Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Round 'em Up


Roundup of stuff time, Rob Hopkins has also posted about David Suzuki over at Transition Culture and made some interesting comments as ever, well worth a read.

An unexpected guest speaker at my permaculture course this weekend was Donnachadh McCarthy , author of Saving the Planet Without Costing the Earth. He had a lot of interesting things to say. A couple of little practical ones:

1) lots of people I know have avoided getting eco-light bulbs because they don’t work with dimmer switches, well now there are some that do – made by Megaman and available through a number of retailers, another course attendee recommends lamps2udirect (thank Geralyn!).

2) Seems that there’s an increasing body of evidence of very low outputs from domestic wind turbines in urban settings. Donnachadh is a pro-renewables voice, and has his own turbine – so I think we can trust him on this. This is particularly concerning given that B&Q are making the big push now with wind, perhaps while the technology is still in its infancy. While there is a good symbolic role in people taking on this technology, it could backfire terribly if lots of middle class people buy £1500 machines and get very little out of them except vibration damage to their roofs.


A note on Energy Bulletin directed me to this promo for the ASPO film Asleep in America on YouTube.



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