Writing to MPs, MEPs and Councils about Transition Towns

Wow. Nottingham City Council has officially recognised Peak Oil, passing the following motion:

This Council acknowledges the forthcoming impact of peak oil. The Council therefore needs to respond, and help the citizens it serves respond, to the likelihood of shrinking oil supply but in a way which will nevertheless maintains the City’s prosperity. It acknowledges that actions taken to adapt to and mitigate against climate change also help us adapt issues around peak oil.
It will do this by:

• developing an understanding of the impact of peak oil on the local economy and the local community
• encouraging a move across the city towards sustainable transport, cycling and walking throughout the city
• pursuing a rigorous energy efficiency and conservation programme through its carbon management plan, the work towards EMAS accreditation and on leading on raising energy awareness across all sectors to reduce dependency on oil based energy in the city
• supporting research and production within the city which helps develop local effective alternative energy supplies and energy saving products in order to encourage a move away from oil based fuels and also in order to create local ‘green collar jobs’
• co-ordinating policy and action on reducing our city’s carbon dependency and in response to the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change and peak oil.

I emailed office@wimborne.gov.uk last week and again with this quote but as of yet I’ve heard nothing back :-(

I also used faxyourmp.com to contact my MEPs (Glyn Ford, Neil Parish, Trevor Colman, Graham Watson, and Roger Knapman) and MP (Annette Brook) and only Roger Knapman’s office has replied so far.

Here’s my letter to them:

I am concerned about “peak oil” and note the development of the “Transition Towns” initiatives. These are local communities organising themselves to mitigate of the effects of declining energy supplies, and help avert climate change, in a grassroots way.

I see the UK Sustainable Communities Act 2007 as a way of helping local authorities to engage and support in these kinds of efforts.

Here are some websites that introduce these topics if they are unfamiliar:

http://www.appgopo.org.uk

http://transitiontowns.org/

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/pabills/200607/sustainable_communities.htm

I hope you can inform me about your thoughts on this issue – local responses to energy supply decline – and especially about how the EP is supporting people’s efforts across Europe.

Yours sincerely,

David Crossland

And here’s Roger’s office’s reply:

Roger Knapman MEP has asked me to thank you for your email and to reply. He is certainly opposed to environmental pollution and to the waste of resources. He supports energy conservation measures and promotion of sustainability (although this term is sometimes narrowly interpreted and he does not support that).

However he is dubious about the theory of peak oil – which is only a theory – as there are likely to be vast undiscovered reserves, just as recently that has been proved to be the case with methane.

best wishes

Piers Merchant

Assistant to Roger Knapman MEP

I replied:

Thanks for your response. I’m sad to hear that Roger has a theory about undiscovered oil fields; I hope he might be able to recommend to me a source to substantiate his theory.

I understand that new fields are discovered, but they are never ‘vast’ – in fact, they are too small to make up for the decline of existing fields, so increasing supply past 90mbpd seems impossible.

I would like to refer you to a recent article on the Times, and hope that he will look more carefully into this issue.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article5133757.ece

Also, may I publish your response on my blog?

He said:

Yes, please feel free to use the reply as you wish. Vast is of course a comparative term, but by their very nature undiscovered fields cannot be measured and therefore any predicitons about oil resources are bound to be theoretical.

I said:

I looked into this a little, and it seems the rate of oil field discovery peaked around 1962-4; the trend is for no new vast fields to be discovered. So I am curious where the indication that their could be new fields has come from. Could you find out and tell me? :-)

He said:

Research carried out in Russia and recently published by their energy ministry points to huge new discoveries in Siberia/the Arctic Circle and indications of further discoveries to come. Also two studies in the US have indicated areas elsewhere in the world where there are indications of very large discoveries. Of course many areas, particularly undersea, have not yet even been explored. All of these have been reported in the media.

That is as far as the conversation has gone, so far. I’ll post other replies here soon, if I get some more…

- Dave Crossland