We have an imminent and potentially devastating emergency to deal with.

• Develop Action Plans for Energy Descent
• Develop Action Plans for Energy Shocks
• The Post Carbon Cities website at the Post Carbon Institute
• ICLEI Website
• Cool Cities website
• Suggested Potential Solutions

To our Municipal Leadership
While global warming is clearly an unprecedented challenge to humanity in the long term, peak oil will provide far more enormous challenges in the shorter term and, coincidentally, the solutions are virtually identical. If we don’t solve the challenge of peak oil, we won’t need to worry about global warming -- it will be too late.

Peak oil presents virtually incomprehensible implications. Rising oil prices are highly inflationary because oil is used in everything we do or make or eat and it’s going to become very expensive, very quickly. And, its availability, to keep our commerce and economy running, is going to decline just as dramatically.

There is an immediate and urgent need to focus on some big issues: First, we must dramatically modify the behavior of our citizens, government and businesses in terms of energy use and our approach to life itself; and, two, significantly modify our physical transportation and energy infrastructure, and the fundamental design of our cities.

Behaviors must be changed to conserve energy on a drastic scale. People will either adapt because of foresight, planning, and phased learning, or they will be forced to adapt abruptly because of the declining resources and will likely be unprepared for what they have to do. A conscious and informed approach will be far less painful than hitting a brick wall at full speed.

• Our infrastructure must be changed to provide new methods of mass public transportation and new sources of energy for virtually everything we do. We will be moving to a world that uses electricity for much more than we do now, especially transportation.
• City designs must be reoriented toward local pedestrian and bicycle traffic, with public transportation for longer distance travel, and away from the personal automobile culture. Clustered living with services within walking distance will be required.

We face a huge task, one that Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute described in his book, “Plan B 3.0”, thus:

“The challenge for our generation is to build a new economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed.”

Will alternatives come to the rescue? Unfortunately, not in time. Today, all alternative energy sources combined currently produce only 1½% of the total energy supply in the United States, and it took us 25-30 years to get to that level. Key alternative technologies and fuels currently supply the equivalent of only about 1% of U.S. consumption of petroleum products, and the Department of Energy projects that even by 2015, they could displace only the equivalent of 4 percent of projected U.S. annual consumption. And, incidentally, be mindful that because of Global Warming, without rapid successes in developing carbon sequestration technology and systems, coal is over.

There won’t be a single solution – there are no silver bullets. We need to start with the recognition that we don't have any models for a sustainable technical society to work from, and a more flexible (and arguably more successful) strategy comes within reach. The solutions will be more like buckshot than silver bullets.

What Should Cities in Washington County Do?

• Come up to speed on the Peak oil Issue quickly
• Publicly explain the problem
• New city designs need to start now, not a year from now.
• The longer you wait, the more expensive and difficult it will be with depleting energy supplies.
• · Make bold and profound changes. Half-measures are not enough, and they may even make the situation worse. There is a wide gap between adding buzzwords to the city manager's lexicon and actually changing business as usual.
• Raise the priority of Energy Uncertainty to become your top Municipal concern (this doesn’t mean neglecting other priorities, it simply means being certain you are considering a post-peak environment in every decision and action). This will require significant education of your staff, and thinking way outside the box.
• Don’t ask, but inform our citizens that we all need to change our behavior, immediately. Then implement policies with teeth to motivate them to achieve it. An extensive education campaign is essential. Starting six months from now will be too late.
• Take a very strong and visible leadership role: If a local government does not show leadership by its own use of renewable energy and dramatic energy-efficiency solutions and behaviors, it will be hard to enjoy credibility with the constituents when asking them to make the hard changes.
• Move quickly -- Aggressively support and utilize “Performance Zoning” to find working solutions, and set a very high bar for compliance – an enormous amount of experimentation is going to be required, quickly, and there are people willing to start them. Some experiments will succeed and others will fail, but dragging variance requests through the bureaucracy will take precious time that we simply do not have and will act as a severe barrier to progress. Performance zoning is your friend. Become the facilitator rather than the roadblock.
• We recommend convening a County-wide conference to include all the municipalities and County government to coordinate approaches and capitalize on economies of scale. You may wish to include key business leaders and citizens in this conference.
• We strongly urge you to establish an official Sustainability function within the County to coordinate activities. This office will need the authority of government for it to work.
• We strongly urge that each municipality join ICLEI for assistance and ideas in your approaches (ICLEI is an international association of local governments and national and regional local government organizations that have made a commitment to sustainable development.) Some of you are already members and we congratulate you on a wise course of action.
• We strongly urge that each municipality join the Cool Cities campaign for even further assistance and resources. (The Cool Cities campaign empowers local leaders to encourage their cities to implement smart energy solutions to save money and build a cleaner, safer future.) We congratulate Beaverton, Lake Oswego and Portland for already participating in this valuable program.
• Influence Home Owners Associations to appropriately modify CC&R’s that act as barriers to implementing energy conservation or generation, or food production at home…such as restrictions on solar panels or home improvements that may not meet specific HOA aesthetic guidelines, and the planting of front-yard vegetable gardens.
• Influence business leaders to not only implement far-reaching energy conservation measures in their own businesses and supply chains, but to aggressively promote it to their employees as well.

Innovations in small-scale alternative energy, massive investments in public-oriented transit, redesigns of city infrastructure, changes in zoning and energy efficiency standards, changing citizen behaviors, and efficient farming approaches are going to endow many regions with a much softer landing. Will our County be one of them? One can expect that no matter what we do, everyday life will necessarily become much more laborious, but also more meaningful as billions of human-hours shift from processing paperwork and watching TV to the intensive learning of new skills to keep people alive. The future is going to demand, and create, an enormous “green-collar” job market.

We’re facing a severe and long emergency, and it’s starting now. Our citizens need to be educated and led. Most people know something is up with oil, but don’t quite know what, and it doesn’t hurt enough yet for them to get involved. That’s what they’re waiting for and, unfortunately, that approach will be very destructive. They need honesty on the issue – no glossing it over. They need to clearly understand how urgent it is that we significantly change our way of life. Everyone living in the developing or developed world is in the same boat – we aren’t in this alone. Every municipality in this nation is facing the same emergency. Some are aware of it – others don’t have it anywhere on the radar. Every country of the world is facing it – some already have been experiencing it for some time. Do nothing and we likely face catastrophe with an every-man-for-himself approach.

Above all, please act now.

Use the resource links at the top of this page.