Stop, Drop and Roll

21 July 2008 | Alameda Community Development Forum, Tranpsortation | John Knox White

Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Insight section ran an op-ed on Peak Oil. It’s an interesting read, even if the piece defines peak oil slightly incorrectly. Peak oil is the time at which the world hits the maximum production of Oil. From that point on, less and less oil is available. The concept has been around for years, but it’s starting to pick up pretty mainstream believers.

From the piece:

Energy forecasting is a tricky business. On one side are those who say that we will never produce more oil than we do right now and should expect supplies to start dwindling rapidly by 2015 at the latest, at which point we’re in deep trouble. Shell Oil recently joined their ranks: In January, its CEO called on the government to initiate a man-on-the-moon intensity project to prepare for the supply-demand gap.

On the other hand, skeptics don’t see peak oil occurring before 2030, though they agree that the sooner we make the switch to alternative fuels, the better.

2030 sounds so far away, but that’s the time period that the lowercase sd&r’s will be starting families (or thinking about it, or deciding not too). In that context, it’s not so distant.

You’d have to have your head under a rock (and a really big rock at that) if you’ve missed the recent gas price spike. It’s the speculators on the market buying oil on the assumption that prices are only going to skyrocket more. (Speculators have been wrong numerous times before, but at some point, we are going to get there.)

I’m not a  big believer in the “collapse of all society” doomsday scenarios that love to float around these types of occurences (and make no mistake, this will be a big occurrence!). But the prospect of $7 gas, $10 gas, whatever, should be enough to indicate to people that we ought to be coming up with strategies now for easing into this new world order.

So what should we, in Alameda, be doing as our part of preparing for this? To me, one of the things we need to be thinking about is our current and future transportation infrastructure. (I know big surprise). And as I type this, I begin to think that the West End bicycle/pedestrian Estuary Crossing issue is probably a key piece in this.

We can dig in, bury our heads, hope it won’t effect us and see our community suffer for a long while as a result, or we can start thinking beyond tomorrow and trying to envision where it is that we want to be in 15 years.