Post Carbon Toronto
is a group of Toronto citizens working together to envision and transition Toronto
and its bioregion into sustainable, low energy communities.
The common thread that binds us together is concern that oil production is peaking globally
due to geological limits, leading to severe social and economic repercussions.
There is an urgent need to raise awareness, begin transition,
and support alternatives to current high-energy modes of living.

More than 6.5 million people live along the shore of Lake Ontario. About 5 million of them live in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and 2.5 million in the City
of Toronto itself.

Every day, the residents of this area make more than 9 million trips by car. Every day, more than 19,000 trucks cross the Ontario-US border carrying goods to and from Southern Ontario as part world's largest international trading relationship. Every year, more than 173,500 tonnes of goods are loaded and 201,500 tonnes unloaded at Pearson International Airport.

The economy of this Southern Ontario is heavily dependent on exports and imports of goods and services. Manufacturing, centred in this region, accounts for 20
.8 percent of provincial GDP. The auto industry accounts for 20.9 percent of all manufacturing. Service industries account for 70 percent of GDP.

Except for some hydro-electric generating capacity and a small amount of oil and gas production near Sarnia, Ontario must import all of its energy requirements.
We import natural gas from western Canada, coal from the US and Alberta and
oil from western Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and the North Sea.

The decline in world oil and gas production is likely to hit Southern Ontario
hard as it first drives up the cost of and then puts absolute limits on transportation. This is likely to make many exports and imports increasingly uneconomic and lead to decline in overall economic activity. At the same time, it promises to make the region's sprawling suburbs nonviable as car travel becomes too expensive for many families and their large homes too expensive to heat.

While Canada as a whole has enviable energy resources, enough to support our current way of living for many decades, most of that energy -- about two thirds of Alberta's production — is exported to the US.
Under NAFTA rules, that supply is permanently allocated to the US. If Ontario wants a share of any future increases in Alberta production it will have to out bid power hungry US energy consumers who already must import about 60 percent of their oil from foreign sources.

We must begin to prepare now for a future that promises wrenching changes. We will need to find ways to produce locally what we will no longer be able to import. We will need radically change our transportation systems to drastically reduce our dependence on automobiles. And we will have to take a new approach to urban planning that makes low energy consumption a central element Finally, we must act to conserve our agricultural resources to maximize local production.