The 2008 Oil Peak - not as we expected it to be

In the past week I have attended two events featuring Professor Peter Newman, speaking on the topic of sustainable cities. He is currently Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in WA, and a board member of Infrastructure Australia, the body recently formed to oversee  the infrastructire elements of the Australian government's economic stimulus package. He has written 8 books and over 200 journal articles on issues of urban sustainability, city planning and transport issues. His latest book "Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change" was co-authored with professor Tim Beatley, Professor of Sustainable Communities atThe University of Virginia in USA.

Professor Newman's talks made a very interesting and very strong connection between Peak Oil and the Global Financial Crisis. He reflected on the deep unsustainability of the car-dependent dormitory suburbs created at the ever-expanding edge of our urban sprawl over the last 50 or 60 years (effectively supporting the thesis of the film "The End of Suburbia"). He showed a chart of oil prices rising steeply in 2008 to over $US140 a barrel and then plunging as the economic system went into collapse. At the centre of the global economic collapse starting in the US he places the inability of heavily mortgaged people living in these car-dependent suburbs to cope with both high mortgage repayments and high fuel prices. The petrol price hike was the tipping point to turn otherwise performing housing loans into 'toxic debt', exposing the layer cake of global debt-financed economic growth that fell like a house of cards.

Professor Newman suggests further that the resulting plunge in oil prices (based on  reduced demand) was very much a turning point and reflected a total loss of confidence in endless growth sponsored by fossil fuels and the realisation that oil depletion was very real and the environmental costs of fossil fuel substitutes was unsupportable.

So the Oil Peak in his presentation was not as we have been perceiving it - a much discussed point at which the availability of easy and cheap oil begins to gracefully decline - but a sharp and sudden 'correction' in the global financial system at the first dramatic realisation that the fossil fuelled economy is itself an unsustainable system.

Beyond this interesting take on Peak Oil, there were many fascinating and quite positive ideas for making cities more resilient and with low carbon footprints. Naturally, improved  mass-transport and voluntary pedestrianism and biking were high on the list and alternative renewable and clean energy featured also. One item that the professor was very positive about was the plug in electric car. With Australia set to become the third country behind Denmark and Israel to sign up for the "Better Place" solution of infrastructure for plug in electric vehicles, though a consortium of AGL Energy and  Macquarie Capital Group (see here for info), and the AGL commitment to supply power only from renewable sources, three of its largest cities, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane could see this solution emerging within a few years. One aspect of this that the professor commented on was the possibility that the high tech lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles could, if networked on the grid, actually become another source of reusable clean energy. Interesting indeed! - a bit like the idea of 'distributed data and processing' in the IT world.