Over the past year or so I have been working with Davie Philip of Cultivate on the Skilling Up for Powerdown program, a learning resource in support of Transition Initiatives in Ireland.
The course has been run in Dublin and Kinsale a few times already and will be available as a community learning course throughout Ireland. In conjunction with this course, a series of 10 TV shows have been made for Dublin Community TV which are due to be aired starting next month.
Over the next few weeks I will post up the 10 Introductions for the course which I have co-written with David Fleming and edited.
Below is the general introduction.
Cultivate Community Powerdown Energy Use, Carbon Reduction and Resilience
The Cultivate Community Powerdown Toolkit is designed to support communities in their responses to the converging crises of the 21st Century: Climate change and Peak Oil; global social justice and equity; resource wars and development; loss of biodiversity and pollution. As we shall see, many if not all of these issues stem from our use and abuse of non-renewable fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. While Peak Oil concerns the availability of energy and how we will adjust to a decline in supply after a century and a half of growth, climate change is being caused by pollution from this energy-intensive lifestyle in the form of greenhouse gas emissions. While the world reels from the onset of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, and the bursting of a speculative bubble sends oil prices tumbling, the temporary reprieve of cheaper oil masks the underlying reality of progressive resource depletion. As human population heads towards 7 billion, we continue to demand ever more supplies of non-renewable resources, particularly fossil energy, and regardless of the price, the future will mean there is less to go around.
The USA with 4.5% of the world’s population consumes more than 23% of the world’s energy and produces 22% of the world’s carbon emissions. {1} This extreme disparity between resource consumption and pollution means also that those least responsible for climate change will have the fewest resources to help contend with it. Other environmental problems can also be seen as a result of energy use: use of fossil fuels has lead to a rapid increase in global population, with a corresponding increase in consumption and environmental destruction.{2}
Over the past 20 years, almost every indicator of the planet’s health has deteriorated, while energy consumption and human population has continued to increase. {3} Moreover, attempts at curtailing our impact are so far failing: Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now growing more rapidly than “business-as-usual”, the most pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios. {4} Much mainstream commentary focuses on how to replace oil with renewables and new technologies as a way of adapting to declining supplies and to reduce carbon emissions, the assumption is that we will be able to continue with much the same lifestyles as we have now and continue to grow the economy and further develop technology to overcome our environmental problems.
Community Powerdown is an attempt to show an alternative approach that is at once more sustainable and more fulfilling. By redesigning our lives and adopting a different set of values to those advocated by the industrial growth society over the past 50-60 years, we can learn to live well –but with vastly reduced energy consumption, and therefore, a much smaller ecological footprint.{5} Meeting the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate change may be the greatest project humanity can undertake; for the community, it provides an unparalleled opportunity for resurgence. Already around the world thousands of communities –such as the Transition Network in the UK and Ireland, and the Post-Carbon Cities movement in North America are planning their Energy Descent Pathways and are finding renewal and a new sense of abundance in their local communities. As you work through this course and begin to think how much energy permeates our lives, and how vulnerable we are to energy and climate disruption, you will also become aware of the resources you have in your community and of many other possibilities for creating community self-reliance.
{1}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
{2} http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html
{3} www.unep.org/GEO/geo4/
{4} http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/arctic.html
{5} Murphy, P. Plan C- Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change
Post a Comment