Sound municipal governance for the transition into the Post Carbon Age requires:

• Nimble government that rapidly reconfigures for energy scarcity
• Active support for relocalization, worker owned cooperatives, locally owned
  businesses, and ecological city design
• Innovative municipal tools to affect land and energy use such as zoning
  ordinances, transfer development rights, tenancy agreements, and community
  benefit agreements
• A contingency plan (or “Plan B”) that addresses how essential
  systems will work with less energy
• Pressure on national leaders for support of local efforts, including demands
  for a global carbon tax to support local initiatives and experiments.

As we consider solutions and policies that will mitigate our energy predicament,
we must adhere to the following guiding principals:

• Reduce energy consumption
• Reduce materials throughout
• Comprehensively non-violent

The foundation of the platform includes the following components:

0) USE MUCH LESS AND MAKE LESS MESS

Everything featured in Einstein's famous little equation (E=mc2)
should be on our list for reduction. if we use less energy and mass as inputs,
we'll produce less material outputs that nature has no use for, such as heavy
metals, pcbs, co2, etc... ad infitum. Using less light is very important,
since lights, though less energy intensive than say heaters, are left on so
much longer that they are highly significant energy users. They also encourage
us to work longer hours. We can and must work less, and with less oil around
we won't be able to do as much work anyway, so we may as well get used to it.
The best way to get used to anything is by planning for it. The alternative
is invariably ugly and painful.



1) Rules on local ownership and local operation of food production

• Much more urgent steps should be taken to relocalize food production. Yes,
  CSA is helpful, but much organic agriculture is still too dependent on oil
  and gas (tractors and drying for example), and also organic is becoming co-opted
  by agri-business. Local rules must be put in place which explicitly (if possible)
  or implicitly enforce local ownership and local operation. The easiest thing
  to do would be to do this by regulation. More subtle methods will be perverted
  by the corporations. Explicit rule making will certianly face great hostility
  from agri-business and every other multi-national - at some point these battles
  will have to come into the open.
• Strongly encourage biointensive techniques of food production which build
  the soil, and consequently need much less water. Biointensive techniques also
  require lots of people, by definition. As the industrial economy decays, this
  will soon be seen as a good thing by more and more people.

2) Access to locally produced food

It is vital that small food shops be reinvented or started from scratch,
as well as the old-fashioned wholesaler and street markets. Otherwise it will
remain virtually impossible for the new professional food grower to get their
product to market. This will include deliberately creating:

• European style street markets on regular days, or indeed everyday when things
  get going. This will mean closing streets to cars. This can be a beginning
  towards getting rid of all private cars completely. Copenhagen has done amazing
  work in this regard.
• Small food shops to be encouraged in every possible way:
  
  • Implement tax breaks or total holidays for a long time to help them
    fight supermarkets (which should be driven to extinction with all speed
    and vigor)
  • Charge minimal or non-existent property rents for small shops
  • If one-story strip malls dominate the old high street or town center
    and if they cannot be quickly bulldozed, then explore whether housing
    can be placed on top of them (beware Egyptian experience - the job must
    be done with enough structural strength). Best to get rid of strip malls
    altogether, and build something with two or three stories of housing on
    top of the shops. It is vital that this looks as beautiful as possible,
    and that is designed to last a reasonable length of time. We just won't
    have the resources to keep rebuilding the kinds of wretched garbage that
    developers are throwing up now. This high quality building work, which
    should have a strong vernacular flavor, and if possible involve the development
    of a tradition of vernacular builder-designers, should try to avoid all
    the normal patterns of architect-developers. These people have helped
    wreak destruction on cities and communities across the planet. There may
    be some resistance to this notion. All this work will be very helpful
    for increasing employment. Local materials should be used, and systems
    of collecting discarded materials should be developed, so that such things
    can be re-used or re-fashioned into something useful. Until the wasteful
    age of petroleum, this was ordinary and natural practice. It must become
    so once again (see artisans below).

3) Transport

• Urgently get public transport (publicly owned) into the village/town/city
  area, especially to feed the traditional high street and (if they existed)
  pre-petroleum main shopping areas. If such centers never existed, look at
  European models, and the American towns that were built before petroleum,
  and designed to foster some sense of community and identity. Almost all post
  war (1945) planning and design should strongly avoided, including of course,
  suburbia and all modern shopping malls, which will one day be torn down or
  simply abandoned. It would be better to dismantle them now, whilst we still
  have the energy. There are at least some things in them can be re-used, such
  as glass, metals and wood.
• If remotely possible try to put in trolley buses or even better trams.
  This will be a huge bonus in the decades to come. But even rubber-wheeled
  buses are much better than nothing. Obviously they must not be natural-gas
  powered. If internal combustion engines are the only short-term option, then
  look at making the buses biodiesel compatible (though note that biodiesel
  is no panacea). Trolley buses and trams will require electricity, which must
  be produced locally, and they will require wire and rails. Both these use
  commodities which are already becoming much more expensive. It is possible
  in the future, that dismantled suburbia and malls may furnish some of the
  resources.
• Strongly encourage car co-operatives or non-profits, or indeed, make them
  public car share operations. Interesting examples exist in Vancouver and San
  Francisco. The mitfarhgelegenheit system in Germany is very successful at
  coordinating ride sharing for ordinary private cars.

4) Create or re-create the pre-industrial revolution system of artisan
production and reinstate selected light manufacturing capacity

Deliberately develop an economy based on artisans producing as much
as possible of local vital needs. This will require similar measures to helping
small stores. Policymakers should think very seriously about metal and vessel
makers, e.g. blacksmiths, potters. We must drastically reduce the amount of
packaging that we use, especially plastic. We need to return to using permanent
containers such as pots and baskets for holding and transporting things. Basket
making is a special and very important art and craft, but it takes time to revive.
Other vessel making, such as metal, clay and glass, takes a lot of energy -
where is that energy going to come from? In the past it was from coal, charcoal
and trees. Natural gas has become the source of choice for industrial process
heat. Any tendency to use these will have to be vigorously resisted. Public
research (which means publicly funded and publicly accessible) will need to
be done now, to start experimenting with what works for a given locale. For
instance, solar appears to be quite impractical for firing the high-temperature
kilns needed for many types of glaze. Biogas may be a substitute but there will
definitely be problems. How are we going to make glass? There is plenty of glass
to be recycled, but it is a notoriously energy intensive. However, life without
glass will definitely be difficult, if not downright brutish.

5) Energy harvesting machines

In general, encourage a highly diverse, localized energy harvesting
web, with a strong emphasis on storage to avoid the inevitable problem of intermittency
which attends all solar harvesting, be it direct (photovoltaic) or indirect
(wind). Urgent attention must be given to short-term storage (overnight) and
long term seasonal storage to balance the lower insolation of winter. Therefore

• Strongly encourage public research and development of energy harvesting
  and storage machines. The U.S. was once the leader in solar cell research.
  Reagan destroyed all that. However, instead of encouraging the usual brutal
  and empire-oriented notions of being the 'leader,' relocalization encourages
  being very good (rather than best, which after all may still be terrible)
  and some-sufficiency, since total self-sufficiency is not a practical short-term
  goal, and may be demoralizing. Also, encouraging regional co-operation and
  sharing will be vital.
• Not only will be engaging in R&D and production of small-scale energy
  machines be good for employment at every level of mental and physical ability
  and engagement, it is the ONLY way to achieve energy security. Universities
  must somehow be pried away from their terrible path of corporate capture,
  and return to or start doing research in the public interest, instead of corporate
  research, almost all of which, being bound for the military or the mall, is
  designed either to destroy the planet or people or both, as fast as possible.
  Given the utterly craven state of universities this will be perhaps the most
  staggeringly difficult undertaking of all. Given that de-corporatizing universities
  may be impossible, municipalities should urgently investigate setting up small-scale
  public laboratories.
• Rebuild a local wind turbine industry. Denmark is the clearest example.
  Note however that they are having difficulties as they reach towards 20% of
  electrical capacity.
• Encourage research and production of small-scale biogas digesters. India,
  Turkey, and some places in Europe have decades of experience. The large biogas
  digesters are designed for industrial hog and cattle farms. This should be
  strongly discouraged. Ideally, such factory farms should be driven from the
  face of the planet with all speed.

6) Ground source heating or geo-exchange space heating

Businesses should be vigorously encouraged in this area, and great
help given to replace natural gas home and office heating with geo-exchange.
However, at the same time, care must be taken to make sure that there is enough
renewable energy & storage, to run the heat-exchange pumps, otherwise this
will exacerbate the problems with electricity generation.

7) Local energy centers & local energy banks

Look at the possibility of setting up local energy centers which will help disseminate
and coordinate information about all of the above, and also, in combination
with local energy banks, help administer loans and other services devoted reducing
energy usage and waste in houses and offices. This includes the retrofitting
of geo-exchange mentioned above, and also the fitting of insulation. Local energy
centers and local energy banks will be a key part also, in helping start car
co-ops, develop bio-diesel co-ops, and install co-generation, biogas digesters,
and as soon as possible, introduced municipally-backed local currency experiments,
most likely tied the public generation of renewable electricity.