Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Post Carbon Cities Guidebook: An essential guidebook on peak oil and global warming
Staff, Post Carbon Cities
Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty is a guidebook on peak oil and global warming for people who work with and for local governments in the United States and Canada. It provides a sober look at how these phenomena are quickly creating new uncertainties and vulnerabilities for cities of all sizes, and explains what local decision-makers can do to address these challenges.
Post Carbon Cities fills an important gap in the resources currently available to local government decision-makers on planning for the changing global energy and climate context of the 21st century.
Download an abridged preview copy of Post Carbon Cities. 699K, PDF
Includes Executive Summary, Introduction, “Making a government statement on peak oil” and “Establishing a Peak Oil Task Force.” Registration required.
(August 2007 ?)
Original has an executive summary of the book.
The Brother-in-Law on Your Couch Vision of the Apocalypse
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
…Ok, it isn’t the apocalypse, but whenever I point out to people that to a large degree hard times means consolidating housing, living with family and friends and taking in refugees you happen to be related to (by biology or friendship), I get a great deal of resistance. I suspect some of us are better prepared to deal with purple-haired mutants invading our neighborhoods than we are prepared to deal with the basic reality that hard times often look like your brother in law, his kids and spouse sleeping on your living room couch for three years. And I get the frequent impression many of us would rather face the mutants, given the choice.
The coming decades bring with them a whole host of reasons why the old system of everyone in their vast houses, isolated from one another, will probably not be able to continue. The first reason is simple demographics. The aging baby boomers will increasingly require help getting along, and the cost of that care will increasingly be shifted onto a smaller working population, particularly since most boomers have comparatively little saved for retirement (The average personal savings was just over $10,000 as of 2004). Most of their wealth is in housing at this stage, and that wealth could easily evaporate entirely during the course of a recession.
Meanwhile the cost of providing elder support will quickly overwhelm existing structures.
…The next factor would be climate change. For almost half a milion people, Hurricane Katrina was an experience in shared housing, among other things, and we can expect similar disasters to increase in frequency. The simple reality is that as more and more disasters wrought by climate change occur, and more and more people are dislocated, they will seek out family and friends to provide either transitional or permanent housing.
…Next there’s economic crisis and peak oil. I speak of these two together because it is virtually impossible to seperate out their effects. As energy prices rise, the economic consequences will increase, and as economic consequences expand, energy availability becomes smaller.
…The forces driving us out of our houses and into consolidation are about to become powerful, but we’ve also been driven by powerful forces encouraging us *not* to live together. I think this is a really important point. It is important to remember how deeply our own sense of privacy, like everything else about is is shaped not in isolation by our inner selves, but by outside forces – particularly the marketplace, and the social mores it creates. That is, one of the reasons for the housing boom is that we’ve been consistently told we need bigger houses, more space, and that we shouldn’t live together. American culture is unusually solitary, with a heavy emphasis on individualism, privacy and not sharing things – and it is no accident that these tend to be characteristics that the growth economy encourages. If we don’t share much, we need more things.
(19 August 2007)
Mud: building block of the future
David Hoppit, Telegraph (UK)
At the vanguard of efforts to revolutionise the way we build our homes are scientists who are taking their cues from the methods of the past.
—
New homes built of mud or straw, with a lawn on the roof, sheep fleeces for insulation and heat from the ground or a boiler fired with sawdust – this is one vision of the future for our green and pleasant land.
Profound changes to the way we build and run our homes will have to be made, and quickly, if Britain is to lift itself from the bottom of the European energy efficiency league. The bald truth is that we are squandering resources. Our houses use three and a half times as much energy as those in, for example, Germany and Denmark.
…Help is at hand in Wales, where for more than 30 years a team of scientists and volunteers has been exploring and developing – or eliminating – alternative building and energy methods. Many of the ideas thought radical years ago are now common practice.
The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth, the ancient Welsh capital, opened in 1975. The centre, in a former slate quarry, is blessed with mountain streams, which help fire up some of the energy projects.
Many of the techniques currently being explored are not new – indeed, much of the work at CAT revolves around materials and methods that have been used for centuries. It is often a case of “looking forward to the past”.
There’s nothing new about rammed earth walls, for example. Ancient cob cottages built by labourers trampling mud and straw have survived for hundreds of years, provided they had “a good hat and boots” (roof and footings).
(19 August 2007)
One of several “green” stories from the Telegraph in recent weeks. -BA
