Film – "The End of Suburbia" is now freely available online free

Thanks for the link Hutton –

I watched it this morning – pretty scarey. So oil production has peaked and gas production may have peaked – and the car and air con dependant US suburbs are set to become the new slums – with McMansions being inhabited by multiple family groups.

I saw Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ last month – equally depressing on global warming.

Maybe all we can do is eat, drink and be merry?:(

can you repost that link mate?

Archeire – http://www.endofsuburbia.com/

An excellent although rather partial documentary. A fuller treatment with ample opportunity for the sceptics to have their say would have strenghtened the arguement. It’s no use in urbanists having to rely on the Micheal Moores of the world to scare-monger our cause. That does not do justice to the argument or presentation of this film though. The parallels between 1950s America and 1990s Irlenad are stricking mind. A fuller film would have also dealth with the social and economic consequences of the extreem forms of sprawl we have been witnessing in Ireland for a decade now. Should be complusive viewing for the Dept. of the Environment. For the Irish contect Frank McDonald presents the local picture. Where are the positive Irish reponses? I heard the Venice show was rather discappointing in the rigour of its argument – is this the case? – and when is the show touring Ireland?

Back in Ireland from London over Christmas. Went out to Connemara to see friends – god they’re making a mess of suburban mall strip Galway.

Cheers, Shane

Its back online and just in time for Patricks day too 🙂

Watch it while you can – my tip for the day!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-776079922862591233&q=duration%3Along+is%3Afree+genre%3ADOCUMENTARY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_end_of_suburbia

Excellent post hutton.
Although maybe a little depressing for paddy’s day…..almost turn me to drink

I think the global media has a massive role to play in peoples indifference
One documentary will never change peoples attitudes

I’ve been trying to get the missus to watch Al Gore’s inconvient truth, sadly to no avail:)
American suburbs scare me! never feel easy in the suburbs, such a feeling of detachment

also I experienced firsthand (getting trapped on the subway)that massive blackout which knocked out most of the east coast and parts of canada in summer2003

Is this responsible journalism from the indo?

Beware brainless pieties of the greens, as nature itself is real culprit behind global warming

THE world has gone mad, utterly mad, as if, eight years after the event, people have only just realised that the millennium is upon us, mankind is doomed, and it is time to repent, repent.

Rational people have abandoned reason, and entire polities are one by one surrendering to the hysteria of the global-warming scare. Vanity meets inanity, and their hybrid offspring is a posturing, self-righteous buffoon who thinks that with a bit of self-denial, the sun can be wooed and the earth can be cooled.

There is nothing mankind can do about global warming. Nothing. There is not even any proof that mankind caused it, merely evidence that it exists – for the moment anyway.

Thirty years ago, scientists were united in their triple declarations that (a) a new ice age was upon us, (b) the earth was running out of oil, and (c) within two decades civilisation as we knew it would be over. Today, only hypothesis (c) remains intact, but now for entirely different reasons. This time, the world is in dire trouble – goes the theory – because we are emitting too much carbon dioxide, and unless we do something about it, the planet, once again, is doomed.

The hysterical rubbish which fills our airwaves has generated an unquestioning vocabulary, a meaningless liturgy of clichés and pieties. Suddenly, politicians and TV presenters are talking authoritatively about ‘carbon footprint’, as if the term had any real meaning.

In fact, it has as much value as the indulgences which were once hawked around Europe to pay for the reconstruction of St Peter’s Basilica, with an equally cynical agenda behind it. Not merely is green the new religion. There is also money in green commodities.

There are profits to be made from selling windmills and trading in carbon credits, as there once were from selling those special papal dispensations that reduced or even eliminated the punishments for your sins, the spiritual carbon footprint of the era.

The eco-priests of our modern lunatic sect, intoning their fluent gibberish, dominate all discussion about the environment. To doubt is to be isolated and ignored. All debate is predicated on the prevailing dogma that global warming is caused by man-made endeavours, and can be cured by us alone. This is now an immutable article of faith, as once was the existence of the Divine Trinity, and as immune to proof or disproof. Indeed, even to suggest it might need analysis is itself a heresy. The hysterical babbling greens are ready to lynch any who dissent.

What insane vanity is it which says that we are responsible for global warming, when we share our planetary system with the thermonuclear psychopath that is the sun? It weighs 300,000 times as much as the earth. Our earth has a diameter of 13,000 kilometres. The sun is 14 million kilometres across, and its heart burns at 15 million degrees centigrade. Solar flares reach temperatures of 10 million degrees, each containing the energy of a million nuclear bombs. Every second, the sun sheds a million tons of charged particles at 6,000 Celsius into space.

So anything we do to change the earth’s temperature is like reducing the Pacific ocean with a salt-spoon.

Earth’s weather grows warmer and stormier during periods of heavy sunspot activity.

So, when the sun had no sunspots between 1645 and 1715, the Maunder minimum resulted, and the earth went through a mini-Ice Age – hence all those Dutch masterpieces of people skating on frozen lakes. What a difference a few sunspots make, because earlier in the 17th century, tobacco was grown as a crop in Warwickshire, and vineyards flourished in Kent.

And no-one said a word about carbon footprints back then, possibly because they were too worried about the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, and other religious-related matters.

Now we have our new religion of climate change, before which we prostrate ourselves, performing the 21st century equivalent of rain dances, which – unless we are careful – will soon turn into the Aztecs’ practice of sacrificing their children to placate the insatiable appetites of their barbaric deities.

Because when the brainless pieties of the green salons are turned into policy to propitiate the weather gods of our own fevered imaginations, they will inevitably limit growth. And however uncomfortable – say – a 10pc reduction in output is for us, it will be a catastrophe for the developing world.

If you are well-fed, then a loss of one tenth of your calories makes you slim; if you are already at the breadline, then a 10pc reduction makes you dead. It is that simple and that certain.

Meanwhile, China and India – rightly – are continuing to expand their economies, churning millions of tons of CO2 into the environment.

But their production of this ‘greenhouse gas’ is nothing compared to what nature does.

THERE are 500 active volcanoes in the world, and a single volcanic eruption can release more CO2 than all of mankind’s production in a year (which is relatively easy: less than 1pc of the atmosphere is CO2).

Moreover, both the seas and autumn leaf-fall dwarf our production of this supposedly lethal gas. And superintending all is the real source of global warming, the sun, all 2000 trillion trillion tons of it.

There seem to have been more of these types of pieces lately. These articles are always devoid of relevant statistics and point to the period before proper climatic records began.

patterns such as el nino and the intensity of hurricanes are manifestations of a trend that is clear. The world is getting warmer and regardless of the underlying causes being disputed it would be irresponsible not to take steps to slow this trend as far as is possible.

If you want independent confirmation of the problem and a view from those who consider all aspects look no further than the acturial profession who at a consensus level predict that the cost of climate related insurance claims will exceed global GDP in the 2050’s.

Gimics such as scapegoating the aviation industry do not help but it is clear that energy use on a macro scale is recalibrated in favour of renewables.

Any news on the Moneypoint conversion?