This is essential reading:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/01/a-great-green-rip-off/

Good effort to send Tony where he belongs!

as a counterpoint to the previous gloomy predictions – i think that this project is a great idea:

Sun, wind and wave-powered: Europe unites to build renewable energy “supergrid”: from the Guardian

once again richard heinberg has written a compelling article that echoes my thoughts. here are a couple of quotes, but i highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Climate change is just one of several enormous interrelated dilemmas that will sink civilization unless all are somehow addressed. These include at least five long-range problems:

* topsoil loss (25 billion tons per year),
* worsening fresh water scarcity,
* the death of the oceans (currently forecast for around 2050 based on current trends),
* overpopulation and continued population growth, and
* the accelerating, catastrophic loss of biodiversity.

As events are unfolding now, these problems, together with climate change, will combine over the next few years or decades to trigger a food crisis of a scale and intensity that will dwarf to insignificance any famine in human history.

To make matters even more grim, there are two near-term dilemmas that may make climate change and these other problems much harder to address: peak oil and economic collapse.

…

To summarize: three factors—the need for resilience, the lack of effective policy at national and global levels, and the tendency of the best responses to emerge regionally and at a small scale—argue for dealing with the crushing crises of the new century locally, even though there is still undeniable need for larger-scale, global solutions.

Does this mean we should give up even trying to work at the national and global levels? Each person will have to make up her or his own mind on that one. To my thinking, Copenhagen is something of a last straw. I have no interest in trying to discourage anyone from undertaking national or global activism. Indeed, there is a danger in taking attention away from national and international affairs: policy could get hijacked not just by parties even less competent than those currently in command, but by ones that are just plain evil. Nevertheless, this writer is finally convinced that, with whatever energies for positive change may be available to us, we are likely to accomplish the most by working locally and on a small scale, while sharing information about successes and failures as widely as possible.

read the full article here…

when it’s so obvious that the planet is cooling… just ask the wallabies in sussex.

warming my arse!

stupid humans.

“We are going to have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as was produced over the past 5,000 years. Nothing less will do.”

Professor Mike Bevan, acting director of the John Innes Centre in Norfolk. (via The Guardian)

Sesame St is 40!

Five years ago we were sitting in our kitchen with Rob Hopkins, Ruth and a couple of other people. We had recently watched the film ‘The End of Suburbia’ and had spent time in conversation with Colin Campbell. Petrol in Ireland had gone up quite quickly from around 70 cents a litre to €1 (EUR) per litre. Rob was thinking about organising a conference on Peak Oil. The end of oil powered lifestyles was near! But how near?

Predicting the future is hard. So I asked everyone how much they thought a litre of petrol would be in five year’s time. Here are the predictions:

• Ruth said it’d be €2
• I said €3
• Roger €3.67 (can’t remember who he is!)
• Rob Hopkins said €3.50
• Graham Strouts said €10 (asked in in Feb 2005)
• Aisling said €2.72 (friend of Graham’s asked in in Feb 2005)

And today the price of petrol in Skibbereen….. is….. drum rolll….. €1.14 per litre!

So in  five years petrol has gone up by 14 cents.

And I am pleased to announce that Ruth is the winner!  I promised to cook her a local food meal if she won.

Graham and Rob, the Peak Oil experts (both have published books on the subject) did just about worst! I reckon they’d been reading too many doomer books!

Of course none of this means that Peak Oil and the need for radical change or the likelihood of industrial collapse are any less likely.  But it is very interesting to me to show how hard it is to get timing right or predict the future.

Comments welcome!

(thanks to laura for the link)

Yesterday was the harvest of a part of the West Cork Bantry community supported agriculture (CSA) oat crop. The smaller field of a bit less than an acre was harvested by hand using scythes. It was great to see how this was done in the times before mechanisation – the farmer remembers doing this only 15 years ago! For me it was a very salient reminder of how much work there could be in a bowl of porridge oats if it wasn’t for modern combines and mills.

The field is in a stunning spot on the Sheep’s Head – so here’s a short video as a reminder of the day.

It’s amazing that any of the crop survived the summer we’ve had – so hats off to everyone involved and best of luck with getting the rest of the harvest in (the big field is to be harvested by combine) and drying it.

[Edit - Madeline has a great video here...]