Transition Dereham

Dereham is not (yet) a Transition Town. But a new website has been built to help create a local Transition Initiative, to raise local awareness of the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change, to encourage a local debate about these threats and their likely impact on our local area, and to help develop local community action in the Dereham area that builds local resilience to these threats through re-localisation and energy descent, following the Transition Initiatives model.

Film screenings are currently being planned for summer 2009 to try and begin the transition process locally. 

Please do check the Website, in particular the Events pages, and Blog for the latest news of these.

What is “Peak Oil”?

Peak Oil comes when about half the world’s available oil has been extracted. At this point global oil production “peaks” and then goes into terminal decline. It is otherwise known as a depletion profile, or as “Hubbert’s peak” - after the American geophysicist Dr M. King Hubbert who first revealed this pattern in 1956. The same bell-shaped curve can be applied to the extraction and use of any finite resource, in any given geographical area.

This pattern of peak and decline is already well proven at national scales. Oil production in the majority of oil producing nations has already peaked and begun to decline. The best known example of this is of crude oil production in the USA (lower 48 states) which M. King Hubbert (in 1956) accurately predicted would peak by around 1970 - following the peak of US oil discoveries in the 1930’s.

It is logical then to expect that oil production globally will also peak at some time. The difficulty (for various reasons) is in predicting when! There are a wide range of opinions about this. But many experts believe that we are now very close to the global peak. Estimates range from “it already peaked” to “it’ll happen within the next 10 years” (by about 2020). No one will be able to accurately say when global peak oil has come, until a number of years after the event, looking back at the figures. By then, spiraling fuel prices, due to global demand for oil exceeding the dwindling supply, will already be causing social and economic crisis for any people or communities who have failed to take advance action to cut their dependence on oil.

We may already be seeing something of this! Without wishing to diminish the reckless stupidity of the banks, it was surely the soaring costs of energy that led to increasing numbers of people defaulting on their ill advised loans, which created the “credit crunch” of 2008-. Had energy prices not risen so much, fewer people would have defaulted, and the banks would be continuing their reckless lending policies, driven on by the false belief in “continuous economic growth”.

With the credit crunch many more people appear to be recognising the physical fact that we cannot maintain “continuous growth” on a finite planet. But this realisation still needs to develop into more radical action; to reduce our consumerism and energy consumption, and to develop new ways of living (including some return to older ways) that our planet can truly support into the future. Transition Towns offers us a model for doing this.