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

Shell CEO Peter Voser is warning that over time oil supply and demand fundamentals are going to tighten significantly:

Oil output from fields in production declines by 5 per cent a year as reserves are depleted, so the world needed to add the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias or 10 North Seas over the next 10 years just to keep supply level, even before much of an increase in demand.

So how have we been doing at discovering new reserves? Not nearly good enough.

All the easy stuff has been found. We basically stopped finding conventional super-giant high production rate oil fields forty years ago.

Despite the best technology and soaring prices, each year the amount of new oil reserves discovered is a fraction of that found in the 1960s. Oil production flattened in 2004. In 2010 consumption exceeded production by over 5m barrels per day for the first year ever.

In the charts above, a large part of the difference between consumption and production is accounted for by such things as biofuels, oil made from coal and other non-conventional sources, which are not included in the production figures. The rest of the difference is from the running down of world oil stocks.

The questions now facing us are how long can global oil production be held on its plateau, and how fast will the subsequent decline be?

The stall in global oil production in the face of strong demand from less developed countries is having a profound consequence: while the Chindia  (China & India) region, and many other developing countries, have been able to increase their net oil imports, most developed oil importing countries, such as the U.S., are being forced, via price rationing, to take a declining share of a falling volume of Global Net Exports.

In the U.S., oil consumption has fallen by 10% since peaking in 2005. Less oil consumption translates into fewer car sales . . .

. . . and less driving.

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the U.S. plateaued in 2005 and have been trending down ever since.

Oregon is no exception to the national trend. Vehicle registrations in Oregon peaked in 2007 . . .

. . .  and were down to 3.23 million in 2010.

Gasoline consumption in Oregon and Washington has been on a plateau since 1999.

Sightline reports VMT in Oregon and Washington have been on a gently declining plateau since 2002.

The trend should now be clear, in Oregon as well as the nation as a whole. The times of ever-growing traffic on our roads are over for good. Instead, our future holds declining fuel consumption, declining number of cars and trucks, and declining vehicle miles traveled.

It’s time to start planning for that, rather than for continued growth.

Cities as a whole have been estimated to produce up to 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, decisions on the structure, including the building types, density, location and public transport, establish the long-term frames for the greenhouse gas emissions of a community.

But a new study from Finland – Implications of urban structure on carbon consumption in metropolitan areas – finds that, when it comes to carbon emissions, urban structure doesn’t make much of a difference.  The study looked at dense center cities , where apartment buildings dominated housing and diverse public transport was available; and “rural” cities with a lower density, a high share of detached houses, and weaker public transport. The study considered the effects of density, dominant building type, private driving and income on the carbon consumption.

Surprisingly, the study found the carbon consequences of urban density and dominant building type to be insignificant, based on a life cycle assessment: there proved to be no clear correlation between urban density and carbon consumption. Despite the identified connections between carbon consumption and urban density, it seems that the effect of density on carbon emissions is rather low, and that other factors override the effect.

The researchers seemed to have stumbled upon something they hadn’t anticipated or designed the study to analyze: what really seems to matter is income. As incomes rise, people engage in more carbon-spewing activities:

The rest of the carbon categories, the consumption of goods and services, reflect clearly the effect of income on the emissions. However, this part of the carbon consumption was not the focus of this study, and also cannot be analyzed in depth with the presented hybrid model. The model shows that traveling abroad and the use of services grow as earnings grow * * * but regarding daily consumption, it is not possible to differentiate amount and quality.

One interesting notion about the relation of income and carbon consumption is that emissions seem to grow as income grows, but with decelerating speed. * * * It seems that the share of savings increases rather rapidly as earnings grow.

The slight growth in energy-related carbon consumption found in less dense areas compared to the denser metropolitan core is overwhelmed by the high correlation of income and carbon consumption.

The results of the study may not be directly applicable in the U.S. Consider that in the E.U., the transportation sector generates 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, while in the U.S., transportation accounts for 33% of total greenhouse gas emissions [in Oregon, 34% of emissions are from the transportation sector; in California, 36%]. In Finland and the rest of Europe, the effect of private transport on overall carbon consumption per capita is quite weak when all emissions related to driving are calculated, including car manufacture, deliveries and maintenance of vehicles (the share of fuel combustion of all all emissions related to private transport is 50–70%, the rest being dominated by emissions related to car manufacture and maintenance). Thus, growth in trip generation due to a decline in the density of the city structure has a relatively minor effect on the overall carbon consumption. Here in the U.S., the contribution of fuel combustion to total emissions may be much higher.

The studies’ authors offer a modest suggestion.

When solutions for low-carbon living * * * are searched for, consumption-based assessments of emissions are essential.

Now here’s a truly revolutionary idea: if we are to emit less, we’ll have to consume less. No more growing the economy; rather, we’ll have to shrink the economy. It’s that simple. It’s the economy, stupid.

Evidence continues to mount suggesting that the seemingly inexorable trend of ever-increasing travel on U.S. roads is faltering.

As we noted earlier here, VMT for 2011 are now down 0.1% from last year and are still well below the pre-recession peak reached in 2008.

Truck traffic on U.S. roads is down, too. The Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index, based on real-time diesel fuel consumption data for over the road trucking, fell 0.9% on a seasonally and workday adjusted basis in May, after falling 0.5% in April. The index has now declined in four of the first five months of 2011, and in eight of the past twelve months. As seen in this chart posted at Calculated Risk, truck traffic remains well below pre-recession levels.

Based on an estimate from Autodata Corp, light vehicle sales were at a 11.79 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in May. That is down 10.2% from the sales rate last month (April 2011), although up 1.5% from May 2010. Again, Calculated Risk has posted a great chart showing U.S. light vehicle sales since 1967.

U.S. light vehicle sales remain at levels last seen about 20 years ago, when the population of the U.S. was 50+ million less than it is today – and there were 35 million fewer licensed drivers, as seen by comparing statistics here and here.

The number of cars and light trucks on U.S. roads appears to be falling, as the number of light vehicles scrapped is substantially outnumbering new vehicle registrations. The overall scrappage rate in the U.S. is about 6.1%. There are about 238,000,000 passenger vehicles in the U.S. (BTS data as of 2008 – the most recent data available – not counting motorcycles or trucks with more than four wheels). With the U.S. scrappage rate at 6.1%, about 14.5 million vehicles are being removed from U.S. roads each year.

The U.S. appears to have entered a new paradigm when it comes to oil consumption, as seen in this chart posted at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis.

As seen in this chart at the U.S. Energy Information Administration website, U.S. oil consumption peaked in 2005.

In 2005, the U.S. burned through 20,802,000 barrels of oil per day. The rate of consumption fell to 18,771,000 b/d in 2009, then rose a bit to 19,148,000 b/d in 2010. Oil consumption in 2011 is faltering again, and is now behind the pace set in 2010.

Maybe it’s not so smart to be squandering billions on new road and bridge projects?

Beginning this month, Transition United States is publishing a three-part series of papers titled Economic Resilience, authored by Joanne Poyourow. The first of the series is Economic Contraction.

Poyourow sets out to confront the the “triple crisis” of global warming, peak oil, and economic collapse. Any long-term plan we come up with is futile unless we anticipate that it will unfold amidst a world of economic contraction:

We have to plan for it, and put alternative financial tools in place to weather it, or it will undermine all of our other efforts.

Poyourow says it takes “raw courage” to confront the end of growth on a personal level, and even more to violate social and political taboos by doing so in public. But in the end, we have no choice – and our options are severely constrained:

Whether it will be a full-scale collapse into chaos like Jared Diamond writes about or Stoneleigh forecasts, or whether we will be successful in creating locally-managed “surge breakers” in time, remains to be seen.  But either way, we’d better try our best to get something in place.

The “techno-fantasy” conceptualized in the chart below – continued growth, “business as usual” – is just that, a complete fantasy. And the “green-tech stability” projection is also a fantasy: it represents a form of bargaining with rather than accepting the reality that renewable .

The uncomfortable reality is, no renewable energy sources are on hand that approach the energy density of fossil fuels. That leaves us with two options. We can choose to accept and deal with reality, with all the creativity, wisdom, and grace we can muster. Or we can continue to deny and resist reality,  destroy the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere and in the end suffer collapse as a consequence of our obdurateness.

The reality is, we  can’t force or cajole a finite world to accommodate infinite growth. As available energy and other resources become more scarce and expensive, there must be a descent.  A a severe contraction in our economic systems is inevitable. And we will have to adapt, voluntarily or involuntarily.

Against the backdrop of this reality, it’s no wonder that our politics – for example, Obama’s nonspeech outlining an energy nonpolicy – are nothing less than an absurdity.

Huge Bardi observes that we can learn an important lesson from the Japaneses – the pre-modern, pre-Fukushima, Edo period Japanese, that is. Like Japan, Earth is an island. To live sustainably and successfully on that island, the winning strategy is adaptation. We need to adjust our needs to what this planet can give us.

A new study by Eben Fodor shows that growth doesn’t pay off – communities are better off without it.

The study, titled Relationship between Growth and Prosperity in 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas, examines the relationship between growth and economic prosperity in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. finds that faster growth rates are associated with lower incomes, greater income declines, and higher poverty rates. Unemployment rates tend to be higher in faster growing areas. The 25 slowest-growing metro areas outperformed the 25 fastest growing in every category and averaged $8,455 more in per capita personal income in 2009.

Conventional urban planning and economic development strategies, which pursue growth of metro areas to supposedly advance the economic welfare of the general public, may be misguided. Our “growth is good” ideology presumes the negative impacts of growth to quality of life – such as increased traffic congestion, environmental destruction, loss of farm and forest lands, and loss of amenity values (such as tranquility, sense of community, or open space), and higher taxes to fund the cost of the new public infrastructure (roads, schools, sewer and water systems, etc.) – are outweighed by the new jobs and economic prosperity that come with growth.

But this study suggests the presumed link between growth and prosperity is nothing more than a myth. The real consequence of growth is degradation of our quality of life.

Growing water scarcity is a hidden financial risk for investors who buy the water and electric utility bonds that finance much of the U.S.’s water and power infrastructure.

That’s the conclusion of a new report by Ceres and Water Asset Management titled Water Risk in the Municipal Bond Market. More extreme droughts, surging water demand, pollution, and climate change are growing risks that threaten water supplies in many parts of the United States, especially the West, Southwest, and Southeast. For example:

• The City of Atlanta’s water supply could be cut by nearly 40 percent as early as 2012 due to the ruling of a federal judge.
• Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River, is quickly approaching a firstever water shortage declaration that would reduce deliveries to fast-growing Arizona and Nevada.
• Hoover Dam, which provides hydropower to major urban centers in California, Arizona, and Nevada, may stop generating electricity as soon as 2013 if water levels in Lake Mead don’t begin to recover
• More regular droughts and heat waves are likely to increase the operating costs of power generators in the Southeast, among them the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was forced to slash power generation for two weeks at three of its facilities in Alabama and Tennessee because of heightened water temperatures, costing the utility an estimated $10 million in lost power production.

Failure to include growing water risks means ratings agencies, and investors, and even utilities themselves aren’t realistically assessing the ability of public water and electric power utilities to repay their debt. Reduced revenues caused by water supply shortfalls can compromise the value of utility bonds in two ways. First, reduced revenues can undercut a utility’s ability to make timely payments to bond holders, potentially leading to default. Second, diminished credit capacity of a utility may result in a negative outlook or financial stress that may reduce the price of the bonds when sold on the secondary market.

To quantitatively assess a utility’s exposure to water undersupply, the model used in the study simulates the projected levels of monthly water flows from water sources used by the utility and compares the available water to the utility’s monthly demand. The simulations evaluated four different climate change scenarios with varying expectations of wet and dry weather, and with various stress scenarios that would constrict water supplies for one- to five-year time frames. The model was applied to eight investment-grade, 30-year public utility bonds: six water bonds and two electric power bonds, all in regions with growing populations and increasing pressures on water supplies.

Among the key findings for the six water utility bonds:

• The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power’s water system bond received the highest risk score of all water utilities, based on tight restrictions on local water supplies due to environmental regulations and prolonged drought. The municipal system, the nation’s largest, is also highly reliant on vulnerable water imports, including the Colorado River. The utility’s water bond was rated “AA+” and “Aa2” by Fitch and Moody’s, respectively, earlier this year.
• Atlanta’s Water and Sewer System received the second highest water risk score, a direct result of its reliance on one key local water supply whose future is jeopardized by a judicial order that may require the city to reduce its withdrawals by as much as 40 percent in 2012. The utility’s water bond received “A” and “A1” ratings from Fitch and Moody’s, respectively, earlier this year.
• The Phoenix and Glendale, AZ utilities—systems with high reliance on increasingly expensive and potentially volatile out-of-state water imports from the Colorado River—also received high water risks scores. The Phoenix bond is rated “AAA” and Glendale bond “AA” by Standard & Poor’s.
• Water risk scores for the Tarrant County, TX utility were double those of the neighboring Dallas system. The wide gap is the result of Tarrant County’s consistent drawdown on critical storage reservoirs to meet water demand, which makes the system more vulnerable to prolonged drought. Both utilities have identical credit ratings.

Among the key findings for the two electric utility bonds:

• Alabama’s PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, which provides power to 49 counties in rural Alabama and northwestern Florida, received the higher risk score, primarily due to the system’s potential vulnerability to increased water temperatures and lower flows in the Tombigbee River, the cooling water source for its largest coal-fired plant. The utility’s bond received “A-” ratings with stable outlooks from both Fitch and S&P last year.
• The Los Angeles electric power system‘s risks are driven in part by reductions in power generated at the Hoover Dam due to low water flows in the Colorado River Basin. The system may also see reduced power deliveries from one of its major coalfired power plants in Utah, due to heavy competition for dwindling cooling water flows. The utility’s bond received “AA” and “Aa3” ratings this year from Fitch and Moody’s.

The study shows that credit ratings agencies’ methodologies largely ignore water risk and may even unintentionally foster wasteful water consumption. Many credit ratings reward pricing and infrastructure plans that encourage increased water use and revenue growth with disregard for even near-term supply constraints and likely disruptions.

Ceres (pronounced “series”) is a national network of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change.

For the last 25 years, the Urban Mobility Report (UMR) created by the Texas Transportation Institute has driven transportation policy in the U.S.  Its results have been used to justify billions of dollars in expenditures to build new roads and highways.

Now a new report titled Driven Apart: How sprawl is lengthening our commutes and why misleading mobility measures are making things worse, finds the solution to the problem of commute time has much more to do with how we build our cities than how we build our roads.

Driven Apart ranks how long residents in the nation’s largest 51 metropolitan areas spend in peak hour traffic, and in some cases the rankings are almost the opposite of those listed in the 2009 Urban Mobility Report. While peak hour travel times average 200 hours a year in large metropolitan areas, Driven Apart proves that some cities have managed to achieve shorter travel times and actually reduce the peak hour travel times.

Here is the report’s key finding, in a nutshell:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Some metropolitan areas such as Chicago and Portland have land use patterns and transportation systems that enable their residents to take shorter trips and minimize the burden of peak hour travel.  Such cities have actually seen reductions in average peak hour travel times. Driven Apart concludes that if every one of the top 50 metros followed suit with Chicago and other higher performing cities, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use two billion fewer gallons of fuel, for a cost savings of $31 billion annually.

The UMR depicts Chicago as having some of the worst travel delays, when it actually has the shortest time spent in peak hour traffic of any major US metro area. In contrast, Nashville jumped from 31st to first on the list of those with the longest peak travel times.

The UMR has a number of major flaws that misstate and exaggerate the effects of congestion, particularly the Travel Time Index (TTI).  TTI is the ratio of average peak hour travel times to average free flow travel times. Furthermore, for the 51 metropolitan areas analyzed in Driven Apart, the UMR overstates the cost of congestion by about $49 billion. Because UMR methodology does not take into account travel distances, it universally rewards cities that are spread out as opposed to compact urban areas.

Driven Apart suggests new metrics that focus on trip distances and total travel times – two statistics not reported in the UMR – because they point to a broader and more powerful set of public policy options for dealing with urban transportation problems.  The report recommends a new system for measuring urban transportation performance that includes emphasizing accessibility and focusing on measures of land uses, trip lengths and mode choices as well as travel speeds. The Texas Transportation Institute is listening, and is considering introducing a Total Travel Time performance measure and sustainability factors in future mobility reports.

Transportation costs are often the second highest expense for working Americans, behind housing costs – so it’s critical that transportation investments are guided by accurate and meaningful data.

A new study finds Oregon’s landmark land use planning program has been successful in protecting farm and forest land – but perhaps not as successful as thought, and perhaps for different reasons than previously thought.

The review focuses on published research evaluating the forest and farm land conservation effects of Oregon’s land use planning program. The authors explain that land use planning in Oregon seeks to influence rates and patterns of land use change and development through zoning and permitting processes. Its effects are largely incremental and occur over long periods of time, and are therefore difficult to measure. It is particularly difficult to distinguish the effects of the planning program from the many other confounding factors that also influence land use change and development such as socioeconomic effects, urbanization pressure, the spatial location of land relative to existing cities, and topography. Controlling for these other variables is necessary to accurately gauge the effectiveness of the planning program.

One study cited by the authors suggests Oregon’s land use planning program prevented 13% of the developable supply of land from being developed between 1982 and 1997. A bit surprisingly, the study found that the most effective land use policies – incentive-based policies, such as tax deferrals – have reduced the supply of developable land in Oregon by 8%.  This means the planning program itself is responsible for only 5% of the land saved from development. Still, a lot of land has been saved from development – about 2,442,000 acres, according to estimates. If Oregon’s regulatory system is responsible for saving 939,000 acres of farm and forest land from development, that’s a pretty remarkable achievement.

The authors point out that the planning program wasn’t designed to stop development. Rather, it is a growth management program: it restricts the rates, locations, and densities at which development can take place and facilitates the orderly and efficient development of rural lands while protecting forest and farm lands and conserving them for farm and forest uses. But merely protecting farm and forest lands does not guarantee the continuation of commercial farming and forestry on those lands. In the authors’ minds, whether land use planning is resulting in sustained or improved farming and forestry viability remains an unanswered question.

The study’s co-authors include Hannah Gosnell, Garrett Chrostek, and James Duncan from OSU and Jeffry Kline from the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. The study, titled Is Oregon’s land use planning program conserving forest and farm land? A review of the evidence, is published in the January 2011 issue of Land Use Policy. The study is available through a free sample issue online.

What are the energy and emissions consequences of continuing to allow rural sprawl – the proliferation of nonfarm dwellings throughout the rural landscape? That’s one of the questions currently being addressed in Lane County by a task force looking at the county’s land use policies.

Rural development patterns enabled by cheap and abundant fossil fuels have energy and climate consequences, as almost 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are associated with residences and cars. Changing development and transportation patterns can significantly impact energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Data that break down per capita CO2 emission rates along other important categories of the United States, such as by urban vs. suburban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, apartment dwellers vs. homeowners, or by ethnic/racial origin is hard to come by. But new studies are beginning to shed some light on the issue.

A 2008 report by the Brookings Institution found that the average American in a metropolitan area has a carbon footprint of 8.21 tons — 14% less than the average American living outside the city.

Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, reached a similar conclusion in a study titled The Greenness of Cities:  Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development. Glaeser and co-author Matthew Kahn found that cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas. The city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York, which developed prior to the dominance of the automobile.

A new study titled Cities produce surprisingly low carbon emissions per capita appearing in the April issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization looked at cities in a variety of countries and, for the most part, affirms these findings. Analyzing the per capita emissions from 12 major cities in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, the study’s author, David Dodman of the International Institute for Environment and Development found that per capita emissions from cities were typically smaller, and often far smaller, than their nation’s averages.

For example, greenhouse gas emissions for New Yorkers are less than a third of those of the national average for the USA. Those of Barcelona residents are half the average for Spain.  Londoners have little more than half the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the UK average. Brazil’s two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have less than one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the average for Brazil.

Tokyo has considerably lower emissions per person than either Beijing or Shanghai, suggesting that prosperity need not inevitably result in greater emissions and that well designed and well governed cities can combine high living standards with much lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, the study cautions that emissions from manufacturing are currently allocated to the countries in which these greenhouse gases are produced, rather than to the locations in which the finished products are purchased and used.

The main driver of greenhouse gas emissions is unsustainable consumption, especially in the world’s more affluent countries.

If you want to build a house in Bolinas, you first have to buy a water meter – at auction. The last time one came up for bid was in 2005. It went to a stonemason, for $310,000. Now there’s something to think about here in Oregon, where we’re just beginning to tinker with the idea of transferable development rights.

Bolinas is a tiny town at the southern tip of Point Reyes in Marin County just 20 miles north of San Francisco, across the Gold Gate Bridge and either over or around Mount Tamalpias. Its water source is a tiny dam thrown across a narrow creek known as Arroyo Hondo, delivered to town by a pipe described as “no wider than a coffee mug”.

In 1971, the Bolinas Community Public Utility District (CPUD) declared a Water Shortage Emergency Condition and enacted a moratorium on new connections to the municipal water supply. CPUD still warns:

That moratorium is still in effect and should be taken into consideration when contemplating the purchase of undeveloped real estate.

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed legal challenges to the moratorium and the suit dragged on for years, costing the town’s 1,500 residents almost $2 million to defend – but the water shortage in Bolinas is no joke. In January 2009, due to the perilous status of the town’s water supply resulting from two previous years of low rainfall and historic low rainfall in the early 2008-09 winter season, EPUD declared a prolonged drought condition in the district; issued a water supply alert; and enacted immediate, mandatory conservation measures. All customers were required to limit their consumption to no more than 150 gallons (or 20 cubic feet) per service connection per day (average daily household water use in the U.S. is 350 gallons).

Despite the town’s water supply difficulties, some people still insist on blaming the moratorium on anti-development forces – which certainly existed, as evidenced by the history of Bolinas Border Patrol. The Bolinas Border Patrol was famous for taking down signs pointing to the town, until the state finally relented and stopped putting up new ones. The New York Times article says now there’s this sign:

Even now, a sign that should say “Entering Bolinas” says, “Entering a socially acknowledged nature-loving town.”

Heck, there’s always been a sign at the entrance to town, just past the sign advertising the “B & M Septic Service”. It’s just without a sign pointing the way to Bolinas at the turn-off from the two-lane Highway 1 that winds its way along the coast, outsiders will never get to the edge of town.

Suspected members of the Bolinas Border Patrol would congregate at Smiley’s Schooner Saloon and Hotel, perched on the edge of Bolinas Lagoon. There, anybody could buy and wear a “Bolinas Border Patrol” tee shirt. Smiley’s was a haven after a morning of walking mist nets and weighing, measuring, and banding birds at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (the Birdo, we fondly called it). You could down a beer and a dollar dog with the locals. From the bar, you could watch the local long hairs in tie dyes and sandals meandering up and down the street, going in and out of the co-op (named the People’s Store – what else, in Bolinas?), the bakery, the library.  Of course, everything was right across the street, in Bolinas.

The BirdO was housed just up the mesa in the old buildings of the Palomarin Ranch, run by the Church of the Golden Rule, refuge to draft dodgers during the dark days of World War II. Allergic to female proximity following the explosive dénouement of an ill-fated second marriage, I bunked in my van rather than share a dorm room with a gaggle of youthful postgrads.

Why is EPUD still cautioning the unwary about “undeveloped real estate”? Look no farther than the Bolinas “Gridded Mesa”. This is an area of about 300 acres on a bluff overlooking Bolinas Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The area was subdivided in 1927 into 5,336 20? x 100? lots – lots of less than 1/20 of an acre – in a grid pattern imposed over a former dairy farm without regard to drainage patterns, slope, bluff erosion, or any other natural features. The lots were sold as part of a subscription promotion by the San Francisco Bulletin.  The streets on the gridded mesa were never accepted by the county, and unless maintained by adjoining property owners, many are often impassible. Some have eroded into the sea and some have been abandoned, leaving lots with no public access. Only a few streets are now paved and maintained by the county. The entire area is served by on-site septic systems.

What a freakin’ planning nightmare. No wonder the Bolinas Border Patrol rose up to keep people out. No place in America was ever more in need of a building moratorium.

Now, the Bolinas Border Patrol is no more – at least not in name. The connotations of “border patrol” have become too ugly for counterculture types to stomach.

The shadowy rebel organization that tore down Bolinas road signs, misdirected tourists and confused the media for more than three decades took a politically correct step last month. The Bolinas Border Patrol members, whoever they are, will henceforth refer to themselves as “Bolinas Community,” so as to stop potentially offending Latinos.

The transition was announced in the Jan. 20 issue of the Bolinas Hearsay News by Bolinas mutineer and t-shirt designer, StuArt, who left ten phone messages unreturned and refused an interview on the top-secret matter. In his Hearsay story, StuArt credited a “no-bullshit” woman called Hawk with highlighting the unfortunate association between the Bolinas Border Patrol and the “brutal” United States Border Patrol.

“Border Patrol is way too ‘fascist police state’ for me,” StuArt wrote, agreeing with Hawk that the name had to change. “I thought about the Minutemen in Arizona, armed to the teeth, patrolling the U.S. border in SUVs.”

So while the logo remains a bespectacled quail (changed from a black widow spider in 1985), the name on all t-shirts, flyers and bumper stickers will be changed to the less controversial and arguably less virile title, “Bolinas Community.”

In the heyday of the Bolinas Border Patrol, members sawed, plowed and otherwise vandalized some 30 signs indicating the road to Bolinas. It was all part of a backfiring effort to keep the coastal hamlet out of public attention, tourist brochures and yuppie developer hands.

The quote above is from an article in The Point Reyes Light – no ordinary small-town newspaper. In 1979, with a circulation of only 2750, it became one of the few weekly newspapers to ever receive a Pulitzer Prize, winning the Pulitzer gold medal for Meritorious Public Service as a result of a series of exposes and editorials about the Synanon cult, infamous for (among other things) booby-trapping the mailbox of lawyer Paul Morantz with a live rattlesnake.

Bolinas, a truly weird and beautiful place. Here’s a map.  But please, don’t tell anybody else.

Recently the media have given a lot of coverage to a supposed new scientific consensus that sea levels will rise by about one meter by 2100. For example, this is from a story in Physorg.com:

Recent studies agree that sea level will rise by roughly one meter over this century for a mid-range emission scenario. This is 3 times higher than predicted by the IPCC.

New research from several international research groups, including the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen provides independent consensus that IPCC predictions of less than a half a meter rise in sea levels is around 3 times too low. The new estimates show that the sea will rise approximately 1 meter in the next 100 years in agreement with other recent studies. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

But it’s not that simple, as this chart posted at Climate Feedback shows:

As you can see, the lower range of estimates of sea level rise are converging at around one meter. The upper range of the latest estimates is now hovering around two meters.  And it seems that every year, as scientists’ understanding of ice sheet dynamics grows, estimates of future sea level rise are growing as well.

You’d think people who live along the coast would be beginning to get a little concerned, wouldn’t you?  Think again.

From Florida, Mark Schrope reports that coastal development continues virtually unabated in Miami in spite of its vulnerability:

Right now Florida is showing almost no leadership on responding sensibly to storms and to rising sea level,” says Robert Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Orrin Pilkey of Duke University in North Carolina, a well-known proponent of greater constraints on coastal development, is even more forthright. “I call it an outlaw state,” he says. “Florida has been particularly irresponsible and it’s going to pay the price very soon.

As Climate Feedback points out, worse than just ignoring the threat of sea level rise, the state of Florida has taken drastic action to ensure that waterside properties damaged in storms can be rebuilt in the same locations time and time again.

Here in Oregon, plans by the City of Newport to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion and to impose new rules governing how construction can occur in them are raising the outrage of property owners. Oregonlive reports:

Property owners here are furious over city plans to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion — and how construction can occur in them.

Proposed building code changes for new construction in areas known as geologic hazard zones will cost property owners billions of dollars, they say, and are bound to trigger lawsuits.

Talk about the changes began circulating town this month. Angry locals swamped a Planning Commission meeting and quickly formed the Central Coast Home and Business Owners Association to fight the changes, which they accuse Newport officials of trying to sneak in.

At the heart of the battle is the city’s plan to adopt maps made by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries in 2004. The maps show landslide and erosion zones, coding them in red, orange and yellow according to the degree of risk. Red is the highest. . . .

Opponents say the changes are naive and wrongheaded — and will cost everyone. They fear that under the changes, existing buildings in red zones would become “nonconforming” uses, making them nearly impossible to refinance, sell or insure.

The city has backed off some of the most controversial proposals, and “further revisions are likely.”
Better an inevitable “natural” disaster than what development interests call an “economic disaster.” In Oregon, as elsewhere, it seems our approach to an unpalatable situation is to bury our heads in the sand. Until we drown.

An analysis by the Urban Land Institute finds that the typical household in the study area spends upwards of $22,000 annually on housing, which represents roughly 35% of the median household income ($68,036). With transportation costs for the typical household reaching nearly $12,000 annually, the combined costs of housing and transportation account for roughly 54% of the typical household’s income.

Similar studies conducted for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C., region have found average housing and transportation cost burdens of 59% and 47%, respectively.

“Drive until you qualify” make no sense when the transportation costs offset the lower house prices.

When gasoline prices rose to over $4 per gallon in 2008, the high prices hit exurban areas hard and magnified the housing bust in areas such as Riverside County, CA.

A news story in the Minneapolis -St. Paul Star Tribune now reports a reversal in the migration to suburbs and exurbs in Minnesota:

New estimates suggest that the movement into suburban and exurban counties within commuting distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul has stopped cold for the first time in recent memory.

For many years, the combination of robust growth, a multitude of freeways and plenty of open space helped ignite an explosion in exurban living. People were commuting for hours from towns such as Mora, Glencoe and Owatonna. National experts classed the Twin Cities as having the nation’s third-largest exurban flight from 2000 to 2005, ahead of even sprawling Atlanta.

But the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates — the first to reflect the impact of 2008’s $4-a-gallon gas — suggest that:

• With people abandoning foreclosed and unsellable homes, the two-state ring of exurban counties is hardly growing. For these counties as a group, 2009 marked the first time more people left than moved in.
• In the five big suburban counties closest to the center (Dakota, Scott, Carver, Anoka and Washington), new arrivals have slowed to a standstill. With a wave of baby boomers sitting on empty nests in older suburbs such as Eagan, and new construction all but extinguished in once-booming counties such as Scott, growth is half what it was a decade ago.
• The two big core counties of Hennepin and Ramsey, losing tens of thousands of people a year as recently as five years ago, are on the rebound. Growth is gaining by the year.

When gas is cheap, moving farther out as a way to get more space for less money can make sense. But there’s a trade0ff. Time spent commuting is time not spent with a spouse, a child, a dog. Distance can be a drag. When gas prices rise and housing prices collapse, being upside down on a mortgage can make it difficult or impossible to escape.

Ominously, gas prices are now rising again.

Over the last 60 years, anti-urban policies have resulted in an energy-sucking, emissions-spewing U.S. Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, points to subsidization of highways and home ownership as deliberate policy choices that have bled cities and encouraged a suburban and exurban infrastructure – one that is dependent on high levels of energy inputs (resulting in emissions outputs) both for transportation and to power buildings.

Glaeser cites studies that find each new federally-funded highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18%. Cities don’t benefit much from that highway infrastructure because dense areas already have good means of getting around – like walking.

Subsidizing home ownership is also anti-urban. Glaeser gives Boston as an example: 62% of Boston homes are rented; 78 percent of suburban Wellesley homes are owner-occupied. Cities are dominated by apartments, and more than 85% of homes in multi-unit structures are rented. Suburbs are dominated by single-family detached houses, and more than 85% of such homes are owner-occupied. Multi-unit structures are generally both smaller and more energy-efficient than detached single-family dwellings considering both embedded and operating energy and emissions – at least up to a point.

Subsidizing home ownership, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the home mortgage interest deduction, lures people out of apartments and cities, increasing their energy and emissions footprints.

The U.S. isn’t alone in promoting sprawl. Canadian government at all levels spends more than four times as much on highways as on transit, thus opening up suburbs for development. As in the U.S, Canadian cities and suburbs artificially limit density through single-use zoning that also imposes density limitations and minimum parking requirements.  Low density limits the number of people who can walk to jobs, shops or transit stops, thus making development more car-oriented. But overall, the Canadian government promotes sprawl less aggressively than the United States – and gets less of it as a result.

One consequence of “less bad” anti-urban policies, Canadian cities are healthier and more vibrant than American cities. Among the ten cities that were America’s most populous in 1950, eight have lost population- often by huge margins.  The most extreme example is St. Louis, which lost 59 percent of its population between 1950 and 2000.  By contrast, every single one of Canada’s 1950 “Top Ten” cities has gained population.

So how to reduce energy consumption and emissions? A good start would be to eliminate highway subsidies, to stop subsidizing home ownership, and to give more respect and provide greater rewards to renters.

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!

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.