Peak Oil: warning and opportunity

Earlier this week I had an opportunity to view an excellent film - the documentary, "The Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil" - Peak Oil is a topic that is still not getting the press it deserves. Click here and here for more about Peak Oil.

Basically scientists, geologists and oil companies are predicting that we are close to having used up half of the world's oil resources - some consider we may have already passed that point. The implications of this are huge as oil prices will rise massively. What will this mean to our world economic system that wants more oil each year? More oil wars? Recession, collapse...commentators paint a variety of pictures but few are very pretty.

It is astonishing the lack of urgency on this issue amongst our government and indeed other political parties. We cannot continue our current course. It is as simple as that.

We need to start making choices now to move away from oil - Sweden is dramatically leading the way by aiming to be carbon neutral by 2020. We can also do it but it needs the political will. Changes made now will make it much easier later on.

This film was about Cuba - and how they have already had some indications of what might be ahead - after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 they underwent the loss of over half their oil imports and survived. This film shows how Cuba survived. I was there some years ago and while I have some criticisms that this film paints an overly optimistic picture of the reality in Cuba it is nevertheless inspiring. It reconfirms my view that we must do all we can now to move away from oil and cut our energy needs drastically.

At Council we have a Policy Panel coming up on climate change - another huge issue that has major implications and an issue the Green party locally has been pushing to get on the agenda for sometime - Peak Oil will be one of the issues I will be raising then. These panels are the start of creating Council policy - let's hope we can put Stroud ahead not just in terms of our economy but also as a leader to inspire other areas.

Today I hope to grab sometime to start looking at the issues we want to bring to that panel - on Saturday I have a meeting with other Greens to discuss which policies should be our priorities.

More about the film:
http://www.communitysolution.org/cuba.html

Another good film I saw last year on this was "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream" - more at:
http://www.endofsuburbia.com/