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Penny

Posted 2011-05-20 09:46 (#695)
Subject: Ask your relations what they know about Peak Oil

Regular

Posts: 63

Following a blog from Rob Hopkins (see below) I decided to try asking my 'ordinary' mum whether she had heard about peak oil. This was her reply:

"Thanks for e mail. I have W.... with me and neither of us know anything about peak oil. I'll ask others over the weekend. Can you tell me what it is. Obviously something environmental !!W.... suggests it comes from the peak district!!!"

So, we may think everyone must have heard about it by now but its clearly still not the case. Can anyone else try asking their ordinary, non-environmentally orientated relations what they know.

It would be interesting to stand on a street corner on the Black Isle and ask the question to see what sort of proportion awareness we get.

Penny

http://transitionculture.org/2011/05/19/might-peak-oil-and-climate-...

Martin

Posted 2011-05-21 10:37 (#696 - in reply to #695)
Subject: Re: Ask your relations what they know about Peak Oil

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Posts: 275
100

The Rob Hopkins blog is interesting, and I think he's right that "educating" people about climate change is a bit of a dead loss now - everyone has made up their mind, even if some have decided to sit on the fence. I agree with Penny that Peak Oil is less well understood - and even for people who know quite a lot about it, it's difficult to predict the consequences. I'm a bit sceptical about some of the theories about sudden collapse of society, but they may be right, no-one really knows. So I think Peak Oil is still a topic we should be publicising, but the uncertainty about the consequences makes it quite difficult to draw conclusions.

There's a strong argument that, irrespective of the minutiae of how Peak Oil pans out and when, the Transition message makes sense - there's lots of evidence that a richer society isn't necessarily more contented, and the things which people get most benefit from are things like community spirit, friendship, etc. And we don't need to know the consequences of Peak Oil with any clarity to justify a focus on local resilience - however things evolve, it's pretty clear we need to be more localised. But the arguments are a bit more complicated and hard to present without talking about the immediate threats of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

And if you present Transition as being primarily about developing the local economy, without the background of Peak Oil and Climate Change, then you could end up with a multi-national parachuting a big car factory in to Killen!

Difficult, maybe the Comms Group needs to convene!

Anne Thomas

Posted 2011-05-22 16:55 (#698 - in reply to #695)
Subject: Re: Ask your relations what they know about Peak Oil

Extreme Veteran

Posts: 319
100

I have put a motion to the Friends of the Earth Scotland AGM this week about Peak Oil.
I've used quite a lot of Penny's ideas from the letter she wrote to the planning department. I wanted to make sure that they at least consider Peak Oil and do some research. Their campaigns and reports so far make no mention of this and when tackled they have said things like 'well the Transition Movement is tackling this'. Rob Hopkins makes clear in his books that just tackling Climate Change without considering Peak Oil may end up with the wrong decisions being made. e.g if we commit ourselves to more nuclear are we going to have the oil resources at the end of its life to clean it up? Thorium may be a solution in that these reactors can use up the waste and thorium itself has a much shorter half life and cannot be used in weapons, but I don't think embarking on a long term thing like conventional nuclear with risks looking worse rather than better makes sense. e.g. a report this week showed that many existing nuclear power stations are at risk of flooding and with increasing flood risk and sea level rise due to climate change the idea of using these sites for a new generation of reactors looks very dubious. The CAT report suggests that we don't need to resort to more nuclear to keep the lights on in a zero carbon Britain.

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