Every time there is a hiccup in the availability of petrol, it amazes me how quickly it is forgotten again afterwards. Surely a light is being shone full-beam not only on our complete reliance on this stuff but how vulnerable the supply system is. Two things you would think would be pretty incompatible.
Peak Oil has been acknowledged as a reality by people like President Obama, the International Energy Agency and Shell. Surely the only sensible move is to gradually adjust our lives to cope without a readily affordable supply? Not wanting to get all gloomy and doomy, but those forecourt scenes are something we are likely to see a lot more of in the mid-term future.
We will be asking our local representatives what they plan to do about this and our local resilience at our event on 24th April ahead of this year’s local elections. Alternatively your councillors can be contacted directly here.
Let’s continue with our creativity in questioning every car journey: combining errands into one trip, cycling, car pooling and even staying put sometimes. After all, it’s a lovely town we’ve got (and less traffic would make it even nicer!) There was an article about us in The Guardian recently, which is clearly a rose-tinted perspective but does go to show there are many worse places to live. It describes Letchworth as having been a sustainable community before the term was even invented. Needless to say, TTL would like to recapture much of that!