City/County Peak Oil Task Force Releases Report

CJ Huxford studies planning and environmental policy at Western Washington University. He has lived in Bellingham for six years and focuses on environmental stories in risk communication. He has also written for The Planet magazine.

Rising prices and demand for energy strains local communities already dependent on traditional sources of energy. So Whatcom County residents acted to meet these challenges by creating an Energy Scarcity and Peak Oil Task Force to put forth recommendations and guidelines for county governments to implement into long term planning. Some experts believe the price of energy produced from fossil fuels — such as coal, oil, and natural gas — will continue to increase in the future as the availability of these cheap resources becomes scarce.

Though experts disagree on how extreme of an impact these scarcities could have on communities, most agree that efficiency, as well as sustainable development and planning, are key in a definite future of fluctuating energy prices.

Peak oil is the phenomenon that describes the point where the maximum rate of extracting black gold is reached. When this happens, the total reserve of oil for a particular oil field or region starts to decline.

Communities have been built around and become dependent on the use of oil to produce the energy they consume. Whether a person is driving their car or eating food grown with oil-based fertilizers and trucked in from outside the region, oil is a part of daily life, said Energy Scarcity and Peak Oil Task Force member John Rawlins.

“Oil is the basis for moving everything. Not just almost everything — everything,” Rawlins said.

Peak oil results in higher prices of the commodity, which then affects the prices of all the products oil goes into, especially gasoline and transportation of goods. Sustainability and energy efficiency have become catchy phrases as consumers have witnessed the average price of gasoline slowly rise every decade.

“The built-in oil-dependency of most cities and towns is a huge obstacle to significantly reducing our energy use,” said task force member David MacLeod.

MacLeod, Rawlins, and fellow member Bill Dean proposed the idea of putting together a task force to Bellingham City Councilor Jack Weiss in 2007. In March of 2008, the group presented the preview of the report to both the county and city councils detailing strategies Whatcom County can take to reduce the risk of negative impacts from peak oil. This led to both city and county councils voting unanimously for resolutions to develop the task force.

The task force began with 18 members and received less than $10,000 of public funds for administrative activities and editing of the final report, which it released in December 2009.

This is the first joint city and county task force in the country, Rawlins said. Portland, Ore. successfully petitioned its city government to develop a task force in 2006. Whatcom County’s task force based its report on the Oregon task force model, according to the recently released Whatcom task force report.

The report from the Energy Scarcity and Peak Oil Task Force lays out recommendations for Whatcom County to cope with rising prices of energy and fossil fuel-intensive products. But the recommendations heavily depend on support of governments that are slashing budgets in the current economic recession.

The city and county are responsible for implementing land use and transportation policies such as installing bike lanes and defining zoning codes to reduce urban sprawl, which are some of the recommendations from the task force report to decrease community dependence on oil.

However, the report is too weighted toward governmental solutions to many of the issues the county will face if cheap oil is scarce in the future, said Bellingham Environmental Resources Manager Clare Fogelsong. Fogelsong coordinated the initial meetings of the task force and the editing of the final report.

The government has a responsibility to pursue the recommendations in the report, but the report doesn’t provide enough direction for the public to take a strong stance to address these issues as well, Fogelsong said.

The task force was charged by the county and city councils to complete the report by December 2008. But because of conflicting priorities and disagreements over how the problem of peak oil should be presented, the report was more than a year late, MacLeod said. Many of the members who left the task force had to leave early because of time constraints and other priorities they needed to focus on in their other jobs, MacLeod said.

Western Washington University economics professor Hart Hodges assisted with the early stages of the report and the final editing. Hodges had differences of opinion with other task force members about some of the recommendations in the report regarding localizing most food production.

Some things can be grown efficiently in the county without using too many resources and energy. But it is more efficient to grow foods like tomatoes in a warmer climate and ship them to the county than growing them in heated greenhouses in Bellingham, Hodges said.

“We can buy green [labels] and feel good about the energy we use, or we can take steps to actually reduce our energy use and make sure the money we invest in green [initiatives] does the most good for the environment,” Hodges said

The report promotes producing most goods consumed in the county more locally, but taking steps to address energy scarcity and higher prices needs to be critically thought out and pursued efficiently to conserve limited resources, Hodges said.

Though differences persisted between task force members throughout the creation of the report regarding how extreme the consequences of peak oil will be, most members generally agreed about the projection of the report, Fogelsong said.

“The process of creating a consensus report was sometimes laborious as we nit-picked at each others’ choice of words,” MacLeod said. “But we were committed to representing a consensus opinion, and the effort paid off in the end with a better report.”

The economic recession and reduced price of oil from when the task force was first assembled present the challenge of keeping the report’s recommendations at the forefront of government policy and public awareness.

Budget-strapped governments provide little support and leadership on the issue of energy scarcity, which has left the public’s priority list as the price of oil has drastically decreased from two years ago, according to the report. When prices of oil are cheap, the public doesn’t consider that immediate and expensive changes are necessary, Hodges said.

The public has as much potential as the government for addressing the recommendations made in the report, Fogelsong said. Organizations like Transition Whatcom and Sustainable Connections provide a means for spurring community involvement to increase the county’s energy independence, Fogelsong said.

It is important for the public to push its governments to consider energy use in city and land use planning so every issue and project is analyzed as if oil supplies are scarce, MacLeod said.

The task force’s next step is to more thoroughly define the recommendations and implementation strategies and present the report to governments around the county.

Following this, the task force will work on another report identifying regulatory changes and budget funding to implement recommendations from the first report, Fogelsong said.

The recommendations from the task force need to engage the public to either participate in addressing the county’s dependence on oil, or create a strong voice in the government to pursue the recommendations, Fogelsong said. §