[Peakoil] Framework policy

[Alex P]

Hi folks,

As a bunch of people concerned about Peak Oil (Peakniks), we need to have 
an idea of the solutions to the predicament.

That means developing policy positions, whether for lobbying Governments 
or including in leaflets.

The idea would not be to prescribe policies for every Peaknik in 
Australia, but to have a process for creating policy frameworks. A policy 
framework would say "to have a coherent and complete policy on issue x, 
you must consider these aspects of the problem" eg for ethanol, should 
subsidies be provided if they encourage land clearing for sugar crops?

There are lots of gotchas in the post Peak Oil world. There are many 
hidden assumptions we make about how things would work without cheap oil.

So it is to our collective benefit if we "look out for each other" by 
drawing together people's knowledge so that on each issue there is policy 
framework setting out all the relevant issues. Then each grouping, whether 
it is a local Peak Oil group or a political party, can write policy based 
on a comprehensive understanding of the issues.

Email lists and bulletin boards are not optimal for this since it is hard 
to gather content together as coherent organised documents.

A solution has already been invented. It provides for interactive document 
editing and is called a wiki.

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

Some Peak Oil wikis have been set up recently

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic4930-15.html#79174

But in terms of specifically addressing what policies are appropriate, not 
much has happened yet.

http://www.peakoil.com/wiki/index.php/Powerdown
http://www.postcarbon.org/wiki

Australian Peakniks could set up their own wiki. This may duplicate 
efforts elsewhere since the policy framework for addressing Peak Oil will 
be fairly universal. But there may be a need to retain control locally and 
not with peakoil.com or whoever.

A "Peak Oil policy" wiki could be set up on the act-peakoil.org site. 
There are many wersions of wiki software, we need to do some research to 
find the best one and on how to deploy it.



Alex
O4O4873828

ACT Peak Oil discussion list
http://www.act-peakoil.org