Press Coverage

Post Carbon Fellow Anthony Perl's commentary on how to reduce America's oil dependence was one of four expert views presented by the Council of Foreign Relations.

From the post:

Anthony Perl, Director, Urban Studies Program, Simon Fraser University

 

America's biggest oil spill has shown us the dark side of pushing the search for oil beyond the frontier of our experience. Going forward, we face a crucial choice that will have profound consequences for America's future. We can either reinvent our energy infrastructure to obtain extreme oil more safely or we can reposition our society to use much less of it. Both options will cost more than Americans have grown accustomed to paying for energy, but the end of cheap oil is inevitable.

 

A key difference between redesigning our transportation system to enable post-carbon mobility and introducing infrastructure to bring us more extreme oil--like the Gulf of Mexico's deepwater reserves--can be found in the state of technology. Moving people and freight without oil can be done with mature technology. Conversely, the technology to safely produce extreme oil on a large scale remains to be perfected, as events in the Gulf have made obvious.

 

High-speed trains have revolutionized the way that people move between cities hundreds of miles apart. These trains are powered by electricity--the ideal medium to facilitate a transition away from oil because it can blend energy sources and thus shift from non-renewable carbon based fuels like coal and natural gas to renewable sources like solar, wind, and water as soon as the infrastructure to generate them can be built.

 

In "Transport Revolutions," Richard Gilbert and I illustrated one scenario whereby the United States could reduce oil-powered transportation by 40 percent between 2010 and 2025 while obtaining roughly the same levels of ton-miles in freight transportation and passenger-miles in local and intercity travel. Around half of today's car travel would shift to electric propulsion, mostly aboard local buses and trains, while about one-third of domestic flying would be substituted by electric trains, mostly running at 125 miles per hour or faster. Electric cars also would play a modest, but growing role in providing local mobility. Similar shifts would occur in freight transportation.

 

The pace of this change would be governed less by the availability of technology and more by the capacity to plan and execute the needed infrastructure. We propose the creation of a Transportation Redevelopment Agency (TRA), a new federal entity that could play a role of banker and infrastructure entrepreneur similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Progress on modifying America's existing rail infrastructure will be slow without a new organization that can accelerate innovation.

Meanwhile, the costs required to unleash this transport revolution in time to preclude the need for extreme oil might appear daunting. But the alternative path--that of developing infrastructure that can safely produce large volumes of extreme oil--will require just as much government initiative to oversee, and it will certainly cost more when the environmental impacts are taken to account.