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

John Michael Greer has written a couple of posts over the last weeks taking on the idea that we can build a better future by deliberate planning. In his latest, Looking for Roong Thisdara, he suggests that this is not only impossible but counterproductive.

His argument is two-faceted. First, Greer points out that making plans is the easy part. Implementing them is another matter. Mostly, plans once drafted - even good plans - sit on a shelf, untouched and ignored.

More fundamentally, the assumption common to all planning is that it’s possible to anticipate the future - or, to address the specific situation he’s concerned with, the process of transition to a deindustrial society in enough detail to make planning meaningful.

He identifies the two strategies that we as a society have grasped at to deal with the end of the age of petroleum:

1. Find another as cheap, abundant, and concentrated as petroleum, and run our society on that instead.
2. Replace those parts of our society that depend on cheap, abundant, concentrated energy with others that lack that dependence.

Greer argues that the problem with both of these strategies is that neither is reality-based.

As to the first, Greer observes that there simply is no other energy source available to us that is as cheap, abundant, and concentrated as petroleum; the fact that we want one does not oblige the universe to provide us with one.

Secondly, there are no parts of our society that don’t depend on cheap, abundant, concentrated energy. Consequently we can’t simply swap out a few parts and keep going. Everything has to change, and we have no way of knowing in advance what changes will be required.

Greer states what should be obvious: what we are trying to invent – a society that can support some approximation of modern technology on a sustainable basis – has never existed on Earth. We can imagine what that might look like, but if we allow our desires to trump unwelcome realities we are in very deep trouble indeed.

Greer argues that our best option would be to skip the plans altogether and get to work on more improvisations.

Let’s sum this up. Greer thinks we cannot foresee the future and even if we could, free from fancy, we could not foretell how to get there. The best we can do is relax our impulse to control the uncontrollable and improvise as the future unfolds.

I think the counsel to free ourselves of hubris and to exercise humility and flexibility is admirable and right. I think where Greer’s argument goes wrong is in failing to recognize our existential dilemma: we cannot choose to not choose. In any situation, to refuse to make a choice is itself a choice that carries with it its own inexorable consequences.

Just as one cannot not choose, one cannot not plan. To choose to not plan is itself a plan, the choice of a path that will inevitably lead somewhere. To pretend that just because we don’t think about where that somewhere might be does not relieve us of responsibility for choosing that path.

The default plan is business as usual. To not plan for a society powered by solar and wind will leave civilization going increasingly dark as our fossil fuel resources are depleted, within a world ravaged by climate change and replete with mass extinctions and radically altered ecosystems. That future may be inevitable, whatever we do. The failure to plan for a different future guarantees that it will come about.

Rather than to plan or not to plan, the important question is whether the assumptions governing our choice of actions are based on spoken or unspoken assumptions, whether our choices are made consciously or unconsciously, thoughtfully or thoughtlessly; and whether our plans are based on fantasy or reality.

The choice is not between planning or not planning, but between good planning and bad planning.

General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower may not have been much of a field general, but he was a hell of a planner. To quote Eisenhower:

Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.

Good planning is based on humility, self-knowledge, and the attempt to see and understand the world as it is. Bad planning is warped by hubris, fantasy and ideology.

As Greer observes,

[A]ttractive visions and passionate beliefs can rest on foundations of empty air.

Our societal ideology is replete with examples of wishes trumping reality: that an investment can keep on gaining value exponentially forever, that infinite economic growth is possible in a finite world. The global financial crisis is exploding the first fantasy; peak oil and global warming, the second.

Eisenhower’s plan brought us the interstate highway system and suburbia. But Eisenhower was a stickler for reality: illusions have no place on and don’t survive the battlefield. Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable. If you see that your plan has turned into a fiasco, let go of it and make a new plan, Stan, set yourself free.

Our planning is similarly based on assumptions we know cannot come true and that would be disastrous were they to prove true: that the fossil fuels necessary to fill the roads, bridges and airports that we continue to build will be forthcoming, that the fossil fuels necessary to sustain exponential economic growth will be discovered and exploited, that the population necessary to fill our urban growth boundaries and urban reserves will continue to multiply, that the water necessary to expand food production will be available, that the fertilizers necessary to compensate for depleting soils can be manufactured and transported.

Planning at its best is an iterative process of thinking through possible scenarios. Through planning our assumptions can be made conscious, put on the table and examined for plausibility and truthfulness. We can model possible scenarios to the best of our ability, projecting the consequences of different choices and testing our model results against reality as best we can, in an open and transparent process.

Planning can help visualize possible futures and at a minimum illuminate the unlikely or impossible. Planning can help us avoid mistakes, wasting precious resources investing in schemes that cannot work or that would have unfortunate outcomes.

Planning can bring together people who will need to know each other as the future unfolds. The more people involved the better - nobody, perhaps especially the experts and elites who are so invested in the present, knows for sure what the future holds or demands. Good planning demands the humility to embrace widespread public participation at all levels.

And we shouldn’t expect  the public to blindly embrace their plans even should they prove prescient.  As Greer rightly observes, execution is a whole ‘nother matter. Good execution demands widespread public participation at all levels.

On November 10 - only four days after receiving the final report from his Transportation Vision Committee - Governor Kulongoski unveiled his Jobs and Transportation Act of 2009.

Gov. Kulongoski calls his package “the largest, most comprehensive and greenest transportation initiative in Oregon history.” Oregon’s environmental community - or at least the “establishment” environmental community represented by organizations such as the Oregon Environmental Council - supports it.

Ironically Republican honcho Jack Roberts, who likes the plan, reveals why progressives should be wary of it:

The Transportation Visioning Committee that recommended the major elements of this plan was largely dominated by representatives of business and local government. Transportation is the lifeblood of commerce, while local governments are major stewards of our transportation infrastructure. This is not a plan foisted on an unwilling public by a left-wing cabal of big-government enthusiasts and central planners.

Two observations about the package must be made at the outset.

First, the package is completely oblivious to the reality of peak oil. How can a transportation planning proposal completely fail to consider how the transportation system will be powered? The package simply assumes that the fuels needed to maintain a car- and truck-dependent transportation system will continue to be available, at prices low enough so that people and freight will keep taking to the roads.

Second, there’s nothing forward looking about the package. The vision remains the same as that laid out by General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. GM produced a short film (view the video clips Part 1 and Part 2 at YouTube) looking into the future of 1960 which now seems spooky in its prescience. That vision, designed by GM to sell cars, became enacted as official policy, all over the U.S.

Here’s what GM envisioned back in 1939. The “American scheme of living” demands “an ever accelerating rate of progress, a greater world, a better world, a world which always will grow, forward.” In concrete terms, GM envisioned “express motorways” for automobiles flowing through the countryside, our cities “redesigned around a modern transportation system” with “residential, commercial and industrial areas all separated from each other, for greater convenience and greater efficiency.” The film declares:  “Over space, Man has begun to win victory.” That dream has now become our nightmare, and the vision as bankrupt as GM itself.

Now to the governor’s proposal. The Press Release states:

[The act] invests $1 billion every biennium into the state transportation system, creating 2100 jobs annually over the first five years.  The plan includes policies to reduce vehicle-miles-traveled in urban areas, a dedicated fund for non-highway transportation investments, a new transportation utility commission, and dollars for rural counties hit hardest by the scheduled sunset of the federal forest payments. The Act also recommends a series of funding options, including bonding, a new vehicle title fee, and a path to transition away from the gas tax as the central funding source for transportation.

Is Kulongoski’s package really green - or just greenwashing? Let’s take a closer look. Read the rest of this entry »

Governor Ted Kulongoski has received a final report from his Transportation Vision Committee.

The “comprehensive transportation plan” is intended as a guide for the Governor’s  2009 legislative agenda. According to the press release,  the report

“includes recommendations for reducing vehicles miles traveled in urban areas, a dedicated fund for non-highway transportation investments, a new transportation utility commission, and dollars for rural counties hit hardest by the scheduled sunset of the federal forest payments. The committee also recommends a series of funding options, including bonding, a new vehicle title fee, and a path to transition away from the gas tax as the central funding source for transportation.”

The transportation plan’s stated objective is to “strategically expand the entire transportation system to support job growth and quality of life and ensure the state’s competitive stance in the global marketplace”. So right off, it’s business as usual.

While paying lip service to alternatives, the report foresees that automobile and truck travel will continue to grow and to be the dominant mode. The big problem, as the report sees it, is how to pay for the necessary road system maintenance and expansion? The “vision” foresees huge and expensive needs for airport and especially road system growth. Public transportation and the rail system is given short shrift by comparison.

Stunning by its absence is any mention or consideration of peak oil or its impacts on our transportation systems. How can a plan that is supposed to identify transportation needs and lay out a strategy for meeting them be taken seriously if it fails to address how our transportation system is to be powered in a world where the oil fields we rely on produce 9% less oil each year?

The obeisance to “quality of life” in the statement of objectives is a fraud. The phrase “quality of life” appears five times in the report; once in the introductory letter; twice in the introduction; once in the preface;  and in the meat of the report, once in discussion of “least cost alternatives” in passing, in the same sentence as “environmental issues” and “climate change”. Nowhere in the report is any exploration of what “quality of life” is, how to measure or achieve it, or how transportation fits in.

Insofar as “quality of life” means anything at all in the report, I think the authors see it as “relieving traffic congestion”. The willful blindness of the authors is revealed by this assertion:

“[P]roperly designed capacity projects addressing system bottlenecks could have a net greenhouse gas reduction benefit by contributing to congestion reduction.”

You read that right: the way to solve global warming is by expanding the road system. Un-friggin’-believable.

What reality are the folks responsible for this report living in?

The makeup of the “vision” (or rather, “blindness”) committee is listed below the fold. In the Oregon tradition, it seems like almost every interest imaginable was represented - and again in the Oregon tradition, these are mostly the same names that show up in working group after working group.

The only “out” for members of the environmental community on this list is the disclaimer in the report that “the recommendations in this report capture the discussions of the Vision Committee, but should not be read as a blanket endorsement. Regardless, I’m glad my name isn’t on this list of infamy.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A proposed measure (SB 375) links regional planning for housing and transportation with California’s new greenhouse gas reduction goal (AB 32) enacted in 2006. The goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions to the 1990 level by 2020. That’s a 30% cut from projected emissions.

The bill would require each metropolitan region to adopt a “sustainable community strategy” to encourage compact development, designed to meet the greenhouse emissions targets set by the California Air Resources Board which is charged with commanding the state’s fight against global warming.

Here’s the enforcement mechanism: transportation projects that were part of the community plan would get first dibs on the annual $5 billion in transportation money disbursed by Sacramento (projects approved before 2010 would be grandfathered in.)

The development community is bought off by “more certainty” - an exemption from much of the environmental review for projects within the community plan. Local governments also would be required to expedite zoning and allow the builders to actually build.

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), who is slated to be the next Senate leader and is the bill’s champion, touts the bill as “smart growth”:

“One issue everyone has been afraid to touch is land use. Everyone understands about using alternative fuel. But land use has been the third rail. AB 32 changed the equation because now land use has to be part of the solution to global warming. You can’t meet our goal just with alternative fuels. You have to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled.

“If people are going to drive - and they are going to drive - we need to plan in ways to get them out of their cars faster. That means shrinking - not the amount of housing, not economic development, not growth - but shrinking the footprint on which that growth occurs.”

Reality check: we’re not going to grow our way out of our energy and climate crisis. God forbid that the California development machine - which has irretrievably despoiled the state I recall from my youth as embodying paradise - should be derailed.

Growth, population and economic alike, is the problem, not the solution. Progressives and conservatives alike have drunk the growth Kool-Aid. By the time they wake up from the trip,  let’s pray it’s not too late.

Sara Robertson has a great piece at the Campaign for America’s Future blog titled
Acts of Creative Destruction: Rebuilding America for the 21st Century. She argues that today’s new energy and ecological realities  demand rethinking how we live within the landscape. It’s not nearly good enough to merely repair what we’ve already got. We have to replace our current infrastructure with something better suited to meet today’s challenges.

I’ve pulled out a couple of tidbits:

“Much of our current failing infrastructure was built between the early 1930s and the mid-1960s—an era of vast public works projects that dammed rivers, raised skyscrapers, and laced the nation with interstate highways. The things our parents and grandparents built and the policy choices they made expressed the cultural values, economic and social priorities, and new technologies that dominated their era. Cheap energy allowed them to replace the streetcars and railroads—considered urban wonders by their own grandparents—with the speed and convenience of cars, trucks, and airplanes. It fueled the construction of big single-family houses and vast freeway networks, which in turn encouraged suburban sprawl. In an era when people believed that humans were put on earth to dominate and tame nature, and defined “quality of life” by the quantity of goods consumed, the suggestion that any of this might be permanently damaging the earth—or that it might cause problems down the road that would seriously threaten human existence—was simply absurd.

“Fast forward 60 years, and we’re now in a very different place. It’s all too clear that our grandparents’ technologies, economic priorities and ideas about what comprises a satisfying way of life are creating serious, planet-wide ecological trouble. These days, we realize that we live on a finite planet, and that we’re finally bumping up against its limits. In particular, we don’t have the vast reserves of cheap energy that will allow us to sustain the all the power-hungry systems our ancestors bequeathed to us. Those sprawling post-war cities made perfect sense in their time; but increasingly, they don’t make sense in ours. But because all this stuff is already built—at a tremendous cost in money and material—it’s also daunting to consider just how much of it will have to be rebuilt, refitted, or simply scrapped and replaced (or not) in order adapt to the new realities. . .

“It’s not enough to merely restore what’s already there. We need to take an entirely fresh look at our assumptions about how cities and towns should be built, and put sustainability at the core of all our planning decisions. We might decide to reclaim what our 19th century ancestors knew about building pedestrian-friendly cities, where families lived above shops on lively neighborhood streets; and cozy small towns where everyone lived just a few blocks from Main Street. We might follow the example of Europe, which has closed most of its historic old downtowns to traffic, increased density, and connected its cities with fast electric trains. (The average European maintains a comfortable middle-class lifestyle with an ecological footprint that’s less than half that of the average North American.) And we might rewrite our building and planning codes to encourage the use of green technology, and to reflect the new understandings about sustainable living that our urban planners have been refining over the past 40 years.

Dynamic Cities Project executive director Byrn Davidson  presented recently at a Metro Vancouver sustainability event focused on peak oil, climate change, and transportation.

His main point is that we can no longer afford to plan on a future of business-as-usual. Peak oil and climate change are new realities, and we will be making an energy transition. They’ve developed a range of scenarios for that transition, from smooth and painless to systemic collapse.

It’s foolish to continue planning as if only the first of those scenarios is possible. It’s entirely possible that we’ll face disruptions or even calamitous and extended crises as a result of either energy price spikes or shortages or climate-caused events or conditions.

We’ll be making huge investments in infrastructure, including transportation infrastructure. If the future we’re planning for fails to come to pass, those investments will be wasted and the infrastructure we’ve built will be stranded and useless. But our planning processes are based on the assumption that past trends are a reliable guide to the only potential future.

Davidson recommends scenario planning. He lays out three possible scenarios - Past Economic Trends (PET), Accelerated Turbulent Transition (ATT), and Major Shock Transition (MST) - each of which describes a plausible future.

Then the important question for planners is: What investments will retain their value no matter which of the potential futures unfolds?

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: The following was originally posted to the Oregon Transportation Reform Activists Network (OTRAN) email list (you can subscribe here).

Although the Oregon Transportation Plan (OTP) was adopted less than two years ago, it might already be starting to show its age, as the story “Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization” in the New York Times suggests: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week saw the public unveiling of the draft design of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). Our take is that the target for reductions isn’t nearly ambitious enough, it leaves too many sources outside the program, and it’s too generous with offsets. But it’s a start.

It’s important to remember what’s at stake, should we fail to bring atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations under control.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress relays that in a new report, researchers looked at the case of a (mere) 700 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2, the A1b scenario, with total warming of about 3.5°C by century’s end. The key scientific point is that “the extremes rise faster than the means in a warming climate.” And the way things are going, these record temperatures could be seen closer to 2060 than 2100.

Business as usual will result in life-threatening and ecologically devastating temperature increases across the U.S. and around the world.

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What are the implications for land use?

We’d better, right now, start adapting to a future characterized by climate change - and depleting oil. First, stop digging. No more big parking lots. No more big highway or bridge projects. No further airport expansions. No more fossil-fuel fired power plants. Then start investing in infrastructure that will make sense in an energy- and climate-constrained future. More villages, both inside and outside of cities. More local production, reducing transportation needs. More and electrified rail, for both freight and passengers. More renewable energy sources to power electrified transportation, such as wind and solar.

We cannot, as our planning program does, continue basing our civic infrastructure on past trends - including continuation of population and economic growth. An assumption of continued population growth underlies our planning program, and continued economic growth is an overriding goal.

As John Michael Greer points out, economic growth is not the same as prosperity, and in fact has little to do with quality of life. A large part of economic growth has consisted of moving activity out of the unmeasured “household” economy into the official and measured market sphere. But just because economic activity is measured doesn’t make it more, or better. We’ve conflated economic growth with prosperity, with devastating consequences as Earth’s limits to growth are approached and exceeded.

We have to purge our thinking - and our planning program - of the false idol of economic growth and replace it with the more sustainable goal of prosperity. We cannot afford to continue business as usual.

The Big Look Task Force met on Thursday and Friday last week. The main purpose was to report on the meetings with “stakeholder” groups and to hone the Task Force’s preliminary recommendations in light of the feedback received (Goal One Coalition’s comments are available here).

It’s clear that the Task Force sees that its clock is running out. The legislative session is fast approaching, and they are nowhere near to crafting any legislative proposals for reform of the land use planning program - and this, after all, was their charge. Anyone who’s been around the legislature knows, to have any real chance for passage, all the heavy lifting for any bill must be done long before the session starts. And they haven’t even begun any public outreach effort, which the legislature instructed they do before submitting their recommendations.

In a desperate effort to salvage something of their four years of fiddling, the Task Force decided to drop most of the “key issues” it had been working on and focus on two issue areas: resource lands and urban growth management.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post by John Foster.

Corvallis has embarked on a community wide sustainability project that could serve as a model for other communities. The Corvallis Sustainability Coalition seeks to:

• Reduce waste and end fossil fuel dependence.
• Eliminate the use of persistent chemicals and synthetic substances.
• Ultimately eliminate the community’s contribution to encroachment on nature.
• Support people’s capacity to meet their basic needs.

The coalition is supported by about 90 organizations including the City government.  It is not, however, a government body.

At the coalition’s first Town Hall meeting, on 31 March, about 600 participants, meeting in small groups, discussed more specific goals for the community.  During the following weeks volunteer working groups held meetings  to refine these goals.   There were 12 groups covering subjects ranging from Cultural Diversity to Waste Disposal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Simmons at CNBC’s Fast Money gives the following advice on what to do about high oil prices:

“. . . start living in villages again, eliminate long distance commuting by liberating the workforce and paying by productivity and growing food locally, and starting to embrace an enormous amount of R&D into things we’re not really doing anything about today, like ocean energy, geothermal, then within 5-7 we could get ourselves out of a very deep hole, but we have to do it real quick.”

Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture applies Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five psychological stages of grief to the peak oil issue:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. He says the presenters are still in the bargaining phase, as if we can somehow haggle and trade our way out of this. I think they - along with most of us - are still in denial.

Bloomberg reports oil today (Wednesday July 16) fell as low as $132 a barrel - more than 10% below the record of $147.27 reached on July 11.

Energy Department reports showed U.S. inventories of both crude oil and gasoline increasing rather than declining as expected. Crude usage averaged 20.3 million barrels a day in the past four weeks, down 2 percent from 2007. Consumption of gasoline averaged 9.3 million barrels a day over the period, down 2.1% from the same period last year. And that may be just the start - MasterCard reports that gasoline sales in the week ending July 11 were 5.2% lower than the same week a year ago.

Falling gasoline consumption has implications here in Oregon: there won’t be enough money to pay for all the bridge and road work in the pipeline.  The Eugene Register-Guard reports that gasoline consumption - and fuel tax revenues - are down from a year ago, but ODOT’s plans assume an annual growth of 1.5% - 2%. Statewide, the gas tax produces about $400 million a year for state and local road, highway and bridge projects. Eugene relies on state and city gas taxes for about $10 million for road maintenance and improvements annually.

It’s not going to get any better. Latest available figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates decreased by 272,000 b/d from March to April. Overall crude oil production statistics have been revised downwards, leading to a lower all time high crude oil production of 74.59 million b/d that still stands at February 2008.

The Oil Drum: Europe has posted several charts, including these two:

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Total liquids data have not yet been updated.

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We now can see that demand for oil isn’t completely inelastic.

In a piece called “Crude Awakening,” Business Week claims to have gotten access to a super-secret internal Saudi document with a field-by-field breakdown of estimated Saudi oil production from 2009 through 2013. Its conclusion? Saudi Aramco will be to produce just 12 million barrels a day in 2010. But the increase is all in medium and heavy crudes, and those production levels will be able to be maintained only for short, temporary periods such as emergencies. The sustainable production level will only be about 10.4 million barrels a day.

Kevin Drum has posted this chart at CBS News.

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The real bombshell concerns Ghawar, the world’s most productive field ever. Ghawar is projected to produce 5.4 million barrels a day next year, but the volume then falls off rapidly, to 4.475 million daily barrels in 2013.

Currently, Ghawar is estimated to produce over 5 million barrels of oil a day,  6.25% of global production. As goes Ghawar, so goes global production.

So now the Portland City Council has unanimously approved a so-called “green” version of the $4.2 billion Columbia River Crossing. The city wants a toll bridge that will accommodate a light rail system and have three automobile lanes in each direction, with a “postcard-worthy design” that will “aesthetically enhance the world-class grandeur of the Columbia River and Mount Hood.”

The Metro Council had earlier approved a version that would include light rail and tolls. The June 5 vote was 5-2, with Carl Hosticka and Robert Liberty voting no.

Conservation groups had argued the bridge would promote sprawl, boost driving and vehicle emissions, and divert transportation money from other local priorities.

But what nobody seemed to realize, friends or foes alike, was that the bridge is already a white elephant. The fuels necessary to power the cars and trucks that it is assumed will be using the bridge simply won’t be there, at any price, at least not in the quantities necessary to support the projected traffic.

The realities of peak oil and depletion rates are unforgiving. It’s notoriously difficult to calculate accurate depletion rates given the lack of good production data about wells, particularly in the Middle East. But it is appearing increasingly likely that production decline rates will prove much greater than expected. The example of Cantarell, the world’s second-greatest oil field ever behind Ghawar, should be sobering. Production at Cantarell is dropping at a rate of 14%. Ironically, horizontal production wells enhance short-term output, but at the cost of precipitous decline rates once peak production is reached.

It is likely that oil will be much more scarce than almost anyone anticipates, and this could be accompanied by unexpected shocking consequences. We need to appreciate that oil, which makes up about 35% of all our total energy consumption, is vital. The electricity produced worldwide needs the indirect input of oil to support and maintain the extraction and transport of ores, fuels, and machinery for our electricity generating infrastructure. One consequence of oil scarcity could be electricity blackouts becoming permanent.

We can’t afford to be wasting precious resources on infrastructure that is already obsolete. If we are to successfully transition to a new energy paradigm, we need to be investing our capital and using our remaining oil to build the new infrastructure.

As Robert Rapier points out at R-Squared Energy Blog, solar is a good place to start.

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A while ago we linked to an article saying that high gas prices are threatening small towns as people who lived there could no longer afford to commute to far-away jobs in large urban areas.

Now here’s an article pointing out there’s a countervailing force at work.

“Many stores in rural towns — from small independent shops to local chains — are starting to enjoy a little life after years of seeing customers bypass them for distant malls.”

The logic driving retail development over the last decades has been to build big mass stores that draw from a huge distance. With gas prices over $4/gallon, that logic no longer makes as much sense as customers are less willing to make the long commute to the big city. The reallocation of dollars could eventually lead to a resurgence of small-town jobs, providing close-to-home employment for small town residents.  As a small town business owner points out, home-owned, independent businesses do have some advantages over their larger, big-city competitors:

“It’s always the perception that the small town can’t compete with the big city, but that’s false. We can’t have the selection, but we can beat (their) socks off on service. We’re here, and we’re local.”

Irina and I took a trip [via Amtrak] to visit family in Sacramento over the 4th of July holiday weekend. Amtrak was great - only ten minutes late arriving in Albany, and early arriving in Sacramento.   WARNING, if you’re planning a trip by train: sleepers are very conducive to sleeping - be sure to take an alarm so you’re up and ready to go upon arrival and don’t find yourself sitting on the platform, unkempt and still in your nighty.

Since my youth, Sacramento has exploded from a tidy little city at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers into a metropolitan area that sprawls subdivisions and strip malls, like an octopus along the tentacles of its freeways. There’s no community - as a result of cheap and easy mobility, people live, work, eat, socialize everywhere, therefore nowhere. The housing and commercial developments look pretty much the same you’d find in Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, the Portland suburbs - any post-1950s American metro area that’s suffered growth. Being there is like visiting a foreign country but staying in a hotel run by one of the international hotel chains: it doesn’t matter where you are, it could be anywhere.

The population of the metropolitan area is now well over two million. The “community” is everywhere, tied together by the road system and the automobile. The population of the region is projected to growth to over three million by 2035.

I couldn’t help but wonder, how is this all going to work as oil supplies run short and prices keep going higher and higher? How can we possibly power a monster which will be growing by 50% while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions to near zero?

There’s a Sacramento Area Council of Governments that’s in charge of planning. Right now they’re flogging a “preferred scenario” that embodies “smart growth” principles, including transportation choices, mixed use development, compact development, housing choice and diversity, infill and redevelopment, quality design, and public use open space.

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All voluntary, of course - local governments in the area aren’t compelled to follow the so-called Blueprint. God forbid we should mandate anything.

Government officials are boasting about what implementing the Blueprint would achieve: together with a $42 billion transportation plan designed to mesh with the Blueprint, reduce the amount of driving per household by 8% and global-warming emissions per household by 12% from their 2005 levels by 2035. Meanwhile, the number of households is increasing by a freaking 50%.

This isn’t “smart growth.” This is insanity. And given the fact of depletion - oil production from existing fields will be declining at about 5% per year and that not nearly enough new finds will be coming online to replace falling production, it’s an insanity that’s completely divorced from reality.

Planning in Oregon isn’t much different from planning in California. We project growth into the future, assume that the resources necessary to serve that growth will magically appear, and assume that no catastrophic consequences to unlimited growth will surface. Oregon is fortunate that its dilemma is an order of magnitude less overwhelming than California’s.

The New York Times reports that “Fuel prices shift math for life in far suburbs.”

“Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas. . .

“Across the nation, the realization is taking hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a change with lasting consequences. The shift to costlier fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes set far from urban jobs. . .

“[E]conomists and real estate agents are growing convinced that the rising cost of energy is now a primary factor pushing home prices down in the suburbs, particularly in the outer rings.”

Portland, Oregon, economist Joe Cortright has published a report titled “Driven to the Brink“(pdf) concluding the collapse of America’s housing bubble and its reverberations in financial markets has obscured a tectonic shift in housing demand. While housing prices are in decline almost everywhere, price declines are generally far more severe in far-flung suburbs and in metropolitan areas with weak close-in neighborhoods.

Cortright lays out the implications for land use policy:

“The new calculus of higher gas prices may have permanently reshaped urban housing • markets. Now that the era of cheap gas is over, demand for development on the fringe is down, and consumer interest and market potential lie in developing and redeveloping neighborhoods closer to the urban core. This trend could lower vehicle miles traveled, reducing spending on energy, stimulating local economies, reducing the trade deficit, and ultimately enabling the nation to meet greenhouse gas goals. This is a huge opportunity for urban economic development if public policy responds. Land use planning that accommodates more mixed-uses in existing neighborhoods and transportation investments that provide people with more alternatives to auto travel can help accommodate these new market realities. Indeed, the regions with these characteristics, in the form of strong urban cores, have been the ones that have weathered the downturn in housing markets best.”

The Oregon Legislature in 2005, shaken by the voters’ approval of Measure 37,  passed Senate Bill 82 creating the Task Force on Land Use Planning (the Big Look Task Force).  The Task Force was to comprehensively review the Oregon Statewide Planning Program and make recommendations to the 2009 Legislature for needed changes to land-use policy.

The Task Force’s preliminary recommendations have now been released. Goal One Coalition believes the Task Force’s recommendations are warped by ideological preconceptions and are dangerously misguided.

The briefing booklet distributed to “stakeholders” is heavy on free-market, anti-regulatory, pro-property rights ideology and light on its connection to the current reality of a world facing peak oil and potentially catastrophic climate change.  The Task Force recommends business as usual, full speed ahead.

Goal One Coalition was invited to meet with Task Force representatives and to respond to the Task Force’s recommendations. Our view, in sum is:

We believe an honest review of the preliminary recommendations compels a conclusion that the Task Force has failed to realistically and adequately identify “the current and future needs of Oregonians” or to evaluate the role of the land use planning program in meeting those needs. . . .

Revamping Oregon’s planning program to effectively meet the unprecedented challenges we face requires setting aside old issues and ideologies to take an unencumbered look at what reality requires of us. We believe that it is imperative that LCDC and DLCD play a lead role in forging and implementing a statewide response to our energy and climate challenges so as to maintain human prosperity within a healthy and stable ecosystem for all generations to come.

The full text of Goal One Coalition’s letter to the Task Force is available here.