PETROL! Demonstrations and Sums...

There's some crazy stuff going on in the world... here in the UK we have the Extinction Rebellion movement, peacefully demanding that governments take urgent action against climate change and mass extinction...

A brilliant peaceful movement - how would we react to a 25% fuel price rise though?

 ...while in France we have less peaceful demonstrations against the price of petrol and diesel. Macron has increased taxes so that people will be encouraged to switch to electric cars, the French are now paying £1.30 a litre.

0.03 pence for the equivalent of an hour of human labour! that's far too much!

SUMS - WHAT'S A GALLON OF PETROL WORTH IN HUMAN TERMS?
I knew that petrol/diesel is a very compact form of energy and cheap for the power that you get out of it so did some sums to see what we're getting in terms of the work that a human being can do. It's a very rough calculation, please check it yourself, partly because it's hard to put a figure on how much work a human being does, how many hours a week they're going to do etc, but I worked out that when you buy petrol it's the equivalent of buying human labour for £0.03 pence an hour. To put it another way, if you got a job pushing a car, how far do you think you might be expected to push it for £1.30? Would you pay £1,500 for a gallon of petrol? (That's its equivalent value at minimum UK wage in human terms). Sums and more petrol stuff here.
THE UNDERLYING ISSUE..
...is transport. That's mainly powered by fossil fuel worldwide and there's no practical strategy for any transition to completely renewable powered transport anywhere. We have lots of renewable electricity here in Scotland but our lives still revolve around using petrol and diesel for moving us and all the stuff we consume about. It's so ridiculously cheap in terms of the quantity and portability of the power you get out of it that it's difficult to make an easy transition away from it.
ONE WORLD FUTURE FARM
So that's why making the transition to zero fossil fuel is a key issue for us. The post-oil way of life is very different but we intend to show that it can be done.