The Transition Towns Movement: Its Huge Significance and a Friendly Criticism

The world is immensely complicated, and the forces of sweeping change may overall boost transition towns for their positive contribution. Or as Ted Trainer lays out below, a course correction is needed now.

Obama: The Making of a Clean Coal President

President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of “clean coal” technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how “to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016.”

Responses & resilience – Feb 16

-War at Home: The Local Eco-Warriors Making a Big Noise
-Brock Dolman on water: “Basins of relations: reverential rehydration revolution”
-Pathways to Re-Localisation with Joel Salatin
-Die Transition Towns-Bewegung – Städte und Menschen im Wandel
-Environmentalists launch low-carbon ‘churches in transition’
-Could chicken manure help curb climate change?

Viral collapse

At this juncture in the industrial age, we have two tired, one-armed lifeguards and a handful of victims. All eyes are on Greece — fittingly, the birthplace of western civilization — but Greece, which naturally turned to Goldman Sachs to try to hide its debt, is one tiny canary in a coal mine the size of Earth.

Leading the way to a low-energy future

My disappointment in government leaders is matched by my admiration for a new influential group of Americans, whom I call lifestyle leaders — those who take matters into their own hands, by building gardens, weatherizing their homes, getting rid of their cars… Believing this group may hold the key to the rapid dissemination of low-energy lifestyles, I conducted an online survey of 2,005 of them in late 2009.