Peak Oil – Part II: Our Social Responsibility

4/12/06 – Note: Since writing the following essay, I’ve read additional credible sources which dismiss “peak oil” as a flawed notion. Some experts believe we will not encounter serious problems with regard to oil supplies before the end of this century or even later. Ironically, that may make oil even more of a problem. As Jeffery Sachs’s pointed out in a recent address to the fourth biennial State of the Planet conference at Columbia University, continued ready availability of oil only gives us more opportunity to damage the earth’s ecological systems through fossil fuel consumption. As Sachs put it, “We’re going to be using lots of fossil fuels and putting an enormous amount of carbon in the atmosphere with all of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, so we have to find a way to de-carbonize our energy.”

That said, I believe this two part essay still gives an adequately balanced overview of the peak oil discusssion. If I feel otherwise in the future I’ll post revisions or a new essay.

———–

She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns — Joni Mitchell

It’s suicidal to build suburban subdivisions with peak oil looming. Image source: amazon.com/Richard Heinberg

In Part I of this essay, we reviewed the range of opinion on peak oil. In the long term, the end of easy and cheap oil, will be a huge issue. Fossil fuels are finite in supply, and peak oil, no matter its form or intensity, will necessitate worldwide fundamental changes in energy production and usage. That much is beyond debate.

We boiled the peak oil debate down to a couple of safe assumptions: Peak oil will have at least moderate economic consequences, and at least a moderate impact on our lifestyles. So while its historic impact will be tremendous, we can hope to luck out and see our lives as individual citizens affected only modestly. For our purposes on the Small Town Project, we needn’t go beyond this “moderate” assumption.

What does peak oil have to do with suburban development?
Our question is: Even if peak oil does not create dire problems for us, what are its implications for the building of suburban subdivisions such as those under way in Mt. Vernon and Lisbon? To answer that, we must first appreciate that typical American suburbs, the kind we’ve seen across the country for most of the last 60 years, are a huge waste of energy, particularly oil.

A suburb is, by nature, automobile oriented. Its inhabitants live in the suburb but work somewhere else. Daily commutes usually mean one person per car, back and forth from wherever work happens to be. Shopping too is generally somewhere else, meaning more trips to and from the mall, the city, or wherever goods and services are found. In fact, suburbanites are forced to travel some distance from home to do nearly anything they can’t do within the home itself. And in it all, they get there by car. Mass transit is almost unheard of. The result? Massive use of oil.

But that’s not where the waste of oil ends. All movement by vehicle to and within suburbs burns more oil as suburban homes are spread out over larger areas than their urban counterparts. This would include deliveries, service calls, children’s travel to and from schools, in short any travel to or within the suburbs. It took a massive government highway construction program to create American suburbia, and on those highways we burn untold barrels of oil from a U.S supply which peaked in 1970 and a world supply for which some experts believe a peak is imminent.

Something’s gotta give.

I say this, by the way, as someone with no ill feelings toward the aesthetic of the suburb. I grew up in a kind of suburb, and still find the suburban image comforting. I have to acknowledge it’s energy consumption, though, and can recognize how it will join forces soon, in troubling ways, with the onset of peak oil.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, two works which bear directly on this matter puts it this way:

Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Peak oil and your life
Sticking to the more moderate scenarios of peak oil’s likely impact on society, we can speculate cautiously about our future. As oil prices drive up the cost of gasoline, citizens in the suburbs will be hard hit. We’ve all come face to face already with $3 dollar per gallon gas. A few months ago gas prices in parts of Europe hit $7 a gallon. (reflecting, in part, their higher taxes on gas) How will we react to gas prices in the neighborhood of $10 a gallon? Unrealistic? Maybe for a time, but as cheap and easy production declines, the price can only go up. And on the downslope of the production curve, the rise in prices will be continuous.

As government and industry work to develop alternative energy sources and vehicles, we individuals will be forced by financial reality to conserve. No doubt we’ll do what we can — more car pooling, telecommuting. Suburbanites will need to do whatever possible to minimize the rising cost represented by their distance from work and the city.

Even people living in the central parts of towns like Mount Vernon and Lisbon will be faced with similar challenges if they use the towns as bedroom communities, commuting to Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. Their proximity to the goods and services our towns provide, however, will help soften the impact.

We’ll all have to conserve, but those in suburbs will struggle most.

Our social responsibility
One hopes we’ll do these things for ourselves and for society as a whole, knowing saving oil now will mean more will be available, at lower prices, for all of us tomorrow. That is our social responsibility. It’s easy to see how irresponsible it would be to drive excessively with world oil supplies shrinking and gas at $10 a gallon.

We need to ask, then, how responsible it is today to build suburban subdivisions, one of our society’s great energy wasters, knowing the pressures to come in just a few years as peak oil becomes an everyday reality. Does it make sense to build these tremendous energy sinks, knowing they’re only accelerating our confrontation with peak oil? Should we erect them now, understanding they’ll amplify our struggles in the coming years to keep pace with rising oil prices and dwindling production?

If we were to ask what kinds of actions could most effectively make peak oil even worse than it should be, building suburban subdivisions would be high on the list. Just as an individual would be hurting society by driving excessively during the period of our adjustment to peak oil, so is a developer hurting society – only to a far greater degree — by building suburban subdivisions today. And so is a city by approving the construction of suburbs. Doing so will directly impact the lives of all of us in the near future, intensifying our struggles with rising oil prices.

The suburbs: One of our society’s biggest oil wasters. Image source: avoe.org

Alternatives
Two alternatives to typical suburban subdivisions waste less oil. The first is obvious: Don’t build subdivisions. In a given town this is a viable alternative. When it’s the will of their citizens, city governments can employ any of a large number of tools to restrict residential growth. These include growth boundaries, open space purchases, purchases of development rights, conservation easements, caps on population size, large open space requirements, a variety of tax incentives, growth moratoria, and many others. We’ve touched on this topic here, and will eventually cover it thoroughly. Suffice it to say that if enough citizens of a town protest residential development vigorously enough, it is much less likely to happen.

The other choice is to build a different kind of neighborhood. “New Urbanism” provides an approach to neighborhood design that returns to sound principles of American city design which were abandoned in the race to build suburbs, particularly the suburbs of the ’50s and onward. To oversimplify a bit, New Urbanism returns to higher density, walkable communities with shorter blocks, centered around commercial districts. It’s not unlike what we have in older Mount Vernon and Lisbon today. It’s also not unlike what is called for in the Mount Vernon Comprehensive plan. Unfortunately the Comprehensive Plan seems to have been demoted to “minor nuisance” status by the mayor and certain members of the current Planning and Zoning Commission.

If a new housing development absolutely has to go up, adopting a New Urban design has important advantages. For the purpose of this essay, the important point is that its walkability and integration with commercial areas makes a New Urban neighborhood much less automobile dependent. It’s not the fossil fuel waster a typical suburb is. If someone can’t resist constructing a new development, a New Urban design is the more socially responsible way to go.

I urge the first alternative as much as possible for Mount Vernon and Lisbon. That’s because adding a few thousand more people, no matter the design, will change our towns’ character and level our land, costing us much of what most of us love about these small towns. (It’s not just what Don Cell, moderator of a discussion of Mount Vernon’s Comprehensive Plan called the “small is beautiful” point of view. I think we all know saving our land goes well beyond our personal tastes.) I concede, however, that the costs of residential development would be less if the design were of a New Urban sort. (There are a couple of other progressive design alternatives, such as “conservation design” which overlap somewhat with New Urbanism.)

What if peak oil’s impact is more than “modest”?
We’ve taken a conservative stance so far, assuming modest economic and lifestyle impacts for peak oil. What about all the rest of the analysts, the ones who are less optimistic? Clearly, if those somewhere farther down the pessimism scale turn out to be right, the construction of new suburban subdivisions would not just be irresponsible; it would be insane. For a good look at the views of the more pessimistic, though still reasonable analysts, see the film, The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream. Though a few of its conclusions are perhaps debatable, some in the scientific and economic communities do subscribe to its stance. We may bring it to Mount Vernon in January for a showing at the Bijou, simply because it provides much food for thought. (It’s also a lot more entertaining than the WalMart movie. :D)

So let’s not be irresponsible or insane. Let’s do the right thing. Let’s say no to new subdivision construction before it comes back to haunt us during an era of sky high oil prices.