"Transition Town"

Tuesday night I was able to attend a seminar about "Transition Towns", towns all across the world committing to local resilience, zero waste, being carbon neutral, fossil fuel independence, local food producers/food security, net-zero energy consumers, etc.

The presenter was Michael Brownlee, who works with Boulder Valley Relocalization. Boulder County is one of the first counties in the US to attempt to become a transition town and reduce their dependence on oil, encourage energy conservation, etc.

The seminar took place in two parts: 1) the bad news and 2) good news if we start to adapt to conditions that will force us to adapt anyway. By adapting early, we can head off some of the worst shocks we will face.

Mr. Brownlee shared about peak oil and global warming. Peak oil, conceptually, is where world oil discovery and production will start to decline in the next few years while world oil demand will continue to rise. This will force oil prices to keep rising. Oil geologists are fairly consistent in their assessment about peak oil coming and coming soon. The new consensus seems to be towards a peak oil year closer to 2010 than 2015 or 2020 which was previously forecasted. After 2010, oil will only get more expensive.

One new problem that I hadn't expected, which we saw in an unrelated field this summer, is hoarding/export stoppages for particular products. When there was a fear this summer of shortages of rice, many countries just stopped exporting rice in order to lessen political pressures within their own countries. There is a real possibility that this will be the case with oil. There is speculation that exports of oil will completely stop 9 years after peak oil. Within the 8 years after peak oil, exports of oil will decline each year until the 9th year, when exports will completely stop.

Mr. Brownlee cited a number of different sources to defend the concept of peak oil, including the commissioning of the Hirsch Report by the Department of Energy in 2005, which immediately suppressed the report. The Oil Drum, an oil think-tank, expects oil to rise to at least $300/barrel in the next 5 years.

Since so much of our economy is based on cheap fuel, we can see facing a number of shocks to our way of life. As a side note: for a good movie documenting the effects of evaporating oil supplies, view The Power of Community to see how Cuba fared after the Soviet Union collapsed. We don't think of all the products that come from oil: plastics, fertilizers, etc.

Cuba was forced to rely on the following:
-neighborhood organic gardens
-utilizing a more vegetarian based meal system
-riding bicycles
-using public transportation
-helping each other in the midst of potential threats to community.


Transition towns hopes to emphasize the following in adapting to the shortage of oil.

-local production of food, energy, and goods
-local development of currency, government, and culture,

To read one town's transition, look at the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan 2021.

More soon....