Saturday 24 July 2010

The End of Oil

     A lot of speculation is happening about how and when.  Personally, I very much hope that Renewables will cut in before it gets too bad.  Anyone who thinks that mining Uranium and the whole process of building, running, cooling, protecting and decomissioning nuclear power plants, let alone trying to deal with the waste,  has less carbon footprint than all the other forms of energy, will do well to look at the recent figures..The further you go into the future, the move damage you are doing to people, the environment , and the higher the carbon footprint becomes.
     The end of oil, as we have known it, is coming. There are a a lot of lovely transition people out there, planning a better future and  I was amazed at just how many groups there are in the U.K.
     One person who lives sustainably as well as writing about it, and not just from the countryside homesteader point of view, is Micheal Smith (Veshengro) of The Green (Living) Review.
      He has recently written a short book, called The End of Oil.  It is one man's view of the future and a genuine, not overly theoretical, summary of some of the ways to live in this new society.  It is honest, forthright and original and comes with years of experience of dealing with things as they are, rather than as  consumersville  would have us live.
     I have benefited from Michael's genuine warmth for anyone writing  whose work he thinks is of value and have read his attacks on greenwash.  I  read his blog regularly because it has its own voice, I learn from it and I am never bored by it. I love passages in his book which come with the sense of humour  I now expect from him,.viz :  the American approach to writing upside down in space and the Russian one. The former was thousands of dollars of research into a pen which would do this...which to be fair, they achieved... and the Russians?  Used a pencil.
      In his advertisement for the book, there is a whole chapter for you to read, to find out more. The End Of Oil by Michael Smith ( Veshengro)

Saturday 3 July 2010

This one, you can eat your way out of!

Does any of you ever have a sneaky suspicion that the scientists may be missing something when it comes to global warming?  We know that it's real and we know that it's happening and apparently it didn't happen before man stood up, but doesn't it ever occur to you that there must have been a lot of dust and ash and stuff being shoved into the earth's atmosphere in its turbulent history, so have they really got it right?
Well yes and no! The answer is so stunningly obvious that I don't know why we didn't all get it straight away.
It took The Organic Consumer to produce the answer to it all in one of their "organic bytes" on Twitter. Funny isn't it, how one of the most important pieces of information this century comes as a tweet. http://bit.ly/cAp1JV on June 3rd 2010. " Go organic change the world, not the climate".  If you don't like using links, just search with organic bytes 227 and the page will come up on the Organic Consumers' Association website. The two extracts below are from the first two articles, which I really recommend.

Change the World Go Organic
  "If you do just one thing to change the world, go organic"
"going organic is the single most critical (and most DOABLE) action we can take right now to stop our climate crisis. Every acre of of ground that's farmed organically has the potential to pull thousands of pounds of warming greenhouse gases out of the air."...
"Organic living can stop the climate crisis.  When you combine the impact of protecting the beneficial mycorrhizal fungi in the soil (which absorb and neutralize carbon) and eliminating all the toxic chemicals (and their packaging and the energy spent producing them), the carbon problem in our atmosphere is practically solved. We will still need more renewable energy, but restoring the earth's ability to sequester carbon is a good place to start. And you'll do it while eating."
 - Maria Rochdale, Organic Manefesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World and Keep us Safe.
   
Alert of the Week: Demand Organic in Climate Change Bill
"A shift to local and organic food and crop production would eliminate most fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, including deadly methane and nitrous oxide emissions, while saving the world's forests and turning our farm and ranch lands back into carbon sinks or storage areas, instead of emitters. Transitioning just the world's 3.5 billion acres of cropland to organic would sequester 40%  annual emissions! Transitioning all range and pasture lands as well, along with global reforestation, would enable us to remove enough excess greenhouse gases to reverse global warming and stabilize the climate."
  
 If we just went back to growing food the way our great grandparents did, we wouldn't have a problem any more. ...and, it tastes a whole lot better.









Peak oil and transition....It's not so bad!

     About Peak Oil....It wasn't so bad  ...Kirk and Maria discussed this early on in the book...
     Just for the record, I wrote to the effect that the oil had nearly run out some time before the nuclear accident. It was so expensive that most people couldn't afford it. Local communities started up again, traffic accidents went down, the air was cleaner...The only problem was nuclear fuel... as Maria says wistfully, "without that we'd have had a good future."
     The nuclear accident  happened afterwards. It did not take out the old fashioned cars, but leave the computers and televisions working.  No, the petrol driven cars had already stopped working.  The computers, as is mentioned in the book,  were solar powered, and the television service was limited.  The fact that I already have a marvelously sun powered website, genuinely powered by Californian sun, and very cheaply to boot, makes me think that it is just possible that this might still be happening in the future. Furthermore, as I read that certain computer giants were already looking at Scottish wind and wave power for energy to power the internet, maybe the internet would be functioning.
      Also, if you were a government in a post nuclear country, where an accident had taken out some of the counties, but not all of them, and the prevailing wind at the time meant that there was still a population which was not yet drastically affected, although everyone knew the cancers would come, and come sooner rather than later, which which was one reason why no one talked about it...... Maybe you would think that the internet was a good way of communicating with people.
     I didn't explain about the cancers, or the risks of their children having mutations in the story, but the way  the reality hits Maria, just when life is full of promise, was more than enough. I have blogged about the resulting problems  as a guest author on another website.
     The teenagers in this story want to have fun, they like being with their friends and life is for living.
     Anyway, it's your future, it can be great, so be positive, take a look at the next post because life CAN be brilliant. Absolutely, utterly, amazingly, brilliant.