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Creating the Post Carbon City

by Fault Lines Article - David Room

Creating the Post Carbon City

By David Room, Post Carbon Institute

postcarbon.jpg"
Illustration of a downtown transformed from car-city to the ecological pedestrian city from www.ecocitybuilders.org.

In the modern tradition many cities have become obsessed with growth. Some find themselves using new development to finance the services required for previous development patterns rely on ready access to cheap energy supplies. These supplies, however, are now coming into question in a way that is far more serious than the energy shocks of the 1970s; geology as opposed to geopolitics is driving a process that heralds permanent energy scarcity. If energy realists are right, cities will need to refocus drastically from energy-intensive development towards using much less energy, not only in the built environment, but also in the whole city infrastructure.

A Stressed Biosphere

Energy-subsidized human activity is causing severe biosphere destruction that threatens all life on the planet. Headlines regularly highlight rapid species extinction, fisheries depletion, and other disturbing trends. Most troubling, there is now widespread scientific agreement that human-induced global warming, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, is causing increasingly harmful climate disruption. Atmospheric greenhouse gases are at levels 30 percent higher than Earth has experienced during the last 400,000 years and they continue to rise inexorably. There are already clear signs of what may become uncontrollable and irreparable impacts. Though obvious to many that urgent and dramatic action is needed, civilization is clearly headed in the wrong direction.

Although human activity has always tended to disrupt ecosystems, climate and other environmental problems have been exacerbated in the last century. Soon for the first time, more people will live in cities than rural areas. City dwellers lead relatively energy intensive lives, even those that live in poverty. As a result, energy consumption scales closely with our explosive urban population growth. The primary enablers of the population run-up and the energy intensive urban lifestyle have been cheap oil and natural gas. After one hundred and fifty years of extraordinary growth, these fuel sources are reaching their limits.

Oil and Gas Peak

Oil and gas do not sit in underground caverns. They are trapped in gaps in certain types of rocks. This is a critical point, because it means that oil and gas fields do not simply drain out as from a tank, but generally follow a bell-shaped pattern of rising to a peak of production and then falling away. The US peaked in 1970. Peak oil makes nonsense of recent claims by BP that we have enough oil for forty years. Oil will still be pumping in a hundred and forty years--just not very much.

Alarm bells sounded in the 1970s with various oil and gas shocks, and there was talk of ‘running out.’ But the urgency was subsequently quelled by significant discoveries in Alaska and the North Sea; extraction was a matter of engineering--very difficult, but possible. Times are different. Unlike the 1970s, we have found no new huge provinces--in fact the North Sea was the last such find. Worse still, following a declining trend, in 2003 for the first time in many years no major fields were discovered, and world oil production rate is now six times the current discovery rate. To underline how different times are now, Matthew Simmons, chairman of the world’s largest private energy bank and writer of a forthcoming book on Saudi oil, believes that Saudi Arabia--the world’s largest oil exporter--has reached a plateau and that decline is imminent. The whole Middle East may also be on a plateau.

When global oil peak will occur is debatable, and can only be known for certain in retrospect. Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes and others believe we have passed the peak for conventional oil that is easily and economically extractable using known techniques. Colin Campbell of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas energy supply. Prudence requires that those involved in urban planning begin considering the possibility that oil is peaking now, since revamping an infrastructure takes decades.
Impetus for Change

The imminent peaking of global oil and gas production could be the catalyst for positive transformation of industrial society, and perhaps avert catastrophic climate change. It could also be disastrous. Essential systems such as food, electricity, health care, and transportation that form the foundation of industrial civilization depend on unfettered access to cheap oil and natural gas. Industrial agriculture relies upon natural gas derived fertilizers, oil-based pesticides, oil-intensive transport, and plastic packaging. In fact, fuel accounts for virtually 100% of the work that’s done in industrial society.

Once supply begins to drop and is no longer able to meet demand, less work will be done--which means less economic activity. Alternative energies, conservation, and new energy carriers such as hydrogen will undoubtedly play a role in future energy systems, yet collectively they will not be enough to preserve industrial society as we know it. A largely positive outcome could result from unusual planning, action, and enduring behavior change. Cities must prepare for a serious decrease in net energy availability in their twenty year time horizon or else accept “the cyanide solution of much more coal and nuclear” says Julian Darley, author of High Noon for Natural Gas.

The burden of cities

Most future initiatives to stave off an energy meltdown will be led from the local level--where most energy consumption actually occurs. Every city and community will have different portfolios of solutions tailored to their circumstances and culture. Solutions for Toronto suburbs will be different than those of Johannesburg. Cities--backed by governments providing appropriate support by ending fossil fuel subsidies, developing renewables, and considering carbon taxes – must begin experiments to discover what works and what does not in a given locale.

This knowledge must be gained before the coming energy crisis--experiments that don’t work now may be considered useful information. If experiments fail in crisis conditions, people are likely to suffer grievously as Cubans and North Koreans found out in the 1990s when they suddenly lost their cheap Soviet oil. In fact, their experiences will likely prove instructive as the rest of the world grapples with energy scarcity. To save precious time and resources, communities and cities will need to learn from existing models, share experiments, outcomes, and lessons learned; the term sister city will soon have a whole new meaning.

Cities need to prepare themselves to do less materially with much less energy and fewer natural resources, with the ultimate goal of living sustainably within the confines of their bioregion. “We need to reinvent the city," says Richard Heinberg author of The Party’s Over and Powerdown. “To not do so will be suicide.” One famous example of energy and natural resource collapse occurred on Easter Island, whose complex society unraveled into cannibalism.

Key building blocks of the solution

Relocalization is the process by which communities localize their economies and essential systems, such as food and energy production, water, monetary, governance, and media. To even out local difficulties relocalization will need some degree of regional integration. Cities need to support and collaborate with community groups on relocalization experiments, since cities are the information hubs and the final destination of most production and resources. The benefit will be adaptable communities and cities that collectively operate within the means of their bioregion, using locally produced food and fuel. As the author of The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler, puts it, “the 3000 mile Caesar salad will be much less palatable when oil is $100 a barrel.” Many regions will also have to experiment with local currencies, as there may be great difficulties with present financial systems.

“The city is radically out of sync with healthy life systems on earth, and is functioning in nearly complete disregard of its long-term sustenance”, says Richard Register of Eco City Builders. “We need to move beyond New Urbanism to rebuild cities for people instead of cars and regain a human balance with nature”. To roll back sprawl, Register suggests ecological city design as the framework for rebuilding cities around high density, mixed use centers with pedestrian plazas, solar greenhouses, rooftop gardens, ecologically informed architecture, and natural features like creeks. In Register’s ‘eco-city’ concept, centers are interspersed with natural open space, parks, and farming, linking to other city centers and regional centers via appropriate transit.

Sound municipal governance for the transition into the Post Carbon Age requires:
· Nimble government that rapidly reconfigures for energy scarcity
· Active support for relocalization, worker-owned cooperatives, locally owned businesses, and ecological city design
· Innovative municipal tools to affect land and energy use such as zoning ordinances, transfer development rights, tenancy agreements, and community benefit agreements
· A contingency plan (or “Plan B”) that addresses how essential systems will work with less energy
· Pressure on national leaders for support of local efforts, including demands for a global carbon tax to support local initiatives and experiments.

At first some of these suggestions will meet great resistance. As the evidence mounts, it will become easier to make the case for serious change. Because so much time has been wasted since the 1970s Oil Shocks were shrugged off, it is essential that cities begin preparations now. We have waited long enough. "The starting is very important", says Jaime Lerner, the driving force behind Curitiba's (Brazil) emergence as the world's most ecological city. "If you wait until you have all the answers, you will never start."

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Post carbon links:

ASPO - http://www.peakoil.net
Global Public Media - http://www.globalpublicmedia.com
Post Carbon Institute - http://urban.postcarbon.org
Museletter - http://www.museletter.com
Eco City Builders - http://www.ecocitybuilders.org Illichville http://www.roadkillbill.com/I-Map.html
Community Solution - http://www.communitysolution.org

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