Below are three letters about Peak Oil and its possible outcomes that were delivered to Boise Idaho Mayor Dave Bieter and the Boise City Council. The first two were also given to the Ada County Commissioners.

The first letter is an outline of America's current energy problem.

The second letter is some possible actions the city could take.

The third letter was sent after I met with Dave Bieter and fought for Peak Oil planning on the city level.

When the energy sh*t hits the political fan, don't let anyone say our local leaders didn't know it was coming. I'll testify otherwise.

**FIRST LETTER**

Hello Mr. Mayor, Boise City Council,

What has often been called ‘the most significant event in human history’ is beginning.

Matt Simmons, one of the worlds foremost energy finance bankers and energy council to the President and Vice President of the United States, said in a speech a few days ago that the energy crisis feared for so long is upon us. When asked how immediate the situation was, he responded that it is now time to learn to grow your own food.

T. Boone Pickens, America’s most famous oilman, said a few days ago that world oil production has peaked.

The Wall St. Journal reported June 12th that Saudi Arabia oil production was down 400,000 barrels a day as of last month, after holding steady for years. In Matt Simmons book “Twilight in the Desert”, he said that when Saudi Arabia peaks, the world has peaked.

Al Gore and Bill Clinton have both recently warned of Peak Oil and asked the media to begin informing the public.

I have been studying energy for several years now, have read most recent books on the subject, and have been following worldwide media coverage of this topic. It is not an understatement to say that Peak Oil should now be the most important consideration for all civic planning.

Peak Oil means that in the coming years:
• The corporate agriculture system of food production will fail because it is entirely predicated upon cheap oil, natural gas and transportation.
• We will experience severe inflation, a collapse of the dollar, and possibly deflation similar to the 1970’s.
• The interstate highway system will collapse and the electrical grid will cease to exist since it takes too much energy to maintain these systems.
• The current monetary system will not survive because it is predicated upon growth and growth will reverse since it is a direct result of an increase in energy supplies.
• Reverse globalization will take place and our local economy will eventually need to produce most all goods needed by the people, especially food.
• Most occupations will fade away and the dominant form of work will be producing food.
• The U.S. Federal Government will likely become powerless and probably cease to exist.

The bad news is that there is no substitute for oil, which has peaked worldwide, and natural gas, which will peak very soon. (There is a distinct possibility we may see shortages of natural gas if the coming winter is normal, or abnormally cold)

Ethanol, if produced using no fossil inputs could only supplant 1% of our motor fuel needs if we used every square inch of America to grow the fuel, it is a dead end.

Coal is being oversold as to its ability to be produced on a large scale, the remaining coal is hard to get to, and it is high in sulphur content.

Nuclear would take too long to build, uranium is becoming scarce (perhaps a 20 year supply is left) and the cost of construction will skyrocket due to the cost of energy.

Tar/Oil sands would only produce a tiny percentage of current supply and will likely be shut down (the project in Alberta shown on 60 Minutes has been stopped from growing) due to enormous environmental devastation.

The short story is that from now on, less energy will be available to our civilization every year, no matter what we do, and the depletion will accelerate rapidly. We humans love to be optimistic, but when all the evidence is laid out, there is no escaping the fact we are in deep trouble. Many have said that the coming years will make the Great Depression look like good times.

The reason so many people have been so wrong about world oil supply is that the USGS has been using ‘cooked’ figures that arose from OPEC rules. In the late 1980’s, OPEC ruled that a country could produce at a certain percentage of probable reserves and, that year every countries reserves jumped dramatically. The unaccounted for new reserve figures have been the ones quoted ever since.

There are many solutions to consider and they all need to be implemented on the local level. This may seem strange, but you, the members of city government, are now the most important leaders in our future.

I understand that Elaine Clegg is aware of this situation, but am not sure how deeply she has studied it.

I would be honored to share what I know in further detail, please let me know how I can help.

Bob Blurton
Former Boise City Council candidate
Technology marketing professional

1735 Melody St. Boise
rjblurton@hotmail.com

384.0706

Reading List:
1. Powerdown by Richard Heinberg
2. The Long Emergency by James Kunstler
3. The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg
4. Twilight in the Desert, by Matt Simmons
5. High Noon For Natural Gas, by Julian Darley
6. Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth Deffeyes
7. Half Gone by Jeremy Leggett
8. The End of Oil by Paul Roberts
9. The Coming Oil Crisis by Colin Campbell
10. Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil by David Goodstein
11. The Oil Factor by Stephen Leeb, PHD
12. The Coming Economic Collapse by Stephen Leeb, PHD
13. http://www.energybulletin.net/
Below is a brief page detailing the problem.
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

**SECOND LETTER**

Energy II: The Solutions

Hello Mr. Mayor, Boise City Council,

My previous letter gave a brief overview of a future of decreasing energy. I would now like to address some of the solutions.

It would be political suicide to start pouring money into an infrastructure in preparation for a future few are aware of, but perhaps there is another way.

The citizens of Boise place rising property taxes and growing traffic congestion, perhaps growth in general, as their biggest complaints. Since conservatives dominate, it would be an easy sell to stop expending resources in areas that have no future.

The traffic congestion and growth will self correct as people find ways to drive less and arrange shorter commutes, and declining energy supplies snuff out growth. The real concern is the many projects that are paving over farmland and adding to an infrastructure with no future.

If well orchestrated and marketed, a strong protectionist, anti-growth stand might facilitate a successful turnaround.

Things with no future are:

• Airports
• Parking structures, lots
• Freeways
• High schools and colleges
• Buildings taller than can be accessed with stairs
• Shopping areas built for car access, featuring giant, flat roofed buildings
• New houses that are not passive solar, or built zero energy
• High water landscaping
• Medium to large size companies, and companies that produce complex, energy intensive products
• Electrical grid, computers, the internet

The end of cheap energy means that most folks in the near future will be busy growing food. We need to find a way to make that transition without massive home foreclosures, high unemployment and starvation.

Richard Heinberg's book, Powerdown, talks in detail about how he thinks this might be accomplished without social chaos. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Howard Kunstler, is also a window into the likely scenarios that will occur.

For many years, local government has acted essentially as a growth manager and crisis referee. If we are to survive, local government will need to assume a leadership role and shed the passive, reactionary one.

Perhaps the best ‘case study’ to peer into our future is Cuba. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a US embargo, permaculturists from Australia saved a starving Cuba. They taught Cuba how to produce their own food in a manner that was sustainable with no fossil fuel inputs. Cuba now produces about 50% of the food needed for their large cities within the city, and the rest is produced in the surrounding area.

Below are some of the latest studies about Cuba.
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes. Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities
The Greening of the Revolution: Cuba's Experiment with Organic Farming

We need to:
• Stop spending money in areas with no future
• Keep people employed
• Encourage community and personal food gardens
• Ramp up agricultural education
• Encourage small, local manufacturing companies and farmers
• Discourage immigration
• Protect water quality and availability
• Protect the sustainable harvest of nearby forests

Zoning laws and ordinances will need to be changed frequently to reflect the new reality. People will need to be able to build structures in the city using techniques like ‘cob’ and ‘straw bale’, and will also need to have more animals such as chickens on their property.

Boise must have plans in place for creating local currency, because the likelihood of a dollar collapse is very high.

This is my personal opinion, but I believe it would be in the public interest to shake up the news-for-profit crowd, and replace them with non-profit organizations if necessary. Our local news sources are virtually useless, and mostly harmful. A successful transition needs real, useful information, not endless car crash, fire and crime stories. Canadian news organizations are an example of a system that informs the public and could be our role model.

In the coming months and years we will hear of fantastic new ways of producing energy. Most, and probably all of them, will be simply a desperate attempt to draw investment money into a marginal and often useless business scheme. The first chapter in Richard Heinberg's book, Powerdown, is a dissertation on the fundamentals of energy and is difficult, but mandatory reading in understanding our energy future. A new type of super efficient solar cell or amazing new wind turbine would buffer us against the coming crisis, but only for a few years. You cannot build solar cells or wind turbines using non-fossil fuel inputs so they will only be a temporary solution at best.

Even if a new energy source were invented that was non-polluting and essentially free, our plight would only be drawn out perhaps another 10 or 20 years. This is because we are running out of the mine-able metals and minerals that are the underpinning of the industrial economy. They are the transformative raw materials that make energy useful, and are becoming ever more scarce.

The key to the future of Boise is to change rapidly as the situation warrants. The danger is in trying to hold on to the energy intensive, industrial model as it becomes antiquated. True leadership will be the top requirement as we venture into the most difficult period in human history.

Bob Blurton
Former Boise City Council candidate
Technology marketing professional

1735 Melody St. Boise
rjblurton@hotmail.com

384.0706

**THIRD LETTER**

Follow up letter to meeting with Dave Bieter...

Hello Mr. Mayor,

Thank you for meeting with me this morning. I would like to share a few more thoughts about the topic of a ‘peak oil’ task force.

The ideas I shared this morning were those of authors who have studied and written on the topic for many years. It has taken me several years of reading their writing to actually feel I have a good grasp of the problem, and the potential solutions.

There are two main enemies you will encounter in quickly trying to assimilate this material. The first is the opinions of people who have not researched the issue, and the second is the free market trying to capture investor dollars.

Most folks think they know quite a bit about energy issues, but a recent survey told a much different story. The researchers concluded that while most everyone thinks they are knowledgeable, they are mostly misinformed, and few have any concept of any of the deeper issues.

The second problem is that we are constantly bombarded by the promise of wonderful new technologies that will make our oil problems a thing of the past. This leads most folks to think that ‘they’ will come up with something, so why worry. The truth is that governments have been throwing billions of dollars at the issue and have little to show for their efforts.

As for alternatives to oil, the lead time to fully ramp up new technologies and broadly implement them is about 10 to 15 years, and as much as 25 years or more for Generation IV Nuclear. This is a problem because as oil prices steadily rise, the cost of implementing these technologies will skyrocket. Most researchers believe that even when fully ramped up, which we probably won’t be able to do, alternative technologies could only replace about 25% of our liquid motor fuels. These alternatives will also only be temporary since you cannot make windmills with wind power, solar cells with solar power, or nuclear facilities with nuclear power.

Alternative energy projects started 10 or more years ago would have given our energy crisis a softer landing, but they would not work in the long run. Cheap oil has created our highway system, electrical grid, food creation and delivery system, and nearly every other facet of our civilization; and expensive oil will reclaim them much more swiftly than most can imagine.

The main issue now is carrying capacity of the land without long distance transportation, or cheap farm machinery and fertilizer. The ‘Green Revolution’ was a product of cheap oil. Many authors now believe that we have overshot the carrying capacity of the world by about 5 billion people, and, unfortunately, America will be among the worst off countries, since most of our systems are entirely predicated on cheap oil.

I ask you to please consider allowing me to work closely with you on this issue. Having a person who understands the incredibly complex interrelations that make up the peak oil issue, and energy issues in general is invaluable.

I ask that you please allow me to assist in starting a city-sponsored task force that would recruit members with deep energy knowledge, and no conflicts of interest. If any person in this valley is better versed in energy knowledge, I would gladly cede to them.

It is critical to get the ball rolling now. I fear that handing the information to your air quality person will just immediately overwhelm them and the issue will die.

The people of Boise need to know that global oil production has peaked, that it is called ‘peak oil’, and that this event has serious implications that have been written about by many authors, for a great many years, and that their community is actively working on a solution.

Please let me help you with this issue, there is literally no time for others to start researching this from scratch.

Thank you,
Bob Blurton