The Peak Oil Crisis: The Portland Report

By Tom Whipple

Thursday, 15 March 2007

Last week Portland, Oregon became the first governmental body in the US to not only acknowledge that imminent peak oil is a reality, but also to publish a plan as to what the city should be doing to cope. Breaking new ground has both its perils and its rewards. The peril is that you have no guidelines to the road ahead. The advantage is that there is no standard of comparison so your efforts instantly become the textbook to mitigating the effects of peak oil at the local level.

As someone who is familiar with the literature and follows the peak oil story on a daily basis, I can report that the folks on the Portland Peak Oil Task Force have produced a succinct, outstanding report that should be read by every local official everywhere. While there will naturally be many local variations, Portland’s approach to the problem contains much that seems universally applicable.

The tone of the Portland report is one of moderation. Although it deals with the most serious issue the world has had to face since the world wars and threats of nuclear holocaust a generation or two ago, the report’s 85 pages methodically makes the way through the peak oil story and what needs to be done. In a matter-of-fact way, the report deals with numerous issues likely to ensue from peak oil and offers many new insights as to what is likely to happen and what we as a civilization should be doing to transition away from fossil fuels and feedstocks.

Portland clearly benefited from the expertise of the many people who served on the task force and its four expanded subcommittees. This process allowed the task force to break down a large and unwieldy problem into more manageable topics (land use and transportation, food and agriculture, public and social services, and economic change) to come up with some new insights and good recommendations for each.

The report’s authors grasp the point that whether oil depletion impacts our civilization this year, in three years, ten years or 20 years makes little difference as the changes required will be so massive that we need to start working on the problem immediately. The authors give short shrift to those who claim we will be saved by alternatives and new technologies by making the point that there is nothing on the horizon that can cheaply, quickly and efficiently replace oil and natural gas. They warn against rapid drops in oil prices as we saw last year as nothing more than the volatility we can expect as we approach peak oil.

In assessing the impact of peak oil, the report starts with the most fundamental of issues: the human carrying capacity of the planet which has been dramatically increased in the last 100 years by the widespread use of fossil fuels.

Drawing on the historical experiences of the 1973 Arab oil embargo which cut world oil production by six or seven percent, the report notes the harm done to US economic growth, productivity and rate of inflation. This discussion leads into three possible scenarios for peak oil’s impact on the world.

In the best scenario, oil availability drains away slowly so that 20 years from the beginning of oil depletion, 50 percent of current consumption is still available. Under such a scenario prices would be volatile with demand dropping in response to spikes and increasing as prices recede.

A second scenario would be sudden disruptions in supplies which could last for months or years leaving the advanced economies in a state of emergency for long periods. Society could cope but with much more disruption.

The final scenario is social disintegration. The economic impact of peak oil simply becomes so great that multiple global systems, financial, currency or trade fail. Governments are forced to concentrate on basic human needs and are overwhelmed. The Portland study concentrates on the long-term transition scenario as a situation that if properly handled has the potential to deal with shocks and prevent social deterioration.

The specific impacts on various aspects of Portland’s economy and social fabric are too numerous to list much less discuss. The basic recommendation is nothing earthshaking— cut absolute use of oil and natural gas in half over the next 25 years. The faster this happens, the smaller Portland’s or anybody else’s vulnerability to shrinking supplies of oil and natural gas will be.

Fifty percent is a challenging number for population growth and is likely to continue, and some services – police, medical, fire, garbage, sewage, clean water – are so vital to modern civilization that more modest reductions in their energy consumption are likely to be feasible. Thus the impact of an absolute 50 percent reduction in oil and natural gas consumption is likely to be closer to two-thirds or more for the average citizen.

The recommendations as to how to achieve such a reduction, even over two decades, are pretty straight forward: mass transit, better land use, walkable communities, far more efficient vehicles, freight moving from planes and trucks to rail and water, building standards improve, and above all, education.

There are other features of the report, such as emphasis on joint planning and coordination with surrounding and other levels of government.

Again, for the first cut at describing what is likely to be one of the major paradigm shifts of the 21st century, the folks in Portland have done an excellent job. Much of what they say is applicable everywhere so their report might turn out to be an instant classic. Should you be interested in just how we might all get through the years ahead, a pdf of the report is available online at: link

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Long Range City Planning

A reflection on cities of the future
by James Howard Kunstler

Published on 28 Sep 2006 by Energy Bulletin.

Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation made its debut every month – cars, radio, movies, airplanes – there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887 – 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.

Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next forty years – and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post World War Two American planners, and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.

Other visions of that early period involved Tom Swiftian scenes of Everest-size skyscrapers with Zeppelin moorings on top, linked to zooming air trams, while various types of personal helicopters swooped between things. Virtually all these schemes had one thing in common: the city of the future they depicted was vibrant. We know now, here in the USA anyway, that this was the one thing they got most wrong. By 1970, many American cities were stone dead at their centers, especially the industrial giants of the Midwest. Ten years later, the American city of the future was the nightmare vision of Blade Runner, an acid rain-dripping ruin fit only for androids.

These days, a new generation of mojo architect savants such as Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are retailing an urban futurism that is basically warmed-over Corbu with an expressionist horror movie spin, featuring torqued and tortured skyscrapers, made possible by computer-aided design, clad in Darth Vadar glass or other sheer surfaces, with grim public spaces exquisitely engineered to induce agoraphobia. There’s more than a tinge of sadism in all this, though Koolhaas is much more explicit in his many writings than the less-voluble Libeskind about consciously surrendering to a zeitgeist of cruel alienation. But these are also very rarified exercises among a tiny group of mutually-referential fashionista narcissists, while the general public itself – at least the fraction that thinks about anything – only grudgingly goes along with it as a sort of drear obeisance to the religion of art.

An alternate awful urban vision of the future, advanced by public intellectuals such as author Mike Davis (The Ecology of Fear), is actually more about the city of the present: the third world mega-slum as embodied by such ghastly organisms as present-day Lagos, Lima, and Karachi. This is a vision of plain toxic hypertrophy with no particular artistic or architectural overlay to it. These cities have organized according to a simple logarithmic progression of horrible conditions – more people, more pollution, more poverty – nourished by cheap energy globalism, with the expectation that they will only continue along that path and get worse.

Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the New Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to the body of principle and methodology drawn from successful historic practice rather than science fiction, politics, or metaphysicsThat is, they rely on urban design that has proven to work well in the past and is worth emulating – by which I mean the relations of buildings to public space and with each other, not the deployment of sewer lines and other infrastructure. The New Urbanists are marginalized because their reliance on tradition is considered sentimental and nostalgic. Their work is viewed by the mandarins of architecture through the lens of Modernist ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf Loos’s declaration that ornament is crime, has worked to decouple contemporary practice from what they regard as the filthy claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has self-evidently become historical in its own right, and the more this is true, paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not matter. Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of human experience which cannot be healthy.

The New Urbanists are also disdained for their modesty of ambition. They are not interested in the biggest this or that. Their plans are typically scaled to the quarter-mile walk and rarely include super-sized buildings. The cutting edge holds no attractions for them in and of itself. They want to create neighborhoods and quarters, not intergalactic space ports. They want the streets, squares, and building facades to provide decorum, legibility, and even beauty, while the latest crop of Modernists seek to confound our expectations about the urban environment as much as possible, in the service of generating anxiety rather than pleasure. The Modernists use the lame adjective edgy to describe their methods. It is supposed to signify excitement, novelty, and especially innovation, but mostly they have managed to innovate only new ways to make people feel bad about where they are.

The future direction of urban experience depends a great deal on an understanding of history, and of recent history in particular, because the hyper development of the past two hundred years has followed the arc of increasing energy resources and, above all, we are now facing the world-wide depletion of energy resources.

As the industrial age gained traction in the early 19th century, so did the demographic trend of people increasingly moving from the farms and villages to the big cities. Industrial production was centralized in the cities and recruited armies of workers insatiably. Meanwhile, mechanized farming required fewer farmers to feed more people. The railroad, by its nature, favored centralization. By 1900, cities such as London and New York had evolved into mega-urbanisms of multiple millions of people. Around the same time, electrification was generally complete and with it came skyscrapers serviced by elevators. Over the next twenty years, oil moved ahead of coal as the primary fuel for transport and, especially in the US where oil was cheap and abundant, led to mass automobile ownership. That, in turn, sparked the decanting of households into massive new suburban hinterlands, and to the extreme separation of activities by zoning law there, which climaxed – with interruptions for depression and war – in the evolution of the late 20th century car-dependent metroplexes like Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and Atlanta. That is where things stand now.

Now my own view is that we face severe energy problems in the decades ahead and they will not be ameliorated by any combination of alternative fuels or schemes for running them. This permanent global energy crisis will have all kinds of consequences, most particularly on our cities. These looming circumstances imply several major trends which contradict conventional expectations, especially of continued urban growth.

One certain impact will be the contraction of industrial activity per se and of the financial sector whose instruments and certificates represent the expectation of growth in accumulated wealth. This alone will comprise a basic challenge to industrial capitalism – apart from the sociopolitical strife that such financial catastrophe is apt to generate.

I hasten to add it is a mistake to suppose that the US industrial economy has already been replaced by a so-called “information” economy or a consumer economy. In reality, manufacturing activities have been insidiously replaced over the past twenty years by a suburban-sprawl-building economy – and the mass production of suburban houses, highways, strip malls and big box stores is just a different sort of manufacturing than making hair driers and TV sets. The sprawl industry also drove a reckless debt creation racket and multiple layers of traffic in mortgages and spinoffs of mortgages (such as the derivatives trade based on bundled, securitized debt) which represents, at bottom, hallucinated wealth that in turn has spread false liquidity through the equity markets and is certain to affect them badly sooner or later. All this is what we have been calling the “housing bubble” and it is now beginning to fly apart with deadly effect.

Much of the suburban real estate produced by this process is destined to lose its supposed value, both in practical and monetary terms as energy scarcities get traction. So, on top of the sheer distortions and perversities of the glut in bad mortgage paper, America will be faced with the accelerating worthlessness of the collateral – the houses, Jiffy Lubes, and office parks – as gasoline prices go up, and long commutes become untenable, and jobs along with incomes are lost, and the cost of heating houses larger than 1500 square feet becomes an insuperable burden.

All this is to say that the suburban rings of our cities have poor prospects in the future. They therefore represent a massive tragic misinvestment, perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is hard to say how this stuff might be reused or retrofitted, if at all, but some of it, perhaps a lot, may end up as a combined salvage yard and sheer ruin.

Another major impact of the coming energy scarcity will be the end of industrial agriculture. Without abundant and cheap oil and gas-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuels for running huge machines and irrigation systems, we will have to make other arrangements for feeding ourselves. Crop yields will go down – a big reason, by the way, to be skeptical of ethanol and bio-diesel alternative fuel schemes based on corn or soybean crops. We will have to grow food closer to home, on a smaller scale, probably requiring more human and even animal labor, and agriculture is likely to come closer to the center of economic life than it has within memory – at the same time that mass production homebuilding, tourism based on mass aviation, easy motoring, and a host of other obsolete activities fade into history.

I think this will lead to an epochal demographic shift, a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and rural places to the big cities. Instead, I believe we will see is a substantial contraction of our cities at the same time that they densify at their cores and along their waterfronts. A preview of this can be seen in Baltimore today. The remaining viable fabric of the pre-automobile city is relatively tiny and concentrated in the old center around a complex harbor system. With little need for industrial workers, vast neighborhoods of row housing built for them are either abandoned or inhabited now only by such economically distressed people that abandonment is inevitable. The pattern of contraction may not be identical in all American cities.

In some it will be a lot worse. Phoenix, Tuscon, and Las Vegas will just dry up and blow away, since local agriculture will not be possible, and they will be afflicted with severe water problems on top of all the other problems growing out of energy scarcity and an extreme car-dependent development pattern. Cities in the “wet” sunbelt such as Houston, Orlando, and Atlanta, will probably still be there but revert to insignificance for the additional simple reason that a lack of cheap air conditioning will make them unbearable.

It is worth keeping in mind that cities generally are located on important geographical sites – harbors, rivers, railroad junctions – and some kind of urban settlement is likely to persist in many of these places, unless climate change drowns them. In recent years, most waterfront property has been reassigned from industrial and commercial uses to condominium sites, and greenways. This will not continue. If we are going to have any kind of commerce between one place and another, we will have to reactivate our waterfronts for shipping – and not necessarily of the automated steel container variety. Like virtually everything else in the coming energy scarce world, maritime trade will have to be rescaled. It may even have to rely on wind power again to some extent. These operations will require wharves, warehouses, cheap quarters for sailors and all the other furnishings typically required through history.

Those who are infatuated with skyscrapers are going to be disappointed. I do not think we will be building many more of them further along in this century. We will have trouble running the ones we have, since most of the glass towers built after 1965 have inoperable windows, and even the ones that have them would have to be retrofitted for coal furnaces, and a less than absolutely reliable electric power grid may make life in a twenty-fifth floor apartment impossible when the elevators go out. In short, I think we will discover that the skyscraper was purely a product of the cheap oil and gas age. Exciting as they may be, we might have to live without them.

The process I have described will probably be messy. Social turbulence should be expected. For instance, the urban underclass will be squeezed even harder than the suffering middle classes, and they already have a nascent warrior culture that could easily redirect its energies from hip hop entertainments to real guerilla warfare if the competition for resources became desperate. Economic distress in the US is also likely to only aggravate unfavorable conditions in Mexico, sending increased streams of impoverished migrants north. Meanwhile, the faltering US middle classes may be so inflamed by the loss of their entitlements to an easy motoring existence that they will vote for maniacs and venture into scapegoating. I certainly expect the American public and their leaders to mount a vigorous defense of suburbia, even if it proves to be a gigantic exercise in futility and a waste of precious resources.

We will be lucky if we can make the transition from our current circumstances to a future of re-sized, re-scaled cities and a reactivated productive rural landscape outside them, with a hierarchy of hamlets, villages, and towns in between, and some ability to conduct commerce and manufacturing. This would, in effect, be a reversion to prior living arrangements, and to some extent it is a model proposed by the New Urbanists – or at least a template they would understand as fundamental. Many things might stand in the way of this. The physical disaggregation of civic life in our small towns is now so extreme that nothing might avail to repair it, especially since we will have far less capital to work with. The suburbs running from Boston through New Jersey to Washington have paved over some of the best farmland in the nation’s most populous region and it may be centuries before it is restored to productivity, if ever. Physical security may become so tenuous that people will sell their allegiance for protection, or take to living behind fortifications. In earlier periods of history when societies got into trouble – for instance, the plague years in Europe – rural places were beset by banditry and lawlessness, adding another layer of difficulty to food production on top of the loss of the peasant labor.

We don’t know how any of these things may actually play out. I have not even mentioned the potential for geopolitical mischief, which could skew the picture a lot more.

But the urban future isn’t what it was cracked up to be when we were riding high, surfing the big waves of cheap energy in the seemingly endless summer of oil. It won’t be fun fun fun ‘til Daddy takes the T-bird away. It won’t be a Herbert Muschamp smorgasbord of delicious, rarified architectural irony. The Koolhaas celebration of alienation will not seem worth partying for. The metaphysics of Libeskind and Peter Eisenman will stand naked in the transparency of their phoniness. By and by, even the mega slums of the third world will contract as the surplus grain supplies of the formerly-developed nations are reduced to nothing and export ceases.

I often wonder what people will think decades from now if they are able to view those old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies of the mid 20th century. Invariably these stories took place in a Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers, and streets full of cars with tail fins, and companies that ruled the world, and men and women who had come back from a World War full of confidence that there was no limit to what people with good intentions could do and nothing that they couldn’t handle. We are their children and grandchildren and it is a different world now.

What can we do about Peak Oil?

It is time to begin to plan.

Helping cities, towns and municipalities adapt to peak oil
by Randy White

Hubbert's Prescription for Survival, A Steady State Economy...

Bringing the Food Economy Home...

As a member of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force, I am excited to see the amazing progress our team is making. The twelve members of the Task Force come from various backgrounds, including land use planners, social workers, business executives, farmers, environmental experts, and more.
For readers who understand the dire consequences we face with fuel and food shortages in the not too far off future, rest assured this team has a deep understanding of complex eco and business systems.
Currently, the team is interviewing businesses and organizations to understand the impacts of peak oil from a systems level down to individual citizens.

While I am excited about the progress our group is making, the challenges ahead of us are staggering. The biggest issue facing the Task Force (in my opinion) is how to help businesses and citizens make changes for a reality many of them are unaware of and unprepared for. With such a complex system oil based system interdependencies, small changes will not be enough to offset the anticipated devastating impacts of peak oil.

At the end of the Task Force's mission, we will submit a report to the city council with a shortlist of recommendations. While the following list of recommendations are NOT the recommendations of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force, they are my own - available to any local governments with the intestinal fortitude to heed the advice.

For readers interested in what can be done on a local level, please consider taking the following suggestions and recommendations to your local government leaders. I truly believe there is no time to lose.

Change school curriculum for High schoolers in grades 9 - 12 to prepare for a fast changing world
Mandate classes for students in 9th - 12th grade that teach everything from basics of earth's ecosystems to Biointensive food growing practices.

Recommended texts for students: When Technology Fails, The Long Emergency, sustainable agriculture books
(We will need new textbooks for schoolteachers based on sound principles of earth's reality, complete with questions and tests for students. It would be based on both needed changes to adapt to the earth's changes.)


Create awareness campaigns and encourage homeowners to buy products and services from local companies that can help convert parts of or their entire lawn(s) to food gardens
(May need to lobby Homeowners Associations)

The city can create assistance and learning programs catered to biointensive food growing practices appropriate for geographical areas. For citizens without land access, create bond measures or taxes for land / home buy-back programs and fund the growth of community gardens in the city and surrounding suburbs.

Continue fostering growth of Farmers Markets and Community Supported Agriculture
This can also expand to work with local grocers / council national grocery chains to offer shelf space for local growers

Create "food preparation, storage and nutrition" classes for citizens
Based on seasonal growing patterns, what can be grown when, and how to keep your health and nutrition all year long.

Expand business and residential composting programs
Helps turn waste into useful, natural soil boosters to grow more food

Mandate energy efficiency inspections for homes and buildings
Create achievable standards. For businesses and citizens that can't afford to retrofit and upgrade to these standards - create neighborhood volunteer programs and create incentives to boost volunteer participation and assistance.

Offer consulting for businesses and citizens looking to prepare and make changes for Peak Oil
This can be paid for by citizens and businesses by passing a reasonable "Peak Oil Preparation" tax or diverting funds from other programs

Assess local food production abilities
Study and prepare plans to begin relying on food generated and transported within a 100 mile radius of the city. Adjust the radius depending on available farmland

Encourage neighborhood grown food swaps
Foster neighborhood food swaps based on produce grown within the city.

Create program for sustainable year round water usage for urban farming
Assuming increased usage due to increased urban farming. Create action plan including rainwater harvesting and efficiencies based on existing water system.

Create or expand neighborhood introduction programs
Foster programs that help neighbors get to know one another (like City Repair)

Continue to encourage use of public transportation, biking, walking, and carpooling
Cities can learn from other cities leading the charge with success (Portland, San Francisco, etc.)

Foster neighborhood co-op owned fueling stations
Pair farmers making alcohol in their own micro-refineries / distilleries with neighborhoods that purchase the fuel from their own alcohol fuel co-op. (Fact: Alcohol can be used as a fuel)

Offer "Earth Shift" support groups
Help people cope with change to help prevent a rise in crime, violence and drug use.

Create "Wisdom of the Elders" program
Like a "Big Brother / Big Sister" program, match eldery citizens that survived the Great Depression with today's youth leaders.

Create a re-use storage program
Instead of recycling, collect used plastic containers and glass from citizens and businesses normally setting them out on the curb. Clean out waste product from these containers and begin storing them in empty city owned wearhouses for future use and distribution to citizens.


Randy White is a member of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force. He works as an advertising executive for AM620 KPOJ, Portland's Progressive Talk Station

Peak Oil: much more to think about as a community.

Portland Takes the Lead

By Tom Whipple

Falls Church News-Press, On-Line Issue

August 3 - 9, 2006

The Middle East , home to a third of the world's oil production, is coming unglued in so many ways and in so many places that it is nearly impossible to track. One would have to be a complete fool, however, not to recognize one of the manifold costs of all this chaos is going to show up on that big sign over your neighborhood gas station— shortly.

The roots of these conflicts go back two thousand years. They are not going to be settled in our lifetime or many lifetimes. There is very little any of us can do except to prepare for the consequences. As yet, with exception of Sweden , none of the major world governments have officially recognized that a decline in world oil production with potentially devastating consequences is imminent.

In the US , it is politically unthinkable for a government confronted by Iraq , Hezbollah , Iran , global warming, and numerous other woes to openly acknowledge peak oil and all that it implies. From time to time, they have dropped hints — "Energy Independence," "Advanced Energy Initiative," need to drill more, "addicted to oil" — but the administration has yet to openly acknowledge that one of the greatest crises the country has ever known is just over the horizon.

This total abrogation of responsibility by the federal government has led to a handful of local governments to start considering action on their own to prepare for what is sure to come. The furthest along is Portland , Oregon . In May, the City Council passed a resolution establishing a peak oil task force "to assess Portland 's exposure to diminishing supplies of oil and natural gas and make recommendations to address vulnerabilities."

The twelve "WHEREAS's" in Portland 's resolution (#36407 should you want to Google it) are a thing of beauty, for they make the case for an imminent and dangerous peaking of world oil production in a succinct and convincing manner. The City's planners have clearly done their homework well.

The charges to Portland 's peak oil task force are also worth noting:

To acquire and study current and credible data and information on the issues of peak oil and natural gas production and the related economic and other societal consequences;

To seek community and business input on the impacts and proposed solutions;

To develop recommendations to City Council in this calendar year on strategies the City and its bureaus can take to mitigate the impacts of declining energy supplies in areas including, but not limited to: transportation, business and home energy use, water, food security, health care, communications, land use planning, and wastewater treatment; and

To propose methods of educating the public about this issue in order to create positive behavior change among businesses and residents that reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
And there, in a nutshell, is a plan. At this stage, the plan may only be to study peak oil and its local consequences, but you have to start somewhere.

At last count, there were 87,576 governments in the United States (one federal, 50 state, 38,976 general-purpose local governments, and the rest special-purpose local governments such as school boards). Thus far, only Portland seems to be planning in public for peak oil.

[b]Last week Portland 's government released a 93-page briefing book prepared by the city to acquaint their new task force with the basis for the City Council's concerns and to amplify on the guidance given in the resolution. The report discusses 14 areas that will be impacted by loss of cheap oil and gas and asks the task force to assess which are most relevant to Portland .

The areas of concern discussed are: Transportation, Land Use, Local Economy, Housing, Food, Public Services, Population shifts, Social Services, Health Services, Education, Electricity, Manufacturing, Retail and Communications.

In preparing this list, the City of Portland have done us all a big favor for they have moved the thinking about how to cope with the post-peak oil world forward another step. The message in the Portland report is that while we are all going to face peak oil, the effects on every one of those 87,576 governments is going to be slightly or a lot different.

Areas with sprawl will face massive commuting problems as gasoline becomes unaffordable, but in New York City , so long as the subway works, most people could care less. While feeding New York City may one day become a giant problem, rural America will continue to grow food way beyond what they consume. We are going to need 87,000 different solutions to mitigating peak oil.

As individuals, there is little most of us can do to keep oil flowing in the face of turmoil in the Middle East and nothing any of us can do in the face of peaking world production — other than to conserve.

There are however, still 87,575 governments in the US that, thus far, are doing absolutely nothing (at least in public) to prepare for peak oil. The chances are excellent that you live in one or more of them. Some day soon, each of these governments is going to have to face the consequences of peak oil. The sooner we can get governments thinking about it, the better off we, our children, and our grandchildren are going to be when that day comes.

Portland prepares peak oil briefing book

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