Urban Age - Creating the Post-Carbon City

Urban Age - Creating the Post-Carbon City

By David Room

Many cities have become obsessed with growth. Some find themselves using new
development to finance the services required for previous development. Such
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 away from energy-intensive
development towards using significantly less energy, not only in the built
environment, but in the whole city infrastructure.
A Stressed Biosphere

Energy-subsidized human activity is causing severe biosphere destruction
that threatens life on the planet, human and other. 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, irreparable impacts.
Civilization is clearly headed in the wrong direction, and urgent and
dramatic action is needed.

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 rises with our explosive urban
population growth. Cheap oil and natural gas have been the primary enablers
of the population increase and the energy-intensive urban lifestyle.
However, 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 U.S. peaked in 1970. Peak oil makes nonsense of recent claims by
British Petroleum that we have enough oil for forty years. Of course, 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 now. Unlike
the 1970s, we have no new huge provinces have been discovered-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 the 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 production 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 University geologist Kenneth Deffeyes and
others believe that 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 and, Ali Samsam
Bakhtiari of the National Iranian Oil Company, using separate calculations,
both predict that the peak will occur in 2006 for all oil, including
unconventional. For oil and natural gas together, the Association predicts a
peak of 2011. Many other geologists predict peak oil within a decade. The
glaring exception is the U.S. Geological Survey, which puts peak in mid
century. Surely, high oil pricing, recent write-downs of oil reserves by
Shell and others, record natural gas pricing and resource conflicts
foreshadow serious issues with world energy supply. Prudence requires that
those involved in urban planning begin considering the possibility that oil
is peaking now, since revamping infrastructure takes decades.
Impetus for change

The imminent peaking of global oil and gas production could be the catalyst
for the 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 is
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 extraordinary 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's suburbs will be different
from those of Johannesburg. Cities-backed by governments providing
appropriate support through 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 do not work now may be considered useful information. If experiments
fail in crisis conditions, people are likely to suffer grievously. Cuba is a
salutary example of a country that had to face a sudden and near total
collapse in both its oil supply and most of its external economic system.
Its 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 sustainable
living largely 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
require 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 James Howard Kunstler, the author of The
Geography of Nowhere, puts it, "the 3,000 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 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. "The
starting is very important," says Jaime Lerner, President of the
International Union of Architects, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, and the
driving force behind that city's emergence as the world's most ecological
city. "If you wait until you have all the answers, you will never start."

David Room is Communications Director of the Post Carbon Institute. He has
broad experience in environmental affairs, energy, and the use of technology
for communications and collaboration. He has a Masters in Engineering
Economic Systems and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford
University. He can be reached at dave@postcarbon.org.