City of the Future

Worrying Trends

As the U.S. prepares to enter the summer driving season, gasoline prices are rising to record highs, exceeding the both the post-Katrina spike and even the inflation-adjusted high of 1981.

Analysts are blaming shortages in refinery capacity. Last week, Paul Sankey, an oil analyst, told the Senate Energy Committee that “We are one major incident away from a 1970s-style gasoline crisis.”

Matthew Simmons believes that supply constraints combined summer demand is setting the United States up for “searing gasoline shortages” in the months ahead. “The painful last 13 weeks ran out our USA gasoline clock. We must be right at the edge of genuine ‘minimum operating supplies’ in at least a handful of states,” he writes. A bad hurricane season—which several weather agencies are predicting—could make things much worse.

New York City Car Show

A few weeks ago, my wife and I took my son (age 4) and daughter (3) to see the annual New York City Auto Show. We did not drive to get there—New York being, ironically, one of the few cities in the country that has not entirely emptied itself in the service of the car (though it remains far from undamaged by the demands automobiles make on urban planning). Instead, we took the subway to the 34th street station and walked.

A cool April breeze blew through the corridors of what used to be called Hell’s Kitchen. Once upon a time, before the era of cars, this area was jammed with factories and tenements, famous for its iconic squalor. Now, as we walked cross-town past parking lots with stacked cars on elevators, across wide avenues just south of the where a tangle of ramps and leads in and out of the Lincoln Tunnel, the noise of traffic infused the whole area with a gritty cacophony—an ambiance that was at once nerve-wracking and part of the area’s urban charm. At the edge of the Hudson River, on the far west side of the neighborhood, was the Jacob K. Javits convention center where the car show was being held—a modernist clump of glass-covered cubes, mostly indistinguishable from any of a dozen other convention centers around the country.

Weekly Update on Peak Oil and Related Topics

On the oil front:

Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, a former director of the Iranian oil company, and a key peak oil modeler, has published several articles recently. Bakhtiari’s theory of peak oil is most distinctive in that it posits several distinct post-peak oil phases; Bakhtiari believes we are currently in the first, a period just past peak of gradual decline. The next phase, starting around 2010 will be much steeper.

“I cannot foresee any other 'Event' coming to eclipse 'Peak Oil', not even the World Wars which might be unleashed in the Peak's aftermath and further fueled by widespread resources' scarcity.”