One of my jobs is conducting home energy management workshops for low income folks.  I'm often faced with questions dealing with the honesty of the utility company, rigging of meters, or how to manage family conflicts about how warm or cold to keep the home.  I do the best I can to address them and move on with the agenda.  On rare occasions I get some really tough questions.  Last night I got one of those.

Early in my presentation I take about 5 minutes to show people where their energy comes from.  You'd be surprised how many people don't know.  The goal of this is three-fold: (1) to illustrate why energy is not free, (2) to discuss the relationship between demand and cost, and (3) to point out the hidden social, environmental and economic costs of our insatiable appetite for energy.

One of my guests last night was a woman, about 70, who wore an oxygen tube around her face.  She raised her hand asked, "We breathe some of the smoke coming out of that plant, right?"

I responded, "Yes, the emissions from coal plants get in the air."

She replied, "I can't breathe, I have cancer, I've never smoked, and I'm going to die.  Why is it that we don't use solar energy, or wind energy, or something that doesn't make us sick?"

Beginning May 6th our Resilience Working Group commences work. The group will work from a Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework which emphasizes a "humans-in-nature" perspective where humans systems are integrated with and dependent upon nature.

Initially the group will determine the boundaries of the system to be assessed, and identify valued attributes of the system that need to be preserved. Peak Oil and Climate Change are the primary issues of concern (resilience to what?) and efforts to identify system thresholds will be started.

The goal will be to produce a report defining a working model for assessing resilience of the SES at the focal scale, results of the initial assessment, and a determination of whether or not the spatial context of the initial boundaries are scalable and appropriate.  Periodical updates about scope, system inputs at various scales, what is learned, changes in scope and the final report will be posted here.

Peak Oil remains in the future. In this update I do not make value judgments about environmental costs of oil production or political considerations about what the best path forward is regarding energy policy and economic development. This is simply a status report on peak oil. With global production of all liquids approaching 90 million barrels per day (bpd) there is no peak in sight. Production of crude oil and lease condensate remains on a plateau at around 74 million bpd, little changed but slightly above 2005 levels. The 16 million bpd difference between all liquids and crude includes natural gas liquids like propane and butane, ethanol, biodiesel and processing gains from cracking heavy hydrocarbons into lighter products. These products generally are less energy dense than crude oil and are not widely used as transportation fuels. So where are we?

Greetings! This message came to the Transition Louisville email from Doug Crouch (treeyopermaculture@...) and I'd like to pass it on.  Below is the full text with hot links.  This is all I know so please contact Doug directly with your questions - Thanks!

"I just wanted to reach out and let the folks down there know that we will be offering a two week intensive PDC and offering a 10% discount to local PC guilds and transition initiatives.  Details can be seen at the following link  (Cincy PDC ) and here is a blurb below just offering a bit of some info.  If you know anyone interested taking this re-skilling type course please let me know.  Thanks so much!

We will have the unique opportunity to host the PDC at two locations to highlight the many contexts in which we are working. We will be stationed for the first five days at OM Valley Permaculture demonstration site in the hills of one of the cities most eclectic neighborhoods of Northside.