EBO Project Presentations and Background Information

• The 'Energy Beyond Oil' presentation
  A 2-hour presentation/discussion on the issues of energy use, peak oil/peak energy and climate change – design to complement the content of the book Energy Beyond Oil
  
  
• The 'EBO/Less' day workshop
  The combined, 5-hour 'EBO'/'Less' day presentation is an intensive introduction to the issue of energy depletion and powerdown options for the UK – this event combines the output from the Energy Beyond Oil and Less is a Four Letter Word research projects in a single event.
  
  
• The 'Less is a Four Letter World' presentation
  A 2-hour presentation/discussion from the Less is a Four Letter Word initiative that covers the issues of growth, consumption, and the scale of individual energy consumption – and how we move away from this towards a lower energy lifestyle.
  
  
• The 'Home Energy Reduction' day workshop
  The 'home energy reduction workshop' is a 5- to 6-hour day workshop from the 'Less is a Four Letter Word' initiative that takes place in someone's home and which tries to get the participants to think in terms of "less" – the object of the day is to get practical experience in changing our homes and our lifestyles to use less resources and energy.
  
  
• The 'Energy and Climate' presentation
  A 2-hour presentation that was developed as part of the Energy Beyond Oil Project. Rather than looking at climate change as an "end of pipe" problem it examines climate and greenhouse gas emissions as a holistic issue. In this context climate change is not a problem, it's a symptom of the operation of our energy and resource system.
  
  
• The 'Energy and Food' presentation
  A 2-hour presentation on the modern food system, the energy and environmental impacts of its operation, and how energy and resource shortages will begin to affect this system and force a wholesale change in the way we source our food. Developed as part of the new Energy & Food initiative from the Energy Beyond Oil Project, the purpose of the presentation is to inform the people about the system they are linked into, and use this knowledge to encourage them to find more sustainable alternatives.
  
  
• The 'Energy and Food' day workshop
  This is a version of the two-hour lecture enlarged to between five and six hours. It includes some videos, more time for discussion, and brings in more on the solutions side – especially linking elements such as life-cycle analysis and permaculture to designing 'human ecosystems'.
  
  
• The 'Bread, Soup and Pie' day workshop
  A 5- to 6-hour practical day workshop, developed as part of the EBO Project's Energy & Food initiative followed by dinner! The purpose of the day is to teach basic, practical food preparation skills alongside other information about the options and systems we can develop to source and prepare food more sustainably.
  
  
• The 'Food Foraging' day workshop
  A 3- to 5-hour countryside walk that explores the legal and social aspects of wild food foraging. Developed as part of the EBO Project's Energy & Food initiative, the purpose of the day is to illustrate how wild foods can make our diet more interesting, but more importantly how they can give us a direct link to the natural world around us.
  
  
• The 'Great Outdoors' weekend workshop
  A weekend workshop event camping in a field, developed as part of the Great Outdoors initiative – the underlying purpose of the event is to get people to think about the skills required for "less" taking them out of the everyday luxuries of modern society and encourging them to learn the art of living simply.
  
  
• The 'Great Outdoors' presentation
  A 2-hour presentation/discussion on using camping and living outdoors as a practical means to learn the skills of simplicity, developed as part of the Great Outdoors initiative. The presentation covers the methods to learn to camp and access the countryside and then directly transpose those skills to the home, especially in the case of national emergencies as the progressive shortage of energy make the power and gas grids less reliable.
  
  

EBO 'Energy' Handouts (the 'E' series)

E1	Peak Energy	Examining the limits to oil and gas production – the laws of physics make it quite clear that once we degrade the value of an energy source we can never use it again, and eventually we will run out; recent studies suggest that this point may be sooner than most governments wish to believe is true
E2	Energy and Carbon	Why climate change is an energy problem – the public debate on climate change tends to focus on the "problem" of greenhouse gas emissions, but in reality for nations like the UK most of those emissions are the "symptom" of energy use
E3	Energy in the UK	Putting energy consumption into perspective – as well as looking at energy consumption within the UK it's also important to look at how the UK compares to other states
E4	Renewable Energy	Its potential and the limitations on its use – as oil and gas production go into decline renewable energy sources will be the only long-term option, but the fact is that renewable energy sources will never provide the same amount of energy that we are using today
E5	Nuclear Power	Why nuclear power isn't an energy 'solution' – Governments around the world are reviving nuclear power, which should be indicative of the scale of the problems we have, but the resource constraints mean that nuclear is only a short-term fix with a long-term legacy
E6	Homes and Efficiency	Understanding how we use energy – you might think that the greatest energy offender in the UK was our homes, but this isn't the case; our homes only account for a small (but significant) part of national energy consumption, and if we are to adapt to Peak Energy we must be able to put the scale of household consumption into context
E7	Resources and Waste	Addressing consumption and waste – waste and recycling is an energy issue; it takes energy to create the resources we routinely buy and dispose of every day, and if we handle waste badly it's not just a source of pollution and nuisance, it's an inefficient waste of energy
E8	Food, Agriculture and Energy	The importance of food security – there is only one source of energy that is essential to the humans, and it's not oil or natural gas, it's food!
E9	Energy Delusions	The trade in pseudo-energy solutions – over 5 years we've heard many "solutions" to the problems we raise and we've looked into many of them, but a large number are, for want of a better term, complete rubbish!
E10	Energy and Transport	Redesigning our need to move around – although transport is the average individual's third largest use of energy (after food and housing), the transport sector is the largest user of energy in the UK economy, and peak oil will hit the transport sector first, and hardest

EBO 'Food' Handouts (the 'F' series)

F1

Wild Food and Foraging

Some ideas for harvesting wild foods – a guide to learning to forage for wild foods, the law and your rights.

EBO 'General' Information and Reports (the 'G' series)

G1	Suggested Reading	A guide to books and other information related to the issued raised by the EBO project
G2	Internet Resources	A guide to peak energy-related issues on the Internet

EBO 'Great Outdoors' Handouts (the 'O' series)

O1	The Great Outdoors	A practical approach to learning the skills of energy descent... outdoors! – The problem with changing to a lower-resource pattern of living is that today we are immersed in a high resource lifestyle that makes it difficult to imagine how we could live with less, or see what skills we might require to live more simply. But there is an easy way that most people can get around the distractions of our everyday life in order to learn the skills of simplicity... go camping!
O2	Tents and Shelter	Assembling the kit to reside comfortably outdoors – The most important element of living outdoors is having the right kind of shelter: a waterproof layer, the tent, and an insulating layer to let to sleep comfortably, your bedding. It's also important to organise these elements in a way that's simple and functional. This unit examines how and what to put together to enable you to live comfortably outdoors.
O3	Heat and Fire	Tips for safely using camp fires, stoves and cooking outdoors – Fire was one of the human species first and most devastating inventions (at least until the plough came along). Fire is a most useful means of converting the stored chemical energy of wood into useful heat energy, but in today's technological society, with predominantly gas and electric heating in our homes, people have lost the skill to use fire safely and have even come to fear it. This unit examines the issue around camp stoves, camp fires, and providing sources of heat.
O4	Water	A guide to finding, purifying and storing water – Clean and reasonably sterile water is important to living outdoors, and finding more of it is essential after a couple of days. We can go hungry for a few days, but a day or two without water can make us very ill. This unit looks at how we can carry find, purify and store water.
O5	Food	THE most important energy resource – If you want to keep walking or cycling then you need the right fuel. Traditionally camp food has been viewed as basic; beans and sausages, or reconstituted dried food from a packet. The fact is that you can carry and cook many of the types of food that you might eat at home, and in this way the restricted scope of camping can be a great tutor for cooking more efficiently in the home.
O6	Mind Your Waste	Consuming without wasting or polluting – If you listened to some politicians we might believe that waste is inevitable; some consider it so inevitable that they look upon it as an energy resource! In fact, waste is just something that has no apparent use and so we discard it to avoid lugging it around with us. When camping or backpacking we can take very simple steps to either avoid the need to dispose of waste, or deal with it in a way that causes no harm.
O7	Travelling Light	Ideas for 'going mobile' with your kit – To begin with, when you're learning the basics of living outdoors, you might not want to travel with your camping kit. However, the main benefit of being able to live comfortably with very little is that you can pack up your stuff and move, enabling you to go from place to place or just tour around a small area. This unit looks at a few of the things you need to know.
O8	Light and Power	Tips for getting and using micro-power systems outdoors – There are a lot of good things about technology: being able to make light at the flick of a switch is one; getting information and entertainment over the radio is another. This unit looks at how we can generate, store and use electricity outdoors using very small-scale micro-power systems.
O9	The Great Indoors	How to 'camp' at home in emergencies – Britain's oil and gas reserves are shrinking and we are importing evermore energy. Our power stations are ageing and becoming more unreliable. One of the first features of the stress that the global peak in oil and gas supplies will cause is a greater unreliability of our large energy grids during periods of high demand. The knock on of this could be the disruption of the 'just in time' systems that deliver the food and goods we buy from shops. In this unit we arrive at the final purpose of The Great Outdoors initiative – using outdoor skills to live more comfortably at home when the power and/or gas supply goes off.
O10	The Wilderness Effect	The psychology of being 'outside' – The past nine units of this series have looked at the practical benefits of learning to live outdoors. Now we look at a wholly different issue... psychology. By coming into closer contact with the natural world we can find the space to slow down from the pace of technological society, and in these circumstances perhaps we may more easily visualise our slower, simpler, low-energy future lifestyles.

EBO 'Simplicity/Less' Handouts (the 'S' series)

S1	Limits to Growth	Why the only real solution is "less" – the Laws of Thermodynamics cannot be changed, so if we don't have the energy we need we are unable to carry out the work we want to, and as we face an imminent peak in global energy supply we have to use "less"
S2	Transformation	Change your Consciousness – the lesson we must draw from energy depletion is the need for a change in lifestyle, not a change of energy supplier; that's a very personal process of how we re-arrange our homes, our work and our lives
S3	Simplicity Solutions	Why "less" can mean "more" – Peak Energy is only one in a number of trends that are converging to make life difficult, but there is a solution that is able to address many of these problems, but in today's "modern" society it's considered too extreme to advocate... voluntary simplicity