City of the Future

New York Sustainability Initiatives

Anyone with an even minimal awareness of the true scope of the world’s coming energy problems is likely to find recent U.S. public discourse on the subject to be downright depressing. At the Federal level, policy and rhetoric is split between the “last man standing” approach to securing energy resources exemplified by the Bush administration and the gauzy fantasies of Democrats who think, against all evidence, that we can keep everything running with ethanol.

But where our national leaders seem completely unable to face the coming crisis with any real foresight or intelligence, there are signs that a few states and cities are beginning, at least, to take a hard, realistic look at what it will take to respond to the energy challenges of the next fifty years. Significantly, both San Francisco and Portland have passed recent peak oil resolutions, which at least takes the important step of admitting there is a problem.

New York has not gone that far, but with the state and city plans recently put forward by Governor Eliot Spizter and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the region is nonetheless positioning itself to at least begin to mitigate the coming catastrophe. Will the plans be enough? Hard core peak oil doomers will be quick to point out that in the near future, decreasing energy supplies coupled with a collapse of the U.S. dollar will make the kind of new investments called for by the Mayor and the Governor very difficult to implement. They may be right. But if we are to hold out hope for some kind of new paradigm as an alternative to collapse, then Spitzer and Bloomberg’s plans are at the very least steps in the right direction.

At the state level, Governor Spitzer’s initiative is focused primarily on energy production and conservation through common sense proposals such as revenue decoupling for power companies, strengthening efficiency standards and promoting the upstate economy by building renewable energy plants. The plan includes initiatives to reduce power use by 15% by 2015—an ambitious proposal, considering that power use is actually projected to increase—and the awarding of grants to assist companies to open nine new wind farms, a significant increase from the four current large-scale wind sites. Unlike his predecessor, Spitzer has shown appropriate skepticism about ethanol, and has offered no new initiatives to promote it.

At a the city level, Mayor Bloomberg recently released PlanNYC, a proposal to redevelop and promote a greener New York city by 2030. (For a good outline of pros and cons, see Glenn’s article at the NYC Oil Drum). The plan’s most controversial initiative is to introduce congestion pricing to Manhattan to discourage excessive car traffic in the city. While the mere mention of such an idea provoked predictable outrage in some circles, considering the damage and pollution caused by auto congestion and the fact that only 4.6% of New Yorkers commute to Manhattan by car, congestion pricing is only common sense—especially if the revenues can be put toward increasing access for public transit.

On that front, PlanNYC proposes numerous significant improvements, including: the long awaited building of a 2nd avenue subway line, an extension of the 7 train to 10th avenue, a significant expansion of commuter rail (including a new rail link between Grand Central and Penn Station and a Lower Manhattan) and expansions of ferry service and bus rapid transit.

In terms of energy, PlanNYC calls for a big efficiency push, including a 10% reduction of electricity consumption by city government and creating an energy efficiency authority for the city, and, perhaps most critically, a plan to cut the peak electrical load by 25% through load managing programs and real time pricing (through net metering). On the supply side, the plan will promote solar, wind, tidal and biogas generation.

What is missing? It would have been nice to see either the state or city address the question of regional rail, which will undoubtedly be necessary in the coming years. New York State has hundreds of once beautiful small towns that have fallen behind economically with the loss of manufacturing and the relentless centralization of agriculture. The coming end of cheap energy suggests that it will be necessary to rebuild regional economies; and in an era of extremely high oil prices it will only make sense to rely on much more efficient freight and passenger rail rather then cars and trucks.

Unfortunately, it seems likely that no matter what we do, New York (and the rest of the country) will soon have to deal with serious shortages of both oil and natural gas; one wishes that plans like these were implemented 30 years ago instead of today. Nevertheless, in a climate in which most of what is proposed and discussed is either clueless or craven, it is refreshing to see politicians who are willing to propose plans that are at once ambitious and realistic. Lets hope that they are successfully implemented and expanded upon in the coming years.

The GAO and Peak Oil

Amidst several weeks of hearings about global warming, a less noticed but equally important piece of energy news came out of the Capitol last month when the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, released a long-awaited study on the question of when global oil supplies will peak and begin to decline.

Entitled, “Uncertainty About Future Oil Supply Makes it Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production,” the report offers little new information to those who have been following the recently escalating debate about peak oil. But given the lack of attention that government at all levels has paid to this extremely serious threat, it provides a welcome validation to those who argue that there is much to be worried about when it comes to the question of future oil supplies.

For the past few years peak oil activists—a disparate group of retired petroleum geologists, oil industry insiders, ecologists and social critics—have fought an uphill battle against the oil industry’s public relations machine to argue that an imminent peak and permanent decline of global oil production is about to devastate the world economy.

Sometimes dismissed as a mere theory, peak oil is more accurately described as shorthand for the scientific observation that any given oilfield or oil producing region tends to increase its production until around half of its oil is gone, and then declines. United States oil production peaked in 1970 at 10 million barrels per day; today, even after 37 years of improvements in the technology of finding and producing oil, the U.S. produces about half of what it did then. According to the GAO report, most countries outside of the Middle East are now also in decline.

As for total world production, the report also points out that “most studies estimate that oil production will peak sometime between now and 2040.” That may seem like a wide timeframe, but according to a 2005 report commissioned by the Department of Energy, adequately mitigating a peak in world oil production would require a crash program to develop alternatives twenty years before the peak in order to avoid “significant shortfalls,” in liquid fuels. Given that under any circumstances an increasing percentage of the world’s remaining oil will have to come from politically unstable or unfriendly regions, it is difficult to see how the high-profile critics of the peak oil movement can continue to justify complacency.

In reality, it is extremely unlikely that the peak will be delayed until anywhere near 2040; optimistic scenarios making that case depend on highly dubious assumptions about both how much conventional OPEC oil remains and how rapidly countries like Canada can ramp up their production of unconventional supplies.

By contrast, numerous experts and industry insiders believe that we could be at or very near peak production now. A series of chilling technical debates on the Oildrum website have recently addressed the question of whether Saudi Arabia is in or near production decline. The majority opinion seems to be that they are, based on conclusions reached both mathematical models and bottom-up analysis. The most recent post projects that by the middle of this year global supply will not meet projected demand (a sentiment echoed in recent interviews by Matthew Simmons), resulting price spikes, higher volatility and possible shortages for the next two years, at which point the world experiences “drastic demand destruction” coupled with the possibility of emergency rationing.

If these authors are correct, the implications could be severe, especially for energy intensive countries like the United States. According to the GAO report, “the consequences would be most dire if a peak occurred soon, without warning . . . competition for increasingly scarce energy would drive up prices, possibly to unprecedented levels, causing severe economic damage.”

As for the prospect of turning to alternatives, “[The Department of Energy] projects that even under optimistic scenarios, by 2015 these technologies could displace only the equivalent of 4 percent of projected U.S. annual consumption.”

If there is any weakness in the GAO report, it’s that despite its warnings, it still fails to adequately convey the breadth and scope of the crisis. It never mentions, for instance, that North American natural gas supply is also currently in decline, a fact that poses serious obstacles to attempts to increase production of gas-dependent ethanol and oil sands. As for solutions, the report focuses far too heavily on hypothetical improvements in automotive technology, when in reality it may be time to face the idea that soon we will simply have to drive much less.

For that matter, it may be time to recognize that any number of our current social and economic arrangements—from globalization, to suburban-sprawl based living, to industrial agriculture—are not inherent parts of the natural order, but are merely artifacts of a cheap oil era. If that’s true, the world could be in for a very bumpy ride—and the future could look a lot different than most people expect.