From oil dependence to local resilience

Climate Change and Peak Oil for New Zealanders - Free Booklet

Sean and Adrienne put this 30 page booklet together (see attached below) and were at the Engineers for Social Responsibility and Sustainable Energy Forum Conference a couple of weeks ago, giving them away. Their intention is clear from the statement on the front cover: "Copying Permitted"

Here are some opening words from the Foreword:

This work is born out of an increasing concern for the future of our families, our country, and our world. At a detailed level, the subject-matter is complex and interconnected, and knowledge of the issues is evolving rapidly. However, at a big picture level, the basic facts are simple and stable. If we carry on with our present levels of fossil fuel use, the number of people the planet is able to support, will be significantly reduced.

It is a brutal message, and one that we, ourselves, are struggling to come to terms with. The contrast with the widely-accepted ethos of ever-rising living standards could hardly be more stark. Born in New Zealand in 1946 and 1948, we are from the baby boom generation, and have enjoyed post-war prosperity, cheap education, and plentiful employment.

...

This booklet comes out of a decision to employ our skills and knowledge in making information about climate change and peak oil more widely available. It is one of a series edited to suit different groups. The transition towns edition is based on a version written for people comfortable with fairly complex language, including policymakers, officials, and managers.

Like the overwhelming majority of the world's scientific community, and all major governments, we believe the debate about the causes of climate change is over, and therefore have not given it any space. Information about the science of climate change is readily available from a wide variety of sources.

Any single publication devoted to the complex and interconnected issues of climate change and peak oil is inevitably a summary. We have tried to keep this distillation of our research as compact as possible. For readers wishing to explore more widely, we provide some starting points in the appendices.

The PDF version you can download here (attached) has been formatted to make it easy to print on an A4 printer for wide distribution. Do have a look at it, it is a valuable resource.

James

Attachments:

CC+PO_4_NZers_Millar_Puckey.pdf, 1.3 MB

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Permalink Reply by Rhys on August 19, 2008 at 13:26

Thanks for contributing this paper. May I share it with the tutors in Sustainable Living programme in the reference section of their next edition of their resources CD?
Rhys Taylor

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Permalink Reply by Danyl Strype on April 8, 2009 at 0:25

Kia ora

It would be great to see this put under a CreativeCommons license, to formalize the intention that it be freely copied and shared. For more info on CC, check out:
http://www.creativecommons.org.nz/