Planning

• Main Authors: Post Oil-peak, Tim Moerman
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.616.8319; http://postcarboncities.net/files/2006API Principles of Post-Peak Planning.pdf

About this time last year I gave a presentation on Peak Oil at the Atlantic Planners’ Institute conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland. For most of the people in the room, it seemed to be the first introduction to the issue. Then, this summer, I gave another presentation in Vancouver. I didn’t know how dialed-in everyone was, so the first thing I asked was, “Show of hands … when I say ‘Peak Oil ’ or ‘Hubbert Peak, ’ who here has no idea what I’m talking about? ” And the entire room was like, “well, duh. ” I might as well have asked them if they’d heard the Earth goes around the Sun. So that’s pretty remarkable, how fast this issue has become common knowledge. In eight months I went from being the bearer of bad news, to accidentally insulting everyone’s intelligence by suggesting it was news at all. The modern planning profession came into being just over a hundred years ago, at almost exactly coincident with the dawn of the petroleum era. By extension, North American planning has lived its entire life so far with a certain set of background assumptions. The key assumption is that energy is cheap and abundant and there’s more of it every year. And when you get right down to it, planning has been about dealing with the effect of this. Industrial cities, urban growth, urban sprawl, traffic congestion—these are all basically side effects of cheap energy. When that cheap energy is gone, the assumptions and the principles of planning are going to be turned on their ear. So that’s what this show is about. 21. The Laws of Thermodynamics