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

Autodata Corp estimates light vehicle sales a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 11.47 million units in August, down 18.9% from August 2009 (which was boosted by cash-for-clunkers), and down 0.5% from the July 2010 sales rate.

Calculated Risk posts this chart showing U.S. auto sales since the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) started keeping data in 1967.

The August 2009 “blip” was the product of “cash for clunkers.”

U.S. auto sales are still below levels last seen in 1983, when there were fewer registered drivers and a smaller population.

VMT in the U.S. peaked in 2007.  About 14.8 million cars are being scrapped every year in the U.S. With the number of cars on U.S. roads declining, it’s hard to understand how projections that traffic volume on U.S. roads will continue to increase in the future as it has in the past will prove out. Maybe it’s time we start planning for reduced traffic volumes – which might mean scuttling some of our most touted projects, such as the Columbia River Crossing.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), neither the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic nor the Northern Sea Route along the coast of Siberia are yet free of ice and open – but it’s looking like they soon will be.

A Russian gas tanker set out from Murmansk on August 14 across the Northern Sea Route, escorted by two nuclear ice breakers, and is expected to deliver its cargo of gas condensate to China by early September.

Ice in the Vilkitsky Strait is the only remaining impediment to shipping across the Northern Sea Route . . .

. . . as seen in this NSIDC graphic of sea ice extent.

While this latest graphic shows the northern route of the Northwest Passage as being open, NSIDC’s Arctic Sea Ice News reports that as of August 17 neither the northern route (Western Parry Channel) nor the southern route (Amundsen’s Passage) through the Northwest Passage were completely clear of ice.  NSIDC says that sea ice area within the northern route is currently well below the 1968 to 2000 average and almost a month ahead of the clearing that was observed in 2007. In the southern route, there is still a substantial amount of ice.

If winds push sea ice away from the entrance to M’Clure Strait, the northern route of the Northwest Passage could open again this year – if it hasn’t already.

M'Clure Strait, Northwest Territories, Canada.

On August 21, 2007, the Northwest Passage became open to ships without the need of an icebreaker.  The Northwest Passage opened again on August 25, 2008. In late August 2008, satellite images showed that the last ice blockage of the Northern Sea Route had melted – which would be the first time since satellite records began that both the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route were open simultaneously.

The Northern Sea Route was open in 2005 but closed again by 2007. A Russian nuclear icebreaker escorted a small convoy including two Western commercial vessels westward through the Northern Sea Route in 2009.

The Federal Highway Administration’s Traffic Volume Trends, June 2010 reports that vehicle miles driven in 2010 were up 1.3% over June 2010. Cumulative VMT for 2010 is now up 0.1% year to date over 2009:

Travel on all roads and streets changed by +1.3% (3.4 billion vehicle miles) for June 2010 as compared with June 2009. Travel for the month is estimated to be 263.9 billion vehicle miles.

Cumulative Travel for 2010 changed by +0.1% (1.6 billion vehicle miles). The Cumulative estimate for the year is 1,469.8 billion vehicle miles of travel.

In Oregon, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in June declined 0.4% over 2009.

VMT in the U.S. now appear to be moving sideways. Miles driven are still 1.8% below the peak, and only 0.1% above the 2009 trough.

If the trend of ever-increasing VMT is now broken or even reversing, that would call into question the wisdom and the need of spending billions of dollars on capacity-enhancing infrastructure projects. Take the Columbia River Crossing: if vehicle traffic is falling rather than increasing, why would we need it?

UPDATE 8/24: Todd Litman has posted on his blog this chart showing how U.S. VMT is now down about 10% from the long-term trend:

Litman points out the emerging reality means we need to rethink our approach to transportation:

This requires a major change in the way we think about transportation problems and evaluate solutions. Most state and regional transportation plans are based on the assumption that VMT will continue to grow as it did in the past, so the primary problem is traffic congestion. The decline in VMT growth indicates that traffic congestion problems will be less severe and other problems will become more important, including inadequate mobility options for non-drivers, transit crowding, transport affordability, and environmental concerns.

Litman concludes with what should be obvious to all: the need to expand roads and parking facilities will decline.

The Federal Highway Administration reports travel on U.S. road and streets is up 0.1% for May 2010 as compared with May 2009. Cumulative travel for 2010 is down 0.1%. The cumulative estimate for the year is 1,206.2 billion vehicle miles of travel.

Calculated Risk has posted this graph showing the rolling 12-month total VMT going mostly sideways, still 2.0% below the peak and only 0.6% above the recent low.

VMT in Oregon was off 2.4% in May compared to May last year.

A meta-analysis published recently in the Journal of the American Planning Association finds the most important single factor in minimizing driving is to develop in existing areas of high destination accessibility – like city centers. Going back in time (or back to the future), that would be villages.

Other factors like mixed-use, street and intersection design, and block size prove to be less important than destination accessibility. Still, these factors are more important than mere density. Density is less important than land-use mix and having shops, schools, and workplaces near to where people live.

Not surprisingly, driving is found to have energy and climate implications:

The transportation outcomes . . .  vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and vehicle trips (VT), are critically linked to traffic safety, air quality, energy consumption, climate change, and other social costs of automobile use.

Figuring out a way to drive less – much, much less – is key to coming to grips with peak oil and to arresting global warming before we reach a tipping point beyond which Earth’s climate will spin out of control, resulting in an Eaarth we no longer recognize and which is no longer fit for human habitation.

The free-access analysis, Travel and the Built Environment, was authored by Reid Ewingab of the University of Utah’s Urban Land Institute; and Robert Cerverocde, University of California (Berkeley) Transportation Center, Institute of Urban and Regional Development.

Here’s the abstract:

Problem: Localities and states are turning to land planning and urban design for help in reducing automobile use and related social and environmental costs. The effects of such strategies on travel demand have not been generalized in recent years from the multitude of available studies.

Purpose: We conducted a meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature existing at the end of 2009 in order to draw generalizable conclusions for practice. We aimed to quantify effect sizes, update earlier work, include additional outcome measures, and address the methodological issue of self-selection.

Methods: We computed elasticities for individual studies and pooled them to produce weighted averages.

Results and conclusions: Travel variables are generally inelastic with respect to change in measures of the built environment. Of the environmental variables considered here, none has a weighted average travel elasticity of absolute magnitude greater than 0.39, and most are much less. Still, the combined effect of several such variables on travel could be quite large. Consistent with prior work, we find that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is most strongly related to measures of accessibility to destinations and secondarily to street network design variables. Walking is most strongly related to measures of land use diversity, intersection density, and the number of destinations within walking distance. Bus and train use are equally related to proximity to transit and street network design variables, with land use diversity a secondary factor. Surprisingly, we find population and job densities to be only weakly associated with travel behavior once these other variables are controlled.

Takeaway for practice: The elasticities we derived in this meta-analysis may be used to adjust outputs of travel or activity models that are otherwise insensitive to variation in the built environment, or be used in sketch planning applications ranging from climate action plans to health impact assessments. However, because sample sizes are small, and very few studies control for residential preferences and attitudes, we cannot say that planners should generalize broadly from our results. While these elasticities are as accurate as currently possible, they should be understood to contain unknown error and have unknown confidence intervals. They provide a base, and as more built-environment/travel studies appear in the planning literature, these elasticities should be updated and refined.

The Federal Highway Administration reports travel on all roads and streets was up 1.2% (3.1 billion vehicle miles) for April 2010 as compared with April 2009.

Cumulative travel for 2010 is down 0.2% (-1.6 billion vehicle miles). Calculated Risk has posted this chart.

Are we seeing a Hubbert’s Peak for VMT? Peak VMT logically would be a consequence of peak oil, as vehicle travel is almost totally dependent on oil.

Travel in the western states rose considerably less than the rest of the country – only 0.3%.

One implication of peak VMT is that we won’t be needing all of the road infrastructure that is currently being planned, based on the assumption that traffic will continue to increase into the future as it has in the past. Peak VMT means we’ll likely be stranded with excess capacity. Continuing to squander billions on new bridge and highway capacity will prove to be a tragic misallocation of precious land and scarce resources.

The Federal Highway Administration reports that vehicle miles driven in February were down from February 2009:

Travel on all roads and streets changed by -2.9% (-6.3 billion vehicle miles) for February 2010 as compared with February 2009.

In the west, not so.  Western region travel is up 0.9%. In Oregon, VMT was up 3.5% in February after being off 1.2% in January.

Cumulative travel in the U.S. is also down so far in 2010:

Cumulative Travel for 2010 changed by -2.3% (-10.1 billion vehicle miles).

Calculated Risk has posted this chart showing the moving 12 month total peaking in November 2007:

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.

Today the Federal Highway Administration reported travel on all roads and streets decreased by -1.6% (-3.7 billion vehicle miles) for January 2010 as compared with January 2009. Travel for the month is estimated to be 222.8 billion vehicle miles.

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the 13 western states were off more than the national average – 2.8%.  VMT in Oregon were off 1.2%. Oregon VMT were up 12.8% in 2009 over 2008, but now appear to be dropping again.

The rural/urban split of the total VMT was about 1/3: 2/3 -  72.0 billion vehicle-miles on rural roads and 150.8 billion vehicle-miles on urban roads and streets.

VMT have declined 2.9% compared to January 2008, and are down 4.7% compared to January 2007. As gas prices have been rising again (as discussed here), it looks like VMT are once again dropping.

Gasoline prices are up, approaching $3/gal. across the U.S. and getting close to being a dollar more per gallon than a year ago.

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk has posted a chart showing the relationship between gas prices and vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

McBride explains:

Although vehicle miles driven are noisy month to month, it appears that miles driven responds to spikes in oil prices.

For the last few weeks, oil prices have been bouncing around $80/barrel, a price level last seen just before oil prices spiked in 2008. Will we once again begin to see demand destruction and a collapse in VMT, such as we saw in 2008?

For December 2009 – the last month of data – the DOT reported that miles driven were unchanged compared to December 2008 after increasing in 5 of the 6 previous months. The report for January should be out this next week.  Should be interesting.

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.

The Oregon Senate has approved a bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks.

SB 1059, which implements recommendations from 2009 Metropolitan Planning Organization Greenhouse Gas Emissions Task Force, does more than just set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in metro areas. It also directs state agencies to:

• Develop a statewide transportation strategy on greenhouse gases.
• Craft a toolkit to assist local governments and metro areas in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.
• Develop guidelines for scenario planning – used by communities across the country to consider alternative choices of land use patterns and transportation options to reduce emissions.
• Work with the Oregon University System to educate the public about the costs and benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
• Report back to the 2011 Legislature with an estimate of how much it will cost local governments to prepare and select a land use and transportation scenario that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and potential sources of funding.
• Report back to the 2013 Legislative Assembly with an assessment of how the agencies are doing on these tasks.

The bill passed out of the Senate despite unanimous opposition from Republicans, 17-13 (Sen. Rick Metsger, D-Mount Hood joining the Rs in voting “no”). The bill now goes to the House, where it will most likely come up for a vote Wednesday.

Mary Kyle McCurdy, 1000 Friends of Oregon Policy Director, stated in a press release:

This victory will help create healthier, sustainable communities across Oregon. And it’s a major step for giving Oregonians better transportation choices.

The press release also quotes Chris Hagerbaumer, Deputy Director of the Oregon Environmental Council:

SB 1059 is a win-win for cities and towns across Oregon. The bill will help create the tools and resources local governments need to make cost effective decisions on planning future growth while also improving air quality and reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Cities and towns of all sizes will be able to use the tools that the agencies develop.

The Task Force identified a number of additional benefits that would accrue from reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including: saving families money by reducing their transportation costs; lower public infrastructure costs; healthier lifestyles due to more opportunities to walk and bike; and greater energy security by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

UPDATE 2/25/2010: SB 1059, which would initiate steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions in transportation, is headed to the governor’s office after passing out of the House 32 to 26 Wednesday. The Rs voted against the bill as a solid block. Two Ds, Terry Beyer of Springfield and Arnie Roblan of Coos Bay, joined the Rs in opposition.

Here’s a news flash from NASA: cars contribute to global warming!

Motor vehicles give off only minimal amounts of sulfates and nitrates, both pollutants that cool climate, though they produce significant amounts of pollutants that warm climate such as carbon dioxide, black carbon, and ozone.

In a paper published online on Feb. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nadine Unger of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and colleagues described how they used a climate model to estimate the impact of 13 sectors of the economy from 2000 to 2100.

In their analysis, motor vehicles emerged as the greatest contributor to atmospheric warming now and in the near term. Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it.

Keep in mind that those cooling aerosols from electric power generation and industry (mostly from burning coal) and biomass burning (otherwise known as deforestation) fall out of the atmosphere quickly, leaving the greenhouse gases behind in the atmosphere to do their warming work for centuries to come. Says Unger:

The differences are because the impacts of greenhouse gases accumulate and intensify over time, and because they persist in the atmosphere for such long periods. In contrast, aerosols rain out after a few days and can only have a short-term impact.

Credit: NASA GISS/Unger

Unger’s model finds that in 2020 (left), transportation, household biofuels and animal husbandry will have the greatest warming impact on the climate, while the shipping, biomass burning, and industrial sectors will have a cooling impact. By 2100 (right), the model finds that the power and industrial sector will begin to contribute strongly to warming as carbon dioxide accumulates.

Here’s a simple idea that would go a long way towards saving the planet:

Cap the national driving speed limit at 34 MPH (55 KMH).

Benefits of a national slowdown would include:

• Massive reductions in oil consumption
• Immediate and significant C02 reductions
• Smaller, lighter vehicles = less materials consumption
• Instant surge in demand for high-speed rail and other public transportation
• Large drop in tire-related particulate pollution
• Plunging traffic fatality rates + reduced health industry expenses
• Constriction of suburbs & exurbs, relieving pressure on farm lands and other rural lands
• Shipping diverted from truck to rail & ship
• Demise of the “big box” model, reinvigoration of local economies and communities
• End of our road and bridge building mania

As if that’s likely to happen.

Still, the passion may be fading from our love affair with the automobile. The Federal Highway Administration reports that vehicle miles driven in December were unchanged from December 2008:

Travel on all roads and streets changed by 0.0% (-0.1 billion vehicle miles) for December 2009 as compared with December 2008. . . . Cumulative Travel for 2009 changed by +0.2% (6.6 billion vehicle miles).

Unfortunately, as our passion fades the automobile has taken a new lover: China.

Chris Martenson used to be a corporate honcho with a big expensive house in the suburbs on the Connecticut coast. Now he’s downsized, is living in a rural community, has traded in his twin-engine fishing boat for a kayak – and travels the country giving lectures on why we’ll never see a “recovery” from our economic throes. What happened, and why?

In a speech before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Martenson lays out the hard facts:

• There are 70 million more people on the surface of the planet this year than last year.
• Each of these new humans consumes some amount of resources such as food, oil, air, soil, water, copper, coal, or timber.
• Someday, perhaps already, maybe a little later, the global flow rate of oil coming out of the ground will peak and then decline inexorably thereafter.
• From 2000 to 2008, eight short years, the total amount of debt in this country doubled while no net jobs were created and median incomes actually went backwards.
• During the industrial revolution, humans have consumed vastly more energy each decade. During the lifetime of a 22-year-old, humans will have burned more than half of all the oil ever consumed throughout history.
• Oceanic fish stocks, ancient aquifers, and topsoil are all being depleted at unsustainable rates.

Martenson goes on to explore the implications of these realities. To summarize:

All these facts share a single common feature: they are tied to exponential growth in some way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exponential growth, as long as you have unlimited room and unlimited resources. We live on a finite planet. Time runs out in a hurry towards the end of any exponential growth system, forcing hurried decisions and severely limiting options. And there are clear signs that several key resources on our planet are in their final minutes.

Just as higher prices for fish will not cause more cod to come from the depleted fisheries, oil fields will yield their treasures in accordance to geological limits and not because our economics textbooks say they should.

Adapting to a future of less and less oil will take decades of preparation – but we’ve not yet even begun. TIME is a critical factor. SCALE is an issue. And then there’s COST.

COST – now there’s the economic rub. Every dollar in circulation was loaned into existence, with interest. The effect of loaning all of our money into existence, with interest, is this: there is always more debt than money floating around in the system. Always. And the amount of debt will compound over time – that is, it will grow exponentially. To service the debts that are growing exponentially, the economy must also grow exponentially.

See the problem?

An energy crisis rooted in resource limits will quickly translate into an economic crisis unlike any other. Consequently, the era of growth is ending and what Martenson calls “an exciting new chapter” is about to begin.

Why the optimism? Martenson sees our challenge as not to find vast new resources to exploit, but to undertake the far more sophisticated and worthwhile task of using what we’ve got more wisely. A life with less pollution, more free time, meaningful jobs, more happiness, less stress and greater connection to each other as well as to nature are all within the realm of the possible.

As Martenson says, the longer we fiddle around the more our options shrink. Let’s hope it’s not already too late.

In 2009, cars scrapped in the U.S. exceeded new car sales  for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million.

The 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2% in one year. The U.S. fleet has apparently peaked and started to decline.

Lester Brown at Treehugger identifies “market saturation” as the dominant factor. The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers – nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers.

Brown points to Japan as an example. In Japan, annual car sales peaked 1990 and have since shrunk by 21%.

Mish Shedlock looks at the data and asks, what about boomer demographics and teenage driving?

The massive wave of boomer retirement is about to hit. Many boomers will go from two cars to one, or from two new cars to one new car and an “emergency” clunker.

As for teens, parents can no longer afford to buy cars for their kids. And with teenage unemployment at the highest rate in history, teens can no longer afford to buy their own cars.

Peak oil, peak autos.  What’s next?

California’s new carbon fuel standard will shut U.S. ethanol out of the biggest U.S. market. Why? Because the regulations will count the emissions created when corn is planted, harvested and ground into fuel as part of ethanol’s carbon output. The regulation also counts indirect land-use changes – the impact on other areas of planting corn in the Midwest for ethanol.

Naturally, the two largest ethanol trade organizations have sued California over the standard.

When you count everything, “green” may not be green after all.

A prime example is the newly rolled out “Greenroads” rating system developed by University of Washington researchers and the engineering firm CH2M Hill. The system (the complete version of which is available here) outlines minimum requirements to qualify as a “green roadway”, including a noise mitigation plan, storm-water management plan and waste management plan. It also allows up to 118 points for voluntary actions such as minimizing light pollution, using recycled materials, incorporating quiet pavement and accommodating non-motorized transportation.

What the rating system leaves out is everything important:

Decisions regarding the location, type, timing, feasibility or other planning level ideas are excluded. While planning is fundamental to roadway and community
sustainability, these decisions are often too complex or political to be adequately defined by a point system.

“Greenroads” is greenwashing at its finest.

For anyone concerned about the impact of emissions from the transportation sector on global warming (or complacent about peak oil), this chart posted by Stuart Staniford at his blog Early Warning should be sobering:

Heading Out at The Oil Drum reports the Chinese purchased 13.6 million cars and light trucks last year, compared to 10.4 million sold in the USA. China is now the world’s #1 auto market. Not surprisingly, Chinese oil imports are also up. In December, Chinese imports of crude oil rose to 20 million tonnes, or the equivalent of 4.7 million barrels a day. Chinese demand is helping keep oil prices firm despite the continuing global economic disruption.

Then again, this chart from another Staniford post looking at urbanization trends shows that urbanization and vehicle use are in lockstep, growing exponentially :

Of course, correlation does not establish causation. But Staniford shows that as the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture declines and as countries “develop” and become urbanized, per capita energy use tends to increase.

The global climate and energy outlook is grim as China begins to look more and more like us. And notice India, looming there on the horizon.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning has posted this chart showing that new vehicle fuel economy wasn’t very responsive to the oil price spike of 2005-2008.

Unlike the oil crisis of the late ’70s, people just didn’t run out and trade in their gas guzzlers for new fuel-efficient cars. And “cash for clunkers” did very little to offset the impacts of lower gas prices.

With gas prices down from the spike in 2008, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is once again on a growth path after falling in 2008. The Federal Highway Administration reports travel on all roads and streets was up 2.5% (5.8 billion vehicle miles) for September 2009 as compared with September 2008. Cumulative Travel for 2009 through September was up 0.3% (6.7 billion vehicle miles) over 2008.

U.S. Vehicle Miles through January 2009

The decline in VMT totaled 122 billion for the period December 2007 to January 2009, compared to the same 14-month period a year earlier. If VMT keeps increasing by almost 6 billion miles a month, it won’t be long before VMT is back to where it was before the oil price spike hit. If oil prices spike again . . . ?

The Energy Information Administration reports petroleum used for transportation in 2009 remains significantly less than in 2007 and 2008 (8.0% and 4.2%, respectively).