City of the Future

Is the Desire to Relocalize Merely Aesthetic?

Last week, peak oil analyst Stuart Staniford wrote an essay on the Oildrum critiquing the relocalization movement which has arisen in response to the threat of peak oil. In a nutshell, Staniford argues that relocalizers—who Staniford rather derisively calls “reversalists”—are incorrect in their belief that imminent declines in oil availability will cause modern industrial agriculture to become untenable, requiring large numbers of people to relocalize and return to rural communities.

On the contrary, Stanford argues, high oil prices have, so far, benefited rather than harmed industrial producers. Given the importance of food, he says, even higher oil prices would imply that industrial producers will simply be able to outbid the urban poor for fuel indefinitely. He then accuses “reversalists” of “wishful thinking” and “nostalgia for the past,” and concludes by saying that “urbanites worried about their future should not be looking to buy or rent a smallholding as a solution to their problems—industrial farmers are extremely efficient, and there is no way to compete with them except by becoming one.”

$100 Oil

Two and a half years ago, DailyKos blogger Jerome a Paris (a Paris-based investment banker who works with alternative energy) began a series of posts on the site called “Countdown to $100 Oil”. At the time, a few years of surprisingly high oil prices and the release of several books about the imminent arrival of peak oil seemed to suggest that awareness of energy issues was gradually increasing. When Jerome began the series, oil was hovering at $59 a barrel; $100 seemed like a shockingly high figure, one which would inaugurate a very different world than the one we were experiencing.

Fifty-six posts later, oil has finally reached the $100 mark—10 times its low in 1999— and Jerome has concluded his series. Strangely, though, it seems that there is little more awareness of peak oil now than there was then. At the moment, Jerome’s diary doesn’t even appear on DailyKos’s recommended list. Granted, the news comes on the eve of the Iowa caucus, and DailyKos is first and foremost a political website. But when he began his series, it seemed that most of his diaries would end up on the recommended list, and while the final post generated a healthy number of comments, the one just before it got only 17—on a site where the most popular diaries get 400.

Depressingly, all of this seems to confirm the perception of peak oil doomers that America and the world will do nothing to truly address energy issues until faced with a full-blown crisis, at which point it will be too late to avoid a full-blown economic collapse or worse. No dollar figure, however symbolic, will matter until the nation is faced with gas lines, rationing and empty supermarket shelves. Maybe that should be the next countdown.