"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.