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Property in Totnes: Wizards of the wacky West
Adam Edwards, UK Telegraph
Totnes, the ‘capital of New Age chic’, is hoping to make itself self-sufficient
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…[Totnes is] a town described by Time magazine as “the capital of New Age chic” and by the British Airways magazine as one of the 10 funkiest places in the world. It is also now emerging as one of the most exclusive places to buy property in the South-West. It has recently become Devon’s answer to Cornwall’s Padstow. Its celebrity chef is the BBC’s John Burton Race and its locals – all with second homes – include many of television’s liberal elite such as Jonathan Dimbleby, Rick Mayall and Jennifer Saunders. (Former royal correspondent Jennie Bond is also there.)
“Prices around Totnes are comparable to London,” says Peter Symonds, of Stags estate agency. “And buyers are choosing the area not only because it is unspoiled with easy access to the coast, but because of its extraordinary diversity.”
Totnes, unlike nearby Salcombe, which has become an expensive Disneyworld for amateur sailors, is a working market town with a strong alternative streak. It once boasted the Harris bacon factory and now has more vegetarians per square yard than a Hindu tofu festival.
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This autumn it is about to become even more diverse. A group of well-educated career professionals are launching an initiative to make the place immune to escalating oil prices.
“We’re not New Age hippies or tree-huggers,” says Fiona Ward, a former London management consultant and now the business projects manager of the Totnes Transitional Trust (TTT). “We are simply trying to prepare the local community for a low-energy future.”
TTT has been set up in anticipation of the imminent arrival of “peak oil”, the name now given to the point at which maximum global oil production is reached. After the world gets to “peak oil”, production must necessarily drop and the price of energy rise accordingly. TTT ‘s aim is to help local businesses and homeowners be more energy-efficient and indirectly to try to make the town more self-sufficient. This involves, for example, encouraging local food production and cheap local energy. This month TTT is launching the Totnes Renewable Energy Company, which will help introduce solar water heaters, community-owned windmills and a tidal energy scheme on the River Dart.
It is, if one believes its supporters, no crackpot venture. Private and public funding is in place. Two hundred and fifty other towns in the UK are in touch with the organisation while civic leaders from California in particular have shown an active interest in the project.
“Nobody else is doing this at a community level,” says Ward. “We are blazing a trail.”
(10 November 2007)
UPDATE (Nov 12)
In a post today, Rob Hopkins groans about the title “Wizards of the Wacky West” but adds that the conservative Right Telegraph gave some “fair(ish)” coverage to sustainable Totnes. Looking at it in a positive way, one could say that the reporter overcame his culture shock enough to get a feel for the significance of Totnes. -BA
Portland unveils carbon tax plan
Dylan Rivera, Portland Oregonian
Portland wants to charge builders who meet efficiency rules and pay those who exceed them
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CHICAGO — In a bold move to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions from the Portland area, city officials plan to charge builders hundreds of dollars for each new home that is not extremely energy efficient. And it would require, as part of every existing home sale, that an energy efficiency report be done by home inspectors.
Believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, the carbon fee and inspection requirement would levy taxes upon builders who merely comply with the energy efficiency requirements of the Oregon building code, already one of the most stringent in the nation. It would then pay cash rewards to developers who make buildings that save at least 45 percent more energy than the code requires.
(8 November 2007)
The Real ‘PPP’: Populism, Probity and Peak-oil in the River City’s Tunnel Deal
Stuart McCarthy, Online Opinion
Today’s traffic problems in Australia’s fastest growing city, Brisbane, result from decades of neglect by a succession of state and local governments. Not long after being elected into office in 2004 on a platform of alleviating the city’s traffic congestion, Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman announced that Brisbane City Council would proceed with Queensland’s largest public-private partnership to construct the North South Bypass Tunnel (NSBT), part of his TransApex project. From the outset, Newman has seen his role as “getting on with the job of reducing traffic congestion problems in Brisbane”. Unfortunately Newman made one flawed assumption that plagued the project’s planning from the beginning and will soon likely see its demise – cheap oil.
Cheap oil has proved costly for previous transport infrastructure investments. Among these is the Fremantle Passenger Terminal, built in the early 1960s at a cost of £1.5 million, approximately $30 million in today’s dollars, to accommodate growing demand from passengers arriving from Europe during the “populate or perish” immigration era. What Western Australia’s planners did not foresee was that growing world production of cheap oil was simultaneously triggering the explosion of cheap international air travel. Within 15 years passenger arrivals plummeted to two per cent of their 1965 peak and the facility became largely redundant.
Here in Brisbane, the transition from growing production of cheap oil to declining production of expensive oil has been completely ignored in the planning for TransApex and the NSBT. Forecasts of increasing car traffic in the various feasibility studies, which have omitted any consideration of rising fuel prices, are highly unlikely to eventuate. Neither will pipe dreams of quickly replacing Australia’s car fleet with hybrid, ethanol or hydrogen cars, which take no consideration of the time, scale, economics or thermodynamics involved in such a transition.
The idea of ‘market-driven’ transition to increased vehicle fuel efficiency is itself without historical basis. Today’s cars are only marginally more fuel efficient than those of the 1960s, indeed average fuel efficiency for new cars has actually worsened in the last five years as Australians continue to buy larger, heavier cars in an era of skyrocketing private debt and perverse tax policies that encourage increasing mileage an d consumption. The absurd fixation on building motorways to solve traffic congestion despite the imminent reality of peak oil is best described by James_Howard_Kunstler
…From a public interest perspective, the construction costs for three of Brisbane’s road projects alone – the Gateway duplication, the NSBT and the Airport Link – equate to the entire budget for South East Queensland rail and public transport projects scheduled for the next 20 years. The construction of these motorways at the dawn of the peak oil era represents a tragic failure of governance and probity unprecedented in Queensland’s history.
(8 November 2007)
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Latest version. An earlier version was published at The Oil Drum:ANZ.
