Herbert Girardet

Regenerative Adelaide

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An urbanizing world requires major policy initiatives to make urban resource use compatible with the world’s ecosystems. Metropolitan Adelaide has adopted this agenda and is well on its way to becoming a pioneering regenerative city region. New policies by the government of South Australia on energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable transport, zero waste, organic waste composting, water efficiency, wastewater irrigation of crops, peri-urban agriculture, and reforestation have taken Adelaide to the forefront of eco-friendly urban development. Working as a thinker in residence in Adelaide in 2003, I proposed linking policies to reduce urban eco-footprints and resource use with the challenge of building a green economy.

Community Energy in Lewes

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Ouse Valley Energy Supply Company, or Ovesco as it is commonly known, is a powerful inspiration for enthusiasts of community renewable energy….Standing on a hill above Lewes you can not only see the solar PV installations completed by Ovesco but also arrays of panels inspired by their projects. The local football club, the leisure centre and many local homes, have all followed the example of Ovesco. Other sites are looking to follow and there are also plans for community wind and hydro-electric schemes.

Digital snow days

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As we progress further into descent, we will see more electricity brownouts, blackouts, and other events where there is a sudden failure of complexity, resulting in a shutdown of productivity. This failure of complexity has created a new urban word: “digital snow day.” And since our digital snow day in Anchorage coincided this time with termination dust on the mountains, the name is especially fitting. When we lose complexity suddenly, much of modern life stops, as our subsystems are highly connected. When complexity brownouts occur, what systems will be impacted, and what will some of those snow days look like? Does digitization make the failures worse, with a drop to a lower trophic level than would have occurred without digitization?

Community rights vs. states rights vs. federal law

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I just don’t see local communities making better choices than those made at the state and federal level. This may happen in isolated pockets, but by the same token you could see vast swaths of places overturning the few gains the environmental movement has achieved on the level of federal and state policies and regulations, which is exactly what the Tea Party wants to do.

Sea level pressure changes since 2007

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I wanted to cross-check for myself some of the work Chris Reynolds has done looking at changes in weather patterns since 2007 (the beginning of the recent sea ice collapse)…So, it does rather look like an abrupt shift in the early summer northern hemisphere circulation has occurred since 2007 and is having multiple effects – poor summers in the UK, melting sea ice – and presumably accelerated warming of the Greenland ice sheet also.

The obvious questions are: why? and will it continue?

The repricing of oil

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Now that oil’s price revolution — a process that took ten years to complete — is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin?

Finding your calling in a Transition world

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Personally I’m at the cusp of stay-at-home-mom returning to the workforce. The landscape of the working world has completely transformed during the decade-and-a-half I’ve been out of it. I’d done quite a bit of volunteer work, but that is a very different scene. I was facing going back to classes to gear up to reenter the corporate world I left many years ago, all the while knowing that corporate world was on self-destruct like some massive Death Star, or …

Or what?

Our years of magical thinking: interview with James Kunstler

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“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson

“That’s a pithy way of saying where our country, perhaps the developed world, is at right now,” notes author James Howard Kunstler. We’ve blown past the mileposts for global peak oil, says Kunstler in his new book, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, and we expect technology to save us.