“spiralling petrol prices are the greatest worry of my political life” – John Howard, The Age, 1st August, 2006. The City of Yarra invites you to a FREE Seminar. With demand for oil rising globally, particularly from China and India, the frenzied search for new oilfields has   largely come up empty. Chris Skrebowski from the Energy Institute, [...]

Some thoughts on schooling, the PR industry and trying to grow up rapidly for an era of energy descent.  I just watched A Century of the Self – Happiness Machines. It's really one of the best doco's I've seen and that's just the first part of 4.  (You can download the whole series at archive.org) [...]

One thing I've been thinking about for an EDAP is the importance of colloborative research.  (I've started slowly working on a wiki page for ideas for structuring it.) This article by Hassan Musam and Mark Tovey goes really deep into both social organisation and technological tools for collaboration: Peak oil. Climate change. Air pollution and [...]

I sat down with Asha today and we quickly wrote down what we thought might be a few basic aims of an EDAP.  Probably needs a bit of work.  I put them up here for your comment. [ UPDATE 26 Sept: I've updated the aims a bit, incorporated some of Rye's feedback ] So we [...]

Re-localising our communities and food systems Richard Heinberg and David Holmgren Monday September 4th 2006 8.30am to 5.30pm Northcote Town Hall, 189 High Street Northcote While the historic peaking and decline in world oil supply is becoming more widely discussed in the media, it is a bad news story to rival climate change. Richard Heinberg [...]

Writes Philli in California:  Community Emergency Respoonce Team (CERT) is a federally sponsored program, by Citizen Corps, to increase emergency preparedness in any and all US communities. It's a fabulous and little-known organizing tool. Any community can start up a CERT program. A good way to maximize the effectiveness of the program is for the [...]

The Congress for the New Urbanism took place on Rhode Island 1-4 June 2006. From wikipedia:  New urbanism is an urban design movement whose popularity increased beginning in the 1980s and early 1990s. There are some common elements of new urbanist design. New urbanist neighborhoods are walkable, and are designed to contain a diverse range [...]

Jago Dodson informs us via Energy Bulletin of his new report, written with colleague Neil Sipe,  examining the spatial vulnerability of Australian urban areas to fuel price and mortgage interest rate rises. An earlier paper "established a basic method for assessing oil vulnerability via a spatial index that measured a combination of car dependence and [...]

An August 2002 conference in Casey, Building Sustainable Communities on the Urban Fringe brought together council planners from around Victoria, particularly the outer suburbs, as well as representatives of State Government and academia. Topics included: Local case studies highlighting the relationship between planning, community development and wellbeing; Examples of successful integrated planning; Exploring strategies for [...]

I was quite blown away by these stats — based on US figures — but no doubt quite similar here in Australia.  About half the energy used in the US goes into constructing, heating, lighting and maintaining the nation's buildings.   That's taken from an article by the Rocky Mountain Institute's Greg Franta based on [...]