Sustaining our food supply
Meeting at 7pm Environment Centre Hamilton, 25 Ward St
If you are interested in where your food comes from, how we can produce more locally, supporting local growers, etc please come along to a meeting on Tuesday evening and begin the process of where we are at, where we want to get to and what actions we can undertake to get there. We will also have some examples of what is happening in other places.
This meeting is a Transistion Towns meeting. TT is an international movement based around making our communities more robust in the face of rising oil prices and increasing scarcity.
Enquiries phone the Environment Centre 839 4452
If you have not seen this article which was recently in the NZ Herald, it is worth a read (just to cheer up your day):
Economist's warning: Oil supplies are running out fast
The IEA's chief economist has warned the world faces a catastrophic energy crunch as oil supplies run out.
9:41AM Monday Aug 03, 2009
By Steve Connor
The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned.
Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.
In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years - at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.
But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago.
On top of this, there is a problem of chronic under-investment by oil-producing countries, a feature that is set to result in an "oil crunch" within the next five years which will jeopardise any hope of a recovery from the present global economic recession, he said.
.....One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day," Dr Birol said.
