The purpose of Transition is “to support community-led responses to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness.”
Transition is about the local community taking practical action now, rather than waiting for some sort of ‘rescue’ from government or technology. It is about positive action, focussing on solutions to using less oil and producing less carbon.
Transition aims to build a thriving, resilient, local community that can withstand change by becoming less reliant on the global economy. The community needs to be resilient to withstand the changes we expect in the near future. Transition is for the long-term future of our children, but it is urgent because:-
we expect oil production to start declining ('peak oil') by about 2020 and
we need to reverse the steady increase in carbon emissions and start reducing emissions by 2015 to avoid too much climate change.
As
key idea is energy
descent, which means the reduction of energy consumption
to where it needs to be. At some point in the future, Sustainable
Thornbury intends to produce an Energy Descent Plan that will map out
how the area can achieve the energy descent it needs.
The Transition Network is a community of towns, cities and countries across the world that are Transition Initiatives. Sustainable Thornbury was given official Transition Initiative status on 11 April 2009. We are number 154 on the list of all the official transition initiatives in the world.
The original idea came from Rob Hopkins in Kinsale and Totnes, and is described in the official Transition Network website and in The Transition Handbook. There is also a Transition Culture website and an online Transition Primer. You can sign up to the Transition Network Newsletter.
Other nearby Transition Initiatives include Transition Bristol, Transition Chepstow and Transition Stroud.
There is only a limited amount of accessible oil under the ground, and oil production has rapidly increased in the last century. Discoveries of new oil fields have been declining in recent years. So many experts predict that oil production will level off and start to decline in the next ten years.
However, demand for oil is expected to continue to rise, and will soon outstrip supply, leading to a steep increase in oil prices. There is a theory that rising oil prices were the underlying cause of the current recession.
The world economy relies on plentiful, cheap oil. When oil becomes scarce and expensive, the cost of moving goods around the country and the world will go up, so local production will become cheaper than importing. However, it takes a long time to build up local production, so there are bound to be shortages unless we start now, before the prices rise.
Please see our downloadable and printable display materials on what peak oil is (PDF 4kB), an oil production graph (PDF 47 kB), peak oil mitigation (PDF 51 kB), the importance of oil (PDF 8 kB), the Power Switch peak oil poster 'Good, Bad and Ugly' (PDF 1.5MB), tar sands and shale oil (PDF 113 kB) and oil and food (PDF 36 kB).
See also the Power Switch website on peak oil, the Peak Oil Taskforce website and the Guardian report on a 2008 Peak Oil Taskforce report. The Industry Taskforce says that peak oil could hit the UK "possibly within the next five years and as early as 2011" and oil prices could be "much higher than the existing record of $147 by 2013".
Climate change means the changes that we expect to our weather in the next few years. This is happening mostly because we are burning oil, gas and coal, which give off carbon dioxide into the air.
The latest official UK forecasts have been produced by the UK Climate Impacts Programme. They have published an explanation of the forecasts and the answers to frequently asked questions.
Climate change is already happening, and could become catastrophic in the next few decades unless we stop burning oil, coal and gas, the fossil fuels. Under pressure from environment groups, the government recently passed the Climate Change Act, which commits the UK to reduce fossil fuel use by 80% by 2050. If governments can agree, there is likely to be great pressure worldwide to reduce the amount of these fossil fuels that we use in the next few years.
Resilience is our ability to carry on in the face of changes. We expect big changes because of peak oil and climate change, both locally and to the world economy. We expect oil to become very expensive, and so transport will be expensive.
To become more resilient, we need to depend less on what is happening elsewhere, so that we are more self-sufficient. We need to grow more of our food locally, have our own sources of energy and produce essential goods locally. The more locally we can do these things, the more resilient we shall be.
In modern times western society has measured well-being by counting wealth, but it is becoming clear that our aim should be to improve happiness, which is not the same thing. There is a new science of happiness, called positive psychology. The scientists say they can measure happiness, and are starting to find out what makes us happy.
They
have measured the happiness of different countries,
and the happiest countries are not the richest but the
ones with income equality. Denmark is officially the happiest country,
followed
by Malta, Switzerland, Iceland, Ireland and Canada. Countries like
Britain and the US that are richer but with very unequal incomes
are
much less happy.
They can measure whether different life-styles make people happier or not, such as whether rich people are happier than poor. Beyond a secure income of about £15,000 a year, more money seems to bring very little extra happiness.
If
we can focus on happiness rather than economic growth we should be able
to improve our well-being in spite of having less. We can have
life-styles that make us happy rather than rich, and reduce the damage
we do to the environment.