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The little island and its big, green victory
The Danish island of Samso is one of the world's first industrialised places to become energy self-sufficient
The community formed an energy association back in 1997 and now meets three-quarters of its heating needs from alternative energy sources. A cheering story from The Independent.
Please follow this link.
Posted: 27 Nov 2009
Resilience Thinking
The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more useful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face.
The latest edition of Resurgence magazine is timed to coincide with the Copenhagen talks, and looks at resilience as a key aspect of the climate change debates.
Rob Hopkins has written an excellent article for the magazine which is available for download as a short PDF here.
Posted: 23 Oct 2009
Looking Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye...
The Transition Network website says this: A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:
At the end of September, Richard Betts of the Met Office introduced a new study prepared for the UK government by saying: "We've always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise". The study warns that average world temperatures 4C higher than pre-industrial levels could be reached by 2060. Yet negotiations currently hinge on attempting to keep the rise under 2C - this considered the absolute upper limit for avoiding run-away climate change. A 4C rise could threaten the water supply of half the world's population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts.
This month, the UK Energy Research Council said that worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could peak before 2020. The chief author, Steve Sorrell, said that estimates that the peak would be after 2030 were "at best optimistic and at worst implausible". Even major new discoveries such as the oil fields recently found in the Gulf of Mexico by BP would delay the peak by only a few days or weeks, according to the report.
So, please consider - are we - as individuals, families, communities, nations - really acting as if we believed what these scientists are saying?
Posted: 23 Oct 2009