Large Hadron Collider rap

Forget matter and anti-matter, do you want to see what happens when the two most mutually alien forms of matter in the known universe - rap and science - meet? Then try this little ditty - with real scientists 'dancing' - authentic geekipods.

Enjoy.

Take your partners for the Lehman's Excuse-Me

(Yes, I know - what, you are thinking, could the collapse of Lehman's possibly have to do with the environment? The answer is that it displays one of the most important aspects of capitalism in its current guise, namely its ability to deal with a serious crisis. Read on...)

The current Lehman collapse gives us a flavour of what is likely to befall us all when markets are squeezed by rocketing energy, food, water and resource prices. Merrill Lynch (the home of prancing bull) are in trouble too, agreeing to be bought by Bank of America for $50,000,000,000. Stock markets and the dollar have fallen and AIG, the world's largest insurance company (who provide over a hundred billion dollars of capital to banks), are also on the skids.

It's not as though they did not see it coming. Already the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos - long before the bubble burst, Lehman's boss, Richard Fuld talked openly about being "really worried" about the risks posed by property valuations, excess leverage and the rise in oil and commodity prices. "We're taking some money off the table," he said (Financial Times, 15/9/08). But nothing like enough it turned out, because they couldn't resist a few more juicy acquisitions and their foresight was a good deal less advanced than their ambition. As so often in business, they (and everyone around them, investors, governments and regulators included) thought they could walk on water, only to discover too late that they were just about to walk out of the shallows and into really deep water. And of course, they became more and more detached from reality:

Mr Fuld’s role in these decisions was hard to pin down because colleagues say he
was growing more remote. Mr Fuld spent an increasing amount of time in his
mansion in Sun Valley, a ski resort in Idaho that he has used for years to
entertain clients, or travelling around the world. “When Dick came over it was
like a state visit,” says one London-based banker. Some bankers believed, too,
that Mr Gregory shielded Mr Fuld from what was going on and discouraged
executives from raising criticism or reporting bad news. “Joe was like Dick’s
bodyguard,” says one senior banker. (Financial Times, 15/9/08)

So, with 'hundreds of billions of dollars' now expected to be lost (say the BBC), who do you think will actually lose their money? The Lehman partners? Merrill's directors? On the contrary, three of the latter are to join Bank of America's board. How about their clients, who also helped dragged us all into this catastrophic mire with their insane gambles? Nope. Profit, economists tell us, is a reward for risk - we take the risk, and they get the reward.

And no, that is not just a lazy, knee-jerk anti-capitalist jibe. As Peter Morici, professor of University of Maryland's business school and 'a recognized expert on international economic policy, the World Trade Organization, and international commercial agreements', has put it:

Performance-based compensation practices at Lehman and throughout Wall Street,
which pay big bonuses when bankers bet right but only imposes losses on
shareholders when they bet wrong, has propagated the kind of toxic financial
engineering that caused mortgage-backed securities meltdown, general credit
crisis, and the near-death experience of many Wall Street banks and securities
dealers.

So when Alan Greenspan opines that 'We will see other major financial firms fail but this does not need to be a problem. It depends on how it is handled and how the liquidations take place. And indeed we shouldn't try to protect every single institution. The ordinary course of financial change has winners and losers', I start to feel a little queasy. Just 'winners and losers', Alan? Such as pensioners whose pension won't get paid now? Such as workers who lose their jobs? Ah well, win a few, lose a few, eh?

So what lesson is being learnt? To quote the man from PWC (who will earn millions from burying Lehman's rotting corpse), 'What it underlines to me is the importance of market confidence'. No fooling. But can we draw a slightly deeper lesson? How about 'the ludicrous vulnerability that comes from fantasising that people whose sole motive is short-term profit are fit guardians of the world's economic health', even if they do wear nice suits?

Meanwhile, not too long from now, when oil and gas start going through the roof, who will be holding all our money then? Hard to name names, but it's a cast-iron certainty that quite a few of them will be ex-Lehman and Merrill who have managed to find another comfortable birth in some other bunch of Masters of the Universe.

So what specifically do we learn about how capitalism might handle a severe environmental crisis?

1. Despite being given long notice, most organisations simply won’t respond in time. We have known about the currently housing finance crisis for a decade - that there was a massive and fundamental financial weakness. That is not to say that the individuals who have been at the forefront of the current crisis have been stupid or short-sighted or greedy or wicked. The returns, while the bubble lasted, were good, and the overriding pressure business people face is to generate a return. It does not matter that the whole edifice is based on junk resources, just so long as the direction is upwards. Like all the other classic financial pyramids and bubbles, just as long as everyone else is buying, things will be OK – even though they are only buying because you are buying too.
   
2. When the crisis comes, it comes extremely quickly and for most people cannot be escaped. It is a classic case of exponential spread leading to systematic collapse. It means that years and decades of solid growth and self-congratulation may still be terminated in months or even weeks. Ironically, thinking about the environmental equivalent to this sort of crisis, one of the seminal books on the environment, the Club of Rome’s Limits of Growth (1972) is all about the logic, consequences and limits of exponential growth.
   
3. The economic crisis become systematic, affecting not only the sector in which the crisis was triggered but all areas of the economy. If AIG are indeed providing over a hundred billion dollars of capital, yet are undermined by their exposure to junk resources, then thousands of firms are going to find their loans called in or their interest rates pushed up when they are least able to repay them.
   
4. The victims will be spread throughout society, to the point where the social system as a whole is threatened. Millions of individuals work for those thousands of firms, have loans from banks, rely on income (e.g., pensions) from those investments, and so on. This in turn can only feed back into the economy in the form of people tightening their belts or claiming massively more in the form of social security and unemployment benefits.
   
5. The government will not be able to manage the problem. One company – a Bear Sterns, perhaps – is one thing, but a whole raft of major financial institutions going down is quite another. Just Merrill’s price tag - $50 billion even when it is in trouble – is equivalent of $160 each for every man, woman and child in the USA. And in any case, governments have so completely abandoned themselves to the idea that capitalist markets are the solution and so completely sold all their assets to the very people who are now in crisis that is will require a major ideological effort even to imagine that the answer is to protect society, not to salvage this fatally flawed economic system – or even recognise that these are two radically different problems.
   
6. The whole process will disable society even at the level of basic physical resources – in this case housing, in the future energy and industry as a whole – not because they somehow don’t work any more or people suddenly don’t need homes, but because the system of property evicts the only people who can use them in the name of organisations who ‘own’ them yet are completely unable to make any use of them.

Of course, an environmental crisis would not look quite like this. Nor are all the player's in the present investment bank crisis behaving quite as stupidly as Lehman's. John Thain, Merrill's CEO, was congratulated for being astute enough to call a halt before they too went over the cliff. But he was an outsider who came in in late 2007 with a cold eye towards Merrill's pretensions and culture. Who is going to perform that role for industrial capitalism as a whole when the real crises start to hit?

Yet the lessons are striking. Cheap energy is the resource-equivalent of cheap credit with no ability to repay the debts - precisely what caused the current credit crunch. As oil, like credit, becomes much more expensive, the effect on any number of major industries will be as inexorable as a huge rise in interest rates and collapsing currencies combined. And the shock effect will be similar – rigidities in the economic system, the vulnerability of society as a whole to crises that are (literally) none of their business, and the inability of government to deal with such a vast crisis.

As for what governments are really willing to do, even about the present crisis, it's worth noting that just a few days later, on 23 September, Philip Augar (author of The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Played the Free Market Game - Penguin 2005), was writing the FT that:

The last time Wall Street was in the mire was between 2001 and 2003 when the
dotcom bubble burst. President George W. Bush pledged “to end the days of
cooking the books, shading the truth and breaking our laws”, but instead a patsy
settlement with the investment banks was reached in 2003 that imposed trivial
fines and minor rule changes but left their business model intact.

It's hard to see that, under the far greater pressure of a global energy or other environment crisis, they would do any better.

Mind you, the current crisis could have much greater political repercussions than initially meet the eye. To quote the FT again:

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve threw open the doors to investment in the US banking industry by private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and corporate investors – in the hope that this would direct much-needed capital to US banks... Morgan Stanley said earlier it would sell a stake of 10-20 per cent to the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) in a deal worth up to $9bn. The news came just hours after Nomura, Japan’s largest broker, confirmed it was buying Lehman Brothers’ operations in Asia and was in exclusive talks to secure parts of its business in Europe.

Does this signal the end of one of the USA's most cherished ideals - the option of isolation? Does it signal that the commanding heights of American capitalism are starting to go offshore? If so, we might start seeing a more global perspective starting to take shape in American politics too - which can only be (relatively) good, given the obstinacy of current American politics in the face of global environmental problems, to which the USA contributes so much and about which it has, so far, done so little.

Negative reality

A small contribution to science fiction rather than science, I suspect.

There is no such thing as a vacuum. Quantum theory tells us that, even if a vacuum existed, it would soon find itself being populated with particles caused by inherent quantum fluctuations. Once they come into existence these particles are normal enough, but a moment ago they simply weren’t here. So where were they? Nowhere. They just emerged out of a quantum flux.

And then there are negative numbers. I can have one apple, two bananas, three protons, four quantum physicists – but not -1 of anything. Why not? Isn’t that a bit of a paradox? No – as Piaget tells me, negative numbers represent not things but actions – taking away. So positing one apple is literally positing – putting into position. And by the same token, negating is simply taking away. Of course, when you get to zero, you can still hypothesise a lot of taking away – hence the negative numbers. Well...

Actually that sounds like a lot of sense to me. But I can’t help speculating in slightly more empiricist vein anyway (probably because I’m British). Is there a possible connection between these quantum fluctuations and negative numbers? How about this? There is a positive universe to which we have access, and a negative universe to which we don’t. That’s not to say that there is nothing there – it just exists on a plane we cannot touch or interfere with. On such an account, nothing/zero refers not to an absolute limit but to a transition point. Being creatures of the positive universe, we cannot make that transition, but that does not mean that matter as a whole is limited to our half of these cosmic Siamese twins. Indeed, that is exactly what the quantum fluctuations in the vacuum – the closest we have to physical nothing – signify – particles shifting between positive and negative universes.

Now, what would happen if we could fish in the vacuum and pull something a little more substantial through from the negative universe? I feel a sci-fi story coming on...

Better a pig than a pitbull

Beats me. A week ago, Sarah Palin proudly compares herself to a pitbull in lipstick. A couple of days back, Barack Obama completely fails to compare her to a pig in lipstick (he was obviously referring to McCain's policies), and she gets all hoity-toity.

Look, Mrs Palin, a pig is an intelligent and useful animal and a pitbull is an ugly, stupid, vicious, downright dangerous beast with absolutely no redeeming features. Now it is perfectly clear that you resemble the latter a good deal more than the former, so when someone says something a least relatively nice about you, try to be a little grateful.

Future for sale

I bang on a lot about how market economics is completely unsuited to our current environmental predicament. Here are a couple of practical - and potentially catastrophic - examples.

Now that we are growing crops for fuel instead of food, we have accidentally created a new nexus that markets have been quick to exploit – to all our costs. Now that corn is sought as eagerly by petrol companies as by food companies, the price of cereals for biofuels must converge with its equivalent in oil. However, even if, say, the USA converted all its crops to biofuels, it this would still barely touch its total fuel consumption, so the prices of cereals must move towards oil rather than vice versa - and the process of oil is currently a lot higher. So this will cause world food prices to rise – just as we complete the seventh year out of eight when we have consumed more food than we have grown, and prices are going up anyway.

Or how about this. In India, the city of Chennai – 7 million strong - is running out of water. So local water companies are buying the water from the farmers who till the surrounding land, who are happy to sell it because it is worth a lot more than any crops they might be able to grow by irrigating mere food. So sometime not long from now, when the currently falling water table has passed beyond practical or economic reach, there will be no more water – and no food either.

Nor is a Third World peculiarity. Cities in the USA (including San Diego, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Denver, El Paso and many more) are perpetrating the same lunacy. Their water purchases run into hundreds of millions of tons and will undermine what is now invaluable farm land over decades and decades. And their purpose? To buy an unsustainable present in which vast quantities of water are squandered and paying for it with a truly terminal future.

But what can we expect if it takes 14 tons of water to make a ton of steel but 1000 tons to grow a ton of wheat, and the steel is ‘worth’ (treacherous word!) two or three times more than the wheat anyway?

Both classic examples of market economics, in which the commodity goes to the highest bidder, regardless of the consequences. Such a system cannot even see the consequences or distinguish human misery from a packet of cornflakes. Yet trade agreement after trade agreement places such arrangements ever more firmly in the driving seat.

And of course, if we don’t sort out a non-market mechanism for managing water soon, much worse will follow.

A pitbull in lipstick

Very decent of the Republicans to describe their own would-be Veep as a 'pitbull in lipstick'. Here in England, pitbulls are regarded as so dangerous that the mere possession of one is a criminal offence. If Mrs Pailn comes here, there is a real chance she will be put down - which could really put a dent in Anglo-American relations. And as far as most Britons are concerned, people who keeps pitbulls are inadequate saddos who really should get a life.

But Mrs Palin doesn't need to go quite so far to find out how most of the world sees her:

It is illegal in Miami-Dade County to own any dog which substantially
conforms to a Pit Bull breed dog... Acquisition or keeping of a Pit Bull dog:
$500.00 fine and County Court action to force the removal of the animal from
Miami-Dade County. [Legal code, Section 5 Code 17]

Pitbulls are also under some form of legal control in at least 23 other locations in the USA, not to mention Denmark, Australia, parts of Canada, Singapore, New Zealand the Netherlands and (now this will impress them) France ...

Hope no one shoots her - that would violate the fine American tradition of shooting only their presidents.

How to reduce what you consume

1. Do all those little things environmentalists talk about - especially the ones that involve doing less.
2. Become a vegeterian. Or at least stop eating beef.
3. Downsize your car. Now. Buy a bike. Always take public transport. Never never never fly again.
4. Stop buying gadgets.
5. Join a local Freecycle group.
6. Make your employer more environmentally aware.
7. Buy locally.
8. Get involved with local 'resilience' projects. In fact, start a local Transition Town initiative.
9. Educate yourself about your impact on the environment.
10. Have no more children. Every time someone with enough technology to read this has another child, it's the equivalent of about 50 children in the Third World. No, that's no exaggeration.

Stop recycling now!

I mentioned in a previous posting that we started to exceed the planet’s carrying capacity more than a quarter of a century ago. So why do we persist in imaging that recycling can make any significant contribution to our current predicament? What recycling really means is that we can go on consuming at our current accelerating rate, just so long as we remember to put back a small fraction of what we consume. After all, very few recycled items can be recycled more than a few times, most produce a degraded product, and none of it makes more than a marginal difference. meanwhile, we continue to consume and consume - sucking in endless new resources.

If we are already over the limit, what can such a strategy possibly achieve? The only intelligible approach is to treat recycling as a very second-rate palliative, and recognise what the real problem is.

Stop recycling now – and start to radically reduce what you consume. More of less!

Transition Network: Newsletter Sept-08

Here's the long awaited newsletter for Sept08.

So much has happened since the last newsletter an (embarassingly long) while ago. Where to start...

"Official" initiatives and all the mullers

In the Japanese myth, the hundredth monkey represents the point at which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to ALL related monkeys once a critical number is reached. So it's somehow fitting that the 100th official transition initiative was Fujino in Japan.

For those at the conference earlier in the year, you may recall that we were at 50 in April. That means the number has doubled in less than 5 months - and the number of contacts on our database has just about doubled in that time too. The number of communities "mulling it over" has also pretty well doubled to nearly one thousand.

And it's not just the number that's heartening, it's the reach. Eight more "officials" from Australia, four more from the US, one from Chile and obviously, Fujino. Meanwhile, while we're busy clucking away in English, the Hungarians have been busy! For those that don't have conversational Magyar, "A 12 Lépés az Átmenethez" means 12 Step of Transition.It's starting fast, reaching far, and there's still a long, long way to go...

Software platform for Transition

We're kicking off a project to create a software platform that'll facilitate the 100th monkey syndrome and allow these initiatives to grow exponentially - a platform that will provide three main things:

• a quick and function-rich web presence for initiatives
• a community networking capability
• a knowledge collaboration and sharing system

The project programme has been drafted up, and we'll be facilitating several teams to take us through this process. So, if you'd like to get involved, here's the online form to let us know how you can help.

Let's unleash the techno genius within so our initiatives can scale up to the size and impact that's really needed to tackle the challenges and grab the opportunities that will be facing us in the coming years.

Introducing Transition Chat!

Transition Chat! is a new initiative co-ordinated by the Transition Network, which will provide a forum for people to share successes, failures, ideas, best practice and so on. Each session takes place on a Monday, between 2 and 3.30pm GMT (it can roll on if the conversation is particularly animated) and it is hosted in a web chat format. Pop them in your diary, the first one is Monday 8-Sept.

The Timetable
The first 10 have been arranged, and they offer a mixture of deepening your understanding of various aspects of Transition, the opportunity to ask the questions you struggle with to experts in the field, and chatting with other Transition folks. The timetable thus far is as follows:

• 8-Sept: Transition Network Structure Document: hosted by Rob Hopkins and Peter Lipman. An opportunity for anyone unable to make the discussion day on the 10th to input into this important document.
• 15-Sept: Transition Training Clinic session #1. An opportunity to ask all your practical questions, what is working and/or not working for you in the early stages of your initiative. Hosted by members of Transition Training.
• 22-Sept: Dr. Colin Campbell of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil answers your questions on peak oil (tbc)
• 29-Sept: The Transition Timeline. Establishing the assumptions underpinning our Energy Descent Planning. Hosted by Shaun Chamberlin, creator of the Transition Timeline
• 6-Oct: Inner Transition, Heart and Soul. Hosted by Sophy Banks
• 13-Oct: Transition Training Clinic session #2. Getting started, raising awaress, building a good head of steam.
• 20-Oct: Transition Cities. How to do this in the city? Hosted by Sarah Pugh.
• 27-Oct: Transition Training Clinic session #3 (tbc)
• 3-Nov: Peak oil and climate change: hosted by Dr. Jeremy Leggett.
• 10-Nov: Collaboration/leadership/structure. Hosted by Mike Jones of Transition Stroud.

How to Chat
To participate, follow this link, type into the box the name you want to be known as online - ideally your own name so we know who are are speaking to (not cheekymonkey18 or bigbob), and then follow the instructions. Do let us know what you think of it.

The Launch of the Lewes Pound, 9-Sept. Be There!

On Tuesday 9th September 2008 at the Foundry Gallery in Lewes, Transition Town Lewes will be launching the Lewes Pound, the second currency to be issued by a Transition initiative, the first being the Totnes Pound (although Brixton are at the early stage of planning their Brixton Brick). The evening will be hosted by the Mayor of Lewes, and will include short talks by Stewart Wallis, Executive Director, New Economics Foundation, Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and author and Transition Network's Rob Hopkins.

It will be followed by a celebration with music from SkaToons, food from Bills, and drinks from local brewery Harveys, who are rumoured to have brewed a beer called 'The Lewes Pound' in its honour! The evening will be your first opportunity to get your hands on the new currency… don't miss it! It's not every day that a new currency is born! They also got some great exposure in Sunday's Observer and have also got their local Barclays Bank to accept and issue the notes.

Transition Network Structure Document - we need your input!

Hopefully by now you might have had a look at the draft Transition Network Structure document. This document arose from the Strategy Day in Bristol in April, and it sets out how this vastly expanding network might organise itself. So far people have fed back their thoughts and comments via the Network forum.

Now there are two more ways to input your thoughts and help to shape it. The first is through the Transition Chat session on Monday 8th at 2pm (see above). The second is to come to a get together to discuss it in Bristol, on Wednesday 11th September between 11am and 4pm, at the Half Moon in Bristol. Details here.

There will also be the opportunity for those of you who are unable to make it on the day to follow the event online, thanks to our fab scribe for the day, Steph.

Transition Towns Come to London: Tues 16-Sept, London

Building sustainable and resilient cities will be crucial to navigating an orderly route through the coming climate and energy challenges. This event will help move the discussions forward and identify practical ways we can all contribute.

Presenting at Transition Towns come to London will be:

• Mike Grenville of Changing Worlds - discussing Peak Oil and the urgency of action required
• Rob Hopkins, author of The Transition Handbook - speaking on how communities can respond effectively to climate chaos and the end of cheap oil, and describing how to start to build local resilient networks

Panel Discussion speakers include:

• Suzy Edwards of Camden Climate Action Network
• Duncan Law of Transition Town Brixton
• Mary Fee of LETSLink
• Lucy Neal of Transition Town Tooting

Next steps and more details:

• Registration
• Where: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1
• When: Tues 16th Sept, 6.30pm - 8.30pm
• Cost: £5 on the door (includes refreshments)

Transition Gathering Camp, 19/21-Sept, Sussex

Thanks to the sterling efforts of the South East Transition group, a transition gathering that welcomes all the family and provides a space to meet transitioners from other places will be taking place on 19/21-September-2008 in Sussex.

There will be a basic framework of activities and also space for sessions you would like to offer. Unplugged music, story telling, skills, questions, debate, open fires and much more.

It will be a time to gather together, a time to celebrate, to share good food, visions for our future, skills and knowledge, have fun, to connect and just be with each other.

The camp site is on a beautiful organic farm in the heart of Sussex at the end of the Bluebell railway line and close to the Ashdown Forest. Elena's kitchen will offer delicious food and a there will be a yurt sauna. Children most welcome.

Suggested donation for the weekend camp Friday and Saturday nights: Adult £25 and child £10 family £50 (no day tickets)

Next steps and more details:

• Registration
• Event Flyer
• Mike Grenville - contact@transitionforestrow.org
• 01342 825169
• Transition Forest Row
• South East Transition Initiatives

Transition Stroud: Open Homes for a sustainable future, 13/14-Sept

Transition Stroud have organised 12 homes around Stroud to open to the public so that they can see renewable energy in action, discuss energy efficiency and get advice on eco-renovations.

Over the weekend, in addition to a whole range of measures on different homes, there will also be a chance to see the largest PV generation in the country on private housing, see how co-housing works and there will also be tours of Tranquility House that has been dubbed by the Building Contracts Journal as 'the most energy efficient house in the world'. There are also two guided walks of the homes which are part of the Stroud's Walking Festival and a cycle route.

Here's the event flyer or check out the Stroud Open Homes website for all the details. Alternatively, contact Philip Booth, Project Coordinator - Transition Stroud, on 01453 755451.

University of Transition: development day, 11-Oct, Hereford

The focus of the day will be on Universities OF Transition. In other words, what educational structures and programs are needed to enable learning about all the technical, personal and other skills needed for the transition to a post peak oil, low carbon future.

Download the programme which sets out the purposes and objectives and outline plan for the day.

For more details, go to the Event thread on the forum.

Transition Training: going global!

If you want to get a picture of how Transition is spreading, take a look at the training schedule for the two-day "Training for Transition" course. The challenge is to build an army of trainers able to deliver this work, and a train the trainers course has already taken place and further ones are planned.

Transition for Wales: networking event, 25-Oct

There's lots of transition activity in Wales now and there's a big "all Wales" meeting on 25-Oct (probably in Builth ).

Keep an eye on the Wales forum for more information.

Low Carbon Communities Network: conference, Llangollen, North Wales, Saturday 4-October

Transition Network is working more and more closely with the groups that are aiming for low carbon or zero carbon within their community. For example, they'll be instrumental in helping us create the software platform noted above.

So we're very happy to help promote their 2008 Conference next month in Wales. All the details are on the conference website - it promises to bea highly participatory event, with a musical star turn by the wonderful Seize the Day.

On the programme are:

• Rachel Nunn, speaking about the Going Carbon Neutral Stirling Project
• Mark Lynas, Author of “Six Degrees, Our Future on a Hotter Planet”
• Ian Roderick, speaking about the Converging World (one of our main conference sponsors)
• George Marshall, Director of projects at Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN)
• Kevin Carey, Llanidloes Energy Solutions (LLES)
• Penney Poyzer (Broadcaster and journalist) will speak about the eco renovation of her home
• Jacqi Hodgson from Transition Towns Totnes will talk about energy descent planning
• Ben Brangwyn from Transition Towns
• Tracey Todhunter from Low Carbon Communities Network will present on new web based support tools for communities

Resources for your transition initiative

Lots on this page, so please add yours if you think it'll be useful to others. This includes a fully scripted peak oil, climate change and transition presentation that you may be able to slice and dice into something that suits your style of presentation.

A great little peak oil animation

And to finish off, here's a real gem, courtesy of Adrienne Campbell from TT Lewes - "... came across it in the Daily Telegraph website of all places!" Thanks Adrienne, you continue to be an inspiration to us all.

==============================================

And thanks to the rest of you, for helping take your communities on the journey beyond oil towards climate stability. It's a long road ahead, so let's remember to rest awhile, lest fatigue overburdens us. And I'm practicing what I'm preaching now, heading off for three weeks for a wedding (my own!) and a honeymoon in the mountains and gorges of Spain and France.Happy transitioning...

==============================================

Ben Brangwyn and all the rest of the gang at Transition Network==============================================
Unsubscribe rj.robinson@prometheus.org.uk from this list

The price of petrol

I read an interesting fact about the price of petrol. I don’t what the price of petrol there is right now, but in 2007 Americans could buy a gallon of gas for $3. However, that price only includes the costs to the oil companies – the costs of exploration, pumping, refining and distribution – plus, of course, a margin for profit. That leaves out most of the real cost of petrol – the tax breaks, the enormous direct subsidies we pay these (fabulously rich) companies, the massive military costs of ‘protecting’ our access to oil fields, and of course the massive and growing environmental costs.

The International Center for Technology Assessment has calculated that, taken together, these additional factors total something like an extra $12 per gallon.

Now, it does seem very likely that a major part of making the transition to a more sustainable lifestyle will depend on making consumers pay the real costs of what they consume. So is anyone going to ask Americans to pay $15 a gallon for petrol? I doubt it, and not just because of the average American politician’s supine attitude to car culture, oil companies and all the other enthusiasts for mass environmental collapse. The real problem is much more serious than that.

Geographically speaking, Americans are very spread out. Leaving aside the fact that there are literally thousands of miles between the principle business and industrial centres on the East and West Coasts, Chicago and Texas, most Americans rely on their cars for an enormous range of practical purposes. There is more space and far less public transport than in Europe or Japan, so even if every American were suddenly smitten by a desire to get on a bus tomorrow, there probably wouldn’t be one to get on.

So if petrol cost Americans $15 a gallon, so many people would be literally unable to move – go to work, shop, or even move to a geographically more sustainable location - that the American economy would collapse - and with it much of the world’s economy too. Add to that the effect of making consumers pay four times as much for everything else they use oil for, and the end would be in sight for American society. We Europeans wouldn’t be far behind.

And if that happens, it would not significantly reduce the environmental damage we do. Much of that is a) embedded in things we have already made, whether or not we use them; and b) built into infrastructure such as power stations that will not stop operating just because we are poor.

On the other hand, it certainly would remove the primary instrument we have for solving the problem, which is the economy itself. Not only would a massive depression remove the economic surplus we need to make long-term investments in environmental solutions but it would so panic us that we would start to adopt short-term solutions that were environmentally catastrophic. So no, a recession would not be a good thing for the environment.

Most of the economic alternatives are little cheerier. Even a degree of economic direction through instruments such as tax and regulation are not credible so long as we continue to treat economic activity as primary and economic motives such as profit as sacrosanct. Yet the option of not accounting for the real cost of our high-energy, disposable lifestyles is also rapidly slipping off the table.

Finally – and perhaps the greatest impediment of all – our existing economic system has no way of managing any such transition. The way companies are organised and the mechanisms whereby capital moves through the system (essentially, directed solely by opportunities for short- and medium-term profit) mean that planning for a long-term transition is out of the question. It is not that we could not manipulate the structure of markets, and so of prices and profits, in the right direction; it is rather that the resistance to this from the existing economic powers – global corporations in particular – would be so great that it is scarcely likely to work in the very limited time we have available.

In short, there is no straightforwardly economic solution to the crushing economic problem our environmental position confronts us with.

Which leaves only one option: a political solution.

That is not to say, a ‘political’ solution of the usual kind we apply to the rest of the world. The rich cannot cut themselves off in a comfortably affluent cocoon, but neither can they force the world into submission. The extent and intensity of globalisation makes any such idea laughable. Even the American military, it turns out, can barely down a single Middle Eastern nation we spent a decade starving into submission before we threw everything we had at it. Even together with Europe, Russian and Japan’s unqualified support, it is improbable in the extreme that we could force the rest of the world to pay for our continuing excesses.

So ‘business as usual’ is not an option, not even temporarily.

As far as I can see, we need a progressive (and very rapid) transition towards two goals – the protection of society as the transition is made, and a long-term sustainable energy position. It is likely that this will have to include capitalist business, and it will be interesting to see how we manage to keep that particular genie in its box – because it will not want to stay there.

9,000,000,000 people? No problem!

One of the most basic determinants of whether we weather the impending ecological storm is a simple issue: How many of us are there? And for as long as I can recall, demographers have agreed that the world’s population is likely to peak at around 9-10 billion people.

Is that a sustainable number? Hardly. We passed the Earth’s carrying capacity in about 1980, and the current population is consuming the Earth’s resources at least 25% faster than can be sustained. For seven of the last eight years we have consumed more grain than we produced, the most important energy resources are peaking as I write, and all the other basics of life – water, every other major food source, the majority of major ecosystems – all are becoming less able, not more, to support even the present population.

And that assumes we stand still, which simply isn’t going to happen. China alone catching up with western standards of consumption – currently scheduled for about 2030 - will double the burden humanity places on the environment. Add to that India’s expected 1,500,000,000, and then twice as many again as the rest of the world joins us here at the top table, and we are talking about resources running out far ahead of the 9 billion mark.

For example, if the whole world shared America's gas-guzzling habits, oil production would have to rise from about 81 to 450 million barrels per day. Yet there probably isn't enough oil in existence for it to exceed 100 million - and that may be a very optimistic figure, given how implausible so many claimed oil reserve figures are.

In such conditions, the world will not have to wait until the tradition ‘demographic transition’ is over. We don’t have to wait for decades until the cultures of high-growth countries catches up with the novel fact of low mortality. There is no need to wonder when population will reach the magic figure – because it never will. The environmental catastrophe that will result from this impossible balancing act – the disaster that befalls us as we collectively tumble from the tightrope of history – means the mortality rate will soon restore itself to a number far above the fertility rate. Far from being a sustainable number, 9,000,000,000 isn’t even achievable. Far from billions of extra births, we can all look forward to billions of deaths from hunger, disease and war.

No problem then, eh?

Theory of Everything? No, actually...

So on September 10 CERN switch on the Large Hadron Collider – the biggest scientific experiment of all time. Will it simply create a black hole that will suck the Earth into oblivion? I think I can say with absolute certainty that, No, it won’t. Of course, the only reason I am so confident is that if I am right then I can crow about it afterwards, but if I am wrong, exactly who is going to tell me so?

Another thing I often hear about these experiments is that they will move us a little – or maybe a lot - towards the scientific grail – the Theory Of Everything – which, rather inelegantly for a holy object, is often referred to by lazy typists like me as just plain TOE.

This ‘Theory of Everything’ stuff impresses me though. A Theory of Everything, eh? So it will explain the weather? The nature of beauty? Why feudalism gave way to capitalism? Whether or not we will deal with climate change? Why I talk to my cat? The nature of consciousness? Why I think Eddie Izzard is funny? How about something a lot simpler, like the nature of life? Or are such things, as people who cannot handle complicated things (like reality) like to say, unreal, epiphenomena, or secondary (whatever that could possibly mean)?

I’m not sure that anyone is claiming that TOE will explain anything like this. So what is the problem? Qualitative change – which necessarily cannot be explained in mathematical terms – is perfectly real. Not in the sense that something magical suddenly appears, but in the sense that novel structure of the kind that the first consciousness, the first life and the first atom were all derived from not only stabilises existing patterns of activity but also reveals new patterns. That is after all why we have not only physical action but also chemical reactions, life and natural intelligence.

So why is it that scientists like to repeat that this really will lead to a genuine Theory of Everything? It may well tell us really important things about the physical world – though even that is likely to be limited to a certain level - but ’everything’? Absolutely not.

(Incidentally, the BBC’s webpage on the day poses the fascinating question ‘Is particle physics the new rock n’ roll?’ I think I can reply with some authority on this one: No. And please don’t say anything so silly again.)

Appeal from Small Island Nations For Action

I thought you'd like to know about this urgent call from Small Island Nations For Action on global warming. Read the email below to learn more about the issue and take action.

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Dear friends,

Imagine the sea rising around you as your country literally disappears beneath your feet, where the food you grow and the water you drink is being destroyed by salt, and your last chance is to seek refuge in other lands where climate refugees have no official status. This is not a dream, it's the fearful reality for millions of people who live on islands around the world, from the Maldives to Papua New Guinea.

That is why these small islands are taking the unprecedented step of putting an urgent resolution before the United Nations ahead of next week's global climate talks, calling upon the Security Council itself to address climate change as a pressing threat to international peace and security. This is a creative move born of desperation, a challenge to global powers to end their complacency and tackle this lethal crisis with the urgency of wars. But the island states' campaign is meeting fierce opposition from the world’s biggest polluters, so they need our help. Sign the petition now to raise a worldwide chorus of support for this call -- it will be presented by the islands' ambassadors to reinforce their resolution at the UN next week:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/sos_small_islands/98.php/?CLICK_TF_TRACK

For the first time in human history, the North Pole can be circumnavigated -- the Arctic ice is melting quicker than many anticipated, accelerating sea level rise. Now small island nations, whose highest points are often only a few meters above sea level, are preparing evacuation plans to guarantee the survival of their populations. They are on the frontline, experiencing the first wave of devastating impacts from climate change which soon will threaten us all.

President Remengesau of Palau, a small island in the Pacific, recently said: 'Palau has lost at least one third of its coral reefs due to climate change related weather patterns. We also lost most of our agricultural production due to drought and extreme high tides. These are not theoretical, scientific losses--they are the losses of our resources and our livelihoods.... For island states, time is not running out. It has run out. And our path may very well be the window to your own future and the future of our planet'.

Beyond the islands, countries like Bangladesh, whose population of 150 million people is already suffering, face losing large parts of their landmass. The experience of our planet's most vulnerable communities serves as a warning sign of the future world we can all expect: extreme weather growing in intensity, conflict over water and food supplies, coasts disappearing and hundreds of millions made refugees.

The small islands' brave campaign for survival is our campaign too -- and the more signatures we raise to be delivered to the UN next week, the more urgently this call will ring out to protect our common future:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/sos_small_islands/98.php/?CLICK_TF_TRACK

With hope, Ben, Iain, Alice, Paul, Graziela, Pascal, Ricken, Brett, Milena -- the Avaaz teamPS: For a report on Avaaz's campaigning so far, see:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/report_back_2

PSS: These are the States who are sponsoring the resolution: Canada, Fiji, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, VanuatuFor a draft of the Small Islands States Resolution please see:

http://islandsfirst.org/draftres.pdf

For more information about those presenting the petition please visit:

http://islandsfirst.org

For information on Tuvalu's evacuation plan and climate refugees:

http://www.wwf.org.au/articles/climate-refugees-in-a-drowning-pacific/

For information about how rising sea levels will affect us all:

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update2.htm

For more information on the Ice melt:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/for-the-first-time-in-human-history-the-north-pole-can-be-circumnavigated-913924.html

For more information about all of the Island States:

http://www.sidsnet.org/aosis/