ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

An article in Post Carbon Cities lauds Portland’s efforts to address peak oil. Melanie D’Arcy says “the transparency of Portland’s process and its clear impact on city policy make it ripe for emulation by other cities grappling with environmental issues and increasing fuel and energy costs.”

Last March the  Peak Oil Task Force issued a Peak Oil Resolution, accompanied by an 86-page Final Report outlining its findings and recommendations. The resolution intends to “establish a goal to reduce oil and natural gas use in Portland by 50 percent in 25 years and take related actions to implement recommendations of the Peak Oil Task Force.”

The top-level recommendations include infrastructural and policy changes such as increased energy efficiency in buildings and transportation, more City support for urban food production and sustainable businesses, and land-use patterns that support decreased transportation needs and more walkable access to expanded City services, particularly for lower income residents.

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.

Even were Portland’s measures adequate to achieve the goal of 50% reduction in 25 years, would that be enough? A quick look at what we might expect oil supplies to look like in the near future would indicate that the bar has been set too low.

Here’s what oil industry financier Matt Simmons had to say in a recent interview about the world’s energy situation, discussing whether or not the world can obtain increased oil output in the near to medium term, or in about the next 10 years:

“If we were lucky enough to open up the entire outer continental shelf, and then we were lucky enough to invent quickly enough seismic equipment to start doing some sort of a high-grading of where we should drill, and then we were lucky enough to have a growing fleet of newer offshore rigs that could drill wells, and we just discovered two new North Seas, then there’s grounds that we could basically spend $400 or $500 billion and maybe end up 10 years from now with 6 million barrels per day of fresh supply. But the problem is that each one of those things that I said, ‘If we were lucky enough,’ we don’t have. And 10-15 years from now, our 73 million barrels per day of current crude production could easily be down to 50 or 45. So you say even if you had another 6 million barrels per day, you can’t climb back out of the hole.”