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

At Wednesday’s all-day Big Look “stakeholders” meeting, Goal One Coalition was represented  by Bob Emmons and me. The purpose of the meeting was to give the  interest groups who have the influence to determine any legislative proposal’s fate one last chance to weigh in on the task force’s draft legislative proposal (a memo explaining the proposal is available here).

This report by Bob Manning for OPB does a pretty good job of conveying the flavor of the discussion. The Task Force got hammered by pretty much everybody for not directly and powerfully addressing global warming – as Goal One Coalition has been urging them to do from the very beginning. Secretary of State Bill Bradbury was given the floor to start the proceedings off and made an impassioned pitch for recognizing the crucial role that land use plays in greenhouse gas emissions. He called for real and meaningful standards:

“I really believe, we need to have a standard, a land-use, or call it what you will, a standard, that says if your project is adding significantly to our carbon contribution to the atmosphere, then you have a problem.”

It’s late in the day for the Task Force to modify its proposal to add a climate change element. They’ll be applying the finishing touches today. But I think they’ve let the clock run out.

Manning mentions that the late afternoon was consumed by a discussion of the costs of infrastructure and how to pay for it, but the article misses the frantic, almost panic-stricken tone of the exchange. It struck me how much the situation described by those in local government around the state resembled the situation described by John Michael Greer in The Long Descent: that the decline of civilizations can take the form of a slow-motion, staged collapse as the demands of maintaining physical and social infrastructure exceed the available resource base. At each stage, “capital” that can no longer be maintained is neglected and eventually abandoned. The picture being painted is that neglect and potential abandonment of physical and social infrastructure is exactly Oregon’s communities are facing, with no rescuing resources in sight.

Goal One Coalition was the only organization to call the Task Force to task for failure to include energy considerations in its proposal. Our energy consumption is largely driven by where and how we build within the landscape, yet Oregon’s land use planning program fails to require in any serious way that energy use be taken into account in our decision making.

The Task Force – and the rest of Oregon’s establishment – are consumed by the idea that we have to accommodate projected population growth. But as Carlos de Castro from the University of Valladolid pointed out at the ASOP VII conference in Madrid, a period of energy use stagnation coinciding with strong population growth is historically unprecedented – and therefore unlikely to occur in the future. We’re at the peak, or at best on a “bumpy plateau”, of global oil production – and the international trade in oil peaks before global production. We have no prospect of any new energy sources to take oil’s place, especially for transportation fuels.

As André Angelantoni says at The Oil Drum, the future we are living into is beginning to disappear. Without the energy provided by oil, the future will be very, very different from what we expect. A planning program ought to be grounded in realism, and confront our possible futures with imagination and vision. Wednesday’s meeting made it clear that Oregon is not ready to do that, yet.

Rebecca Solnit has a great article in the latest Orion, titled The Most Radical Thing You Can Do: Staying home as a necessity and a right. This is powerful stuff:

“It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.”

As Solnit says, the reality is we are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. This means changing ourselves:

“For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time.”

Now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Maybe we should even start planning for it?