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
Showing results 351 - 355 of 360 for the category: Energy.
Here’s a great article called From Dissent to Descent, worthy of mention for its title alone (wish I’d thought of that!), which appeared on UK Watch‘s site, but which also had some very kind things to say about **Transition Culture** and the energy descent planning approach. Did a very nice job of putting this work in a larger context.
As you will have seen from my previous posting, someone I admire greatly is Michael Shuman of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in the US. If I had a *’People I Would Like to Meet in 2006’* list, he would definitely be in the top three. His book **Going Local** is one of the best books on the subject of localisation. The ever-wonderful Energy Bulletin drew my attention to the fact that the latest edition of Hope Dance magazine is all about energy, and contains an excellent inteview with Shuman called Going Local: Creating Self Reliant Communities Now. Do check it out, I think he has a lot of interesting things to say. There are lots of other interesting pieces in the magazine too.
Part of preparing for oil peak and relocalisation is learning about plants that will grow in the gardens we should be starting to put in place now. One interesting and useful plant is the **Jerusalem Artichoke**. They have no connection to Jerusalem at all, actually originating in North America. The name is a corruption of ‘girasole’, from the Italian ‘sunroot’, due to their resemblance to sunflowers, to which they are related. They can be used to make sugar, and have been considered as a replacement for sugar beet. They are a very easy-to-grow garden vegetable, great for novice gardeners, but are also being researched as a source of biodiesel, to be grown on an industrial scale to fuel the nearly 30 million cars on the UK’s roads. And therein lies a dilemma.
A new species, discovered recently in Borneo, could be under threat by the growing European biodiesel industry. The cat-like animal, which actually when I first saw the picture I thought was a minature brontosaurus until I noticed that its ‘neck’ was actually its tail, is thought to be a kind of cat. The BBC reported on it this morning in an article called ‘New mammal’ seen in Borneo. It turns out however that the creature is already at risk due to deforestation of Borneo’s indigienous forests in order for the planting of palm oil to feed Europe’s rapidly expanding demand for biofuels to replace diminishing oil imports.
It is becoming clear to me that one of the important elements of the response to peak oil is a relocalisation of the energy grid. Most of the current scenarios about energy for the UK, including those that have prompted the Government’s revival of the nuclear option, are based on a National Grid (and also on maintaining current levels of consumption rather than attempting to rein in our out-of-control consumer culture, but that’s a subject for a later post…). I have yet to see figures for the national implications of a localised energy scenario rather than the National Grid. It would be interesting to see how much it would reduce demand. Very little research exists as to the feasibility of localised grids. **FEASTA** in Dublin have produced a very useful document, the ENLIVEN Report, looking at some of the real nitty gritty of applying this concept to actual settlements.
