Responding to a recent blog post of mine, a reader made this comment:

This raises an essential point about retrofitting our cities and suburbs for low-energy transportation. I've often thought that trying to make American / Canadian cities and suburbs less car-dependent simply by adding more buses, streetcars and light rail is like trying to make a bowl of chicken soup vegan simply by picking the chicken out. Dependence on private vehicles powered by gasoline is ingrained in nearly everything we've built over the last sixty years -- like the chicken broth in my chicken soup, car dependence is an inherent property of our settlements...

That said, it's not necessarily impossible to quickly scale up public transport across the US and Canada. Cities and, yes, suburbs throughout Western Europe have proven for decades that many people will opt for a mix of walking, bicycling and public transit over personal cars if the price is right and, especially, if the trip quality is superior. For local buses and rail, that means headways well under fifteen minutes, and a whole experience that is safe, reliable, fast, and clean. For bicycling that means extensive networks of dedicated, wide, uninterrupted paths with minimal stops, and secure, covered parking at destinations...

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This is an excerpt from Daniel's blog. Read the full post, plus comments, at:
www.postcarboncities.net/blog

The last few weeks have been a particularly interesting time to follow reactions to surging oil prices. In addition to the spate of news stories about cities struggling with energy costs in their transit services, school districts, and even police departments, we're now hearing about shifts in urban land values and cutbacks in airline service. Perhaps the biggest canary in the coal mine: General Motors is moving to dump the Hummer in favor of subcompact and electric vehicles.

Unfortunately, we're also hearing more of the same old short-sighted solutions, now in their latest repackaging. In just the last few days I came across the same three talking points in four different publications (not to mention one presidential contender's speech):

Plenty of folks have explained already why points 2, 3 and, yes, 4, are pipe dreams, so I'll focus instead on the much more interesting solutions that some sensible local government leaders in the US and Europe recently started pursuing:

• We recently learned that Alachua County, Florida (county seat: Gainesville) created an Energy Conservation Strategies Commission last year, charged with reviewing the potential effects of global oil decline and recommending actions the County can take -- report due by September of this year. This marks the first official response to peak oil (which is our criteria for listing on our ever-growing Peak Oil Responses page) we've heard of from the US Southeast.
• Two weeks ago, Whatcom County, Washington and its county seat of Bellingham created the second task force in that state, following Spokane a few months ago. This marks the first (as far as we know) joint city-county task force established to address peak oil.
• This week we learned that a resolution is underway within the parliament of German city-state Hamburg to establish various bodies for identifying the local vulnerabilities created by peak oil, develop suggestions for responding to them, and coordinate activities to mitigate them. While this is not yet an adopted resolution, it's the first major peak oil effort by sub-national government officials in Europe that we've heard about. Ausgezeichnet!

This month I'm spending nearly two weeks total in my old stomping grounds of the New York City metro area. I'm excited to be doing presentations at three institutions that have important roles to play as we plod through the peak oil years: the New York Institute of Technology, the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council. Economically, this is one of the most dynamic and resilient parts of the United States -- communities, businesses, institutions and governments here have centuries of experience in dealing with crisis and change, and time and again they've pulled through and the region has come out the better for it. I predict it won't be too long before we see some truly sensible and clever solutions to peak oil emerge from this most urban corner of the United States.

As gasoline rises past a record $4 per gallon in the United States^*, we're hearing more and more about people leaving their cars for public transit. In the first few months of 2008, transit ridership has increased 5% on New York City's commuter trains, 8% in Denver's system, and a full 16% on Minneapolis-St. Paul light rail, compared to the same time last year. Miami's commuter rail saw a whopping 28% year-over-year increase just for April.

The ability of people to switch from cars to transit (or bicycling or walking, for that matter), however, is directly tied to the past planning and investment decisions made by local government. People can only choose to use transit where transit exists -- and even where transit systems are built and operating, they will only last as long as they are funded in a sustainable way...

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This is an excerpt from Daniel Lerch's blog at our Post Carbon Cities program. Click here to read the full article at postcarboncities.net.

^* Gasoline/petrol, of course, is already well past this mark elsewhere, with prices above the equivalent of $8 per gallon in Germany and $9.50 per gallon in the UK.

Last Wednesday John Kaufmann, Jennifer Brost-Sarnecki and I held a session on "Responding to Peak Oil and Energy Uncertainty" at the annual American Planning Association conference in Las Vegas -- the only session this year specifically on peak oil, and likely the first ever at this annual conference. (If you attended the session and want to our presentations or get on the mailing list we discussed, click here.)

This is not something I'm happy about. James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg and other scholar-authors sounded the mainstream wake-up call on peak oil over three years ago with books like The Long Emergency and Powerdown, among others. We planners, of all folks, should not have waited until 2008 to get peak oil on the agenda.

Still, better late than never. And judging from the reception we got at our last-of-the-day session (a near-capacity audience, most of whom stayed 45 minutes after the end for Q & A), APA members are starting to recognize that peak oil is a serious, serious issue for us to deal with.

At last year's conference in Philadelphia conference I was encouraged by the trends I saw toward integrating sustainability thinking into conventional planning practice. Last April, however, oil was trading around $60, not $120, and the 'acceptable' level of atmospheric carbon was a reasonable 450 ppm, not a daunting 350 ppm (daunting because we're already at 385 ppm). Things have changed. So this year I went to Las Vegas with a high sense of urgency, and sought to gauge --if only roughly-- two things:

Disappointing, to be sure. Indeed, the whole conference was somewhat discouraging to me: a massive missed opportunity to address sustainable community planning in this most unsustainable of cities. Not only was there not a single session on what was wrong with Las Vegas (and there is plenty to be learned from, there), the closing speaker, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, largely focused on how Las Vegas was an extreme extension of American anti-urbanism (per Venturi et al's groundbreaking 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas) that nevertheless has become 'accidentally urban' thanks to the massive pedestrian traffic the Strip generates. Well, the urban designer in me finds that interesting. But we're in a sorry state when thousands of planners come to Las Vegas and the focus is on architectural philosophy -- and not on the fundamental incompatibility of that sprawling city's economic, land use and transportation patterns with the increasingly uncertain flows of natural and human capital it depends on for survival.

In other words: We've got nearly 2 million people living out here in the middle of the desert; they're extremely dependent on distant and declining water sources; their economy absolutely depends on cheap aviation fuel, which will soon be a distant memory; their food, manufactured goods and construction material are all trucked and trained in thousands of miles with cheap diesel fuel, which also isn't getting any cheaper... Maybe this is something planners should be concerned about?

No, at the APA conference, as in planning offices around the country, I'm afraid it's still largely business as usual. I caught the tail end of a session on John Kasarda's 'aerotroplis' concept, which basically promotes public investment in airport-related development clustered around expanded airports. (This is exactly the kind of concept that Hamilton, Ontario abruptly reconsidered after a study pointed out that the air travel and freight sector will have a hard time expanding given a future of depleting oil reserves.) After the session was over, I asked a fellow on his way out if the speakers had discussed energy. He said "No. Absolutely not."

Disappointing, but not surprising.

For folks who attended our session at APA:

I also announced --in response to a suggestion by an audience member-- that I'd set up a mailing list for people to continue the discussion about advancing the peak oil message within the APA. I've done so and have added to it the people who gave me their cards after the presentation. If you'd like to be on this list as well and you're an APA member, please contact me with your email address, name, title, affiliation, and APA member number and we'll add you to the list. Please put the words "SCP list" in the title of the message -- I get a lot of email!

This year's American Planning Association conference is in Las Vegas next week, and while the theme for 2008 isn't exactly "sustainability", there are a lot of great sessions this time around focusing on green initiatives, climate change, and even peak oil.

I'll be hosting a session on "Responding to Peak Oil and Energy Uncertainty" (S639) on Wednesday starting at 4:00pm. Here's a quick overview:

• Daniel Lerch, Program Manager at Post Carbon Institute and author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty introduces the issue of peak oil (the imminent maximum point of global oil production), describes how the problem is really one of uncertainty and explains how local officials and planners can best approach it. Daniel will also cover what some cities in the U.S. and Canada are already doing in response to peak oil. [bio]
• John Kaufmann, Senior Policy Analyst at the Oregon Department of Energy, was the lead staffer for the groundbreaking Portland (Ore.) Peak Oil Task Force. He has given presentations about peak oil and the experience of the Portland task force to state and local governments across the country. John will describe in detail how the Portland Peak Oil Task Force went about its work, what its findings were and what Portland has accomplished since.
  
• Jennifer Sarnecki is a Senior Planner in the Environmental Division of the Southern California Association of Governments. She serves as the lead staff for all of SCAG's energy planning efforts, which includes developing the Regional Comprehensive Plan's Energy Chapter, staffing SCAG's Energy Working Group and positioning SCAG to be successful in its approach to AB 32 (California Global Warming Solutions Act). Jennifer will discuss SCAG's leadership on energy uncertainty, including the challenges of approaching this complex topic from the regional perspective.

We're also happy to announce that Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty will be carried by the APA Bookstore at the conference! Pick up your copy there, or order it directly from us at postcarbonbooks.com.

I'm on the road for another set of presentations for the Post Carbon Cities book -- this time in Ireland courtesy of the Cultivate Centre in Dublin, which has brought me here to keynote their thirteenth annual Convergence Festival. This year's conference theme is "Transition Strategies: Post Carbon Cities, Transition Towns and Eco-Villages," and the focus will be on community and government action to prepare for the coming energy crisis.

The conference doesn't start until Thursday, so in the meantime I'm doing a few other presentations, including for a one-day symposium in Kilkenny for local officials, planners, architects and builders (organized by Future Proof Kilkenny) earlier today; then for Belfast City Council tomorrow; and finally for Dublin City Council on Thursday. On Monday I fly to the UK for a presentation to the Local Government Association, followed by two presentations in Bristol and finally a presentation at the second annual Transition Network conference, in Gloucester. (View my full schedule at postcarboncities.net/pcc-tour.)

Highlights from the Kilkenny symposium today:

• Davie Philips from Cultivate Centre described Cultivate's new educational series, Skilling Up For Powerdown. Among Philips' many fascinating endeavors is The Village, a 132-home ecovillage under construction in rural Cloughjordan. The Village is putting into practice just about every sustainability idea you've heard of, from green building and district energy to permaculture / edible landscaping and a local currency.
• Ireland is really pushing ahead with energy efficiency regulations for buildings. Colm Byrne from the energy services firm Glas descrived how the new Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (being implemented from 2006 to 2009) will, among other things, require energy performance ratings (much like we are used to seeing on things like washing machines and cars) to be displayed on buildings for sale and for rent, as well as in public buildings (see www.sei.ie for more).
• Güssing, Austria (pop. ~4,000) is getting more and more attention as the little town that single-handedly led a local energy revolution. Among their accomplishments: attracting 25 companies to this struggling rural area with a new Energy Technology Center that is pushing local energy sources and renewable energy technology.

I'll be back with an update on my Belfast and Dublin presentations in a few days.

We've had a few minor surprises here at Post Carbon Cities over the last few days.

First: The day after the price of oil burst through its all-time high of $103.76¹, Common Current's Warren Karlenzig, author of the widely-acclaimed How Green is Your City? sustainability ranking of the 50 largest U.S. cities, released a new report on the preparedness of those 50 cities for $100+ oil and $4 gasoline.

The surprise? Neither super-green Portland (Ore.) nor super-dense New York City topped the list. The big city most prepared for an oil crisis turned out to be very-green and relatively-dense San Francisco, thanks in part to its high levels of public transit use, population density and telecommuting. Portland and New York took sixth and second, respectively, with Chicago, Washington and Seattle (in that order, which is also a bit of a surprise) rounding out the top five.

Second: A few weeks ago we reported that the medium-sized city of Spokane (Wash.) was the first city we'd heard of to create an official task force tackling peak oil and climate change together. At a presentation Laurel and I attended last week by renowned Australian sustainability scholar and author Peter Newman, we learned that Brisbane, Australia convened a joint task force in 2006, and released their final report a year ago yesterday. This means that Brisbane was most likely the first in the world; as far as we know, however, Spokane was still the first in North America.

I've only had time to skim the report, but at first blush it's quite impressive, particularly with its ranking of recommended actions by benefit, cost and level of local government control.

Third: The sharp eyes over at Energy Bulletin noted yesterday that incoming New York governor David Paterson has been outspoken about the challenges posed by peak oil. If Paterson acts on these views once in the Governor's chair, we hope New York's influence helps spur peak oil responses throughout the Northeast -- particularly in the neighboring states of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, where we've heard rumblings of possible peak oil action in the state legislatures.

In the coming weeks, look for updates on these and other state actions on our local and state/provincial tracking page at www.postcarboncities.net/peakoilresponses.

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POSTSCRIPT
We just learned that Corporate Watchdog Radio has posted the radio interview they did with me last week. This was one of the most substantive interviews I've done -- hosts Francesca and Bill asked some great, incisive questions.

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FOOTNOTE
1. There are various ways of calculating what the record oil price of April 1980 was in inflation-adjusted dollars. I'm using the most commonly-cited figure I've found, as seen here.

"If I only had a time machine..."
Since we started tracking local government responses to peak oil over a year ago, our little map has filled up a bit -- the latest addition being Haines, Alaska.

Now that we're in record-high territory with oil prices, I'd wager that more than a few folks out there are starting to envy these cities -- particularly the really early actor cities like Portland, Oregon and Burnaby, British Columbia, where which were thinking about $100 oil back in 2006 when oil prices were in the $60 to $70 range.
Of course, it's one thing to write a policy assessment or start a task force, but it's another to actually set policy and make those difficult planning and funding choices. Laurel and I went to a presentation last week by Michael Armstrong, Deputy Director of Portland's Office of Sustainable Development, to see just what Portland has managed to accomplish on peak oil since the release of its Peak Oil Task Force final report (the first in the nation) last March.
Portland pushes the envelope...by staying the course
The main accomplishment of the task force so far seems to be that (according to Armstrong) the peak oil view is being incorporated into the City's existing sustainability policies, initiatives, and planning. This is the sort of subtle policy shift that's hard to quantify from outside an agency, but it's quite important...and in some ways more important than a high-profile "green" project that may or may not have real agency buy-in.
Armstrong highlighted this shift by noting that the City now recognizes two key things that need to happen:

• From an institutional perspective, it needs to integrate peak oil and climate change into all city planning and policy;
• From an action perspective, it needs to " dramatically" expand and accelerate related policies and efforts.

A more conspicuous example of this shift can be seen in a $1.4 million allocation in the 2008 budget that explicitly addresses sustainability initiatives, many of which are related to peak oil. Energy / climate / land use blog One Town Square wrote up a nice summary of this allocation from a recent article by Melanie D'Arcy :

The city even budgeted 1.4 million dollars for peak oil related measures, including:

• $150,000 for the City's Office of Transportation to develop strategies to implement the Task Force recommendations - essentially to figure out how to get people out of their cars.
• $91,000 to develop urban agriculture under the Sustainable Food initiative and the Diggable City Project, which opens city lands for community gardens and other agricultural uses.

$1.14 of the $1.4 million is allocated for “sustainable economic development”:

• $350,000 for biofuels development, outreach, education, and grants.
• $100,000 for the SolarNow! program, to work with businesses and homeowners to make it easy to install solar technology.
• $475,000 to provide technical assistance to businesses that want to move towards sustainability.
• $150,000 to support green building efforts
• $15,000 for development of a sustainable economic development plan.
• $50,000 for efforts to acquire renewable energy for City operations.

Though $1.4 million sounds like a lot of money, broken down like this makes the efforts seem pitifully inadequate. But it’s a beginning along a path that few other jurisdictions have even begun to contemplate.

Indeed, much more needs to be done. Armstrong illustrated the challenges ahead with the following slide, which shows just how much farther Portland's Mulnomah County (let alone the rest of the U.S., which is trending in the wrong direction) needs to go in the coming decades to avoid severe climate disruption.

We've talked with Mr. Armstrong about getting a video of his presentation posted here on Post Carbon Cities. Watch for it in the next few weeks.

PRESS RELEASE - 14 February 2007

U.S. city first to fight climate change and peak oil together

by Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute

Many cities have plans in place to reduce greenhouse gases, and a growing number are planning for declining global oil production. But the northwestern U.S. city of Spokane (pop. 199,400) has become the first to tackle climate change and global oil depletion together, marking a new step in local government responses to these increasingly urgent challenges.

Announcing a new strategic planning effort to identify and address the impacts of climate change and energy security, Spokane Mayor Mary Verner said: "By aggressively pursuing strategies now that prepare us for future energy and climate uncertainties, Spokane will manage challenges while increasing our competitive advantage over other cities. It just makes sense." A citizen task force will lead the strategic planning effort, supported by work groups and technical assistance from city staff and other experts.

Spokane, the second-largest city in the state of Washington, has built on previous sustainability efforts to emerge as a new leader in the fight against climate change and global oil depletion. With the launch of this initiative, Spokane joins other more recognized sustainability leaders like Seattle, which in 2005 launched the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, and Portland, Ore., which in 2006 pioneered the nation's first Peak Oil Task Force to identify the local risks posed by global oil depletion.

Both Seattle's and Portland's efforts have since served as models for other cities across the United States. Spokane's new initiative promises to similarly blaze new trails for local governments.

Speaking to an overflow crowd at the February 6th launch of the Spokane initiative, Daniel Lerch of Post Carbon Institute said, "We're entering uncharted territory with world oil production plateauing and atmospheric carbon reaching record levels. Cities need to identify the new risks they face, because there isn't any state or federal government agency that's going to do it for them." Lerch, a national expert on local government responses to global oil depletion, is author of the recently released book Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, the first major government guidebook on the subject.

Spokane's initiative is part of a growing movement of local government leaders concerned about the local economic and social ramifications of global oil depletion. In the last few years, as oil prices have surged past historic highs, at least 10 cities in the U.S. and Canada have started task forces or released studies on the risks to local economies and local government services; in addition to Portland and Spokane, Oakland (Calif.), Austin (Tex.), Brattleboro (Vt.), San Francisco (Calif.) and Berkeley (Calif.) have all created task forces within just the last year.

With General Motors Chairman Rick Wagoner and President George W. Bush both making groundbreaking statements last month about global oil demand outpacing global supply, and with concerns about energy prices growing among both local and state officials, 2008 may well be the year that global oil depletion joins global warming as a mainstream economic and political issue.

Additional information:
City Seeks Applicants for Sustainability Project Citizen Task Force - City of Spokane press release, 11 February 2008.

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About Post Carbon Institute:
Post Carbon Institute conducts research, develops resources and assists groups and individuals who are leading their communities in making a smooth transition to a world that is no longer dependent on hydrocarbon fuels nor emitting climate-changing levels of carbon: the post-carbon world. Post Carbon's advisers and fellows include some of the world's foremost experts on energy resource depletion and sustainability. Post Carbon is headquartered in Sebastopol, California with offices in Portland, Oregon; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Queensland, Australia. For more information visit www.postcarbon.org.

Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty (Post Carbon Press, 2007; 113 pages, $30; www.postcarboncities.net/guidebook) is the first major guidebook on peak oil and global warming for people who work with and for local governments in the United States and Canada. It provides a sober look at how these phenomena are quickly creating new uncertainties and vulnerabilities for cities of all sizes, and explains what local decision-makers can do to address these challenges.

Photo credit: Spokane by pgautier2004

By Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Cities Program Manager

Last week I escaped the cold, rainy Oregon winter for the even colder --but sunnier-- Minnesota winter. On an invitation from State Representative Bill Hilty, I ventured up north for a two-day, five-city peak oil presentation whirlwind tour with John Kaufmann of the Oregon Department of Energy. (Hawaiian legislators take note: I still have some dates open over the next few months.)

Our events were variously targeted to state legislators, citizens, and local government officials and staff. With some adjustments for available time and my slowly-improving bronchitis, we did the same standard show at each:

• John introducing the data behind peak oil;
• Daniel discussing the Post Carbon Cities guidebook and how cities are facing a new challenge of "energy and climate uncertainty"; and
• John again, describing the work and recommendations of Portland's Peak Oil Task Force, for which he served as lead support staff last year.

Bill and his wife Laurie trekked with us through cold and snow as far afield as Duluth and Rochester, passing the usual suburban McMansion sprawl as well as two more distinctly Minnesotan icons: cornfields and ethanol plants. Appropriately, both home heating and ethanol figured repeatedly in the questions John and I fielded after our presentations. Minnesotans are understandably worried about how they're going to heat their (increasingly larger) homes as our incoming stream of oil and natural gas starts to shrink. And while more and more observers now recognize that ethanol is a terrible solution for our overdependence on oil, it's also hard to deny the benefits of local energy supply and local jobs that states like Minnesota get from ethanol investment.

Whether it's larger homes that need more heating or larger cars that need more fuel, the trend towards greater and more wasteful consumption --just when we're nearing the global high points of oil and natural gas production-- is more than a little worrying. It also speaks to a broader question I'm often asked after my Post Carbon Cities talks: How can we possibly reduce our overall oil dependence as quickly and drastically as we need to with so many trends of land use, infrastructure investment, government policy and, of course, consumption, all still pointing in the wrong direction?

It's a tough one, and I try not to sugar coat my standard response: the fact is, in peak oil and global warming we're facing rapid, fundamental changes in two of the most complex (and most important) systems we can conceive of: the global economic system and the global ecosystem. Nobody but nobody knows really knows how those fundamental system changes --or our responses to those changes-- will play out. With so much at stake, we shouldn't just sit back and wait for imperfect global markets or national governments to solve the problem for us. We need bold, informed leadership and initiative at all levels --and especially the local level-- from government, business and citizens alike.

I like how John and Bill each spoke to this question at various points during our tour. John took up the recent idea that we need to address peak oil at the level of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. A better analogy, he said, would be the World War II effort in the United States. Why? The war effort here didn't involve just top government scientists and engineers solving a technical problem. Rather, just about every American man, woman and child recognized a responsibility to contribute to (and sacrifice for) the global war against facism -- and did so as Victory Gardeners, volunteer nurses, civil defense team members, recyclers, and of course as soldiers.

Representative Hilty made a more recent analogy. He likened the crisis we face to an interstate highway bridge that thousands cross every hour without a second thought. There's a joint on this bridge with five potential fracture points: growth, energy, climate, the environment, and the economy. Fractures at any one of these points would threaten the structural integrity of the bridge, let alone all five. As Bill summed it up, "We need to do an inspection" -- a point not lost on Minnesotan audiences.

In my next blog post I'll write about some interesting energy initiatives coming down the pike in Minnesota, including a peak oil resolution to be introduced to the State legislature in February and a possible joint-jurisdiction peak oil task force for Minneapolis and St. Paul. In the meantime, be sure to check out these two articles about our Minnesota tour:

• ARTICLE: 23 January 2008, Post-Bulletin (Rochester, Minn.)
  Bill Boyne: Adjustments will be needed as oil supplies dwindle
• ARTICLE: 18 January 2008, The Daily Kos (blog)
  Peak oil event in Minneapolis