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

Energy Information Agency data shows U.S. liquid fuels consumption declined by 810,000 bbl/d (4.2 percent) to 18.7 million bbl/d in 2009, the fourth consecutive annual decline. That’s 10% off the peak in consumption of 20.8 million bbl/d in 2005.

As energy analyst Jeff Rubin points out, the U.S. will never regain pre-recession peak levels of oil consumption – and ditto for oil consumption in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or anywhere else in the OECD economies.

But don’t expect oil prices to go down. Rubin says:

Back in the 1990s, that kind of demand contraction in the OECD would have foretold a big decline in oil prices, since those countries accounted for almost three quarters of global oil demand. Today, they account for barely half, and tomorrow they will account for even less.

In a world where oil supplies have most likely peaked, global oil consumption has become a zero-sum game:

As China moves from consuming 8 million barrels a day to 10 million barrels, and OPEC ramps up its own daily consumption from 10.5 million to 12 million barrels, somehow, somewhere else in the world, there must be a corresponding decline in oil consumption. That somewhere else just happens to be the U.S. market and the oil markets of the other OECD economies.

Automobile sales in the U.S. have also peaked, never to regain former levels. Calculated Risk reports estimated car sales for February 2010 at 10.4 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate).

The current level of sales are very low – far below the 17 million that were sold each year between 1999 and 2007 – and are still below the lowest point for the ‘90/’91 recession (even with a larger population).

All of our land use and transportation planning assumes that vehicle travel will continue to grow at historic rates. Based on those assumptions, reducing the historic rate of increase would require heroic efforts; reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled (VTM), even more.  Reducing overall VTM significantly enough to achieve even the modest emissions reductions goals that are currently on the table would be a Sisyphean task, especiallyif population were to continue to increase as projected.

Given the new reality of dwindling fuel supplies and collapsing vehicle sales, it may be wiser to devote our planning efforts to figuring out how people can live and get around in communities with far less fuel and far fewer vehicles. The new reality is, the era of car-dominated communities is drawing to a close.

Lane County is convening a stakeholders group with the objective of revising the county’s comprehensive plan and development code to address the burning issues of the 21st century: how to best ensure cleaner, healthier, safer, and more prosperous communities in a world increasingly threatened by energy shortfalls and a warming climate.

Here’s the text of an email sent out by Planning Director Kent Howe:

All,

As part of the citizen involvement process for Lane County’s Long Range Planning Program, you have volunteered to participate in the Lane County Stakeholder Group that will be reviewing potential revisions to land use policies and regulations.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners has directed Land Management Division staff to facilitate this group process.

The first meeting of the Stakeholder’s Group is Thursday, February 25th, 6:00pm, Harris Hall, 125 E. 8th Ave, Eugene.

At the Feb 17, 2010, meeting the Board specified the Stakeholder Group review the first 6 policy issues in the Goal One Code Amendment Proposal, attached. These correspond to lines 1-24 on the Preliminary List of Code Amendments spread sheet, also attached.

We look forward to working with you. If you have any questions, please give me a call.

Thanks,

Kent Howe
Planning Director
Lane County
541-682-3734

The text of the amendments proposed by Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County is available here.

So all of you Lane County folks who are concerned about figuring out a way to strong local economies that will be resilient enough to grapple with the challenges we are already beginning to face, here’s your chance to take on the developers who normally have their way.

See you Thursday!

Solastalgia:  the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault; a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’; symptoms include anxiety, despair, numbness, a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless, grief.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003. It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change. Solastalgia is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment

Wikipedia explains:

As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home – “solastalgia” is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative affect that is exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.

An article in the New York Times quotes Albrecht:

There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease.’ People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.

Albrecht has found that this “place pathology” isn’t limited to natives or to the displaced. People can be despairing and depressed without being forced from their homeland. The land changing around them can bring about the same sense of mournful disorientation.

The researchers could have found evidence of solastagia by looking at me in Sacramento, California in the ’70s, as the paradise I was born and grew up in was devastated by rampant and uncontrolled “development.”  It got so bad I fled in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of sanity. The Seattle area in Washington proved little better. When at last I found a real home again here in Oregon, that traumatic experience provided the impetus to do everything in my power to prevent a repeat of the California and Washington experience.

In California, things have gone from bad to worse; it is now what Sasha Abramsky in an article in The Nation calls the “west coast wasteland.” California’s population has exploded from a little over 10 million in 1950 to about 37 million today. But as many have warned (including Eben Fodor in his landmark 1998 study “The Cost of Growth in Oregon“), growth costs a lot and doesn’t pay for itself. After 60 years of growth, the bills have come due.

As Abramsky observes, what was a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century now has no money or political will to keep the place running properly. Paradise is broken and in a perennial state of fiscal crisis as California threatens to become a failed state. And California is not alone.

My heart still aches for what once was and is now irretrievably lost. I still can’t bear to cross the border. Unfortunately, as the symptom of climate change shows, the disease of growth doesn’t respect borders. Growth now threatens to devastate the entirety of the globe.

Earth is the only home we have, there’s nowhere left to flee. As it succumbs to the ravishes of growth, are we not destined to see solastalgia spread and become a global contagion?

In overwhelmingly approving the report of its Peak Oil Task Force, the Bloomington (Indiana) City Council,  has endorsed a truly revolutionary idea:

Recognize the need for, and the inevitability of, a steady state economy – one that is not predicated on ever-greater amounts of energy and materials throughput, but recognizes the limits of the biosphere.

The Task Force report – Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience - calls for a reduction in community oil consumption by 5% per year in an effort to realize a 50 percent decrease in consumption in just 14 years. The targeted rate of decrease in oil consumption is along the lines laid out by the oil depletion protocol.

Suggested strategies for achieving the reduced fuel consumption goals include:

• Explore new energy sources, greater efficiencies and conservation opportunities for the following energy-intensive municipal services: water and wastewater treatment; law enforcement and fire protection; heating and cooling municipal buildings; and trash removal and recycling. Immediate attention should be given to off-grid water production to meet minimum community needs.
• Promote economic relocalization. Our community’s reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far as halfway around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil and/or shortages. Producing and processing more goods within the community fosters greater security in a post-peak world while strengthening the local economy.
• Intensify the City’s emerging focus on form-based development, so that residents can easily live within walking distance of daily needs, such as grocery stores, schools and pharmacies.
• Increase home energy conservation and aim to retrofit 5 percent of housing per year.
• Establish community cooperative rideshare programs.
• Advocate for greater local, state and federal funding for public transit.
• Accelerate local food production by training more urban farmers and removing legal, institutional and cultural barriers to farming within the city.
• Plant edible landscapes throughout the city.

The Task Force’s vision is for a city where “most residents live within walking distance of daily needs; most of the food required to feed residents is grown within Monroe County; residents can easily and conveniently get where they need to go on bike, foot or public transit; most of the community’s housing stock is retrofit for energy efficiency; and local government provides high-quality services to its residents while using less fossil fuel energy.”

That actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A post-peak world need not be dismal.

Lane County will at long last be reviewing and approving property line adjustments.

That’s the effect of amendments to Lane Code Chapter 13 – amendments which have long been pushed for by LandWatch Lane County and Goal One Coalition.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners approved the revisions by a unanimous 5-0 vote at its afternoon meeting on Wednesday, December 9.

Lane County’s historic “hands off” approach to property line adjustments has long allowed for developers to find tiny “lots”, often created when road construction sliced through properties, leaving new “lots” on each side. Speculators buy up the land; reconfigure the property lines by simply recording deeds; obtain “legal lot verifications” for the reconfigured properties; and then sell off the developable parcels at a hefty profit. All this happened without public notice, any opportunity for public comment or participation, adequate county review, or any way to challenge the result.

A Court of Appeals decision (Phillips v. Polk County) and the passage of two bills in the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions ( HB 2723, dealing with retroactive unit of land validations; and HB 3629, dealing with property line adjustments) made it obvious to everyone – including the development community – that Lane County’s practices failed to comply with state law, putting Lane County property owners in an untenable position.

In the spring of 2009, the Board of Commissioners directed the Land Management Division (LMD) to initiate the post-acknowledgment plan amendment (PAPA) process to adopt the code changes drafted by LandWatch and Goal One Coalition. Following a joint public hearing before the Board and Planning Commission, the Board directed LMD to call together a work group composed of land use advocates, surveyors, and the development community to see if a consensus proposal could be achieved. The Planning Commission recommended approval of the draft resulting from that effort, and with formal Board approval the new provisions will now become the law of the land.

This morning (December 9, 2009) the Linn County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to overturn the Planning Commission’s denial and approve the application of its Parks Department to establish a park on 175 acres of farmland at the I-5/Highway 34 interchange.

An RV park is the key and most controversial element of the proposed park. Owners of several existing local, private RV parks complained vociferously that competition from a publicly operated RV park would put them out of business. While the original proposal envisioned as many as 196 RV hookups, the Board imposed a condition of approval limiting that number to a maximum of 100.

The local farm community also voiced strong opposition, arguing that farm land is irreplaceable and that farming, Linn County’s biggest industry, deserves and needs the county’s support and protection.

The Board of Commissioners has three elected members: Roger Nyquist, Will Tucker, and John Lindsey. Lindsey’s seat is up for election next November.

It should be obvious to everyone – even our county commissioners – that investing public funds in an RV park when we are facing climate change, peak oil, a financial crisis, and the need to ensure our food security is as foolhardy as can be. Come November, the voters will have a chance to voice their opinion.

Pete Boucot, a declared candidate for Lindsey’s seat, is leading the opposition to the Board’s plans. The county borrowed over $1.25 million from its road fund to purchase the property. Boucot objects this in an inappropriate use of the county’s road funds. Boucot also points out the commissioners have been silent on how or when the road fund is to be paid back or where the funds to develop the park are to come from.

From Tuesday’s Eugene Register-Guard:

Springfield growth inventory delivers a surprise

City councilors were prepared to adopt the results of a buildable residential land inventory, which concluded the city was short by more than 300 acres in what it would need to meet 20-year growth projections.

Instead, they learned the city actually has a slight surplus of buildable residential property.

The change brought a howling protest from one developer and muted concern from two others who spoke at a public hearing Monday night.

Springfield’s early estimates suggested it might be short by as much as 1,000 acres of land for homes. But by August, with the help of local consultant ECONorthwest, the city concluded it was short by only 344 acres of the land it would need for housing by 2030.

But Monday night, Springfield planning supervisor Linda Pauly explained that that total was based on a mistaken assumption that housing could only be constructed on land that had no more than a 15 percent slope.

When a community member concerned about the survey results asked to see the data, city staff and ECONorthwest discovered they’d used the wrong slope constraint, Pauly said.

Housing can go on hillsides with a 25 percent slope, according to state law. It’s commercial buildings that require the 15 percent slope limitation.

The mistake was only discovered last week, Pauly said.

The revision concludes the city has a small surplus: 59 acres more than they’ll need to meet expected residential growth between now and 2030.

The “community member” mentioned in the article was LandWatch Lane County member Mia Nelson. Through dogged persistence and determination, she overcame stonewalling by the City of Springfield and EcoNorthwest, who didn’t want to make available the data which supposedly supported the earlier conclusion that 300+ more acres of land would be needed to support projected growth. When Nelson finally got her hands on the raw data, she brought to light the flawed assumption.

City officials aren’t yet ready to give up their precious expansion plans:

Mayor Leiken called the latest review a hiccup in an otherwise useful process. . .

While some councilors worried that the new numbers may be as flawed as the old ones, they voted unanimously to adopt the Residential Lands Study.

Al Johnson, a consulting attorney for the city, assured the councilors that their vote would not be considered the last word on the subject, and that their conclusions about how much land they’ll need won’t be considered final until the city formally adopts its Springfield 2030 Plan, a process it will undertake with Lane County.

Can you visualize the day our political leaders will let go of the idea of growth?

The urban structure of our cities, towns and suburbs is one of the largest drivers of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Cities that are compact, walkable, and transit-served, with a good distribution of daily services, use a fraction of the energy and generate a fraction of the greenhouse gases as U.S. cities.

There is an enormous difference in energy use between compact cities and sprawling cities, as American ones tend to be – with no corresponding difference in quality of life. This chart shows gasoline use.

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VTM) is just part of the story. Other sources of emissions from urban form in the five key categories of infrastructure, and its embodied and operating energy; other advantages of “location efficiency,” including additional benefits of walking; optimized size, orientation and urban shaping of buildings; lost ecosystem services; and behavioral factors and “induced demand” may add up to twice as much as emissions from personal transportation and VMTs alone.

Michael Mehaffy explores each of these factors in depth in an article at Planetizen. Bottom line: increasing urban energy efficiency and cutting urban emissions is about a lot more than increasing density, reducing VMT, and improving fuel mileage. The way we design the places we live can make it improbable or even impossible to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But if done right, the places we live can make it possible an elegant, satisfying, low-carbon way of life.

Ron Eber and Ed Sullivan have just made available their new article Long and Winding Road: Farmland Protection in Oregon 1963 – 2009.

Ron Eber, now retired, was the long-time farm and forest specialist at the Department of Land Conservation and Development. Ed Sullivan is the dean of Oregon land use attorneys at Garvey Shubert Barer. The article was published in the San Joaquin Agricultural Law Review.

I haven’t had a chance to read much of it yet. The article ends with “a few modest suggestions for further improvements” to Oregon’s planning program. We’ll be giving particular attention to these recommendations, especially as they relate to the challenges of peak oil and climate change.

Lane County has reaffirmed the public’s right to participate in the land use decision making process by lowering the fee imposed for an appeal to the Board of Commissioners from $3,700 to $250.

The adoption of the Chapter 14 amendments was the culmination of years of work by LandWatch Lane County and Goal One Coalition.

The Board of Commissioners at its meeting on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 4  unanimously approved amendments to Lane Code Chapter 14 to streamline and expedite the way the county processes applications for permits and zone changes. Most importantly, the revised Chapter 14 dramatically lowers the cost of getting through the local process to a final decision. The new procedures provide two tracks for appealing a hearings official decision to the Board of Commissioners. For $3700 – the amount currently charged – a party can ask that the Board hold a public hearing and make the final county decision on an application. But for only $250, a party can ask that the Board not hold a public hearing, but rather simply ratify the hearing official’s decision as the final county decision. On either track, the decision to hear or not hear the appeal rests with the Board.

Goal One first introduced a bill to cap local appeal fees during the 2003 legislative session. That proposal withered on the vine due to vociferous opposition from lobbyists for the League of Oregon Cities and Association of Oregon Counties, who complained that it would impose “unfunded mandates” on local governments.

Seeking to sidestep opposition from local governments while addressing their concerns, we then crafted an approach that would offer local governments two options. The default option would be for permit and zone changes to be processed with only a single public hearing – the decision resulting from that hearing would be the final local decision, obviating the need for a local appeal and avoiding all the related costs and expenses. If the local governing body insisted on retaining final approval authority, the fee for an appeal hearing to the local governing body would be capped at an affordable amount. Goal One Coalition attempted to generate interest in this new concept leading up to the 2007 legislative session, but got nowhere.

Our attention then shifted to local initiatives: if we could get the concept implemented in just one jurisdiction, that could serve as an example and real-life test case for the rest of the state. Building on the strong partnership between Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County and LandWatch’s extraordinary effectiveness, Lane County offered an excellent opportunity. And Lane County desperately needed a fix:  exorbitant appeal fees made it effectively impossible to challenge any decision beyond the hearings official level.

Because Lane County’s appeal fee was so high, and because Land Management Division (LMD) attempts to fund all of its operations from user fees, we believed any proposal to dramatically lower and then cap the fee for an appeal to the Board would be a non-starter. Our approach, therefore, was to eliminate the appeal to the Board and make the hearings official decision the final county decision.

We presented our proposal to the Board of Commissioners in 2008. In March 2009, the reconfigured Board of Commissioners directed LMD to initiate the process to adopt the joint Goal One/LandWatch proposal.

At a joint public hearing before the Lane County Planning Commission and Board of Commissioners in July, the Board directed Land Management Division to conduct stakeholder meetings to try to reach a consensus among advocacy groups and developer representatives. Out of those meetings came the proposal to keep the option for an appeal to the Board of Commissioners while providing a way to get through that appeals process for only $250. What was really surprising is that the $250 cap was proposed by the developer group – they figured that was the price that needed to be paid to get what they wanted, a process which they believe protects their interests from arbitrary interference from the current progressive majority on the Board of Commissioners.

The text of the Chapter 14 amendments adopted by the Board is available here.

The Nasca people, best known for giant geoglyphs etched into the surface of a vast desert plain, once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru. About 500 AD their civilization collapsed into a bloody resource war and then vanished.

Photograph: Kevin Schafer/Corbis, published in the UK Guardian

What happened? Archaeologists from Cambridge University say the Nasca brought about their own demise by ruining the fragile ecosystem that supported them. Their study was published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Over the course of many generations, the Nasca cleared areas of forest for agriculture. The huarango tree, which once blanketed what is now desert, was gradually replaced by crops such as cotton and maize.

But the short-term agricultural gain came at a high price because the trees were the critical component of the ecosystem. Dr. Beresford-Jones explains what happened:

The huarango is a remarkable nitrogen-fixing tree and it was an important source of food, forage, timber and fuel for the local people. Furthermore, it is the ecological ‘keystone’ species in this desert zone, enhancing soil fertility and moisture, ameliorating desert extremes in the microclimate beneath its canopy and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known.

In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold – sharply defined in such desert environments – exposing the landscape to the region’s extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Niño floods.

In the absence of huarango cover, when El Niño did strike, the river down-cut into its floodplain, Nasca irrigation systems were damaged and the area became unworkable for agriculture. Infant mortality rose, while average adult life expectancy fell. The crops that had been cultivated by the Nasca for generations disappeared, and the area fell victim to a severe drought.

There are now no undisturbed ecosystems in the region, and what remains of the old-growth huarango forests is being destroyed in illegal charcoal-burning operations.