbanites weren’t, as many across southern Ontario were without power for days or weeks.
What did TransitionKW learn from this and other experiences while we were creating our Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit? We should make friends with our neighbours. It’s much more fun, and easier, too, if you work on transition projects with your neighbourhood – and besides, they’re the ones you will turn to in an emergency. You can floodproof your basement on your own, but it’s more fun when done with friends. You can make an emergency preparedness kit for your home, but when your power goes out, you should know people in your neighbourhood, because they will be your only source of entertainment, and maybe heat and good food, too. And, thinking about others now, when the power goes out in the dead of winter, who in your community needs your help to get food, water, or to a place where they can keep warm, so why not get to know them and their needs now?
Speaking of cold – did we ever get blasted with that here this winter. We also experienced the “polar vortex”, as did many parts of the United States that don’t usually get cold winters. We should be accustomed to cold winters in Canada, but southern Ontario has been spared from truly cold winters in the past decade, and it seems like we lost our ability to cope with -20C days for weeks on end, given the whinging that was heard everywhere (weather is a constant topic of conversation among Canadians, good or bad. Especially bad). The polar vortex is an example of the changes we can expect thanks to climate change. The wackiness was due to weather the weather pattern came from, and not the weather itself.
But those days will soon be behind us (though -10 is pretty cold for a first day of spring), and we’ll be back into the hot, humid days of summer before we know it. That is another impact expected in this region – more hot days than usual, longer periods of extended heat waves, and increased risk of drought. This affects our agricultural industry, so important in our area, as well as our human health. And shows yet another way where neighbours working together can help each other out. For example, a community garden in Kitchener has installed large holding tanks which capture rainwater from the roof of an equipment storage building nearby. The community is securing water for itself during drought, conserving water overall, and helping to ensure some food security for that neighbourhood.
That’s why we created the Climate Change Adaptation toolkit – we wanted to showcase ideas and actions that are relevant to our community when dealing with climate change. We know lots of people in our community are taking action on climate mitigation, and we fully support them in that work (see here for more on that!), but we wanted to focus on what wasn’t yet being addressed but is affecting us already.
It ended up being more than adaptation, because actions that help us adapt to climate change can also help us mitigate it, and help the environment and the community in lots of other ways. Check it out after March 29 here: toolkit.transitionkw.com. The toolkit website will officially launch March 29, and the link won’t work before that. If any Transition initiatives want more more information on the how & why of the toolkit, please get in touch with us: transitiontoolkit@gmail.com.
Written by Sylvie Spraakman, Facilitator at TransitionKW (see www.transitionkw.com for more!). We will be hearing more about the Toolkit next month when our theme will be “what is the impact of Transition, and how do we know?”.
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25 Mar 2014
Today we talk with Prof. Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford’s Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department. He is a prominent and widely published climate scientist. He also wrote a recent article in the Mail on Sunday called Why I think we’re wasting billions on global warming, by top British climate scientist. It began “we have campaigned tirelessly against the folly of Britain’s eco-obsessed energy policy. Now comes a game-changing intervention… from an expert respected by the green fanatics themselves”. What’s going on?
We will come on to that interview later in this piece, but the first thing I wanted to discuss with him was the recent floods the UK has experienced. Allen was recently involved in publishing a paper which looked at the extent to which climate change could be responsible for the 2000 floods.
He told me:
“The 2000 floods were really the first major event that got people talking about the possible role of climate change in these events. But of course it’s always a difficult question to answer because floods have always happened. The UK has always had high rainfall variability and so in some seasons we get more rain than others and as a result we occasionally get floods.
So the question is whether what we’re seeing now is just the normal run of bad luck in British weather, or whether climate change might be playing a role in it. That was the sort of question we set out to answer in the study we published a couple of years ago.
The key point is you can’t say, as a lawyer might put it, that but for climate change this event would not have happened. Because these are all events that might have happened anyway in a hypothetical climate in which we hadn’t increased greenhouse gas levels.
But what we can say is to “what extent has climate change or human influence on the climate made this event more likely to occur, or probable”, and that was what we looked at in that study. We came to the conclusion that on average human influence on the climate through rising greenhouse gas levels had more or less doubled the risk of an event such as occurred in the autumn of 2000.
But there was a big range of uncertainty on that. It might have been more than double, it might have been a good deal less than double. But we were fairly confident that the risk had at least gone up and that was the conclusion we drew. As you can see, it’s a fairly complicated message! A lot of people like us to answer the question “was climate change to blame or not?” The bottom line is it doesn’t make sense, for a random event like a flood, to say climate change was entirely to blame or entirely not to blame. We have to look at how the probabilities may have been changed through our changing climate.
If, with the floods of 2000, climate change doubled the probability of those events happening, and we’re now 14 years further into the warming process, would one therefore be able to infer that the floods we’ve just had were made even more probable by climate change?
Just because one kind of flood has been made more likely by human influence on the climate, it doesn’t mean all kinds of floods have been made more likely. That said, the circumstances we’ve seen this winter are not dissimilar to what we saw in the autumn of 2000, so perhaps human influence has played a role, but we are actually running experiments at the moment to find out, and I don’t know what the outcome of those experiments will be. It’s reasonable to suspect that human influence might have played a role, but until we’ve got the numbers in we shouldn’t really say either way.
Do you still think that staying below 2° is possible and/or feasible?
You’re talking about 2°C, the internationally agreed goal of 2°C above pre-industrial temperature. To remind people that that means really not much more than 1° above today’s climate.
First of all, it would be a very good idea, very desirable for us to do that, primarily because as a climate modeller, I don’t really know what a climate 3 or 4 or 5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial would be like. That might not be the thing you would expect from a climate modeller, but as you will appreciate, the further we go from the kind of conditions which we can test our models on, the more concerned we are about trusting what they tell us. I would be very worried about relying on anybody’s projection of what a world 4° warmer than pre-industrial would be like in detail, and for that reason alone I think limiting warming to 2° would be a very good idea.
So I fully support the goal. You asked whether we think we’ll manage it. I think we could manage it. There’s no question we still could do it. The reality is it’s not too late. But that’s not to say we don’t have a problem or a very substantial challenge in meeting that 2° goal. Just to put it into simple terms for people, global temperatures are largely determined, in the long term, by the total amount of fossil carbon we’ve dumped into the atmosphere.
Back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we had around 3-4 trillion tonnes, that’s 3-4 thousand billion tonnes of fossil carbon sitting underground waiting to be dug up and burned to power the Industrial Revolution. Over the past 250 years, we’ve dug up and burned about half a trillion tonnes. Over the next 35 years, at the current rate, the way things are going, we’ll burn the next half trillion tonnes and the next half trillion tonnes after that will take us over 2°.
That puts the challenge into perspective. We have to somehow work out what we’re going to do with all that fossil carbon underground that would be immensely profitable to dig up and burn if we’re not going to dump it all in the atmosphere very substantially greater than 2°C. That’s the challenge we have to face, we have to bear that in mind when talking about whether we’re going to meet the 2° goal. I think we could do it, but I’m not convinced that the current policy, that the majority of current policies are actually particularly helping towards that goal.
James Hansen has been arrested for trying to stop coal trucks in the US and Kevin Anderson has been quoted as saying that he feels that civil disobedience is one of the only routes to actually dealing with climate change. What’s your take on the balance, as a climate scientist, between stepping across into doing something about it or just documenting the process and gathering the science?
I’m pretty conservative on this one. I think it is our job to do the science as you described. I don’t think where we get our funding from or what our political views are really make much difference to the science we do, and we should always take very careful steps to make sure it doesn’t make much difference to the science we do. When I’m doing climate science I’m working in a community which is working together to understand the system as best we can and that’s very different. I don’t think my political views really come into it at that point.
Just going back to Kevin Anderson for a minute, he was published recently about arguing that his sense is that economic growth and adequate response to climate change are incompatible with each other. What’s your sense of that – is it possible that you can still have a growing economy that is capable of staying below 2°C?
I absolutely do, yes. I respect Kevin’s views on this, but I don’t think there’s any hard evidence that economic growth and climate mitigation are incompatible. I feel as a matter of policy it’s very unhelpful to suggest that there are alternatives, because all of the countries in the world feel that economic growth is their imperative and understandably so, because they have a lot of poor people, a lot of mouths to feed, and if people tell them that doing something about climate change is an alternative to economic growth then many of these countries would, entirely reasonably, say “well let’s concentrate on economic growth first then”. So no, I don’t think there’s any incompatibility between a growing economy and addressing the problem of climate change.
You wrote a recent piece in the Daily Mail, in which you argued that the only route forward to talking climate change was carbon capture and storage but it’s still an experimental technology. Is there a danger with putting all our eggs in one basket in terms of risks, do you think?
In a sense we’ve only got one basket to put the eggs in, if you think about the problem from a perspective of the overall carbon in the ground. We started off with three and a half trillion tonnes of fossil carbon under the ground. We’ve burnt half a trillion tonnes, we’ve got three trillion to go, more or less, and we’re cracking through the remainder. If we want to limit warming to 2°C, we have to limit overall carbon emissions in the atmosphere to less than a trillion tonnes, possibly one and a half trillion but not more than that. That still leaves a couple of trillion tonnes of fossil carbon in the ground, available to be converted into useful energy.
That just really leaves us with three options:
- We burn that carbon, dump the CO2 in the atmosphere and suffer the consequences in terms of climate change
- We introduce a global climate mitigation regime that’s so stringent, so draconian that no-one ever in the world is allowed to dig up that fossil carbon and burn it.
- We sequester the carbon before it enters the atmosphere
That second option is one which I would actually regard as pretty frightening in itself. I find it very hard to believe that we would set up some kind of global carbon governance regime that is that strict. If we can’t do that, then we just have to accept that some of that carbon which cannot be dumped in the atmosphere is going to be.
We’re talking about building an industry from scratch in effect today (carbon capture and storage), comparable to the fossil fuel industry itself, and we need to do that over the next two or three decades, which is why we need to be getting on with it. Without it, we will not solve the problem of climate change because we will continue to use these fossil energy sources.
We might use them slower if we are successful in improving our energy efficiency and so forth, but the key point is that it really doesn’t make any difference using carbon slower if you still burn it all in the end. In the end it’s the total amount of carbon you dump into the atmosphere that matters, not the rate you emit in any particular year.
You’ve been involved in publishing papers on climate change since 1999 and know as much about this as many people, I’m sure. How do you live with it in your daily life? How does knowing what you know about climate change impact on how you live and how you live with that information?
One thing’s for sure, the bulk of my carbon footprint is spent going to IPCC meetings, which is ironic but also highlights the difficulty of relying on personal behaviour to address the problem. Until the problem is addressed at the source, until we essentially engage the fossil fuel industry in solving its own waste disposal problem rather than asking individuals to tighten their belts and reduce their carbon budgets, we’re not really going to make a serious dent in it. While I think, obviously, there’s an excellent case for people diversifying their energy supplies and reducing their energy consumption, there’s an excellent economic case for doing that, an excellent energy security case and so forth. But we also need to be realistic. We need to recognise that we’re not going to solve the problem of climate change until we solve it at source, until the fossil fuel industry essentially is required to take responsibility for the waste products of the products themselves.
For the rest of us, what will characterise living with climate change over the next 20 years, do you think?
The consensus prediction is reasonably clear, that we should be expecting to see a higher frequency of warmer summers and wetter, warmer winters. But there’s obviously a lot of variability around that, and we’re still a long way from seeing, as I said at the beginning, weather events that simply wouldn’t have happened without climate change.
In the UK at least, because there’s a lot of weather variability in this part of the world, I think detecting the effects of climate change on the UK will take a while. In some respects it’s one of the hardest parts of the world to see the impacts of climate change coming through. I think it will be much more obvious, and already is, the impact of climate change on places with less year to year variability such as Africa and Australia for example”.
[Editor’s note] In the interest of balance, I’d like to close this piece with a link to Joe Romm’s fierce response to Allen’s Daily Mail article, and to Allen’s proposal that all other attempts to reduce carbon emissions through demand reduction, renewables and so on are a waste of time, with carbon capture and storage being the only solution. It is an essential companion piece to read alongside this article.
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25 Mar 2014
Transition Athelney links five villages on or bordering the Somerset Levels. At the February meeting of our organising group we were asking ourselves what contribution we could possibly make in response to the disruption and suffering caused by the prolonged flooding. An answer presented itself a few days later when a member of T.A. who is a local councillor with a lifetime’s knowledge and experience of land management in Somerset, gave me a draft document to read.
He was gathering local views on his detailed proposals for remedial action. He was also asking for T.A’s endorsement of this document, for submission to the County Council’s consultation process, ahead of its feedback to DEFRA. My friend’s document highlighted the complexity and interconnectedness of the issues affecting us. Weighing their relative importance is a demanding task, even before cost and funding sources, special interest and political factors enter the picture.
Upstream, midstream and downstream river catchment, land management and intensive farming, protecting homes vs food production, the growth of our County town (Taunton), dredging and drainage, the tidal range of the Bristol Channel, all have to be considered. The roles and perspectives of central and local government, the Environment Agency, Internal Drainage Board and environmental or wildlife organisations also feature prominently. One of the report’s aims was to address muddle and conflict between these agencies and the danger of local voices being drowned out by them.
The document revealed an impressive grasp of all these issues. Its proposed remedies to soil erosion (one source of the silt problem) and rapid run-off into the upper reaches of our County’s rivers include reforestation and hedge renewal. They make good sense and draw on the example of Pontbren, as highlighted by George Monbiot and others. But despite the depth and breadth of this analysis, three linked factors concerned me. One was that I felt too much credence was being given to the scapegoating of the Environment Agency. The second was a dearth of reference to climate change and how it loads the dice towards extreme weather.
I asked him about his fleeting mention of climate change and reference to its impacts as a future prospect, rather than a current and escalating reality. He was agreeable to changing the latter point, but was wary of increasing the overall emphasis on climate change, for fear of putting people off, and not having the document taken seriously!
The Environment Agency is widely seen as having a confused agenda, with ecological considerations being given undue prominence, at the expense of human needs. I am not qualified to judge how well or badly the E.A. reconciles these criteria, but what I do pick up is a perception (fanned of course by elements in the media) that it’s an either/or matter, rather than a set of perspectives which must be integrated because, as Tony Juniper puts it, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of planetary ecology.
The third thing which troubled me in the document was something which again reflected widely held views and feelings. This was that local people find the prospect of the Levels reverting to marshland “completely unacceptable”. This phrase reminded me of COIN’s illustrated report Moving Stories, which documents the plight of those caught up in climate related migration in places as far flung as the Arctic and Indonesia, China and the Sahel. How “acceptable” is the situation of all these people? Presumably, feelings of fear, anger and helplessness make it harder for people to look at their predicament from a global perspective, even when the data are readily available.
This may not matter all that much when we are discussing adaptation, but it gives few grounds for optimism to those of us who hope that weather disasters will serve as a wake up call to assist mitigation measures. This was illustrated in a BBC television programme on 4th February, when people from one of our flooded hamlets were interviewed, then shown a report explaining climate change, including the fact that several decades of further heating are now locked into the system. The extreme weather implications were spelt out clearly. This section was followed by further interviews, but I saw no evidence that climate change had entered people’s narratives, at least at a conscious level.
On a more positive note, T.A’s involvement in the report did increase its engagement with climate change in a way that spans mitigation and adaptation. The river Parrett (into which the Tone, which gives its name to Taunton, flows) is tidal, well into the Levels. I had not heard anyone locally talking much about sea level rise as a key factor. Dredging, whilst still an emotive issue, is now widely recognised to be no magic bullet. A sluice in Bridgwater bay has been mooted, but it is currently hard to see where the funding would come from and the benefits beyond Bridgwater itself would be limited. The report now advocates exploring the feasibility of a tidal lagoon (as is now proposed for Swansea bay). This could attract private funding, by virtue of projected revenue from electricity generation.
That BBC cross-referencing was good, even if it did not find immediately fertile ground here. On the same day, Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, spoke in London of the “merciless” process of climate change and the urgent need to remove fossil fuel subsidies and to price carbon emissions effectively. Our Chancellor clearly wasn’t listening, but hopefully others were. We should not wait for those in the merciless firing line to join the dots, but the number of people in the rich world who find themselves directly facing it, along with millions in places less well known to us, is growing. Perhaps it’s not too late for the cries of distress from within (and on) our own shores to coalesce with the warnings from climate science and help to concentrate the minds of our policy makers.
Somerset’s inland sea can seem beautiful, though not to those whose houses, land and roads have been inundated. As the water is pumped away and the fields begin to dry out, we begin to get wafts from the rotting vegetation, reminders of the stench which hit us after the flood of Summer 2012. There is an obvious parallel with the stink of political and economic business as usual. Somerset County Council’s report, which the T.A. contribution had a hand in shaping, makes frequent reference to “resilience”. Does this signal a promising shift in thinking along lines advocated by Transition, a helplessness in the face of future disasters, or is it merely empty language, a few vain drops of perfume, to mask the signs of social and environmental decay?
Adrian Tait, 20th March 2014
Adrian is Chairman of Transition Athelney and a founder member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.
Read more»
25 Mar 2014
Transition Athelney links five villages on or bordering the Somerset Levels. At the February meeting of our organising group we were asking ourselves what contribution we could possibly make in response to the disruption and suffering caused by the prolonged flooding. An answer presented itself a few days later when a member of T.A. who is a local councillor with a lifetime’s knowledge and experience of land management in Somerset, gave me a draft document to read.
He was gathering local views on his detailed proposals for remedial action. He was also asking for T.A’s endorsement of this document, for submission to the County Council’s consultation process, ahead of its feedback to DEFRA. My friend’s document highlighted the complexity and interconnectedness of the issues affecting us. Weighing their relative importance is a demanding task, even before cost and funding sources, special interest and political factors enter the picture.
Upstream, midstream and downstream river catchment, land management and intensive farming, protecting homes vs food production, the growth of our County town (Taunton), dredging and drainage, the tidal range of the Bristol Channel, all have to be considered. The roles and perspectives of central and local government, the Environment Agency, Internal Drainage Board and environmental or wildlife organisations also feature prominently. One of the report’s aims was to address muddle and conflict between these agencies and the danger of local voices being drowned out by them.
The document revealed an impressive grasp of all these issues. Its proposed remedies to soil erosion (one source of the silt problem) and rapid run-off into the upper reaches of our County’s rivers include reforestation and hedge renewal. They make good sense and draw on the example of Pontbren, as highlighted by George Monbiot and others. But despite the depth and breadth of this analysis, three linked factors concerned me. One was that I felt too much credence was being given to the scapegoating of the Environment Agency. The second was a dearth of reference to climate change and how it loads the dice towards extreme weather.
I asked him about his fleeting mention of climate change and reference to its impacts as a future prospect, rather than a current and escalating reality. He was agreeable to changing the latter point, but was wary of increasing the overall emphasis on climate change, for fear of putting people off, and not having the document taken seriously!
The Environment Agency is widely seen as having a confused agenda, with ecological considerations being given undue prominence, at the expense of human needs. I am not qualified to judge how well or badly the E.A. reconciles these criteria, but what I do pick up is a perception (fanned of course by elements in the media) that it’s an either/or matter, rather than a set of perspectives which must be integrated because, as Tony Juniper puts it, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of planetary ecology.
The third thing which troubled me in the document was something which again reflected widely held views and feelings. This was that local people find the prospect of the Levels reverting to marshland “completely unacceptable”. This phrase reminded me of COIN’s illustrated report Moving Stories, which documents the plight of those caught up in climate related migration in places as far flung as the Arctic and Indonesia, China and the Sahel. How “acceptable” is the situation of all these people? Presumably, feelings of fear, anger and helplessness make it harder for people to look at their predicament from a global perspective, even when the data are readily available.
This may not matter all that much when we are discussing adaptation, but it gives few grounds for optimism to those of us who hope that weather disasters will serve as a wake up call to assist mitigation measures. This was illustrated in a BBC television programme on 4th February, when people from one of our flooded hamlets were interviewed, then shown a report explaining climate change, including the fact that several decades of further heating are now locked into the system. The extreme weather implications were spelt out clearly. This section was followed by further interviews, but I saw no evidence that climate change had entered people’s narratives, at least at a conscious level.
On a more positive note, T.A’s involvement in the report did increase its engagement with climate change in a way that spans mitigation and adaptation. The river Parrett (into which the Tone, which gives its name to Taunton, flows) is tidal, well into the Levels. I had not heard anyone locally talking much about sea level rise as a key factor. Dredging, whilst still an emotive issue, is now widely recognised to be no magic bullet. A sluice in Bridgwater bay has been mooted, but it is currently hard to see where the funding would come from and the benefits beyond Bridgwater itself would be limited. The report now advocates exploring the feasibility of a tidal lagoon (as is now proposed for Swansea bay). This could attract private funding, by virtue of projected revenue from electricity generation.
That BBC cross-referencing was good, even if it did not find immediately fertile ground here. On the same day, Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, spoke in London of the “merciless” process of climate change and the urgent need to remove fossil fuel subsidies and to price carbon emissions effectively. Our Chancellor clearly wasn’t listening, but hopefully others were. We should not wait for those in the merciless firing line to join the dots, but the number of people in the rich world who find themselves directly facing it, along with millions in places less well known to us, is growing. Perhaps it’s not too late for the cries of distress from within (and on) our own shores to coalesce with the warnings from climate science and help to concentrate the minds of our policy makers.
Somerset’s inland sea can seem beautiful, though not to those whose houses, land and roads have been inundated. As the water is pumped away and the fields begin to dry out, we begin to get wafts from the rotting vegetation, reminders of the stench which hit us after the flood of Summer 2012. There is an obvious parallel with the stink of political and economic business as usual. Somerset County Council’s report, which the T.A. contribution had a hand in shaping, makes frequent reference to “resilience”. Does this signal a promising shift in thinking along lines advocated by Transition, a helplessness in the face of future disasters, or is it merely empty language, a few vain drops of perfume, to mask the signs of social and environmental decay?
Adrian Tait, 20th March 2014
Adrian is Chairman of Transition Athelney and a founder member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.
Read more»
20 Mar 2014
Stand by your newsstands! May 1st sees the relaunch of Transition Free Press following its successful pilot which produced four very popular and high quality papers. The relaunch also represents a shift in emphasis for the paper. I spoke to Alexis Rowell, TFP’s Managing Editor, who told me that in the relaunch issue, “the focus is shifting slightly to include anything that is “Transition-like” without necessarily being Transition. There are all these solutions groups out there, and we would like to join them all up, to expand the focus a bit”. So how can this new and improved TFP be assured of ongoing success? That’s where you come in.
The aim of the pilot was to show that there is demand for a newspaper focusing on the kinds of solutions that are coming through the Transition movement and elsewhere, with each edition of 10,000 copies being distributed, in pre-paid bundles, through Transition initiatives. It is estimated that every copy is read by at least 3 or 4 people, giving the paper a very wide readership.
The production team has recently been complemented by some great new additions. You can meet the whole new and expanded team here. What is clear is that even in a short time, whether as was reflected in the successful crowdfunding appeal or in the response to each issue, TFP has become a much-loved expression of Transition. Here are some quotes from readers:
“Thanks to the article on brewers in TFP, a group called Farnham Hoppers will be growing hops in gardens around Farnham to produce a local pale ale from the harvest. There are about 50 people involved. It’s very exciting.”
Robert Simpson, Transition Farnham
“I save all my TFPs and reread them when I’m a bit down.”
Diana Korchien, Transition Leytonstone
“TFP is an impressive read – it’s full of articles which educate, get you thinking about alternatives, and raise your spirits about the ingenuity of local communities to deliver incredible results.”
Transition Walthamstow website
“[TFP] plants the seed of the idea that a “newspaper” could be a thing of value – for slow enjoyment – that lasts – something that can be kept and passed around – for months!”
Dave Hampton, Transition Town Marlow
So, how to make sure that TFP thrives and becomes the success it is clearly capable of becoming? The model of distributing the paper through Transition initiatives (which if your initiative isn’t doing, please do, you can sign up for here) has, according to Alexis “probably reached its limits”, providing a “good solid base” upon which to expand the paper. Some initiatives distribute a lot of copies. Transition Town Lewes, for example, sell 500 copies, but they are the most proactive in this regard. With that base, the plan now, he continues, is “to ramp it up and go further”.
What will really make a difference is the number of people who sign up to become subscribers, paying £15 a year in advance for four copies. Do you know a friend or relative who might enjoy a subscription to TFP? As Alexis put it, “we’re looking for subscriptions in a big way”. You can subscribe here. It may turn out to be the best investment you ever made. In its short life, TFP has rapidly become something for which there is a great deal of affection. Let’s make sure that it continues to go from strength to strength.
Another way to help is to advertise in TFP. Its very reasonably priced Marketplace ads page offers a maximum of 55 words including contact details for just £35. What better way to reach out to the UK Transition community and beyond? Contact alexis@transitionfreepress.org.uk.
Finally, just kind of as an aside really, at Transition Network’s office, in our toilet, we have a Caption Competition on a regular basis. Here are our favourite entries from the TFP one, of Transition Network’s Trustees all, entirely unstaged, reading TFP:
- The nude centrefold of Peter Lipman lying naked on a pile of gel bike seats met with a mixed reaction
- “Damn! I thought this paper was going to be “Transition-free”. But it’s not…”
- The Rupert Murdoch buy-out had increased circulation but it just wasn’t the same
- As part of the push for more “being” at Board meetings, ‘Musical Statues’ had become a regular feature
- Jeremy Clarkson’s editorial was going down a treat
- The Board’s process of “empathising with the mainstream” involved replicating the conditions of a rush hour commute on the London Underground
- Ben had figured out 3 Across, but he wasn’t letting on.
If you can do any better, and let’s face it, it’s not difficult, do post your caption below. And please, do put whatever weight you can behind making TFP the huge success it so deserves to be.
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In those few hours of intense rain, 500 trees were damaged in Waterloo region. Our neighbours in the big city of Toronto fared much worse. They had heavier rains (exceeding the 100-year rainfall amounts at Toronto international airport), and had to cope with old inadequate infrastructure beneath very busy areas. The main transit hub, Union Station, was flooded! Social media had fun with it, though, using the flooding photos to mock the internationally infamous Mayor Rob Ford (see right).
