Transition Town Stafford

Climate Change and Peak Oil are a pair of problems which are intimately related. The solutions chosen for either, could easily make the other worse, for instance:

- Focusing on managing the extra CO2 in order to avoid disastrous Climate Change, still leaves us without cheap plentiful oil which we use in many ways, including food production (fertilisers) and distribution.

- Focusing on other sources of liquid fuel (such as tar sands or biofuels) means causing extra CO2 emissions (even many/most biofuels), and increased world hunger.

Both problems are due to our oil dependency, and both will require us to break the habit. We need to go for Transition from oil dependency, including conservation and relocalisation. In this way our communities can become resilient to the oil shocks which we should expect, and we can avoid tipping our climate over the edge.

Richard Heinberg “At the most superficial level, we could say that climate change is an end-of-tail-pipe problem, while peak oil is an into-fuel-tank problem.” Which is most likely to cause us to act…?

Our response must not be ‘Something must be done!’ but ‘What can we do about it?’. We need to develop local resilience, and we should not expect this to be done for us.

You’ve heard of Earth Quakes. How about Ice Quakes? The alternative to Transition could be Society Quakes…

I’m Geoff of the potential Transition Town Stafford, and I’m glad to be part of Community Carbon since it seems to share my aims, particularly connecting people. I believe that as more people connect on these issues, they will become encouraged to take action.

Transition Towns are addressing Climate Change and Peak Oil, transitioning from oil dependency to local resilience.

We have established a set of forums which can be of benefit to people in Staffordshire. This was done having recognised that rural communities may be limited in their ability to become Transition Initiatives in the short term, and that such forums could help to connect people.