"Portland and the Oil Crisis" in the Oregonian today

David Cohan of Portland Peak Oil penned the following editorial that was printed in the Oregonian today.

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Portland and the Oil Crisis

Thinking globally while acting locally
Monday, May 08, 2006
David Cohan

When you're angry about high gas prices and wondering how the United States is going to get the global oil situation under control, the most important things to keep in mind are some familiar names: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Russia and Venezuela. Those seven countries control 70 percent of all the known oil on Earth. And every one of them is either overtly hostile to the United States, politically unstable, located in a politically volatile region or all of the above.

You don't need to know much else to realize that our ability to influence the global supply of oil is limited and attempts to do so could lead us into dangerous, expensive international conflicts that may never truly resolve the problem. This is particularly true when you consider that demand for oil is skyrocketing in China and India at the same time that production from many of the world's largest oil fields is declining. The global oil equation is shifting in a way almost guaranteed to ensure permanently higher prices and more volatile supplies.

But we do have an alternative to controlling supplies, one that is cheaper, easier, requires no new technologies and can be undertaken unilaterally at the individual and local level: reducing our consumption. Some ways of reducing are obvious -- switching from a gas-guzzler to a high-mile-per-gallon vehicle could cut your individual gas consumption in half. Nationally, if we raise fuel efficiency standards by 7.6 miles per gallon, we would yield more gasoline than we now import from the Persian Gulf.

Other ways of reducing demand are less clear because oil permeates our society in often hidden ways. For example, more than 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production, 20 percent to operate machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for raising livestock (not including the feed), and 5 percent for pesticide production. Understanding the many interdependencies between oil and our daily activities is therefore key to creating effective, cost-efficient public policies that complement personal choices.

To that end, Portland Peak Oil, a grass-roots group of citizens concerned about the world oil crisis, has helped draft a resolution that will be presented to the City Council on Wednesday. The resolution would require the city to study the economic and other societal consequences and uncertainty of rising oil prices and to make recommendations about the strategies that the city and its bureaus should follow to mitigate the impact.

What can be done at the municipal level to address this global problem? Policy decisions about housing density, the relationship between commercial and residential zoning, and the role of mass transit directly and often permanently affect how much oil will be used both by the city itself and by individuals.

But equally important is the national leadership Portland can provide by being one of the first cities in the nation to address these issues.

David Cohan is an energy efficiency professional and a member of Portland Peak Oil.