Climate change policy, energy and cities

Abstract

Urgent public policy debate on energy is currently highly fragmented with one party not wishing to hear what the other is saying. There is continuing pressure to find and exploit more oil and gas. This, however, contradicts the recent Copenhagen Climate Change Agreement to limit global warming - caused mainly by burning fossil fuel – to no more than another 2°C. Then we have the ‘peak oil’ debate that indicates that in any case oil, and shortly after gas, production will imminently be diminishing on the way down to total exhaustion later this century. This should, actually, be good news as NGOs attending the Copenhagen Conference indicated that it will take a rapid exit from the use of fossil fuel to achieve the Copenhagen limit. However, if we are to maintain even our present energy demand, let alone further growth, then we would need a crash programme to obtain more energy from renewables and nuclear. The International Energy Agency, that recently confirmed that oil production is very likely soon to go into rapid decline, has expressed scepticism that even if such a programme were politically and financially feasible, the available technologies are not up to the job. Whether the Copenhagen Agreement is implemented through political decision to reduce energy use, or whether we are forced to reduce energy use by lack of supply, the consequences for our present lifestyle are dire. The second half of this article discusses some of the issues and debates that are currently emerging that try to face up to these consequences and what this might do to our cities

Keywords:

• Copenhagen Climate Agreement
• peak oil
• economic decline
• compact cities
• Transition Cities

This commentary is about the future of cities in the light of policies to mitigate climate change and an increasingly problematic energy future. Before focussing on cities – and related modern lifestyles – it is, however, necessary to outline what problems we are talking about.

At this time we have three discourses underway that ostensibly are about the same thing, or at least about closely related things, that are, however, not communicating with one another. These are as follows:

•	ongoing concern to access to the energy we need to increase economic growth;
•	a growing debate on climate change, what should be done to mitigate it and the politics surrounding this, coming to an apparent head at the recent Copenhagen Conference; and
•	a debate about the emergent decline of petroleum production as a consequence of ‘peak oil’.

Although there is a generalised belief that access to energy, and most importantly oil, be available for ongoing development, actually we should be reducing not increasing our use – or at least the burning – of fossil fuels if we are to combat climate change effectively. However, it appears that the availability of fossil fuels (in the first instance petroleum upon which the world's transport system is overwhelmingly dependent) is about to go into an accelerating decline. Perhaps these issues need a little more explanation.

1.	Discussion in the (particularly economic) press about energy is unthinkingly connected to the issue of economic growth, which is a fundamental good, that should not be questioned and where ‘economic recession’ is seen as the greatest problem that humanity faces. Scarcity of energy – and consequent price hikes – jeopardises economic growth. Scanning the pages of the Financial Times, we recently saw discussion on one page of the auctioning of the Iraqi oil fields seen as an unmitigated good and on another page progress in Copenhagen Climate talks noting the lack of agreement among participating politicians. These issues are not allowed to interact. What should be being discussed is that the exploitation of Iraqi oil will contribute significantly the failure to control climate change.
2.	Although Time magazine expressed the opinion that the Copenhagen Climate Conference was a success, in that it drew the heads of states – and particularly Barak Obama – into what has hitherto been a rather neglected area in the political arena, most commentators deemed it to be a failure because the ‘Climate Change Treaty’ (United Nations 2009) failed to set any legally binding targets on who should reduce greenhouse gas emissions – and hence consumption of fossil fuel – by when and how this might be accomplished. Although expressing the universal recognition of the urgency of the issue and asserting that the world's climate should not be allowed to increase by more than 2˚C, this was the limit of precision reached in the final accord. Briefly it is necessary to look at just what draconian measures will need to be taken to keep the global temperature increase below 2˚C. The World Wide Fund for nature, together with the participation of a number of other concerned NGOs, produced a much longer proposal for a Climate Change Treaty (2009), which they hoped might influence the outcome of the Copenhagen Conference. The measures necessary to limit global warming to a ceiling of 2˚C are stated as follows: • industrialised countries' fossil fuel and industrial greenhouse gas emissions would have to drop from present levels rapidly and almost be fully phased out by 2050; • deforestation emissions would need to be reduced globally by at least 75% or more by 2020; • developing countries' fossil fuel and industrial greenhouse gas emissions would need to peak before 2020 and then decline, which emphasises the need to provide high levels of binding support by industrialised countries. The reason why the accord emerging from the Copenhagen Conference remained incorrigibly vague is that nobody wants to face up to the fact that this is highly likely to mean a crash reduction in the use not only of fossil fuel but of energy as such in that some 80% of greenhouse ‘forcing effect’ comes from burning fossil fuels and 80% of our energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels. It takes a heroic assumption – as noted by the IEA in its 2008 World Energy Outlook – to conclude that alternative energy sources (renewable and/or nuclear) could make up anything like the difference in the time span in question: Even leaving aside any debate about the political feasibility of the 450 Policy Scenario (maintaining a ceiling of a 2˚ increase in global temperature), it is uncertain whether the scale of the transformation envisaged is even technically feasible ? (IEA 2008, p. 38) Of course if the political will were there, there are extremely easy ways of inducing what the IEA (2008, p. 47) refers to as ‘hundreds of millions of households and businesses around the world (who) would need to be encouraged to change the way they use energy’, beyond over-sophisticated ‘carbon trading’. Simply annual ratcheting of targeted energy taxes and using the proceeds to ameliorate hardship among those most needy but above all planning the restructuring of economies and lifestyles outlined below would do the job. But, as George Bush Sr. put it at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development: ‘The American Way of Life is not Negotiable’ and we are currently witnessing a rapid growth in the Internet of extreme negative reactions (much simply garbled ranting) emanating from the United States regarding any kind of ‘Climate Agreement’ and on the virtual shelves of Amazon a proliferation of books denying that global warming is a problem or even that it exists as a phenomenon!
3.	Since the closing years of the last century, it has become increasingly clear that petroleum (and fairly soon after this other fossil fuels) will imminently start to decline in availability because of a phenomenon known as ‘peak oil’. This asserts that when only half of the known accessible resource is exhausted, difficulties in production and inaccessibility initiate an accelerating decline in availability. The exact date of the global oil peak has been greatly disputed but by now very few experts – and this includes the major oil companies – are prepared to put the peak at no later than 2020 and most estimates arrive at a considerably earlier date – like right now such that last year's oil price spike was a first sign that peak oil has arrived (and oil consumption – particularly in the United States – actually declined as a consequence). The International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2008 World Energy Outlook opened on the following note (IEA 2008, p. 37): Current Global Trends in Energy Supply and Consumption are patently unsustainable – environmentally, economically, socially. This was supplemented by a graph, presented to the press conference releasing the report, which indicated a possible decline in production from current sources starting imminently. Although remaining more optimistic than most independent experts as to the oil peak – wishing to continue the upward passage of global energy use – it nevertheless appended a comment that 64 mb/d of gross capacity needs to be installed between 2007 & 2030 – six times the current capacity of Saudi Arabia – to meet demand growth & offset decline. It will clearly require a lot of luck in the search for new resources and thence immense investments to maintain their hoped for upward path in supply for too much longer.

So where do we go from here? The rest of this commentary looks at the impacts on today's urban living resulting from a rapid decline in the use of energy either due to there being less available or due to a sudden achievement of the kinds of policies and planned actions that will be necessary to achieve the Copenhagen objective. The effect, after all, will be the same, only in one case it will be achieved chaotically and probably through escalating conflict that will jeopardise any reasonable mitigation measures, and in the other case measures will be planned and implemented in such a way as to provide future populations with a reasonable lifestyle that is also genuinely sustainable.

Of course there is a third way that can by no means be ruled out which is that current lifestyles continue to spread onwards and upwards, and succeed in achieving the energy growth scenario of the IEA, such that by the end of the century the earth's temperature rises by as much as 6˚C. This could, for instance, be played out through resort to the ever more polluting use of so-called non-conventional sources of oil from tar sands, from oil shale and by the liquefaction of coal.

This will certainly lead us by the end of this century to the radical reduction or even entire elimination of the earth's ecosystems and with it the elimination of humanity. There is little point in discussing this further here; however much we might fear this will be the outcome based on what we see happening around us today in terms of determination of the world's consumers to continue their current lifestyle and the vacillation of politicians to confront this.

So how, assuming we do take the reasonable path, might we plan to rapidly reduce the amount of energy we consume – or react to a de facto decline in energy? And what, more specifically, is the role of cities in this?

First the basic facts: insofar as ‘development’ increases inexorably the per-person energy use, this generally starts from a level of maybe a third of a ton of oil equivalent per year (typical of ‘underdeveloped’ countries). Through the process of industrialisation and urbanisation (e.g. the cases of Korea over the past 30 years), we reach somewhere between 3.5 and 4 tons of oil equivalent per person (almost 8 tons in the United States) to maintain the lifestyle that we consider to be the goal of development.

There is some pride in the fact that the energy to produce goods has continually decreased per unit of production over the past decades (a general reduction in energy intensity). But increased demand for goods (of ever decreasing durability) ¹ has ensured that industrial energy use remains very significant. The real killer, however, is the inexorable growth in the demand for electricity and above all the growth in the use of the private automobile. These two stand out as the great consumers of energy in the developed countries – and increasingly in the developing world and particularly China.

There are many significant energy uses that perform no very meaningful function but that titillate our lives. These include the use of so many gadgets and appliances to be found around the average home today. The IEA (2009) recently completed a report on energy consumption in household electronics noting that the little twinkling lights around the house – on stoves and TVs and video machines, telephones, computers, printers and even simply on multiple socket outlets – have become a significant electricity load. Furthermore, at night billions of streets right across the globe are brightly lit throughout the night although along the majority of these few if any people are there to appreciate this display. Such cases of how we brighten our lives in this brief era of profligacy are manifold.

But the automobile is truly the heart of the matter. It has got to a situation in the rich countries where almost every adult capable of driving owns or at least has access to a car. Although this started as a luxury and then a convenience, today it has become for large sections of the population a necessity. This is a consequence of choosing to live in houses at a low density difficult to serve economically any other way than by car and then a long way from the place of work or, indeed, any facilities. Not only car ownership but also car use has been increasing year by year everywhere. We are all more or less aware of this such that it is almost a banality to mention it.

But its link with energy use, eventual exhaustion of the resource and its lethal aspect in terms of global warming simply are not allowed to disturb our use, our love of, our obsession with and our dependence on our cars (Flink 1988, Sachs 1992, Wolf 1996, Miller 2001). It is this, above all, sacrosanctness of our freedom to own and use these machines as and when we wish – and indeed to possess and use machines that use far more energy than necessary to perform their ostensible functions – that silences the politicians when it comes to proposing concrete measures to reduce energy consumption.

So what would a sharp decline in energy mean for our cities and what can be done to ameliorate the negative impacts? The first point is that suburbia – especially of the US variety in its present form – will rapidly become unviable as a lifestyle option for vast numbers with relatively modest means. Already in 2005, a group of academics, oil experts and even bankers came together to produce a video under the title of The End of Suburbia and for anyone interested in these issues, this should be viewed. ²

A longer academic debate has been ruminating over energy use and built form since at least the mid-1980s (Owens 1986, Braheny 1992), proliferating in recent years (Jenks and Burgess 2000, Williams et al. 2000, Jenks and Dempsey 2006). Whilst focussing on a problem of immense importance for any future policy on using energy more frugally while maintaining a reasonable ‘modern’ standard of living, the problem has kept leaking out into areas beyond simply built form and the configuration of land uses.

Although prima facie and, in theoretical terms, ‘compact cities’ might have the potential to use less energy per person and per unit of activity – certainly than US-type suburbs – it is also evident that in practice, high-rise city centres, again of the US type, are enormously energy-voracious. Indeed, according to the IEA, cities that currently contain about half of the world's population consume two thirds of the energy used by human societies.

Clearly settlements need to be designed with intelligence concerning the configuration of land uses and the design of buildings, bearing in mind the reduction of energy needs to a minimum and that the energy that is required comes from renewable sources. This also means that they be adapted to particular climatic conditions – as one saw in the vernacular past before the advent of fossil fuels.

But the problems that will emerge as energy availability decreases, or the decision is taken to maintain global warming below 2˚C, spread way beyond simply physical buildings and urban land use planning. Let us start with food production and distribution as here a lot has already started to happen. The problem is that 90% of the energy that goes into our food comes from sources other than the sun and overwhelmingly from fossil fuels. This includes the application of agrochemicals, fuel for tractors and harvesters, transport to the processing plant and processing – often refrigerated – transport to the supermarket, packaging, transport from supermarket to home and finally refrigeration for however long before it is cooked and eaten.

An interesting statistic here was revealed in a study of ‘food miles’ (just one part of the problem) carried out by the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA 2005), discovering that it is neither air freighting nor trucking of food but rather journeys from home to the supermarket and back that comprise the lion's share of food vehicle-kilometres (but not CO₂ emissions) in transporting food. This points again to the issue of the problematic way in which we configure our cities and at the same time to our reliance on cars as a central component of our lifestyle.

Countering all of this, we already have mass movements in places as diverse as Osaka, St. Petersburg and Havana where organic ‘urban and peri-urban farming’ is bringing much of the food production back home and getting rid of the treadmill of agrochemicals. Interestingly, in the Cuban and Russian case, the movement got going under conditions of energy starvation at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union but has now become a part of the local culture even though energy is again (temporarily!) flowing freely. Obviously this is one element confusing any too-theoretical an approach to ‘compact cities’ nevertheless throwing into question in other ways the configuration of cities as we know them today.

But that is just the beginning, because we can expect that substantial reduction in available energy will also make nonsense of our now globalised manufacturing system, transporting materials and components and then finished goods round and round the world before being sold and consumed. Manufacturing will, like food production, also be coming home again necessitating further restructuring the cities to accommodate the manufacturing workplaces that systematically disappeared in recent decades at a minimum to the suburbs but mostly to huge concentrations of manufacturing – notably in Asia. And there will be a shift in employment from the current predominance of servicing to working with the hands to make things.

As the century progresses, major issues will include a shift from importation of raw materials and goods to the recuperation of materials from abandoned excesses of the consumer age. Above all there will be the issue of how to transform millions of ‘dead’ cars that will no longer be useful with very high petrol prices or altogether lacking fuel into goods that will be useful under the new conditions. A second major issue will be how to reconfigure settlement patterns – including considerations discussed above – and reuse the materials in now-unusable buildings for the job of reconstruction. Clearly there cannot be any simple return to the twentieth- or nineteenth-century past. There will also be an increasing problem of where the electricity is going to come from to continue using our sophisticated electronic life-support and communication systems and probably relatively rapidly, solutions of some sort – in many cases simple abandonment and a return to simpler ways of communicating, lighting, preserving food, etc. – will have to be found.

It is perfectly clear that all of this is currently way beyond the social imagination, and thus the greatest problem in the coming decades will be the psychological adjustment out of the liberal consumer mentality and approach to life, to one which accepts that one's sphere of life is reduced down to the locality in which we find ourselves and that the re-invention of civilisation itself will require intense cooperation with one's neighbours. When these issues are brought up – I often lecture on the subject – one senses in many a kind of depression descending on the audience that doesn't want to think about it.

But on the other hand – I have mentioned already the urban farming movement – there are positive initiatives. Notably in the last couple of years, the ‘Transition Cities’ movement has taken off (Lerch 2007, Hopkins 2008, Chamberlain 2009) and although in the first instance not deeply aware of the fundamental changes that we are going to be witnessing, it is nevertheless making a start and, above all, has an optimistic attitude that the transition can be made.

The greatest tragedy will happen in the countries of the South, pushed and dragged and then seduced and ‘developed’ by us northerners along pathways that have destroyed perfectly sustainable lifestyles and societies and created problems that nobody has even started to think about how to deal with. These will certainly result in the most dire (re)transformations before a sustainable future emerges – assuming, of course, that our vaunted northern society decides in time not to allow the global temperature to rise by 4˚C, 5˚C and 6˚C. . . .

Notes on contributor

Until 2008 Adrian Atkinson was Professor of Development Planning in Berlin. He has spent a lifetime working with international agencies, governments national and local, and civil society organisations in over 50 countries on urban and environmental issues. He is currently writing a book on the coming decades concerning amelioration of the catastrophic consequences of our unsustainable world.

Notes

1. If you have not yet seen it, please go to the Internet and look at www.storyofstuff.com for a wonderfully laconic look at the profligate wastage embodied in our lifestyle!

2. This can be ordered from many sources through the Internet.