Letter: Transition Towns look backwards

THE Transition Town movement (Spectrum, 26 September) and its planning for a world without oil may represent a welcome growth in community activism. However, it is based on false premises.

First, there is no shortage of high grade energy. While oil production will decline in the decades ahead, reserves of natural gas are growing sharply, with recent innovations in drilling technology used to extract gas from deep shale bed rock. Shale gas is believed by many to be a significant new source of low carbon energy. Importantly, gas can be an almost direct substitute for oil in transportation. Many countries already rely heavily on "autogas" to power conventional internal combustion engines. In addition, uranium and vast untapped reserves of thorium can provide clean, low-cost energy for the future, but only if we have the will and ambition to exploit them.

Second, while local food production may well engage a community, local modes of production cannot deliver complex products such as medical CAT scanners, vaccines, biosynthetic insulin or indeed luxuries such as dental anaesthetic, never mind efficient crystalline photovoltaic solar cells for community energy production. The result of such localism would be a socially regressive slide back towards subsistence and poverty.

Transition Towns are not the future, they are simply a romanticised view of the past. A truly progressive future will see the growth of clean, low-cost energy and the use of technical innovation to decouple human needs from the environment.

Colin R McInnes, Glasgow