Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
shakti
()
Date: May 19, 2010 12:47AM
Also, one last question, Rob, and it is an important one:
Where did the money come from? Are your books open and transparent? As someone who has been active in various left/eco groups over the years, I'm well aware of how tough funding can be, how difficult it can be to create and sustain mass organizations (that aren't thoroughly coopted and funded by groups like Ford Foundation, MD Anderson Fund, etc.)
While I am a firm believer in the power of the Internet to close down geographical space and boundaries, and that it has made organizing far easier, I also know there are limitations to what can be done due to finances. The rapid speed with which Transition has spread worldwide, with websites and committees and such, in just four years cannot simply be attributed to the soundness of your message. The world simply doesn't work that way, not even in the Digital Age.
Show me the money, Rob!
Where did the money come from? Are your books open and transparent? As someone who has been active in various left/eco groups over the years, I'm well aware of how tough funding can be, how difficult it can be to create and sustain mass organizations (that aren't thoroughly coopted and funded by groups like Ford Foundation, MD Anderson Fund, etc.)
While I am a firm believer in the power of the Internet to close down geographical space and boundaries, and that it has made organizing far easier, I also know there are limitations to what can be done due to finances. The rapid speed with which Transition has spread worldwide, with websites and committees and such, in just four years cannot simply be attributed to the soundness of your message. The world simply doesn't work that way, not even in the Digital Age.
Show me the money, Rob!
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
margarets
()
Date: May 19, 2010 04:39AM
A reply to shakti:
-I'm aware of Hubbert. However, he is not the main public face of "Peak Oil".
I think that's because he's dead. Or at least very, very old.
-Heinberg is. And he is a weird dude and a believer in Velikovsky. If the organizations espousing "Peak Oil" want to gain more credibility, they need to can that dude. Yet nearly every article I ever read about Peak Oil... they quote Heinberg. And yet I have seen zero debate within the "Peak Oil" community on his value as a spokesperson.
It's tough to find a spokesperson who will appeal to everyone. Sometimes you have to go with what you've got. Fortunately there are other groups working on the issue of oil dependency and they have different spokespeople. No doubt somebody somewhere has a problem with them too.
-"But I do know that there a very large movement with exactly these same concerns proposing exactly these same solutions and it's all on the up and up. I've followed this stuff since at least 1993, although back then terms like 'car-free cities' and 'sustainable transportation' were in vogue."
-However, there is a continued element of "population control" and anti-immigration sentiment at the core of the main Peak Oil groups, including ASPO, which has printed fascist screeds by British racists. Do you support such causes?
No. But come to think of it, everyone at the TT meeting I went to was the same race. Hmmm....
-"And let's go back to first principles: the definition of a cult, per Singer et al. Does Transition Towns meet the criteria?
Dodgy, sleazy, weird, flakey, pointless - a group can be all these things, and still not be a cult."
-I agree, the jury is still out. However, the elephant in the living room is that this is a 12-step program! Do you really think that was unintentional? I mean, couldn't it have been 10 steps or something?
OMG. I think you're onto something there. There are 12 zodiac signs and 12 apostles and did you ever notice that in many high-rise buildings there is no 13th floor? And what number comes right before 13? 12!
Seriously, it's just a number.
"The Great Awakening?" "The Great Unleashing?"
Quoted phrases with question marks at the end?
-I'm aware of Hubbert. However, he is not the main public face of "Peak Oil".
I think that's because he's dead. Or at least very, very old.
-Heinberg is. And he is a weird dude and a believer in Velikovsky. If the organizations espousing "Peak Oil" want to gain more credibility, they need to can that dude. Yet nearly every article I ever read about Peak Oil... they quote Heinberg. And yet I have seen zero debate within the "Peak Oil" community on his value as a spokesperson.
It's tough to find a spokesperson who will appeal to everyone. Sometimes you have to go with what you've got. Fortunately there are other groups working on the issue of oil dependency and they have different spokespeople. No doubt somebody somewhere has a problem with them too.
-"But I do know that there a very large movement with exactly these same concerns proposing exactly these same solutions and it's all on the up and up. I've followed this stuff since at least 1993, although back then terms like 'car-free cities' and 'sustainable transportation' were in vogue."
-However, there is a continued element of "population control" and anti-immigration sentiment at the core of the main Peak Oil groups, including ASPO, which has printed fascist screeds by British racists. Do you support such causes?
No. But come to think of it, everyone at the TT meeting I went to was the same race. Hmmm....
-"And let's go back to first principles: the definition of a cult, per Singer et al. Does Transition Towns meet the criteria?
Dodgy, sleazy, weird, flakey, pointless - a group can be all these things, and still not be a cult."
-I agree, the jury is still out. However, the elephant in the living room is that this is a 12-step program! Do you really think that was unintentional? I mean, couldn't it have been 10 steps or something?
OMG. I think you're onto something there. There are 12 zodiac signs and 12 apostles and did you ever notice that in many high-rise buildings there is no 13th floor? And what number comes right before 13? 12!
Seriously, it's just a number.
"The Great Awakening?" "The Great Unleashing?"
Quoted phrases with question marks at the end?
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
shakti
()
Date: May 19, 2010 11:20PM
Quote
margarets
It's tough to find a spokesperson who will appeal to everyone. Sometimes you have to go with what you've got.
I think you can do better than that, Margaret. Nice try, though.
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
RobHopkins
()
Date: May 20, 2010 04:13AM
Oh dear.. I did write a long response here and thought I had posted it... was there a problem? Did it not get moderated yet, or did I make a mistake when uploading it?
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
shakti
()
Date: May 21, 2010 12:59AM
One of the best, and earliest warnings about the Oily Peakers back in 2003, from the late Green activist Walter Contreras Sheasby.
[www.davesweb.cnchost.com]
excerpt:
"Support for a remedial program of oil exploration and development versus switching to research and development of alternative energy sources tends to be found among oil experts who are consultants to the industry. While accepting some of the values of the New Age, they largely remain loyal to their calling as oil geologists and wildcatters. The leading trio of Jean H. Laherrere, Colin J. Campbell, and L.F. (Buz) Ivanhoe have worked for, or with, the leading firm modeling oil fields, Petroconsultants of Geneva. Since the 1950s, they have been fed data on oil exploration and production by just about all the major oil companies, as well as by a network of about 2000 oil industry consultants around the world. They use this data to produce reports on various matters pertinent to the oil industry, which they sell back to the industry. "This much is known, Kenneth Deffeyes writes, "the loudest warnings about the predicted peak of world oil production came from Petroconsultants" (Deffeyes, 2001: p. 7).
In a late 1998 merger Petroconsultants became IHS Energy Group, a subsidiary of Information Handling Services Group (IHS Group), a diversified conglomerate owned by Holland America Investment Corp., IHS Group's immediate parent company, for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (TBG, Inc.). In the 1920s George Herbert Walker and his son-in- law, Prescott Bush, had helped the Thyssen dynasty finance its acquisitions through Union Banking Corp. and Holland-American Trading Corp. (Wikipedia, 2003). Until his death last year, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the nephew of the Nazi steel and coal magnate, was one of the world's richest men. Some of the old Hubbertians would probably flinch at such an association."
The Coming Panic over the End of Oil - Coming to a Ballot Box Near You
By scoop, Section News
Posted on Thu Dec 4th, 2003 at 12:17:58 PM EST
By Walt Contreras Sheasby
Psst! Hey, there. You believe that we are facing a crisis, an Imminent Peak of World Oil Production, right? Well, the insiders in the President's Energy Strategy Team would like you to join with them in solving this new sudden crisis.
In fact, you may already have been inducted. You panic at the idea of Western civilization collapsing as the engines and machines grind to a halt, uh-huh? You agree with Ron Swenson of Ecosystems that "The world is about to experience a real energy crisis, likely to be a calamity unparalleled in human history" (Swenson, 1996).
You think, as oil geologist Colin J. Campbell says, that "the very future of our subspecies 'Hydrocarbon Man' is at stake," right? You agree with Virginia Abernathy that there are too many immigrants using up our resources, I'm sure.
You probably realize, as many do not, that the Era of Cheap Oil and Gas is over. As Matthew E. Simmons, the CEO of the energy investment bankers of Simmons and Co. International, recently said: "I think basically that now, that peaking of oil will never be accurately predicted until after the fact. But the event will occur, and my analysis is leaning me more by the month, the worry that peaking is at hand; not years away. If it turns out I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, the unforeseen consequences are devastating "
Well, guess what? Simmons is not only an oilionaire himself, but he has been a key advisor to the Bush Administration and to Vice President Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force, as well as sitting on the Council on Foreign Relations. Simmons is a board member of Kerr-McGee Corp., a major oil and gas producer. He insists that the US government is very worried about oil depletion. However, Cheney's secretive National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) refused to make its records of closed-door meetings with industry executives public. The Industry has taken a beating in public opinion since the Kyoto summit put the spotlight on global warming. And now Simmons apparently wants to make the public's fear of The End of Cheap Oil the drum beat of the 2004 Re-elect Bush and Cheney Campaign, although a more enlightened energy policy, he worries, "is going to take a while."
On July 3, 2003, the same day that the World Meteorological Organization warned that global warming was creating an unprecedented pattern of extreme weather, Congress was considering a bill that would create a controversial new national energy policy (Independent, 2003). The bill allows new oil exploration all along the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) using invasive technologies that will damage sea life and ocean habitat in environmentally sensitive areas. In addition, the bill would open our public lands to further destructive drilling and mining operations. Two years ago President Bush demanded that Congress pass an energy policy centered around more drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but that red flag has been dropped from the new energy bill, S. 14, the Energy Policy Act of 2003
Given the immediate concern with natural gas supplies, little strategic planning is likely to come out of Congress this July, so attention is focused on reviving the ideas of 2001 in 2004 to have a mandate for change in the second term. Simmons said last year that "The [2001] plan devoted almost as many pages to the need to increase alternative energy sources like wind and fuel cells as it did for the need to protect the supply of oil and gas. It called for a giant amount of new power plants.... The plan called for America to begin addressing the need for a return to more nuclear energy and clean coal. ...none of these new energy sources [wind and fuel cells, etc.] can grow fast enough to be a real alternative to oil OR natural gas even by 2020" (Simmons, 2002).
These days Simmons is getting a lot of help from folks all over the political spectrum, from some of the global moguls themselves, like Schlumberger and Halliburton, to the environmentalist-lite Republicans of REP America (Green Elephant, 2001), to some of the anarcho-primitivists and Luddites who admire Ted Kaczynski (Xsilent, 2003), and from plenty of middle-of-the-road enviros in between.
On May 27th, 2003 Simmons addressed the second international conference of ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil [and Gas] which was meeting at the French Petroleum Institute (IFP) via a satellite teleconference video link from his Houston offices. His remarks were transcribed by Michael Ruppert, the ex-cop who challenged the CIA for its role in the drug trade. Since 9-11-01, according to his webpage (www.copvcia.com), Ruppert has pioneered the effort to educate the world about the consequences of Peak Oil, the fact that the world is running out of energy, and what this might mean for human civilization (Ruppert, 2003).
Simmons gained a powerful ally this spring when the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported for the first time that the peak of world oil production is in sight.
Spencer Abraham, the US Energy Secretary, called an emergency meeting of the National Petroleum Council's Natural Gas Summit on June 26, 2003, amid calls for the administration to deal urgently with the acute shortage of natural gas this year: "It is a national concern that will touch virtually every American," Abraham told the Summit of experts and industry execs. "It is our hope that the energy bill will contain provisions that help spur domestic production of natural gas and enhance our importation facilities to boost supplies, while reducing our nation's growing over-reliance on this one source of energy." Daniel Yergin, author of the 1991 book about the oil industry, The Prize, and founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, counseled that the fault was not with markets: "Rather it is the result of disappointing geological experience over the last few years plus restrictions on exploration, combined with a shift to new uses of gas that will certainly grow consumption" (Picerno, 2003). Spurring domestic production of gas will also subsidize oil drilling, and diversifying sources will entail more use of coal, so this energy bill does not quite entail the immediate end of Hydrocarbon Man.
Without a doubt, despite the talk of alternative fuels, the use of government to stimulate the exploration and discovery of new oil and gas fields is at the top of the agenda. Simmons believes that the reason oil reserves have fallen so far behind oil and gas consumption is that "we drill far less wells. We also stopped doing most genuine exploration." Higher oil prices are essential, since "The higher the cost, the more you can extend, recovering more and more of the harder and harder to get resources." Simmons funds the remaining wildcatters, handling an investment portfolio of approximately $56 billion, so he should know (Simmons, 2003a).
In fact the coalition that is pushing for a radical new energy policy is largely composed of those who stand to benefit from a revival, not a phase out, of oil and gas development. The intellectual and activist core of the coalition is made up of those veteran oil geologists and engineers who use the method of modeling the ratio of reserves to production developed by the maverick research geophysicist Marion King Hubbert, who died in 1989. He believed that the peak of production is reached when half of the estimated ultimately recoverable resource, determined by what has been discovered and logged cumulatively as actual reserves, has been pumped. In 1956 at the Shell Oil Lab in Houston, Hubbert startled his colleagues by predicting that the fossil fuel era would be over very quickly. He correctly predicted that US oil production would peak in the early 1970's.
In the 1970s Hubbert embraced solar power, saying "I'm convinced we have the technology to handle it right now. We could make the transition in a matter of decades if we begin now" (Hickerson, 1995). Although his thinking was definitely in the ecotopian tradition, he has often been mistaken for a cynical dystopian by those who swear by Hubbert as the prophet of the Great Malthusian Die Off (Hanson, 2003).
The dean of the older Hubbertians is Kenneth Deffeyes, Professor Emeritus at Princeton and author of Hubbert's Peak: the Impending World Oil Shortage (2001). Deffeyes, who worked with Hubbert in Houston for Shell Oil, says _I never came to identify with management." Convinced of Hubbert's theory, "I realized that a contracting oil industry was not a good career prospect," he says, "so I decided to get out and go into academia" (Guterl, 2002). Besides, he thinks that "crude oil is much too valuable to be burned as a fuel." (Dunn, 2002).
Support for a remedial program of oil exploration and development versus switching to research and development of alternative energy sources tends to be found among oil experts who are consultants to the industry. While accepting some of the values of the New Age, they largely remain loyal to their calling as oil geologists and wildcatters. The leading trio of Jean H. Laherrere, Colin J. Campbell, and L.F. (Buz) Ivanhoe have worked for, or with, the leading firm modeling oil fields, Petroconsultants of Geneva. Since the 1950s, they have been fed data on oil exploration and production by just about all the major oil companies, as well as by a network of about 2000 oil industry consultants around the world. They use this data to produce reports on various matters pertinent to the oil industry, which they sell back to the industry. "This much is known, Kenneth Deffeyes writes, "the loudest warnings about the predicted peak of world oil production came from Petroconsultants" (Deffeyes, 2001: p. 7).
In a late 1998 merger Petroconsultants became IHS Energy Group, a subsidiary of Information Handling Services Group (IHS Group), a diversified conglomerate owned by Holland America Investment Corp., IHS Group's immediate parent company, for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (TBG, Inc.). In the 1920s George Herbert Walker and his son-in- law, Prescott Bush, had helped the Thyssen dynasty finance its acquisitions through Union Banking Corp. and Holland-American Trading Corp. (Wikipedia, 2003). Until his death last year, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the nephew of the Nazi steel and coal magnate, was one of the world's richest men. Some of the old Hubbertians would probably flinch at such an association.
In 1995 a report by Campbell and Laherre on world oil resources, World Oil Supply 1930-2050 (Petroconsultants Pty. Ltd., 1995), written for oil industry insiders and priced at $32,000 per copy, concluded that world oil production and supply probably would peak as soon as the year 2000 and decline to half the peak level by 2025. Large and permanent increases in oil prices were predicted after the year 2000.
Alternatives to fossil fuels got a mixed review from the petroleum consultants gathered at the ASPO Meeting in Paris May 26-27, 2003, who maintained that hydrogen, solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources will not be able to fill the looming demand-supply gap that faces the planet (Baker, 2003).
Colin J. Campbell, the leader of the Neo-Hubbertians, is a petroleum geologist from Ballydehob, Ireland, and author of The Coming Oil Crisis (1997). He worked for Texaco as an exploration geologist and then at Amoco as chief geologist for Ecuador. He is a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) and the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), originally a network of 24 oil scientists. ASPO has Associate members like Halliburton and financial sponsors like Schlumberger, but Campbell is critical of the Bush-Cheney Administration for "collectively having personal investments of as much as $150 M in oil companies" (ASPO, 2002).
Campbell has laid out his prescription for various consumer governments, for example: "Germany should resist Green pressure to give up nuclear power at precisely the moment it needs more energy, as oil peaks and declines.
Germany has coal and possibilities for coalbed methane. This industry needs to be rediscovered. It may become economic again. Germany should encourage its motor manufacturers to move to more efficient engines and hydrogen fuels, especially those made by solar means. It should provide whatever fiscal incentives are needed." (Campbell, 2000).
Jean H. Laherrere is a petroleum consultant residing in Paris, France. Laherrere's early work on seismic refraction surveys contributed to the discovery of Africa's largest oil field. He retired in 1992 after 37 years with Total CFI and its subsidiaries in exploration activities in the Sahara, Australia, Canada and Paris. Since retiring from TOTAL, Laherrere has consulted worldwide on oil and gas potential and production as a Petroconsultants Associate, and he serves on boards of the Society of Petroleum Engineers/World Petroleum Congress.
Like Campbell, Laherrere sees a key role for nuclear energy in the coming transition, but he also envisions a new role for the petrol pump: "If new nuclear plants with high temperature reactors are widely used in the long-term future to supply electricity, they can also provide hydrogen in their off-peak time, which could be carbonised to supply synthetic oil. It could easily replace declining oil supply for transport without any change in the distribution" (Laherrere, 2003). The Big Five could thus survive the end of oil.
L. F. (Buz) Ivanhoe discovered oil for Occidental for 12 of his 50 years in oil exploration, and he continues to consult as president of Novum Corp., Ojai, California. He founded the M. King Hubbert Center for Petroleum Supply Studies at the Colorado School of Mines to study supply data. Ivanhoe is pessimistic about alternative energy sources: "Natural gas/methanol ... should not be counted on to quickly replace all or most of crude oil. Building gas pipelines takes decades. The other alternative fuels (solar, wind, geothermal, wood, waste) combined produce less than 1% of US electricity!" (Ivanhoe, 1997).
Walter Lewellyn Youngquist is a retired field geologist, and now a geological consultant who teaches at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and author of GeoDestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations and Individuals (1997). He concludes that "...coal and uranium are the only two alternative sources of energy which can be developed in large amounts, and provide a dependable base load in the reasonably near future" (Youngquist, 2000).
Matt Simmons has to sell whatever Bush-Cheney Energy Policy is projected in 2004, but he personally believes "There really aren't any good energy solutions for bridges, to buy some time, from oil and gas to the alternatives." Neither the ASPO geologists nor the USGS geologists will ever admit to the indeterminacy principle that Matthew Simmons shyly confessed: "It turns out that total energy resources, uh, is still a mystery" (Simmons, 2003b).
Over 200 organizations around the world launched a campaign against new oil exploration in December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. As documented in the Rainforest Action Network and Project Underground report Drilling to the Ends of the Earth, ongoing exploration threatens old growth frontier forests in 22 countries, coral reefs in 38 countries, and mangroves in 46 countries. A Greenpeace technical analysis, based on the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has found that only a quarter of global economic reserves of fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas - can be burned before dangerous rates of temperature increase and climate change occurs, to which many species of plants and animals will not be able to adapt (Greenpeace, 1998).
If the question becomes which cataclysm is the gravest threat, global warming or oil and gas shortages, the greens will go in one direction while most voters choose the path most traveled. In Milton's words, "Why is the greatest of free communities reduced to Hobson's choice?"
There is no reason for radical ecologists to join debates over the esoteric timetables for the decline of world oil production, which should be bracketed as irrelevant to the socio-political imperative of democratizing the economy and creating a new energy infrastructure that is based on post-capitalist norms of sustainability, sharing and community democracy. We must find ways of making the urgency of that transformation a motivation in people's lives and in their self-conscious anti-ideological politics. The dangers posed by global capitalism to human life and nature itself are all too real. We need to reject the posing of imminent danger as panic, as Chicken Little's alarm over the Falling Sky.
[www.davesweb.cnchost.com]
excerpt:
"Support for a remedial program of oil exploration and development versus switching to research and development of alternative energy sources tends to be found among oil experts who are consultants to the industry. While accepting some of the values of the New Age, they largely remain loyal to their calling as oil geologists and wildcatters. The leading trio of Jean H. Laherrere, Colin J. Campbell, and L.F. (Buz) Ivanhoe have worked for, or with, the leading firm modeling oil fields, Petroconsultants of Geneva. Since the 1950s, they have been fed data on oil exploration and production by just about all the major oil companies, as well as by a network of about 2000 oil industry consultants around the world. They use this data to produce reports on various matters pertinent to the oil industry, which they sell back to the industry. "This much is known, Kenneth Deffeyes writes, "the loudest warnings about the predicted peak of world oil production came from Petroconsultants" (Deffeyes, 2001: p. 7).
In a late 1998 merger Petroconsultants became IHS Energy Group, a subsidiary of Information Handling Services Group (IHS Group), a diversified conglomerate owned by Holland America Investment Corp., IHS Group's immediate parent company, for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (TBG, Inc.). In the 1920s George Herbert Walker and his son-in- law, Prescott Bush, had helped the Thyssen dynasty finance its acquisitions through Union Banking Corp. and Holland-American Trading Corp. (Wikipedia, 2003). Until his death last year, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the nephew of the Nazi steel and coal magnate, was one of the world's richest men. Some of the old Hubbertians would probably flinch at such an association."
The Coming Panic over the End of Oil - Coming to a Ballot Box Near You
By scoop, Section News
Posted on Thu Dec 4th, 2003 at 12:17:58 PM EST
By Walt Contreras Sheasby
Psst! Hey, there. You believe that we are facing a crisis, an Imminent Peak of World Oil Production, right? Well, the insiders in the President's Energy Strategy Team would like you to join with them in solving this new sudden crisis.
In fact, you may already have been inducted. You panic at the idea of Western civilization collapsing as the engines and machines grind to a halt, uh-huh? You agree with Ron Swenson of Ecosystems that "The world is about to experience a real energy crisis, likely to be a calamity unparalleled in human history" (Swenson, 1996).
You think, as oil geologist Colin J. Campbell says, that "the very future of our subspecies 'Hydrocarbon Man' is at stake," right? You agree with Virginia Abernathy that there are too many immigrants using up our resources, I'm sure.
You probably realize, as many do not, that the Era of Cheap Oil and Gas is over. As Matthew E. Simmons, the CEO of the energy investment bankers of Simmons and Co. International, recently said: "I think basically that now, that peaking of oil will never be accurately predicted until after the fact. But the event will occur, and my analysis is leaning me more by the month, the worry that peaking is at hand; not years away. If it turns out I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, the unforeseen consequences are devastating "
Well, guess what? Simmons is not only an oilionaire himself, but he has been a key advisor to the Bush Administration and to Vice President Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force, as well as sitting on the Council on Foreign Relations. Simmons is a board member of Kerr-McGee Corp., a major oil and gas producer. He insists that the US government is very worried about oil depletion. However, Cheney's secretive National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) refused to make its records of closed-door meetings with industry executives public. The Industry has taken a beating in public opinion since the Kyoto summit put the spotlight on global warming. And now Simmons apparently wants to make the public's fear of The End of Cheap Oil the drum beat of the 2004 Re-elect Bush and Cheney Campaign, although a more enlightened energy policy, he worries, "is going to take a while."
On July 3, 2003, the same day that the World Meteorological Organization warned that global warming was creating an unprecedented pattern of extreme weather, Congress was considering a bill that would create a controversial new national energy policy (Independent, 2003). The bill allows new oil exploration all along the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) using invasive technologies that will damage sea life and ocean habitat in environmentally sensitive areas. In addition, the bill would open our public lands to further destructive drilling and mining operations. Two years ago President Bush demanded that Congress pass an energy policy centered around more drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but that red flag has been dropped from the new energy bill, S. 14, the Energy Policy Act of 2003
Given the immediate concern with natural gas supplies, little strategic planning is likely to come out of Congress this July, so attention is focused on reviving the ideas of 2001 in 2004 to have a mandate for change in the second term. Simmons said last year that "The [2001] plan devoted almost as many pages to the need to increase alternative energy sources like wind and fuel cells as it did for the need to protect the supply of oil and gas. It called for a giant amount of new power plants.... The plan called for America to begin addressing the need for a return to more nuclear energy and clean coal. ...none of these new energy sources [wind and fuel cells, etc.] can grow fast enough to be a real alternative to oil OR natural gas even by 2020" (Simmons, 2002).
These days Simmons is getting a lot of help from folks all over the political spectrum, from some of the global moguls themselves, like Schlumberger and Halliburton, to the environmentalist-lite Republicans of REP America (Green Elephant, 2001), to some of the anarcho-primitivists and Luddites who admire Ted Kaczynski (Xsilent, 2003), and from plenty of middle-of-the-road enviros in between.
On May 27th, 2003 Simmons addressed the second international conference of ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil [and Gas] which was meeting at the French Petroleum Institute (IFP) via a satellite teleconference video link from his Houston offices. His remarks were transcribed by Michael Ruppert, the ex-cop who challenged the CIA for its role in the drug trade. Since 9-11-01, according to his webpage (www.copvcia.com), Ruppert has pioneered the effort to educate the world about the consequences of Peak Oil, the fact that the world is running out of energy, and what this might mean for human civilization (Ruppert, 2003).
Simmons gained a powerful ally this spring when the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported for the first time that the peak of world oil production is in sight.
Spencer Abraham, the US Energy Secretary, called an emergency meeting of the National Petroleum Council's Natural Gas Summit on June 26, 2003, amid calls for the administration to deal urgently with the acute shortage of natural gas this year: "It is a national concern that will touch virtually every American," Abraham told the Summit of experts and industry execs. "It is our hope that the energy bill will contain provisions that help spur domestic production of natural gas and enhance our importation facilities to boost supplies, while reducing our nation's growing over-reliance on this one source of energy." Daniel Yergin, author of the 1991 book about the oil industry, The Prize, and founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, counseled that the fault was not with markets: "Rather it is the result of disappointing geological experience over the last few years plus restrictions on exploration, combined with a shift to new uses of gas that will certainly grow consumption" (Picerno, 2003). Spurring domestic production of gas will also subsidize oil drilling, and diversifying sources will entail more use of coal, so this energy bill does not quite entail the immediate end of Hydrocarbon Man.
Without a doubt, despite the talk of alternative fuels, the use of government to stimulate the exploration and discovery of new oil and gas fields is at the top of the agenda. Simmons believes that the reason oil reserves have fallen so far behind oil and gas consumption is that "we drill far less wells. We also stopped doing most genuine exploration." Higher oil prices are essential, since "The higher the cost, the more you can extend, recovering more and more of the harder and harder to get resources." Simmons funds the remaining wildcatters, handling an investment portfolio of approximately $56 billion, so he should know (Simmons, 2003a).
In fact the coalition that is pushing for a radical new energy policy is largely composed of those who stand to benefit from a revival, not a phase out, of oil and gas development. The intellectual and activist core of the coalition is made up of those veteran oil geologists and engineers who use the method of modeling the ratio of reserves to production developed by the maverick research geophysicist Marion King Hubbert, who died in 1989. He believed that the peak of production is reached when half of the estimated ultimately recoverable resource, determined by what has been discovered and logged cumulatively as actual reserves, has been pumped. In 1956 at the Shell Oil Lab in Houston, Hubbert startled his colleagues by predicting that the fossil fuel era would be over very quickly. He correctly predicted that US oil production would peak in the early 1970's.
In the 1970s Hubbert embraced solar power, saying "I'm convinced we have the technology to handle it right now. We could make the transition in a matter of decades if we begin now" (Hickerson, 1995). Although his thinking was definitely in the ecotopian tradition, he has often been mistaken for a cynical dystopian by those who swear by Hubbert as the prophet of the Great Malthusian Die Off (Hanson, 2003).
The dean of the older Hubbertians is Kenneth Deffeyes, Professor Emeritus at Princeton and author of Hubbert's Peak: the Impending World Oil Shortage (2001). Deffeyes, who worked with Hubbert in Houston for Shell Oil, says _I never came to identify with management." Convinced of Hubbert's theory, "I realized that a contracting oil industry was not a good career prospect," he says, "so I decided to get out and go into academia" (Guterl, 2002). Besides, he thinks that "crude oil is much too valuable to be burned as a fuel." (Dunn, 2002).
Support for a remedial program of oil exploration and development versus switching to research and development of alternative energy sources tends to be found among oil experts who are consultants to the industry. While accepting some of the values of the New Age, they largely remain loyal to their calling as oil geologists and wildcatters. The leading trio of Jean H. Laherrere, Colin J. Campbell, and L.F. (Buz) Ivanhoe have worked for, or with, the leading firm modeling oil fields, Petroconsultants of Geneva. Since the 1950s, they have been fed data on oil exploration and production by just about all the major oil companies, as well as by a network of about 2000 oil industry consultants around the world. They use this data to produce reports on various matters pertinent to the oil industry, which they sell back to the industry. "This much is known, Kenneth Deffeyes writes, "the loudest warnings about the predicted peak of world oil production came from Petroconsultants" (Deffeyes, 2001: p. 7).
In a late 1998 merger Petroconsultants became IHS Energy Group, a subsidiary of Information Handling Services Group (IHS Group), a diversified conglomerate owned by Holland America Investment Corp., IHS Group's immediate parent company, for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (TBG, Inc.). In the 1920s George Herbert Walker and his son-in- law, Prescott Bush, had helped the Thyssen dynasty finance its acquisitions through Union Banking Corp. and Holland-American Trading Corp. (Wikipedia, 2003). Until his death last year, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the nephew of the Nazi steel and coal magnate, was one of the world's richest men. Some of the old Hubbertians would probably flinch at such an association.
In 1995 a report by Campbell and Laherre on world oil resources, World Oil Supply 1930-2050 (Petroconsultants Pty. Ltd., 1995), written for oil industry insiders and priced at $32,000 per copy, concluded that world oil production and supply probably would peak as soon as the year 2000 and decline to half the peak level by 2025. Large and permanent increases in oil prices were predicted after the year 2000.
Alternatives to fossil fuels got a mixed review from the petroleum consultants gathered at the ASPO Meeting in Paris May 26-27, 2003, who maintained that hydrogen, solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources will not be able to fill the looming demand-supply gap that faces the planet (Baker, 2003).
Colin J. Campbell, the leader of the Neo-Hubbertians, is a petroleum geologist from Ballydehob, Ireland, and author of The Coming Oil Crisis (1997). He worked for Texaco as an exploration geologist and then at Amoco as chief geologist for Ecuador. He is a Trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) and the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), originally a network of 24 oil scientists. ASPO has Associate members like Halliburton and financial sponsors like Schlumberger, but Campbell is critical of the Bush-Cheney Administration for "collectively having personal investments of as much as $150 M in oil companies" (ASPO, 2002).
Campbell has laid out his prescription for various consumer governments, for example: "Germany should resist Green pressure to give up nuclear power at precisely the moment it needs more energy, as oil peaks and declines.
Germany has coal and possibilities for coalbed methane. This industry needs to be rediscovered. It may become economic again. Germany should encourage its motor manufacturers to move to more efficient engines and hydrogen fuels, especially those made by solar means. It should provide whatever fiscal incentives are needed." (Campbell, 2000).
Jean H. Laherrere is a petroleum consultant residing in Paris, France. Laherrere's early work on seismic refraction surveys contributed to the discovery of Africa's largest oil field. He retired in 1992 after 37 years with Total CFI and its subsidiaries in exploration activities in the Sahara, Australia, Canada and Paris. Since retiring from TOTAL, Laherrere has consulted worldwide on oil and gas potential and production as a Petroconsultants Associate, and he serves on boards of the Society of Petroleum Engineers/World Petroleum Congress.
Like Campbell, Laherrere sees a key role for nuclear energy in the coming transition, but he also envisions a new role for the petrol pump: "If new nuclear plants with high temperature reactors are widely used in the long-term future to supply electricity, they can also provide hydrogen in their off-peak time, which could be carbonised to supply synthetic oil. It could easily replace declining oil supply for transport without any change in the distribution" (Laherrere, 2003). The Big Five could thus survive the end of oil.
L. F. (Buz) Ivanhoe discovered oil for Occidental for 12 of his 50 years in oil exploration, and he continues to consult as president of Novum Corp., Ojai, California. He founded the M. King Hubbert Center for Petroleum Supply Studies at the Colorado School of Mines to study supply data. Ivanhoe is pessimistic about alternative energy sources: "Natural gas/methanol ... should not be counted on to quickly replace all or most of crude oil. Building gas pipelines takes decades. The other alternative fuels (solar, wind, geothermal, wood, waste) combined produce less than 1% of US electricity!" (Ivanhoe, 1997).
Walter Lewellyn Youngquist is a retired field geologist, and now a geological consultant who teaches at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and author of GeoDestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations and Individuals (1997). He concludes that "...coal and uranium are the only two alternative sources of energy which can be developed in large amounts, and provide a dependable base load in the reasonably near future" (Youngquist, 2000).
Matt Simmons has to sell whatever Bush-Cheney Energy Policy is projected in 2004, but he personally believes "There really aren't any good energy solutions for bridges, to buy some time, from oil and gas to the alternatives." Neither the ASPO geologists nor the USGS geologists will ever admit to the indeterminacy principle that Matthew Simmons shyly confessed: "It turns out that total energy resources, uh, is still a mystery" (Simmons, 2003b).
Over 200 organizations around the world launched a campaign against new oil exploration in December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. As documented in the Rainforest Action Network and Project Underground report Drilling to the Ends of the Earth, ongoing exploration threatens old growth frontier forests in 22 countries, coral reefs in 38 countries, and mangroves in 46 countries. A Greenpeace technical analysis, based on the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has found that only a quarter of global economic reserves of fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas - can be burned before dangerous rates of temperature increase and climate change occurs, to which many species of plants and animals will not be able to adapt (Greenpeace, 1998).
If the question becomes which cataclysm is the gravest threat, global warming or oil and gas shortages, the greens will go in one direction while most voters choose the path most traveled. In Milton's words, "Why is the greatest of free communities reduced to Hobson's choice?"
There is no reason for radical ecologists to join debates over the esoteric timetables for the decline of world oil production, which should be bracketed as irrelevant to the socio-political imperative of democratizing the economy and creating a new energy infrastructure that is based on post-capitalist norms of sustainability, sharing and community democracy. We must find ways of making the urgency of that transformation a motivation in people's lives and in their self-conscious anti-ideological politics. The dangers posed by global capitalism to human life and nature itself are all too real. We need to reject the posing of imminent danger as panic, as Chicken Little's alarm over the Falling Sky.
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
shakti
()
Date: May 21, 2010 01:03AM
[peakoildebunked.blogspot.com]
COLIN CAMPBELL "LETS THE MATTER REST"
One of the key assumptions of peak oil "die-off" theory is that there are too many people. Oil has allowed human population to balloon, and overshoot the carrying capacity of the earth. Therefore when oil production begins its steady decline, billions of people will have to die to bring humankind back into balance with nature.
According to the doomer hysterics, this is the gospel truth, and cannot be questioned. More sinisterly, they use this idea to justify authoritarian depopulation programs, and culling of the human herd, either as an act or mercy, or to eliminate burdensome and unfit humans.
This idea is not limited to the doomer riff-raff in internet chat rooms. It goes to the very top of the PO doomer movement: Colin Campbell.
Campbell is the founder of ASPO (Assocation for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas), and is widely respected as the elder statesman of PO today. He currently edits and publishes the widely read ASPO Newsletter from his website, and in the July 2005 issue, he ran an op-ed piece by Wiliam Stanton called "Oil and People". From the article:
To those sentimentalists who cannot understand the need to reduce UK population from 60 million to about 2 million over 150 years, and who are outraged at the proposed replacement of human rights by cold logic, I would say “You have had your day, in which your woolly thinking has messed up not just the Western world but the whole planet, which could, if Homo sapiens had been truly intelligent, have supported a small population enjoying a wonderful quality of life almost for ever. You have thrown away that opportunity.”
The Darwinian approach, in this planned population reduction scenario, is to maximise the well-being of the UK as a nation-state. Individual citizens, and aliens, must expect to be seriously inconvenienced by the single-minded drive to reduce population ahead of resource shortage. The consolation is that the alternative, letting Nature take its course, would be so much worse.
The scenario is: Immigration is banned. Unauthorised arrives are treated as criminals. Every woman is entitled to raise one healthy child. No religious or cultural exceptions can be made, but entitlements can be traded. Abortion or infanticide is compulsory if the fetus or baby proves to be handicapped (Darwinian selection weeds out the unfit). When, through old age, accident or disease, an individual becomes more of a burden than a benefit to society, his or her life is humanely ended. Voluntary euthanasia is legal and made easy. Imprisonment is rare, replaced by corporal punishment for lesser offences and painless capital punishment for greater.Source
This verbal sewage provoked quite an uproar, and one admirer of Campbell, a Ms. Caryl Johnson, urged him to disavow Stanton's proposals:
My second reason for writing is to express certain questions and concerns about the article printed in the July 2005 ASPO Newsletter, "Oil and People," by William Stanton. The step from Peak Oil to radical population control may not seem to be such a great one. But I think it is a huge, and unwarranted, step, and I would fear to have your name associated with it. You are too wonderful a man to risk the distortion of your realism by the "chilling logic" of lesser men, who might indeed use such convenient distortions to commit mass murder – by whatever euphemism for such deeds that might occur to them. For this reason alone I urge you to make a clear disavowal of Mr. Stanton's prescriptions – and urgently, in the next Newsletter.Source
In response to this, Colin Campbell wrote the following in an e-mail dated July 18,2005:
So far as the Newsletter is concerned, I think it is probably best to let the matter rest for the time being.(Same source as above)
No disavowal was printed in the August Newsletter. This was Campbell's only remark:
Item 573, in which William Stanton discussed the impact of declining fossil energy supplies on population, triggered a predictably vigorous response. One or two correspondents almost took offence both at the article and its inclusion in the newsletter, while others accepted the thrust of the argument, seeing its relevance.Source
COLIN CAMPBELL "LETS THE MATTER REST"
One of the key assumptions of peak oil "die-off" theory is that there are too many people. Oil has allowed human population to balloon, and overshoot the carrying capacity of the earth. Therefore when oil production begins its steady decline, billions of people will have to die to bring humankind back into balance with nature.
According to the doomer hysterics, this is the gospel truth, and cannot be questioned. More sinisterly, they use this idea to justify authoritarian depopulation programs, and culling of the human herd, either as an act or mercy, or to eliminate burdensome and unfit humans.
This idea is not limited to the doomer riff-raff in internet chat rooms. It goes to the very top of the PO doomer movement: Colin Campbell.
Campbell is the founder of ASPO (Assocation for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas), and is widely respected as the elder statesman of PO today. He currently edits and publishes the widely read ASPO Newsletter from his website, and in the July 2005 issue, he ran an op-ed piece by Wiliam Stanton called "Oil and People". From the article:
To those sentimentalists who cannot understand the need to reduce UK population from 60 million to about 2 million over 150 years, and who are outraged at the proposed replacement of human rights by cold logic, I would say “You have had your day, in which your woolly thinking has messed up not just the Western world but the whole planet, which could, if Homo sapiens had been truly intelligent, have supported a small population enjoying a wonderful quality of life almost for ever. You have thrown away that opportunity.”
The Darwinian approach, in this planned population reduction scenario, is to maximise the well-being of the UK as a nation-state. Individual citizens, and aliens, must expect to be seriously inconvenienced by the single-minded drive to reduce population ahead of resource shortage. The consolation is that the alternative, letting Nature take its course, would be so much worse.
The scenario is: Immigration is banned. Unauthorised arrives are treated as criminals. Every woman is entitled to raise one healthy child. No religious or cultural exceptions can be made, but entitlements can be traded. Abortion or infanticide is compulsory if the fetus or baby proves to be handicapped (Darwinian selection weeds out the unfit). When, through old age, accident or disease, an individual becomes more of a burden than a benefit to society, his or her life is humanely ended. Voluntary euthanasia is legal and made easy. Imprisonment is rare, replaced by corporal punishment for lesser offences and painless capital punishment for greater.Source
This verbal sewage provoked quite an uproar, and one admirer of Campbell, a Ms. Caryl Johnson, urged him to disavow Stanton's proposals:
My second reason for writing is to express certain questions and concerns about the article printed in the July 2005 ASPO Newsletter, "Oil and People," by William Stanton. The step from Peak Oil to radical population control may not seem to be such a great one. But I think it is a huge, and unwarranted, step, and I would fear to have your name associated with it. You are too wonderful a man to risk the distortion of your realism by the "chilling logic" of lesser men, who might indeed use such convenient distortions to commit mass murder – by whatever euphemism for such deeds that might occur to them. For this reason alone I urge you to make a clear disavowal of Mr. Stanton's prescriptions – and urgently, in the next Newsletter.Source
In response to this, Colin Campbell wrote the following in an e-mail dated July 18,2005:
So far as the Newsletter is concerned, I think it is probably best to let the matter rest for the time being.(Same source as above)
No disavowal was printed in the August Newsletter. This was Campbell's only remark:
Item 573, in which William Stanton discussed the impact of declining fossil energy supplies on population, triggered a predictably vigorous response. One or two correspondents almost took offence both at the article and its inclusion in the newsletter, while others accepted the thrust of the argument, seeing its relevance.Source
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
RobHopkins
()
Date: May 21, 2010 02:35PM
Thanks for the replies folks, and apologies for the delay in responding, I did reply once but for some reason it didn't work.... anyway, I'll try again. Thanks Shakti and Margarets for your actual responding to the points I made, unlike Corboy, who just threw in puerile toilet humour and googled anything derogatory about Brixton he could find. Hardly a great example of critical thinking in practice. Shakti makes lots of points which I will try and address:
* In relation to my stating that there is no link to Steiner, you just posted a link to my website, presumably a reference, as was cited earlier in this thread, to the 'Head, Heart and Hands' wording. If that is a Steiner term as stated here, I had no idea, it came to mind while I was writing the book and should in no sense be taken as having any reference to Steiner at all
* Colin Campbell is incredibly knowledgable on peak oil, has proved to be a very insightful analyst of that issue, but when he departs from that issue, and talks instead about politics or other energy solutions, he comes across very much as a man from an older generation somewhat out of touch with this one. His printing of the William Stanton piece was utterly reprehensible, and I wrote to him to say so. My sense from discussing it with him was that he didn't necessarily endorse it, but wanted to put it in the newsletter to 'shake things up a bit' and provoke a reaction, a response I thought was naive in the extreme.
* I think you are taking views held by a small number of people interested in peak oil ('culling the herd', the far right, BNP etc) and using that to extrapolate to everyone with an interest in that idea. I'm sure there are some involved in climate change campaigning who think we should 'cull the herd', or all sorts of mad ideas, doesn't alter the nature of the core science around climate change. Peak oil attracts doomers, fascists, separatists, but it also attracts far more people who are sensible, level headed, and use the analysis that we are at, or close to a peak in world oil production, to start designing creative solutions in a positive way. I have been to two ASPO conferences, and haven't met any fascists or separatist, just a few doomers.... The people you refer to are really the 'outliers' here, which you choose to focus on in order to make your point. Read the reports by the UKERC, by the Peak Oil Task Force (leading UK businesses), even Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, now tells world leaders "we must leave oil before oil leaves us". You diminish the power of the peak oil case by linking it to nutcases, but they are a small fraction of those concerned about peak oil.
* Heinberg. I'm not going to spend ages defending Richard Heinberg, that's for him to do if he so chooses. However, he is not an 'utter charlatan', in my view he is one of best analysts of the peak oil situation out there, a very gifted researcher and a leading thinker on the implications of peak oil and climate change. In terms of his views on 9/11, that is regrettable, and I don't agree with him on that. In relation to the Shambala stuff Shakti mentions, I don't know anything about that, and don't want to comment about views you attribute to Richard that may, like the accusations you make of the peak oil movement, be outliers, one thing he wrote in his early 20s or whatever. I have certainly never seen him mention it, and he has never discussed it with me.
* "more credible scientists". It is important to note that the peak oil movement does not just rely on Heinberg, as this thread would have it. Again, look at the UKERC report, the Peak Oil Task Force report. A wide range of analysts and geologists add to this work, Heinberg has a gift for making their work which is often hard to understand, clear and digestible for the public, but it is built on the analysis of many other people.
* Who bought Transition to the US? There was no single missionary who, like St. Columbus, set out to 'convert' America. Transition started popping up all over the country, which is how Transition happens.. people had read about it, seen it online, and just got started. After a while, Transition US was formed to support that work, but there was no single 'missionary'.
* Is Transition 'insufficient to deal with climate change'? Quite possibly, we'll see. We always state that on its own it won't be enough. It needs local government action, national government, international legislation like that which was sunk at Copenhagen. However, we would argue that all of those will struggle if they are not also supported by communities that are engaged with designing local responses too. As to whether the Transition model can ever work at all, that would be a longer conversation.....
* "Thought reform". Oh dear. That is a term you laid on top of my reference to the pyschology of change. It is not about 'thought reform' (clearly a term far more emotive on a cults awareness website than 'pyschology of change', nice twist. As I said, Transition does also acknowledge that a Transition on the scale envisaged is not purely an outer process, but an inner one too, and we need to recognise that. Nothing to do with 'thought reform'....
* Margarets makes a comment about how everyone at her Transition meeting was white, implying that somehow that was intentional given, after all, that Shakti has established that peak oil only appeals to the far right. I don't know how it is in the US, but the same would almost certainly apply to most community environmental group meetings or climate change groups here. The environment is an issue that tends to appeal largely to the white middle class. An uncomfortable truth. Transition, in its early stages at least, needs people with a bit of voluntary time on their hands, who understand these issues, which tends to select out certain people. The issue of diversity is key though, and we are very much aware of it and working to address it, but it is easier to observe and criticise for, harder to build true, deep engagement, but we are aware of it and are working on it. In surveys of Transition groups it emerges as one of the key things people want to address, which is why Transition Network now has a diversity co-ordinator.
I hope this actually posts this time. Having already written it once, it never flows so well the second time!
Best wishes
Rob
* In relation to my stating that there is no link to Steiner, you just posted a link to my website, presumably a reference, as was cited earlier in this thread, to the 'Head, Heart and Hands' wording. If that is a Steiner term as stated here, I had no idea, it came to mind while I was writing the book and should in no sense be taken as having any reference to Steiner at all
* Colin Campbell is incredibly knowledgable on peak oil, has proved to be a very insightful analyst of that issue, but when he departs from that issue, and talks instead about politics or other energy solutions, he comes across very much as a man from an older generation somewhat out of touch with this one. His printing of the William Stanton piece was utterly reprehensible, and I wrote to him to say so. My sense from discussing it with him was that he didn't necessarily endorse it, but wanted to put it in the newsletter to 'shake things up a bit' and provoke a reaction, a response I thought was naive in the extreme.
* I think you are taking views held by a small number of people interested in peak oil ('culling the herd', the far right, BNP etc) and using that to extrapolate to everyone with an interest in that idea. I'm sure there are some involved in climate change campaigning who think we should 'cull the herd', or all sorts of mad ideas, doesn't alter the nature of the core science around climate change. Peak oil attracts doomers, fascists, separatists, but it also attracts far more people who are sensible, level headed, and use the analysis that we are at, or close to a peak in world oil production, to start designing creative solutions in a positive way. I have been to two ASPO conferences, and haven't met any fascists or separatist, just a few doomers.... The people you refer to are really the 'outliers' here, which you choose to focus on in order to make your point. Read the reports by the UKERC, by the Peak Oil Task Force (leading UK businesses), even Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, now tells world leaders "we must leave oil before oil leaves us". You diminish the power of the peak oil case by linking it to nutcases, but they are a small fraction of those concerned about peak oil.
* Heinberg. I'm not going to spend ages defending Richard Heinberg, that's for him to do if he so chooses. However, he is not an 'utter charlatan', in my view he is one of best analysts of the peak oil situation out there, a very gifted researcher and a leading thinker on the implications of peak oil and climate change. In terms of his views on 9/11, that is regrettable, and I don't agree with him on that. In relation to the Shambala stuff Shakti mentions, I don't know anything about that, and don't want to comment about views you attribute to Richard that may, like the accusations you make of the peak oil movement, be outliers, one thing he wrote in his early 20s or whatever. I have certainly never seen him mention it, and he has never discussed it with me.
* "more credible scientists". It is important to note that the peak oil movement does not just rely on Heinberg, as this thread would have it. Again, look at the UKERC report, the Peak Oil Task Force report. A wide range of analysts and geologists add to this work, Heinberg has a gift for making their work which is often hard to understand, clear and digestible for the public, but it is built on the analysis of many other people.
* Who bought Transition to the US? There was no single missionary who, like St. Columbus, set out to 'convert' America. Transition started popping up all over the country, which is how Transition happens.. people had read about it, seen it online, and just got started. After a while, Transition US was formed to support that work, but there was no single 'missionary'.
* Is Transition 'insufficient to deal with climate change'? Quite possibly, we'll see. We always state that on its own it won't be enough. It needs local government action, national government, international legislation like that which was sunk at Copenhagen. However, we would argue that all of those will struggle if they are not also supported by communities that are engaged with designing local responses too. As to whether the Transition model can ever work at all, that would be a longer conversation.....
* "Thought reform". Oh dear. That is a term you laid on top of my reference to the pyschology of change. It is not about 'thought reform' (clearly a term far more emotive on a cults awareness website than 'pyschology of change', nice twist. As I said, Transition does also acknowledge that a Transition on the scale envisaged is not purely an outer process, but an inner one too, and we need to recognise that. Nothing to do with 'thought reform'....
* Margarets makes a comment about how everyone at her Transition meeting was white, implying that somehow that was intentional given, after all, that Shakti has established that peak oil only appeals to the far right. I don't know how it is in the US, but the same would almost certainly apply to most community environmental group meetings or climate change groups here. The environment is an issue that tends to appeal largely to the white middle class. An uncomfortable truth. Transition, in its early stages at least, needs people with a bit of voluntary time on their hands, who understand these issues, which tends to select out certain people. The issue of diversity is key though, and we are very much aware of it and working to address it, but it is easier to observe and criticise for, harder to build true, deep engagement, but we are aware of it and are working on it. In surveys of Transition groups it emerges as one of the key things people want to address, which is why Transition Network now has a diversity co-ordinator.
I hope this actually posts this time. Having already written it once, it never flows so well the second time!
Best wishes
Rob
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
RobHopkins
()
Date: May 21, 2010 02:38PM
Oh and sorry, I forgot Shakti's 'where does the money come from' question. Individual Transition groups are usually self-funded, although some may occasionally get grants from the usual bodies that fund such things. Largely though, they are voluntary organisations. Transition Network has core funding from the Tudor Trust, and some funding from other grant-giving bodies for specific projects. As a company with charitable status, our audited accounts are available from Companies House, and are transparent.
Thanks
Rob
Thanks
Rob
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
shakti
()
Date: May 22, 2010 01:07AM
"* In relation to my stating that there is no link to Steiner, you just posted a link to my website, presumably a reference, as was cited earlier in this thread, to the 'Head, Heart and Hands' wording. If that is a Steiner term as stated here, I had no idea, it came to mind while I was writing the book and should in no sense be taken as having any reference to Steiner at all"
- I would love to be reassured by this answer. However, I am also wary of the fact that you are involved with Schumacher College, which is closely linked to Rudolf Steiner's philosophy. E.F. Schumacher, of course, was a coal man himself, despite his supposed environmental leanings.. He is also alleged to have believed that "Marx, Freud, and Einstein ruined everything" (paraphrasing here). In other words, Jew, Jew, and Jew. An interesting perspective from a German. His philosophy was anti-West in many ways, and not that dissimilar from that put out by Heinberg, Dugin, etc. You have even accepted an award from this university. Interesting to see a connection to a German-born coal man in this considering the context of peak oil as something forwarded by a Thyssen subsidiary right around the time that Thyssen was involved in efforts to revive the coal-to-liquid industry. I'm curious what your response is to the Sheasby article. Do you consider Matt Simmons a reliable source as well?
" Colin Campbell is incredibly knowledgable on peak oil, has proved to be a very insightful analyst of that issue, but when he departs from that issue, and talks instead about politics or other energy solutions, he comes across very much as a man from an older generation somewhat out of touch with this one. His printing of the William Stanton piece was utterly reprehensible, and I wrote to him to say so. My sense from discussing it with him was that he didn't necessarily endorse it, but wanted to put it in the newsletter to 'shake things up a bit' and provoke a reaction, a response I thought was naive in the extreme. "
-"Naive?" Do you really think this guy is naive? Note his reaction after people called him on it. He didn't apologize, he said that the points brought up by Stanton were "relevant". In other words, he agreed with the sentiments and seemed appalled that anyone would be upset with him for publishing it.
Also, as for him being "incredibly knowledgeable about peak oil", why is it that he has been WRONG so many times on the peak? He called for $200 oil by 2005. As I type this, oil is sitting at $69 even as it gushes out into the Caribbean Sea.
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/10/122-colin-campbell-wrong-again.html
.... True to form, ASPO yesterday released the October 2005 Newsletter(pdf), in which Colin Campbell changed his peak oil forecast from 2007 to 2010. This is the fourth time Campbell has extended his forecast date, and he is now predicting world oil production of 85mbd in 2010 -- more than twice the 40mbd he predicted in 1991. Let's face it: Colin Campbell's credibility is in the toilet. His methods are totally bogus, as Lynch has so frequently pointed out. This is a clear vindication of the open, verifiable methods of Rembrandt Koppelaar (see #86), as opposed to the opaque methods of ASPO which claims to have a "secret" database underlying its predictions, although no one outside of ASPO has ever seen it. (Personally, I think they're lying, and don't even have a database, but that's just my opinion.) It also creates a bit of a conflict within the peak movement because Deffeyes is still calling (ridiculously) for a peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005.
" I think you are taking views held by a small number of people interested in peak oil ('culling the herd', the far right, BNP etc) and using that to extrapolate to everyone with an interest in that idea. "
-Nope, I believe there are many people who are involved in this who are sincere environmentalists who have concern for humanity and the planet. That is why I care enough to research this. I know good, kind people personally who have been suckered on Peak Oil by folks like Ruppert, Campbell, Simmons, etc. from day one. But just because they are good folks doesn't mean they know anything about the oil business or geology. Also, if the right-wingers are a "minority" within the movement, then why aren't folks like yourself doing more to call them out PUBLICLY? It is one thing to send a private email to Colin Campbell about his fascist viewpoints, it is another to denounce those on your website. Which I highly doubt you will.
[www.wyecommunitylandtrust.org.uk]
To this day, you list the ASPO as a good source. You list Richard Heinberg as a good source. The ASPO has been funded by Halliburton and Schlumberger. Do you think they are "worried about climate change and interested in shifting to a low-consumption, post-materialist society"? You list the Energy Bulletin as a good source, which is put out by the Post-Carbon Institute. You cite the Hirsch Report, yet haven't seem to noticed what Hirsch is truly advocating.
[peakoildebunked.blogspot.com]
excerpt:
Here's the fine print, from the Hirsch Report:
Nevertheless, this analysis clearly demonstrates that the key to mitigation of world oil production peaking will be the construction a large number of substitute fuel production facilities, coupled to significant increases in transportation fuel efficiency. The time required to mitigate world oil production peaking is measured on a decade time-scale. Related production facility size is large and capital intensive. (P. 6)
Let's break that down. Note that conservation plays no role whatsoever in Hirsch's "mitigation". None. Zero. His idea of "solving" the peak oil problem is to build horrendously expensive, highly polluting facilities for producing substitute liquid fuel (CTL, GTL, heavy oil) so that everyone can continue driving their current vehicles in a completely business-as-usual fashion.
(Incidentally, as I've noted before, 30% of Dr. Robert Hirsch Ph.D's "mitigation" plan depends on Venezuela (of all places) ramping up heavy oil production from 0.6mbd to 6.0mbd in 10 years. Which is probably the most butt-stupid peak oil plan ever put to paper. The US is not going to maintain business-as-usual by ramping up heavy oil production in Venezuela, for a whole host of reasons Hirsch is apparently too senile and poorly informed to notice.)
Hirsch frankly concedes that his plan only addresses the supply-side, and intentionally ignores all demand-side conservation measures:
Our focus is on large-scale, physical mitigation, as opposed to policy actions, e.g. tax credits, rationing, automobile speed restrictions etc. (P. 25)
This oversight seriously calls into question his claim that it will take 20 years to "mitigate" peak oil. It's as though we were considering solutions for an obese person, and Hirsch is telling us it's going to take forever because we won't be considering options like dieting and exercise."
Rob: " I'm sure there are some involved in climate change campaigning who think we should 'cull the herd', or all sorts of mad ideas, doesn't alter the nature of the core science around climate change. "
-True. But the climate source people are able to source HUNDREDS of creditable science institutions to support their thesis. While the Peakers are sourcing.... ASPO. Heinberg. Simmons. Hirsch. Deffeyes. Campbell. I have noticed also that the Transition Town guide seems to focus heavily on Peak Oil, with climate change thrown in almost as an add-on. Why is that?
" The people you refer to are really the 'outliers' here, which you choose to focus on in order to make your point. "
-But they are the people YOU are focused on to make YOUR point! If they weren't, and your pages were free of folks like ASPO, Heinberg, etc. then I wouldn't bother focusing on them.
" Read the reports by the UKERC, by the Peak Oil Task Force (leading UK businesses),"
-Yes, that report seems to be based on actual science and not funded by Halliburton, Schlumberger, etc. However, it is still working with a Peak Oil date of around 2020-2030. That is what the USGS was saying, yet they were HAMMERED by the Peak Oil community for suggesting that. Why? It doesn't fit with the dates put out by Campbell over the years, who has constantly had to revise everything.
" You diminish the power of the peak oil case by linking it to nutcases, but they are a small fraction of those concerned about peak oil. "
-NO, folks like YOU have diminished the peak oil case by "linking it to nutcases". If nutcases like Campbell and Heinberg, who believes that Venus flew into our solar system around 3000 years ago, weren't being cited and celebrated by Oily Peakers, I wouldn't have even been interested in this movement. If all your sourcing referred to USGS, UKERC, the UN, National Academy of Sciences, etc., then I wouldn't be interested. But as somebody who is not an oil man (therefore I am largely agnostic on the science of the "Peak"), but is a student of the history of fascism, including occult fascism, those are the things that drew me into studying the warts on the face of Peak Oil.
" However, he is not an 'utter charlatan', in my view he is one of best analysts of the peak oil situation out there, a very gifted researcher and a leading thinker on the implications of peak oil and climate change."
-You're talking about a guy who was a personal aide to Velikovsky and wrote books about his amazing predictions. You would do yourself and your reputation a big service if you spent five minutes looking into Velikovsky and how damaging that is to Heinberg. It is an elephant in the living room.
"In relation to the Shambala stuff Shakti mentions, I don't know anything about that, and don't want to comment about views you attribute to Richard that may, like the accusations you make of the peak oil movement, be outliers, one thing he wrote in his early 20s or whatever. "
-He wrote for New Dawn in 1998. Was he in his "early 20s" then? Also, why is someone who is allegedly some kind of "whistleblowing maverick against the oil industry" WORKING AS AN ADVISOR to the National Petroleum Council, which represents the oil industry in its relations with the government. Which made me wonder, "gee, I can get why Heinberg would want that job, but why would the NPC want him?" Surely they have actual OIL MEN who could make the case without having to rely on a guy who specializes in twisting astronomy to fit religious myths. But it occured to me, Heinberg is a catastrophist. He has an imagination. He is probably very good at making people AFRAID. Particularly afraid of what will happen if Peak Oil occurs. And what do you think the NPC is pushing? Electric cars? Wind power? Of course not. They will advocate more drilling. Opening wilderness areas to drilling. Lower taxes on oil. Right?
" Who bought Transition to the US? There was no single missionary who, like St. Columbus, set out to 'convert' America. "
-Uh, is that an attempt at a joke? Columbus was a) not a missionary b) hardly a saint and c) not out to convert anybody, but looking to find a path to the East not controlled by jihadists.
" Transition started popping up all over the country, which is how Transition happens.. people had read about it, seen it online, and just got started. After a while, Transition US was formed to support that work, but there was no single 'missionary'."
-I'll take your word on that. However, it is undeniable that there is a connection to the New Age. For example, the local transition group near me seems to be dominated by people involved with the "nonviolent communication" new age movement.
* Is Transition 'insufficient to deal with climate change'? Quite possibly, we'll see. We always state that on its own it won't be enough. It needs local government action, national government, international legislation like that which was sunk at Copenhagen. However, we would argue that all of those will struggle if they are not also supported by communities that are engaged with designing local responses too. As to whether the Transition model can ever work at all, that would be a longer conversation.....
-Intelligent, open-minded response. I do appreciate your coming here to debate, even if I seem kind of harsh. However, I would like to ask: what changes have been brought in Kinsale, Totnes, for example. What progress has been made in reducing dependency on oil in those communities? TANGIBLE progress, not just "we had a movie night, we talked about process,etc" and such.
" As I said, Transition does also acknowledge that a Transition on the scale envisaged is not purely an outer process, but an inner one too, and we need to recognise that. "
-I sort of agree, but it is those phrases that lends a New Age touchy-feeliness to it, that many people on this board are all too familiar with.
" Margarets makes a comment about how everyone at her Transition meeting was white, implying that somehow that was intentional given, after all, that Shakti has established that peak oil only appeals to the far right. "
-Never said that. It clearly appeals to those on the Left/eco side of things, yet when looks at those behind it: Campbell, Heinberg, ASPO, Simmons (Bush-Cheney energy advisor), Schlumberger, Halliburton, Thyssen-Krupp.... one comes up RIGHT. Way RIGHT.
- I would love to be reassured by this answer. However, I am also wary of the fact that you are involved with Schumacher College, which is closely linked to Rudolf Steiner's philosophy. E.F. Schumacher, of course, was a coal man himself, despite his supposed environmental leanings.. He is also alleged to have believed that "Marx, Freud, and Einstein ruined everything" (paraphrasing here). In other words, Jew, Jew, and Jew. An interesting perspective from a German. His philosophy was anti-West in many ways, and not that dissimilar from that put out by Heinberg, Dugin, etc. You have even accepted an award from this university. Interesting to see a connection to a German-born coal man in this considering the context of peak oil as something forwarded by a Thyssen subsidiary right around the time that Thyssen was involved in efforts to revive the coal-to-liquid industry. I'm curious what your response is to the Sheasby article. Do you consider Matt Simmons a reliable source as well?
" Colin Campbell is incredibly knowledgable on peak oil, has proved to be a very insightful analyst of that issue, but when he departs from that issue, and talks instead about politics or other energy solutions, he comes across very much as a man from an older generation somewhat out of touch with this one. His printing of the William Stanton piece was utterly reprehensible, and I wrote to him to say so. My sense from discussing it with him was that he didn't necessarily endorse it, but wanted to put it in the newsletter to 'shake things up a bit' and provoke a reaction, a response I thought was naive in the extreme. "
-"Naive?" Do you really think this guy is naive? Note his reaction after people called him on it. He didn't apologize, he said that the points brought up by Stanton were "relevant". In other words, he agreed with the sentiments and seemed appalled that anyone would be upset with him for publishing it.
Also, as for him being "incredibly knowledgeable about peak oil", why is it that he has been WRONG so many times on the peak? He called for $200 oil by 2005. As I type this, oil is sitting at $69 even as it gushes out into the Caribbean Sea.
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/10/122-colin-campbell-wrong-again.html
.... True to form, ASPO yesterday released the October 2005 Newsletter(pdf), in which Colin Campbell changed his peak oil forecast from 2007 to 2010. This is the fourth time Campbell has extended his forecast date, and he is now predicting world oil production of 85mbd in 2010 -- more than twice the 40mbd he predicted in 1991. Let's face it: Colin Campbell's credibility is in the toilet. His methods are totally bogus, as Lynch has so frequently pointed out. This is a clear vindication of the open, verifiable methods of Rembrandt Koppelaar (see #86), as opposed to the opaque methods of ASPO which claims to have a "secret" database underlying its predictions, although no one outside of ASPO has ever seen it. (Personally, I think they're lying, and don't even have a database, but that's just my opinion.) It also creates a bit of a conflict within the peak movement because Deffeyes is still calling (ridiculously) for a peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005.
" I think you are taking views held by a small number of people interested in peak oil ('culling the herd', the far right, BNP etc) and using that to extrapolate to everyone with an interest in that idea. "
-Nope, I believe there are many people who are involved in this who are sincere environmentalists who have concern for humanity and the planet. That is why I care enough to research this. I know good, kind people personally who have been suckered on Peak Oil by folks like Ruppert, Campbell, Simmons, etc. from day one. But just because they are good folks doesn't mean they know anything about the oil business or geology. Also, if the right-wingers are a "minority" within the movement, then why aren't folks like yourself doing more to call them out PUBLICLY? It is one thing to send a private email to Colin Campbell about his fascist viewpoints, it is another to denounce those on your website. Which I highly doubt you will.
[www.wyecommunitylandtrust.org.uk]
To this day, you list the ASPO as a good source. You list Richard Heinberg as a good source. The ASPO has been funded by Halliburton and Schlumberger. Do you think they are "worried about climate change and interested in shifting to a low-consumption, post-materialist society"? You list the Energy Bulletin as a good source, which is put out by the Post-Carbon Institute. You cite the Hirsch Report, yet haven't seem to noticed what Hirsch is truly advocating.
[peakoildebunked.blogspot.com]
excerpt:
Here's the fine print, from the Hirsch Report:
Nevertheless, this analysis clearly demonstrates that the key to mitigation of world oil production peaking will be the construction a large number of substitute fuel production facilities, coupled to significant increases in transportation fuel efficiency. The time required to mitigate world oil production peaking is measured on a decade time-scale. Related production facility size is large and capital intensive. (P. 6)
Let's break that down. Note that conservation plays no role whatsoever in Hirsch's "mitigation". None. Zero. His idea of "solving" the peak oil problem is to build horrendously expensive, highly polluting facilities for producing substitute liquid fuel (CTL, GTL, heavy oil) so that everyone can continue driving their current vehicles in a completely business-as-usual fashion.
(Incidentally, as I've noted before, 30% of Dr. Robert Hirsch Ph.D's "mitigation" plan depends on Venezuela (of all places) ramping up heavy oil production from 0.6mbd to 6.0mbd in 10 years. Which is probably the most butt-stupid peak oil plan ever put to paper. The US is not going to maintain business-as-usual by ramping up heavy oil production in Venezuela, for a whole host of reasons Hirsch is apparently too senile and poorly informed to notice.)
Hirsch frankly concedes that his plan only addresses the supply-side, and intentionally ignores all demand-side conservation measures:
Our focus is on large-scale, physical mitigation, as opposed to policy actions, e.g. tax credits, rationing, automobile speed restrictions etc. (P. 25)
This oversight seriously calls into question his claim that it will take 20 years to "mitigate" peak oil. It's as though we were considering solutions for an obese person, and Hirsch is telling us it's going to take forever because we won't be considering options like dieting and exercise."
Rob: " I'm sure there are some involved in climate change campaigning who think we should 'cull the herd', or all sorts of mad ideas, doesn't alter the nature of the core science around climate change. "
-True. But the climate source people are able to source HUNDREDS of creditable science institutions to support their thesis. While the Peakers are sourcing.... ASPO. Heinberg. Simmons. Hirsch. Deffeyes. Campbell. I have noticed also that the Transition Town guide seems to focus heavily on Peak Oil, with climate change thrown in almost as an add-on. Why is that?
" The people you refer to are really the 'outliers' here, which you choose to focus on in order to make your point. "
-But they are the people YOU are focused on to make YOUR point! If they weren't, and your pages were free of folks like ASPO, Heinberg, etc. then I wouldn't bother focusing on them.
" Read the reports by the UKERC, by the Peak Oil Task Force (leading UK businesses),"
-Yes, that report seems to be based on actual science and not funded by Halliburton, Schlumberger, etc. However, it is still working with a Peak Oil date of around 2020-2030. That is what the USGS was saying, yet they were HAMMERED by the Peak Oil community for suggesting that. Why? It doesn't fit with the dates put out by Campbell over the years, who has constantly had to revise everything.
" You diminish the power of the peak oil case by linking it to nutcases, but they are a small fraction of those concerned about peak oil. "
-NO, folks like YOU have diminished the peak oil case by "linking it to nutcases". If nutcases like Campbell and Heinberg, who believes that Venus flew into our solar system around 3000 years ago, weren't being cited and celebrated by Oily Peakers, I wouldn't have even been interested in this movement. If all your sourcing referred to USGS, UKERC, the UN, National Academy of Sciences, etc., then I wouldn't be interested. But as somebody who is not an oil man (therefore I am largely agnostic on the science of the "Peak"), but is a student of the history of fascism, including occult fascism, those are the things that drew me into studying the warts on the face of Peak Oil.
" However, he is not an 'utter charlatan', in my view he is one of best analysts of the peak oil situation out there, a very gifted researcher and a leading thinker on the implications of peak oil and climate change."
-You're talking about a guy who was a personal aide to Velikovsky and wrote books about his amazing predictions. You would do yourself and your reputation a big service if you spent five minutes looking into Velikovsky and how damaging that is to Heinberg. It is an elephant in the living room.
"In relation to the Shambala stuff Shakti mentions, I don't know anything about that, and don't want to comment about views you attribute to Richard that may, like the accusations you make of the peak oil movement, be outliers, one thing he wrote in his early 20s or whatever. "
-He wrote for New Dawn in 1998. Was he in his "early 20s" then? Also, why is someone who is allegedly some kind of "whistleblowing maverick against the oil industry" WORKING AS AN ADVISOR to the National Petroleum Council, which represents the oil industry in its relations with the government. Which made me wonder, "gee, I can get why Heinberg would want that job, but why would the NPC want him?" Surely they have actual OIL MEN who could make the case without having to rely on a guy who specializes in twisting astronomy to fit religious myths. But it occured to me, Heinberg is a catastrophist. He has an imagination. He is probably very good at making people AFRAID. Particularly afraid of what will happen if Peak Oil occurs. And what do you think the NPC is pushing? Electric cars? Wind power? Of course not. They will advocate more drilling. Opening wilderness areas to drilling. Lower taxes on oil. Right?
" Who bought Transition to the US? There was no single missionary who, like St. Columbus, set out to 'convert' America. "
-Uh, is that an attempt at a joke? Columbus was a) not a missionary b) hardly a saint and c) not out to convert anybody, but looking to find a path to the East not controlled by jihadists.
" Transition started popping up all over the country, which is how Transition happens.. people had read about it, seen it online, and just got started. After a while, Transition US was formed to support that work, but there was no single 'missionary'."
-I'll take your word on that. However, it is undeniable that there is a connection to the New Age. For example, the local transition group near me seems to be dominated by people involved with the "nonviolent communication" new age movement.
* Is Transition 'insufficient to deal with climate change'? Quite possibly, we'll see. We always state that on its own it won't be enough. It needs local government action, national government, international legislation like that which was sunk at Copenhagen. However, we would argue that all of those will struggle if they are not also supported by communities that are engaged with designing local responses too. As to whether the Transition model can ever work at all, that would be a longer conversation.....
-Intelligent, open-minded response. I do appreciate your coming here to debate, even if I seem kind of harsh. However, I would like to ask: what changes have been brought in Kinsale, Totnes, for example. What progress has been made in reducing dependency on oil in those communities? TANGIBLE progress, not just "we had a movie night, we talked about process,etc" and such.
" As I said, Transition does also acknowledge that a Transition on the scale envisaged is not purely an outer process, but an inner one too, and we need to recognise that. "
-I sort of agree, but it is those phrases that lends a New Age touchy-feeliness to it, that many people on this board are all too familiar with.
" Margarets makes a comment about how everyone at her Transition meeting was white, implying that somehow that was intentional given, after all, that Shakti has established that peak oil only appeals to the far right. "
-Never said that. It clearly appeals to those on the Left/eco side of things, yet when looks at those behind it: Campbell, Heinberg, ASPO, Simmons (Bush-Cheney energy advisor), Schlumberger, Halliburton, Thyssen-Krupp.... one comes up RIGHT. Way RIGHT.
Re: Transition Town Movement
Posted by:
RobHopkins
()
Date: May 22, 2010 04:35PM
Hi again Shakti.... here are some responses to your points raised above.
* Schumacher College has no, to the best of my knowledge, connection with the Steiner community. Look at their programme of courses, nothing remotely Steinery. I know some people who work there, same story. As for E.F.Schumacher being into Steiner, I think I need a bit more confirmation of that than the fact you claim he was "anti-Western", an easy label to throw at anyone who questions the economic growth model, and argues that society needs to become more sustainable. I could be labelled 'anti-Western' by that criteria, if by that you mean believing that a different approach to economics might actually make our economy more sustainable as well as leading our our quality of life actually improving. I think arguing that Schumacher College is a bastion of Steiner philosophy is clutching at straws frankly.
* You question the accuracy of peak oil predictions by people like Colin Campbell, but predicting oil prices is notoriously difficult. Arch cornucopian and peak oil sceptic Daniel Yergin has similarly been wildly off with his predictions. Yes the oil price is now lower than before, but you neglect to factor in the bursting of the debt bubble and this crippling recession which has dampened demand for oil.
* You state, on the flimsiest of evidence (do you not suspect that a website called 'Peak Oil Debunked' might not, perhaps, have a particular agenda on all this? I hope you are looking at both sides of the argument in your research here for a bit of balance), that all of the early promoters of the peak oil are not only right wingers, but hold dangerously fascist leanings. Let's take that as being a correct assumption (which I don't)... the question for me would be did those people come up with the peak oil hypothesis because they are right wing, or did they come up with the peak oil hypothesis and they're right wing. To us an odd analogy which might work or might not, the Beatles were into some pretty odd esoteric stuff, but we put that to one side and still regard their music as sublime. Many of the early 'oily peakers' as you call them, were older men, from a background in the oil industry, with no background in environmental thinking, which informed their take on what they had discovered. For me, that doesn't devalue the actual observation. The ASPO conferences I have attended, I have felt like the one of about 10 people from a sustainability perspective. As an organisation that draws together valuable research on peak oil, ASPO is a very useful and effective organisation. As a think tank for the future direction of humanity, forget it....
* You criticise Hirsch for his report and its focus on mitigation not conservation, and I agree entirely. Worth remembering though that he was commissioned to write a report on mitigation, not on conservation. When that report came out the US DoE who had commissioned it tried to not publish it, so uncomfortable did it leave them feeling. I have written about the Hirsch Report in the Transition Handbook, which I see as offering a very useful analysis of the scale of the challenge responding to peak oil will require, but it is based on dreadfully flawed assumptions, not those shared by Transition. It has no understanding of climate change, and its findings would lead to climate chaos. That doesn't, however, mean that every single piece of analysis in his report is useless.
* You ask why the book, and also the talks I give, are heavy on peak oil rather than climate change... the book says, and I always say, that Transition gives equal weighting to the two, but peak oil is less familiar to people which is why I give it more explanation time, that's all.
* The UKERC and the Peak Oil Task Force reports do not give a date of 2020-2030, as you say, both suggest 2015 as the time when the crunch will bite (as it were)
* St. Columbus... yes, sorry, slip of the finger due to writing late at night... I meant St. Columba, I didn't mean to raise a murderous marauding imperialist pirate to the level of sainthood!
* As for Heinberg and Campbell being 'nutcases'... we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one I think. Your accusations about Heinberg are for him to respond to if he so chooses....
* You ask what tangible changes have been seen in Transition initiatives beyond a few 'movie nights'. Here in Totnes were are soon to launch a community-owned energy company, we are trying to secure an 8 acre site in the centre of town to develop as a low carbon housing/green business catalyst development, we have linked garden owners to people who want to grow food (a project called 'Garden Share') so that 40 families now grow food who couldn't before, our 'Transition Streets' initiative is well on track to put PV on 5% of roofs in the town, and to turn the Town Hall into a net energy generator, in Lewes they have also set up an energy company and the Lewes Pound is doing a great job of connecting people to local traders, Transition Town Forres has bought new land for allotments, Transition Stroud have been feeding in to (pardon the pun) local government policy on food... check out the Transition Network's site, and its 'projects' database for some other things that are happening... good question though!
* I must pick up on your point that referring to the psychology of change "lends a New Age touchy-feeliness to it" and that Transition groups have a 'connection to the New Age'. As I said before, I don't see that we are going to agree on this one. For me, looking at behaviour change is a key element to this being successful, as is the fact that we need not just focus on community resilience but also on helping individuals to feel more resilient, and part of that will include acknowledging the fact that this can be scary and that we need to support each other. What you read as New Agey, others might see as running meetings in a more inclusive way, sitting in a circle rather than rows so everyone can see each other, and so on. If every Transition meeting starts with chanting and energy work, moving on to channelling advice about where the local food system should go, checking out with the devas if that's OK and then finishing up by a bit of astral travel to the Akashic Records to see if they have any hints on fundraising I'd be with you. If, however, you choose to regard anything faintly unconventional as 'New Age' then there's not much I can do for you on this one.... If, for you, Transition needs to be an entirely conventional model with no space given to exploring why we do the things we do, exploring less confrontational, more consensus based approaches or acknowledging that there is an inner aspect to the changes a move towards sustainability will necessitate, or else you label it 'New Agey', then I sense we will not converge on this one.
Thanks again... and best wishes
Rob
* Schumacher College has no, to the best of my knowledge, connection with the Steiner community. Look at their programme of courses, nothing remotely Steinery. I know some people who work there, same story. As for E.F.Schumacher being into Steiner, I think I need a bit more confirmation of that than the fact you claim he was "anti-Western", an easy label to throw at anyone who questions the economic growth model, and argues that society needs to become more sustainable. I could be labelled 'anti-Western' by that criteria, if by that you mean believing that a different approach to economics might actually make our economy more sustainable as well as leading our our quality of life actually improving. I think arguing that Schumacher College is a bastion of Steiner philosophy is clutching at straws frankly.
* You question the accuracy of peak oil predictions by people like Colin Campbell, but predicting oil prices is notoriously difficult. Arch cornucopian and peak oil sceptic Daniel Yergin has similarly been wildly off with his predictions. Yes the oil price is now lower than before, but you neglect to factor in the bursting of the debt bubble and this crippling recession which has dampened demand for oil.
* You state, on the flimsiest of evidence (do you not suspect that a website called 'Peak Oil Debunked' might not, perhaps, have a particular agenda on all this? I hope you are looking at both sides of the argument in your research here for a bit of balance), that all of the early promoters of the peak oil are not only right wingers, but hold dangerously fascist leanings. Let's take that as being a correct assumption (which I don't)... the question for me would be did those people come up with the peak oil hypothesis because they are right wing, or did they come up with the peak oil hypothesis and they're right wing. To us an odd analogy which might work or might not, the Beatles were into some pretty odd esoteric stuff, but we put that to one side and still regard their music as sublime. Many of the early 'oily peakers' as you call them, were older men, from a background in the oil industry, with no background in environmental thinking, which informed their take on what they had discovered. For me, that doesn't devalue the actual observation. The ASPO conferences I have attended, I have felt like the one of about 10 people from a sustainability perspective. As an organisation that draws together valuable research on peak oil, ASPO is a very useful and effective organisation. As a think tank for the future direction of humanity, forget it....
* You criticise Hirsch for his report and its focus on mitigation not conservation, and I agree entirely. Worth remembering though that he was commissioned to write a report on mitigation, not on conservation. When that report came out the US DoE who had commissioned it tried to not publish it, so uncomfortable did it leave them feeling. I have written about the Hirsch Report in the Transition Handbook, which I see as offering a very useful analysis of the scale of the challenge responding to peak oil will require, but it is based on dreadfully flawed assumptions, not those shared by Transition. It has no understanding of climate change, and its findings would lead to climate chaos. That doesn't, however, mean that every single piece of analysis in his report is useless.
* You ask why the book, and also the talks I give, are heavy on peak oil rather than climate change... the book says, and I always say, that Transition gives equal weighting to the two, but peak oil is less familiar to people which is why I give it more explanation time, that's all.
* The UKERC and the Peak Oil Task Force reports do not give a date of 2020-2030, as you say, both suggest 2015 as the time when the crunch will bite (as it were)
* St. Columbus... yes, sorry, slip of the finger due to writing late at night... I meant St. Columba, I didn't mean to raise a murderous marauding imperialist pirate to the level of sainthood!
* As for Heinberg and Campbell being 'nutcases'... we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one I think. Your accusations about Heinberg are for him to respond to if he so chooses....
* You ask what tangible changes have been seen in Transition initiatives beyond a few 'movie nights'. Here in Totnes were are soon to launch a community-owned energy company, we are trying to secure an 8 acre site in the centre of town to develop as a low carbon housing/green business catalyst development, we have linked garden owners to people who want to grow food (a project called 'Garden Share') so that 40 families now grow food who couldn't before, our 'Transition Streets' initiative is well on track to put PV on 5% of roofs in the town, and to turn the Town Hall into a net energy generator, in Lewes they have also set up an energy company and the Lewes Pound is doing a great job of connecting people to local traders, Transition Town Forres has bought new land for allotments, Transition Stroud have been feeding in to (pardon the pun) local government policy on food... check out the Transition Network's site, and its 'projects' database for some other things that are happening... good question though!
* I must pick up on your point that referring to the psychology of change "lends a New Age touchy-feeliness to it" and that Transition groups have a 'connection to the New Age'. As I said before, I don't see that we are going to agree on this one. For me, looking at behaviour change is a key element to this being successful, as is the fact that we need not just focus on community resilience but also on helping individuals to feel more resilient, and part of that will include acknowledging the fact that this can be scary and that we need to support each other. What you read as New Agey, others might see as running meetings in a more inclusive way, sitting in a circle rather than rows so everyone can see each other, and so on. If every Transition meeting starts with chanting and energy work, moving on to channelling advice about where the local food system should go, checking out with the devas if that's OK and then finishing up by a bit of astral travel to the Akashic Records to see if they have any hints on fundraising I'd be with you. If, however, you choose to regard anything faintly unconventional as 'New Age' then there's not much I can do for you on this one.... If, for you, Transition needs to be an entirely conventional model with no space given to exploring why we do the things we do, exploring less confrontational, more consensus based approaches or acknowledging that there is an inner aspect to the changes a move towards sustainability will necessitate, or else you label it 'New Agey', then I sense we will not converge on this one.
Thanks again... and best wishes
Rob
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