Farms need to provide not just food but also large proportion of energy.

Farms and other estates own and are in control of large proportion of the land and land is where most of the current technologies extract renewable energy from, be it wind turbines, or PV arrays on marginal land, AD plants or biomass production.

The development spurt experienced in the past 200 years is entirely based on the discovering of cheap and later almost free energy (such as the 50,000 : 1 return on capital for energy from sweet crude in the Arabian peninsula).

Such almost free and apparently almost unlimited resource is bound to lead to enormous development and could have led to a truly rich and equal, satisfying society. Unfortunately we have allowed two trends to develop, which will lead to the compete destruction of the current civilisation. These are

Facts not getting through

The facts about Global Warming are just not getting through to the public, so here is my bit for the education of all the NIMBYs up there:

If Global Warming exceeds 2C then natural positive feedback processes will push it to 6C with unstoppable force, which will result in the desertification of most of the planet surface.
So far global temperature has risen by 0.8C and a further 0.8C worth of CO2 is already in the atmosphere. We therefore have just 0.4C to play with before the planet will be set to become largely uninhabitable by humans.

Budget for Transition

Well, the 2009 Budget really is staggering:
· Projected slump this year of 3.5%

Thank you everyone who participates in the forum, keeping it informative, entertaining, and relatively peaceful! Let's keep it that way and expand it further in the new year.

It's been a long time coming, but the Transition NC website is finally up and running at www.TransitionNC.org.