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The San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force explores life after fossil fuels –
an era that may be coming sooner than most people think
Charles Russo, San Francisco Bay Guardian
The fourth floor of San Francisco’s City Hall feels remote. Dimly lit and strangely quiet, it conveys a sense of isolation from the powerful people who do their work in the lower levels of the building.
Here, in an unremarkable conference room, is where the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force is conducting its second meeting. Two of its officers are absent, and only one member of the public has turned up to participate. It is an atmosphere that belies the issue’s cataclysmic potential.
The day’s breaking news headlines of oil reaching $100 per barrel for the first time in history is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. One year earlier the price was $58 per barrel. This dramatic increase in such a short span would devastate economies around the world if it continued at anywhere close to that rate.
Chairperson Jeanne Rosenmeier, an articulate, contemplative woman, reiterates the task force’s purpose: “Our charge is to examine how the city is going to handle rising oil prices and possible shortages. That is what we have been asked to do.”
The assessment seems like an understatement, perhaps suggesting that the group is merely looking for solutions to how the average citizen could function better without an automobile. Yet in a society built on oil, the consequences of such an energy crisis are likely to be far more sweeping and problematic than merely high gas prices.
While considering models for the study the task force will prepare, Rosenmeier points to Portland, Ore.’s recently completed peak oil report and talks about limiting San Francisco’s effort to outlining the range of scenarios, from small impacts to large. She’s reluctant to acknowledge the extralarge scenario – massive worldwide social unrest and full-scale anarchy in the streets of San Francisco – which she argues would be harmful to the group’s focus.
Jan Lundberg, the task force member in charge of “societal functioning,” politely disagrees. Insightful and exuding a sort of deeply ingrained experience, Lundberg has a goatee and a big mane of blond hair that make him look like a Berkeley-ish version of billionaire Virgin CEO Richard Branson. The resemblance is strangely apt when you consider that Lundberg has defected from more lucrative ventures. His family’s business, the Lundberg Survey, has been one of the premier oil industry research authorities in the world for the past few decades, but today Lundberg is volunteering his time to the task force.
“You have to look honestly at what we are up against,” Lundberg tells the Guardian. “Only then can you come up with intelligent responses to what is occurring. If it is a tsunami coming, then you take action for a tsunami.”
It might come as news to most San Franciscans that a team of seven relatively unknown, politically appointed volunteers is hashing out the hard realities and dire implications of a potentially massive energy crisis. When the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution (with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent) in April 2006 to acknowledge the looming phenomenon of the global oil supply being exceeded by demand, San Francisco was the first city in the country to do so. It was a precedent that received little attention from the media, perhaps shrugged off as just another wacky resolution steeped in San Francisco values.
For the next 10 months the task force will be preparing a study of mitigation measures to be considered by the city government for implementation into law. Much like the phenomenon of peak oil, their work will also be best assessed in hindsight. For now, some will see them as a team of Chicken Littles sketching a contingency plan for when the sky falls.
Yet if the scientific insights that compelled the Board of Supervisors to form the group prove prescient, then the report that the task force is producing may well be crucial to San Francisco’s very survival.
…Chairperson Rosenmeier, one of Lundberg’s colleagues on the task force, is wary that such an explicitly bleak viewpoint may scare public attention away from the matter.
“You have to be careful with peak oil that you don’t immediately leap to ‘We’re all doomed and our economy is doomed,'” she says. “I think there is an intermediate phase, which is what we are being asked to address: the transition from business as usual.”
An accountant by trade and a longtime Green Party activist, Rosenmeier ran for state treasurer in 2002, garnering about 350,000 votes. Setting an ambitious pace for her contribution to the report, she recently met with the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to request an analysis of how oil prices are related to the orientation of San Francisco’s economy. For this reason, she appears less concerned with predictions than with producing a heavily researched and well-structured report.
“I have a very strong vision of what I want the report to look like,” Rosenmeier says. “I want us to have a uniformity and a more quantitative approach. I do not want to address the disintegration of our society.”
The disparity between the views of Lundberg and Rosenmeier reflects the vast spectrum of opinions on how peak oil will manifest, although the extremes go well beyond them: some call peak oil a liberal hoax, while others have converted all of their assets to gold and prepared well-stocked and well-armed bunkers where they can ride out the social and economic storm.
…the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force plans to release its final report in October.
(30 January 2008)
Long article – goes into peak oil and the SF peak oil taskforce -BA
Energy Roundtable: Simmons, Hirsch, Rubin (Audio)
Jim Puplava, Financial Sense Newshour
Energy Roundtable with special guests:
- Matthew R. Simmons Chairman, Simmons & Company International
- Dr. Robert L. Hirsch Senior Energy Advisor at MISI, and consultant in energy, technology & management
- Jeffrey G. Rubin Chief Economist/Chief Strategist, Managing Director, CIBC World Markets
(2 February 2008)
EB contributor termoil reports:
This is the second hour of the Financial Sense program. In the first hour contributor Zapata George Blake gives a market report on energy.
Understanding the current energy crisis in South Africa
Simon Ratcliffe and Jeremy Wakeford, The Oil Drum: Europe
TOD editor Doug Low:
This is a guest article by Simon Ratcliffe and Jeremy Wakeford. Simon is an energy and sustainability consultant and is the Chairperson of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil South Africa (ASPO South Africa). Jeremy is an economist specializing in energy and sustainable development and is Research Director of ASPO South Africa.
South Africa has been experiencing blackouts over the last three weeks or so, and is forecast to have electricty shortages until at least 2013, see S Africa eyes rationing to end power cuts (Financial Times, 24 Jan.) for a brief overview. Here Simon and Jeremy discuss the issues in more detail.
Let us venture into a political no-go zone and say that at some point in the not too distant future there is a bitter pill that we will need to swallow and we are getting just a foretaste with the current energy crisis. In a nutshell, our global growth based economic model is fundamentally unsustainable.
…There are many factors that contribute to the current crisis. We are familiar with the fact that Eskom, the state-owned electricity utility, has been warning of a power crunch for some 10 years now, of the fact that government wouldn’t invest in new power plants, of denial by ministers and other government officials, of hemorrhaging of skills from Eskom, of rain-soaked coal, of allegations of bad planning and incompetence. But while all of these factors may contribute to the problem, they don’t give us a picture of the systemic issues. They are all indicators of how complex the whole system is and consequently how difficult it is to predict how this will play itself out. Perhaps the scale of the electricity issue can best be explained by understanding exponential growth and its implications.
…The current blackouts provide us with unique opportunities. Firstly, it is a huge wake-up call. We are being offered a glimpse of the limits of our current models and an opportunity to change course to a more sustainable path. We are seeing too, the consequences of these limits. Mines and factories are being forced to shut down during outages. The cost to the economy is huge. Costs to industry of the blackouts vary, with some estimates in the order of R1 billion (£70m) a day. Large numbers of people have their livelihoods threatened and confidence in the country’s economy as an investment destination is being questioned. The upside is that it provides Eskom and the government with the opportunity to take energy conservation and efficiency, as well as renewable energy sources, more seriously. We have for decades been very wasteful with our energy resources and this must change, for reasons of depletion as well as carbon emissions and climate change mitigation.
The era of very cheap electricity in South Africa is now over. Consumers will face price hikes of between 14 and 20% per annum for at least the next few years. This will encourage necessary conservation and efficiency measures, but will be especially hard on poorer consumers. Thus the government will come under pressure to increase its expenditure on social support programmes and grants.
(1 February 2008)
