Dereham shop sign pictures

I've been out round the town taking lots of little camera-phone photos of shop and business signs and I've begun to collage these together to build up an image of the town. The Transition Handbook talks a lot about "resilience"; being able to meet essential local needs through locally owned shops and businesses suppling local produce and products to local people, thereby being (relatively) unaffected by disruptions to fuel supplies and other large supply chains (as will happen with "Peak Oil"). Its how towns functioned before the age of cheap oil, and we'll have to recapture something of it.

So how much of Dereham is locally owned, independant businesses, or supplies local produce and products to local people, and how much is caught up in the global economic system that seems to be in so much trouble at the moment? Have a look and judge for your self!

Here is my first collage; of shop signs around Dereham Market Place.

Some images of other parts of the town will follow.

In the last week I've created a Google Map of Transition Initiatives and "mullers" (like me here in Dereham) around Eastern England (see link on right of the main page). Following feedback from the Transition groups around the region that I've been able to contact by e-mail about this map, I have now also set up a Google Group to help facilitate Transition networking around the eastern region.

Current fuel prices; Record 5

Last Monday (6th October) I again went round Dereham's petrol stations and here's the fuel prices at that point;

Morrisons supermarket, Station Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 108.9p
Diesel; 118.9p

BP station, Lynn Hill roundabout, Dereham
Unleaded; 109.9p
Diesel; 120.9p

Tesco supermarket, off Yaxham Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 109.9p
Diesel; 120.9p

As some BBC News journalists are now repeatedly saying, the now falling fuel prices is the result of reduced demand due to growing recession as a result of the Global financial crisis. It all fits quite well with the predicted impacts of Peak Oil and the effects of the high oil prices that we have seen!

Transition events and fuel prices

I realise that I've been rather quiet on this blog for a couple of months and in particular I've let the 'Fuel Price Records' slip a bit! But in the meantime I've been to a couple of larger of Transition initiative events.

At the end of July I went up to the Transition Scotland network day, tagged onto the start of 'The Big Tent; Festival of Stewardship' www.bigtentfestival.co.uk in Fife. This was at the invite of a relative who (after I had mentioned Transition to him) had connected into the Transition Initiative where he lives in Edinburgh, linking it to his own project; a website to help promote locally owned shops www.nearbuyme.com which he was speaking about at the network day. I had a really good time up there and spent a further week around Edinburgh.

This last Wednesday evening (1st October) I went in to "The Great Unleashing" of Transition Norwich at St Andrew's Hall in the centre of Norwich city, which was filled with "350 people" in what the speaker Ben Brangwyn (from the Transition Network) said was "the first UNLEASHING of a major city". It was a very good evening where after Ben and the local MP for Norwich North; Dr Ian Gibson (Lab.) had spoken, we broke into small discussions around tables of about 10 people, each with different themes.

I came away from the Transition Norwich Great Unleashing with a copy of "The Transition Handbook" by Rob Hopkins; the founder of the Transition movement at a discounted price of £10 (RRP £12.95) see www.transitionculture.org which I'm currently reading. It is already giving me fresh ideas about what could (and needs to) be done to transition Dereham and its surrounding areas. This will likely produce thoughts and musings to fill fresh posts in the coming days and weeks.

I also left a feedback slip at the end of the Transition Norwich Great Unleashing saying that I would like to meet up with anyone else from the Dereham area who may have been there, to develop stuff local to Dereham, and that I would be willing to co-ordinate a meeting of such a group. So if you were there (or not, but your interested in being involved) please do e-mail me a message at transitiondereham@googlemail.com to introduce yourself.

To finish this post I do have some fuel prices recorded from August and September. Since my last Fuel Price Record post in July, the retailers have been battling each other to cut fuel prices. But as a chart presented by Ben Brangwyn at the Transition Norwich Great Unleashing showed, this is due to falls in global oil prices resulting from reduced demand in the wake of recession caused by 'the credit crunch' and current financial turmoil!

On Tuesday 12th August the fuel prices I recorded were;

Morrison's supermarket, Station Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 111.9p (down 8p or 6.67%* & 0p #)
Diesel; 122.9p (down 10p or 7.52%* & 0p #)

BP station, Lynn Hill roundabout, Dereham
Unleaded; 111.9p (down 8p or 6.67%* & 2p or 1.76%#)
Diesel; 133.9p (down 10p or 7.47%* & 1p or 0.8%#)

Tesco supermarket, off Yaxham Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 111.9p (down 8p or 6.67%* & 2p or 1.76%#)
Diesel; 133.9p (down 11p or 8.22%* & 3p or 2.38%#)


* figures since Tues, 15th July (4 weeks/28 days previous)
# figures since Mon, 19th May (12 weeks/85 days previous)

On Thursday 11th September I noted the fuel prices at Morrison's supermarket, Station Road, Dereham, as;
Unleaded; 112.9p
Diesel; 123.9p

Tomorrow; Monday 6th October I'll try to record the next fuel price record.

Current fuel prices; Record 3

Its been another 4 weeks so its time for another record of the fuel prices at the petrol stations in Dereham. I have been round the town again on the afternoon of Tuesday 15th July (29 days after the last time) and here's what I found;

Morrisons supermarket, Station Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 119.9p
(up 2p or 1.7%* & 8p or 7.15%#)
Diesel; 132.9p
(up 2p or 1.53%* & 10p or 8.14%#)

BP station, Lynn Hill roundabout, Dereham
Unleaded; 119.9p
(up 2p or 1.7%* & 6p or 5.27%#)
Diesel; 133.9p
(up 3p or 2.29%* & 9p or 7.21%#)

Tesco supermarket, off Yaxham Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 119.9p
(up 1p or 0.84%* & 6p or 5.27%#)
Diesel; 133.9p
(up 2p or 1.52%* & 8p or 6.35%#)


* increase from Mon, 16th June (4 weeks/29 days ago)
# increase from Mon, 19th May (8 weeks/57 days ago)

Energy debate; letters in the Dereham Times

Today's Dereham Times (10th July) carries 2 letters about energy supplies. Malcolm Heymer (of Wheatcroft Way, Dereham), replying to my letter printed last week, continues his ill-conceived argument that man-made global warming doesn't exist! Well I'm sorry to inform him that the OVERWHELMING weight of evidence and the broad scientific consensus says that IT DOES EXIST! Yes, there is an element of natural variations in temperature that Mr Heymer speaks of, but this is small compared to what we are facing as a consequence of man-made CO2 emissions!

Mr Heymer refers in his letter to a report by a group calling itself the "Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)". This is clearly intended to deceive many people because it could very easily be mistaken for a reference to the much more widely accepted UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) report (see http://www.ipcc.ch). Mr Heymer also appears to have been deceived by exaggerated predictions claiming that there are vast undiscovered reserves of finite resources like oil and uranium that will thrust the peak of these resources far off into the future! Maybe those reserves are out there somewhere! But who's to say we'll ever be able to find or extract them!!!

The logical thing is to plan based on the resources that we know (or can reasonably predict) that we've got! Regarding oil, the current evidence is that global production is coming to a peak, beyond which it will go into terminal decline. And this is happening at just the same moment that global demand for oil is sky-rocketing due to the growth of India and China (among others). This IS creating a widening gulf between supply and demand, leading to soaring oil prices which is exacerbating (if it didn't directly cause) the "credit crunch" and other economic instability.

The solution to all this is VERY obvious and relatively simple; we must rapidly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil. I believe that through this we can build stronger, more robust local economies, stronger, healthier, friendlier local communities, and a nicer, healthier local environment. But having done a little web search for "Malcolm Heymer, Dereham", I've discovered that Mr Heymer is a very vocal climate change denier and a member of the car lobby, the "Association of British Drivers" (ABD). So I don't expect that he'll be convinced by any of this until long after the facts have been proved.

The other letter is Cllr Rupert Read's response to Malcolm Heymer's previous letter (printed 26th June), answering Mr Heymer's criticisms of Mr Read's previous letter (19th June). Mr Read (quite rightly in my view) dismisses Mr Heymer's argument for building new nuclear power stations to solve our "looming crisis in electricity generation" as economically unviable and physically dangerous (citing Chenobyl, and the modern terrorist threat).

Energy supplies

In last Thursday's Dereham Times (3rd July '08) I had another letter published about energy supplies, which was given the title "We need sustainable energy" by the Dereham Times. It was in response to a letter by Malcolm Heymer (of Wheatcroft Way, Dereham) printed in the Times the previous week (26th June) which appeared to quite misunderstand the comments of Cllr Rupert Read (printed the week before - 19th June) with regard to the decline of oil supplies. Mr Heymer also appeared to foolishly dismiss the facts of global warming!

The main focus of Mr Heymer's letter was "the looming crisis in electricity generation" which I quite agree with him about, although I disagree with his suggested solutions!

Once again with my letter the Dereham Times failed to include the details of this blog when they published it. HOW HOPELESS!!!

Below is my letter in FULL.


Mr Heymer (June 26) miss-understands the science if he believes that slightly cooler temperatures "since 2002" mean global warming had ceased! Temperatures fluctuate from year to year. But the longer-term trend clearly shows a rapid warming of our climate due to humans burning fossil fuels, releasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. It IS rapid relative to what we know of from the geological past.

Mr Heymer is right to say that there is a "looming crisis in electricity generation". But the solution is NOT to build new coal or nuclear power stations. Instead we need to significantly reduce our energy use, and to develop genuinely sustainable energy sources like wind (both off-shore and on-shore), micro-hydro, and wave/tidal power.

I think Mr Heymer misunderstands what Mr Read (letters, June 19) meant about oil supplies (a mistake repeatedly perpetuated by the media's representation of concerns about available oil supplies). Oil will certainly not just "run out". But the point comes, when about half the available oil has been extracted, that the rate of production reaches an all-time peak and then goes into terminal decline. This happens in every oil producing country or region. In the USA (lower 48 states) the peak happened in 1970 and even significant advances in extraction technologies did little to halt the subsequent decline!

The same thing will happen to oil supplies globally. The question is when! No one can say for sure until sometime after the event! Oil companies say it won't be until 2030. But many independent experts believe it will be before 2012! It may already have happened! And with ever growing global demand for oil, the growing gap between supply and demand will create a perception of shortages, and ever-rising prices.

It should also be said that the same process of peak and decline will apply at some time to all finite resources including coal, and uranium ore for nuclear power. So these cannot be sustainable energy solutions!

We must reduce our unsustainable use of energy. We have to rapidly engineer an end to our dependence on cheap oil for transport and agricultural production. And we have to reduce our electricity use to levels that can be provided by sustainable sources like wind and hydro. We must make a Transition in Dereham and surrounding areas towards a sustainable, low-carbon economy. Please come to discuss these issues further and help to develop solutions at the Transition Dereham blog; http://transitiondereham.blogspot.com.

Matt Walker

Cycle town! Its time to get on our bikes

On Thursday (19th June) the government announced a scheme investing £100m into 12 chosen "Cycling Towns/Cities" to improve cycling infrastructure and facilities in those urban areas. But it appears that the money is going to places that already have good cycling infrastructure (like Cambridge)! Friday's EDP newspaper was very critical of Norfolk County Council for failing to even bid for a share of this funding, despite both Norwich and Yarmouth being qualified and Kings Lynn expressing an intrest, because "funds would have to be taken from other transport budgets to match any funding award made" (quoting EDP article).
Rupert Read (Green Party Transport spokesman) says in the EDP that "its about time we took the initiative on getting the key improvements made to road junctions. The more people we can encourage on to their bikes, the less congested the road network will be - and the more people will be saving money, by travelling in a way that is immune to fuel price increases."

SO WHAT IS Norfolk County Council playing at??? We need serious investment into forms of transport (like cycling) that do not depend on damaging and dwindling fossil fuels like oil. Dereham is wofully lacking in cycling infrastructure like cycle lanes/paths, cyclist priority at junctions, and good sheltered cycle racks around the town.

I regularly cycle to the City College learning Station at Trafalgar Business Park, Rashes Green. But there are no proper bike racks there at all! So I have to lock my bike to some rather exposed railings. Service providers (like the Learning Station), employers, and particularly planners at Breckland must do far more to ensure that the infrastructure is there to facilitate cycling. And if there is money out there that the County Council can go for to help fund this then they really MUST GO FOR IT!

The County Council (and others) must get their act together and start investing into our carbon-free transport future, rather than linguring in our dying, oil-adicted transport past! Lets see safe dedicated cycle routes being developed to link Dereham town centre to all the surounding housing areas and on out to all the surounding villages.


Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been swanning around in Jeddah over the weekend trying to talk Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich countries into giving us back some of the trillions of dollars that we're spending, buying their oil. But Gordon wants them to invest all that money that they're making out of us due to soaring oil prices, back into the UK by financing new nuclear power stations! IDIOT! Nuclear is clearly NOT the solution!

Frankly we would much sooner solve these problems if we were to stop pouring our money away to Saudi's in the first place by not buying their oil! Then we would instead have that money ourselves, to invest into finding zero-carbon solutions, reducing our energy use and rebuilding more resillent and re-localised economies.

Response in the Dereham Times

In reply to my last letter (5th June), today's Dereham Times carries a letter by Rupert Read, a Norwich City Councillor and the Green Party's lead candidate for the Eastern Region in the 2009 European elections, in which he says that "the Green way is ever-increasingly the affordable way". I wholly agree with Rupert's letter and I'm e-mailing him to invite him to view this blog.

Rupert has a blog at http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/
and the Norwich Green Party website is at www.norwichgreenparty.org/

Current fuel prices; Record 2

4 weeks after my first fuel price record (Mon, 19th May) I have been round Dereham's petrol stations again on the afternoon of Monday 16th June and here's what I found;

Morrisons supermarket, Station Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 117.9p (up 6 pence or 5.36%*)
Diesel; 130.9p (up 8 pence or 6.51%*)


BP station, Lynn Hill roundabout, Dereham
Unleaded; 117.9p (up 4p or 3.51%*)
Diesel; 130.9p (up 6p or 4.8%*)


Tesco supermarket, off Yaxham Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 118.9p (up 5p or 4.39%*)
Diesel; 131.9p (up 6p or 4.76%*)

* increase from Mon, 19th May (4 weeks/28 days ago)

Shopping locally

Saturday's Eastern Daily Press (14th June 2008) has the right message. Its front-page headline says "WE'RE STILL GOING LOCAL; Consumers say it's more economical".

Highlighting their own "Shop Here" campaign, supporting locally owned independent shops, the EDP cites its own new survey which says that "consumers still back their local shops - and say it is actually more economical to shop locally, cut back on trips to out-of-town supermarkets and conserve their own fuel." The article includes comments from a number of local Norfolk producers who all appear to be reporting growing demand for their produce despite having to increase their prices to pass on some of their rising fuel costs to their customers.

The EDP article by Kathryn Cross also reports that "Russian oil giant Gazprom predicts that the price per barrel [of oil] could hit $250 before 2009 is over, which would catapult the cost of a litre of unleaded petrol to an incredible 230p and push energy prices sky-high." I'm not at all surprised at these figures! But it should make everyone think; how will we cope IF in a year from now fuel prices are nearly twice what they are today (on Saturday 14th at both Morrisons and BP prices are 117.9p for unleaded and 130.9p for diesel)?

Will we all half our car use? Will we be wasting less good food and buying less heavily processed (energy intensive) food in less excessive, oil based and environmentally damaging packaging? Will we all be growing more of our own food in our own back gardens or in a vast number of new allotment plots that the council is going to have to provide for us somewhere (probably instead of the possible 3500 houses that the Breckland LDF has identified space for around Dereham)?

We WILL ALL have to change our ways to adapt to the soaring cost of energy. Is it not far better to start planning for these things now and begin to implement the changes we need to make, rather than wait until crisis forces us to react? And if we wait for the crisis the resources and options we have to deal with the issues will be severely limited.

With the Shell tanker drivers strike this last weekend and the threat of another 4 day stoppage this next weekend, coupled with increasing road haulier demos against high taxes, I suspect that it may not be long before we get at least a short taste of what life after oil will look like unless we do something about it!

The EDP's Shop Here listing is here

The EDP article mentioned above can be read on their website here

The EDP website www.edp24.co.uk

Letter in today's Dereham Times

Today (Thurs 5th June 2008) I have a letter printed in the Dereham Times in reply (in large part) to the comments made by Mr David Milburn of North Elmham in a letter in last week's Times. The Times has not printed my letter in full and I'm particularly disappointed that they have missed off my last paragraph which gave details of this blog. How will everyone find this blog to continue the debate if the Times refuses to publish the details of the blog address?

Below is my letter to the Dereham Times in full. The Times has titled my letter "Attitudes to oil use must alter" (which I'm much happier with than the title they gave to my previous letter!). The parts in italics are what the Times has printed;


In reply to David Milburn (letters, May 29), I wish to stress that my previous letter (May 22) NEVER said "We can live without cars"! That was a headline invented by the Times' editor which I believe misrepresented what I had to say! I fully accept that some people would find things very difficult without cars, especially considering our government's failure to ensure that we have access to high quality public transport.

The fact remains that soaring global demand for oil at a time when "cheap oil has gone forever" (Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Shell) and production is set to begin a terminal decline will continue to drive fuel prices ever higher. A cut in UK fuel tax may provide some temporary respite for drivers. But it would likely have to be offset by other tax rises (say income tax!) and it would send quite the wrong message - that we can all continue to consume oil as usual (which we can't)! Mr Milburn suggests that that fuel taxes should be reduced to the point where "... few people would be worried about the cost of filling their tank..." This view is frankly shocking! We should all be "worried", not least by the environmental costs of burning so much fossil fuel.

So you see Mr Milburn, I am quite firmly on planet Earth!

Our economic and social structures over the last 60 years have been built on the liberal use of energy from relatively cheap and apparently limitless supplies of fossil fuels. But we must now realise that we have hit the finite limits of these resources and our attitudes must change! We will have to make big reductions in our energy use and switch to sustainable alternative energy sources like wind and micro hydro-electric. The use of oil for transport is the greatest and most challenging part of this transition due to its pervasiveness, our high dependency on motorised transport, and a lack of ready alternatives to oil based fuel!

Think back to the last fuel price protest blockades, and how shops were empty and much of the country ground to a halt within a few days without oil! Now imaging what happens to us when global conditions severely restrict the amount of fuel available to the UK! If we are to prevent this from causing severe crisis then we must start building resilient communities that are far less dependent on the consumption of oil to get along. We need better local services, reversing the closures of village schools and post offices. We need to create local jobs so that people don't have to commute large distances, and we need to promote the local consumption of local produce and products that haven't been transported vast distances (with the escalating fuel costs that that transportation entails).

We have a choice;
EITHER we plan for higher oil prices and reduced availability, taking steps to reduce our high dependence on oil (and through this we can also improve our genuine quality of life as we go),
OR we can ignore the warning signs and wait until severe crisis hits and forces us to react, by which time we will have lost the chance to do many positive things and be prepared!

I've created a blog to encourage further local discussion about these issues at; http://transitiondereham.blogspot.com. I believe that the focus on UK fuel taxes is an unnecessary distraction from the far more serious global issues around Peak Oil and its impacts, along with Climate Change, which require us all to make very big cuts in our use of fossil fuels.

Matt Walker

10 Downing Street petition against fuel tax cuts

In reaction to a Facebook group that I came across yesterday promoting a petition on the 10 Downing Street website that calls for fuel tax cuts, I have created a petition calling on the Prime Minister to resist these calls of road hauliers (and others) over fuel taxes, and to maintain the current policies of high taxes to help deter unnecessary use of private vehicles and excessive transportation of goods.

I believe that any tax cut at this time would send quite the wrong message – that we can go on consuming oil as usual! We can’t. In light of Peak Oil we need radical action to reduce our dependence on oil. High fuel taxes are one of the measures we need to help deter unnecessary use of fuel.

Please sign this petition at;
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/maintainfueltax/

Responses in the Dereham Times

Just to note that in this week's Dereham Times (Thursday 29th May) there was one letter in response to my letter the previous week. David Milburn of North Elmham majored on fuel taxes, saying that they should come down, and in response to my comments on fuel taxes asks "which planet [am I] living on?" Well I'm quite firmly on planet Earth thank you very much!

Mr Milburn also fails to differentiate between my letter and the exaggerated title given to it by the Dereham Times' editor! I have drafted a reply to Mr Milburn to send to the Times.

Good on-line videos about Peak Oil and Transition Towns

I would like to recommend that people take a look at the following two on-line videos;

"The Video - More Peak Oil"
on Darren Workman's Blog; Green Desires and Intentions. A very good 13 minute film explaining what Peak Oil is, featuring Geologist and author Dr Jeremy Leggett.

and;

Rob Hopkins - founder of the Transition movement, talking about his new book "The Transition Handbook" (5 minutes: 46)
see Green Books or YouTube

Enjoy.

More links

This evening I've watched the documentary film "The 11th Hour" on Channel 4, looking at the serious environmental crisis that humanity is creating for our planet and ourselves, and talking of the urgent "transition" that we all need to make if we're to stand any chance of avoiding total disaster! The film is very well worth a watch. There's more about it at;
www.11thhourfilm.com or www.11thhourmovie.co.uk

And a couple more good Peak Oil websites I've come across today (both UK based);
Peak Oil; www.peakoil.org.uk
and PowerSwitch; www.powerswitch.org.uk which has an on-line map that you can stick a "pin" in to show people where you are and see who else is near you who shares the same interest. Find the map HERE

BBC News reports on soaring fuel prices

As if to emphasize my point about fuel prices, the lead story on last night's BBC Look East (Wed, 21st May 2008) was that the price of diesel had "jumped by more than 6% in [just the last] one month - its biggest rise this century..."
"... Over the past month the price of diesel in the east is up by 6.4% - from 117.8p to 124.2 pence per litre. Petrol is up by 4.1% - from 108.5p to 112.6p/litre (source: AA Fuel Price Report)."
"Fuel prices are tipped to reach £1.50 per litre this summer."

see; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7413774.stm

And then on tonight's national BBC News the lead story was that the price of a barrel or oil on the world markets has hit a new all-time record high of $135 - that's double what it was a year ago. But I suspect that in another year even $135 will look incredibly cheap! The BBC News suggested that the price could hit $200 by the end of 2008. But they also suggested that it might fall back the other way in coming months (I think that is rather unlikely!).
"Western" governments appear to be blaming OPEC for not increasing their oil production as the cause of higher prices, while OPEC appears to be blaiming market speculators for the price hikes! But the media continues to pay less than adequate attention to the fact that global demand for oil is now outstripping available supply with an ever widening gap.

Letter printed in today's Dereham Times

My letter resopnding to last week's "Man of our Times" column by Ian Clarke is printed in today's paper on page 7 and is (almost) word for word as I wrote it. The Times editor has given my letter the heading "We can live without cars" which I'm not sure conveys what I wrote in quite the right way! But judge for yourselves.

Below (in italics) is the full text of my letter as I wrote it;

"In response to Ian Clarke's column commenting on rising fuel prices (Dereham Times, 15th May 2008), I wish to draw readers attention to the fact that many experts believe that the global production of oil is now at its all-time peak and is beginning a terminal decline! Anyone who has any idea of economics will understand that this dwindling supply, coupled with continuing growth in demand for oil, both in the "West", and in rapidly developing countries like China and India, will inevitably drive fuel prices ever higher. And we can already see the knock-on consequences, for instance in spurring the dash for bio-fuels which is diverting agricultural land away from food production, thus adding to the global shortage of grain and driving the price of all our food higher while raising the spectre of famine across much of the globe.

As for the profits of oil companies like BP and Shell - it must be recognised that these increased profits are coming from their oil production operations, due to the rising global demand for oil outstripping the available supply and driving up the value of a scarce resource. They make relatively little money from the filling stations themselves! The other big beneficiary of fuel prices in the UK is the Treasury who impose high tax rates;
a) to try to discourage us from using our cars so much (although this doesn't appear to work as many journeys by car are unnecessary and could be done by other means), and
b) (in theory) to invest the money raised into much better public transport, and into local facilities so that people don't have to travel so far for the arts, recreation, and entertainment, etc (if this investment isn't happening then we should all be asking the Government why not?).

Fuel prices will inevitably continue their rapid rise, leading to very serious economic and social consequences for us all, unless we take urgent action to wean ourselves off our addiction to oil! But there are ways we can tackle this. The "Transition Towns" initiative, which began in Totnes, Devon, in September 2006, and now includes many places around the UK (including Norwich) and globally, sees communities looking to develop and implement "Energy Descent Action Plans" to reduce their use of fossil fuels like oil, with a focus on re-localising their economies - increasing local consumption of local produce, etc, and so reducing the need for oil powered transport and the exposure to rising fuel prices that that entails.

Lets all stop whining about the inevitable rising price of a diminishing resource and start working together to find ways of living without the need for a substance that is so destructive to our world. For anyone who saw the exhibition of old photos in Dereham Library from "Before the car was king", lets all start to imagine positively what our towns and villages will be like when "the car is no longer king"!!! And lets stop our NIMBY cries of objection to schemes like wind turbines, which will help us in our urgent need to cut our dependence on all fossil fuels."

Matt Walker

One other letter (by Raymond Mann) printed in today's Dereham Times argues that "pedestrians are more important than cars" and that if they were given more priority, instead of cars, then Dereham "could be a lovely shopping town". I couldn't agree more.

Record of current fuel prices

Just as a side note I thought; why not on this blog, occasionally record current fuel prices at the three petrol stations in the town! So here's the first log, and I'll try to do it on a regular pattern - perhaps once a month or every 4 weeks!

As of Monday 19th May 2008, between 2:30 & 3pm, fuel prices at the 3 petrol stations in Dereham were as follows;

Morrisons supermarket, Station Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 111.9p
Diesel; 122.9p





BP station, Lynn Hill roundabout, Dereham
Unleaded; 113.9p
Diesel; 124.9p


Tesco supermarket, off Yaxham Road, Dereham
Unleaded; 113.9p
Diesel; 125.9p


P.S.
Perhaps other people could post comments to this blog entry, noting the prices at other petrol stations in the areas surrounding Dereham!

Transition Dereham blog intro

In the "Man of our Times" column of 15th May 2008 in the Dereham & Fakenham Times, chief reporter Ian Clarke (who I know personally to some extent) writes that "the tide must turn over rising fuel prices", complaining about the soaring cost of fuel in the UK over the last 16 months. But Ian fails to make any attempt to analyse why fuel prices are rising so far so fast, or to suggest any solutions we can take other than unfairly blaming big oil company profits and high taxes!

In response I have written a letter to the Dereham Times to highlight the issue of Peak Oil and the almost inevitability that fuel prices will continue to soar, creating serious economic and social consequences for us all unless we take urgent action to reduce our high dependence on oil (and all other fossil fuels). I would like to point people in the direction of the Transition Towns Initiative as a practical solution to the emerging crises that stem from the rising price of oil due to the peaking of global oil production.

I hope that the Dereham & Fakenham Times publishes my letter and that it sparks a local debate in our towns and villages leading to Transition Towns across mid-Norfolk. But after writing the letter I thought that whether or not the Times prints it, I would create a blog to publish it myself, and hopefully to ignite and to record the debate and the process towards creating Transition Dereham.

Whether the Times prints my letter, in whole, part, or not at all, I will post the letter here and as I wrote it, when the next issue of the Dereham & Fakenham Times comes out this Thursday; 22nd May 2008. I must stress that Dereham is not (yet) a Transition Town. But I hope that a debate will be started that will lead us towards being a Transition Town and that this blog will become a record as we engage in the Transition Towns process.

I will endeavour to make posts to this blog over the coming weeks and months as any debate develops and may open it up to other voices as and when a Transition Dereham group may develop. But whether this blog becomes a hive of news and debate or a quite and forgotten corner of cyberspace will all depend on the nature of the media debate and the degree of willingness of local people to engage in this serious issue.