To be decided: The Future of our Cities: Sustaining Affluence Beyond Cheap Oil

The Twentieth Century saw the United States and many other nations complete the transition to an urbanized society, a process that included the centralization of commerce and population. The Twentieth Century also witnessed the suburbanization of the United States following World War II based on the widespread availability of personal transportation and highways. This allowed population centers to decentralize from commercial centers, which led to the massive and unnecessary usage of natural resources. Depending how you look at the issue of suburbanization, it either was a serious lack of planning or seriously short sided planning. Either way it was a great mistake, and it brings the United States to a unique predicament. Either we can right the mistake of the decentralization of society into suburbs with smart and innovative planning, or we can wait until we are forced by global disaster and a crumbling economy built almost solely on a finite resource. If we as a society opt to take the route of smart planning there is a number of issues we will need to address.

Water Availability

Because of the availability of cheap energy, water has been easily and unsustainably pumped to population centers far from natural sources. There are several poignant examples of this potentially dire, future problem. As a Northern Californian I feel I should address a problem in my own backyard. The California State Water Project that supplies a significant portion of Los Angeles’ water needs burns energy pumping water 2,000 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains -- the highest lift of any water system in the world. The amount of energy used to deliver that water to residential customers in Southern California is equivalent to approximately one-third of the total average household electric use in the region.[1] A number made essential by the positioning of ten million people in the Los Angeles River basin, a largely semi-arid desert. The Average Net Electricity use of the California State water project is 5.1 Billion kilowatt hours of electricity[2]. What will happen when the energy supply increasingly scarce? Will it still be considered prudent to spend our scarce energy resources bringing in water from far away to support certain communities.
A distinct problem awaits many coastal nations with limited water supplies, specifically in Africa and the Middle East. Such an example is the large portion of Dubai’s water that is sourced from desalinization plants run entirely on a finite supply of cheap crude oil, without which the processes costs would be astronomical. IPS news reports that

"the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have an urbanisation level of about 85 percent. As a result, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), for example, is the world's second largest consumer of water per capita after the United States. Its average daily domestic consumption is 353 litres (80 gallons) per person compared to 425 litres (96 gallons) in the U.S." (AEM 2007)

Without the desalinization plants that supply Dubai with water, the aspirations of the up and coming global cosmopolitan center that is Dubai would be but a pipe dream.

Food production

Cheap energy also brought about the so-called “green revolution” which created crops ill suited to local environments, heavily dependent on petroleum-derived products such as pesticides, and increased irrigation, leading to further water depletion[3]. Additionally, these genetically modified seeds are dependent on outside factors such as pesticides for their survival and they do not adapt to local environments like their indigenous cousins. They are also highly invasive; they destroy crop diversity in major global food staples such as corn, wheat, rice, barley, and oats, posing a dire problem for the future of many ecosystems. The lack of natural diversity can cause an entire harvest to be wiped out if insects or other natural disaster attacks it.
The practice of comparative advantage in global trade will have to cease if every country is to be able to feed their populations, the international transportation will simply be too expensive. Although in theory, it is supposed to reduce opportunity cost for the economies of countries in practice it evolves mostly from dictation of specialization by loans from global financial institutions.

Economic and Population growth

The fast-paced, perpetually growing, consumption-driven economy fuelled by cheap energy solutions allowed the US to have sustained long-term growth throughout the Twentieth Century. Fueling the growth of the suburbs were city planners who make the assumption that 3% economic growth would occur forever, despite the fact that a finite resource underpins this growth. The miracle of the development and economic growth has provided Americans—and citizens around the developed world—with a “culture of affluence” where it becomes almost a right to consume at will. This culture has long included the option to work in suburbs far away from home and from the resources that sustain their lifestyles, a practice that must end.
Rapid economic and population growth has been achieved by a myriad of private investment and free market policies, which are light on macro planning and heavy on consumption. Such an example is the strategy of GM in the early Twentieth Century to buy up electric urban light-rail systems all around the country and push for federally built highways on which their busses would cruise back and forth from newly built suburbs, with massive sub developments outside major cities.
None of this growth or infrastructure would have been possible without the presence of an extremely cheap and relatively efficient energy source: crude oil.

Alternative Energies

There are many creative solutions available to solve the problem of sustainable planning. There are a myriad of renewable energy sources could replace a significant amount of the fossil fuel consumption in the United States, however Ethanol is not one of them. Ethanol is touted as the greatest alternative to petroleum in the US, but unfortunately its benefits are largely political, providing a godsend to politicians seeking support in the Iowa caucuses. Ethanol is a feasible alternative fuel for a country like Brazil, which already has massive exportation in the more efficient ethanol from sugar cane industry. The corn-based ethanol from the US is a different story all together. To begin, corn-ethanol based biofuel is much more efficient of an energy source than its sugar-cane based cousin, which cannot feasibly be imported to the US because of tariffs in the US market. Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol has an efficiency ratio of 8-to-1, i.e. the energy output is eight times higher than the

energy inputs. Gasoline by comparison clocks in at just 5-to-1 says an oil-industry engineer at R-Squared Energy Blog. The US Department of Energy states that “The most recent findings show that corn ethanol fuel is energy efficient and yields an energy output: input ratio of 1.6” (DOE 2007). Industry experts predict that number will increase very slowly if at all, given that most corn ethanol in the US is heavily dependent of petroleum products.

Although there are many renewable energy sources that can help offset the Peak Oil crisis—a phenomenon where oil’s efficiency ratio will drop below 1:1—some geologists and energy experts have warned that no combination of renewable energy sources can replace the sheer amount of energy output the world currently attributes to petroleum-derived products. John Busby, a British scientist with background in power generation, chemical manufacture, agriculture, and food processing, along with experience in the economies of the developing world, wrote The Busby Report, an independent guide for the energy future of the UK. In it, he writes that

"…with the dwindling of global oil and gas reserves, international competition for supplies of coal, the demise of the indigenous coal industry together with the gradual termination of nuclear power mean that in order to be secure from the consequences of external events, the UK has to rearrange its economy to run with only around 25% of its current energy consumption.”

Although this will be a momentous challenge for Britain to undertake, the alternatives are far worse. To do no long-term planning for the coming difficulties would invite catastrophe and chaos as essential functions of the country simply shut down, think Iraq, 2007. The smarter our future planning is, the less likelihood these potential “water wars” will occur over the resources of coal and oil on a global scale. As far as the U.S. goes, our situation is no easier than the U.K.; in fact, it may be more severe. Britain does not suffer from decentralization and suburbanization, if anything we have farther to go them the UK.[4]

Solutions

The question we should be asking as a society is not how can plan to keep our lifestyles the same, what we should be asking is how can we re-plan our cities so that the transition from cheap oil can be made less-jarring, without mass rationing or conservation. The planning of our states and countries should have conservation and sustainability built in. Because we allowed city planners and the federal government to decentralize our society without an eye on the long term, we have more work to do for the coming transition.
To transition from a global economy in the world and a decentralized US society there are two important concepts. We can transition from a suburban society with New Urbanism, a movement dedicated to transforming our communities into walkable, neighborhood based development, what the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) calls “transforming growth patterns from the inside out.” This will help reduce energy use by reducing transportation energy costs by working and playing closer to where we live. The Local Government Commission is another New Urbanist group self-described as “local elected officials, city and county staff, planners, architects, and community leaders who are committed to making their communities more livable, prosperous, and resource-efficient.” Whether or not these organizations are effective, this philosophy is the one that is needed to bring cities into the future.
A modern version of Localism, what British Labour Party MP Alan Milburn calls "making services more locally accountable, devolving more power to local communities and, in the process, forging a modern relationship between the state, citizens and services”, will be dedicated to increasing local self-sufficiency in