Contents:

• Organizing the task force
• Structuring the inquiry
• Running the inquiry
• Analyzing vulnerabilities
• Developing conclusions
• Presenting your findings, and cycling back

Mapping this dependency can be surprisingly difficult task; it requires more than just a list of all the ways oil is used in the community (see the book's appendix, "Systems Thinking: A Tool for Municipalities" for an in-depth discussion of identifying vulnerabilities in complex systems). This process can be complicated if you don’t have a clearly-defined structure, process and goal to guide your inquiry.

Below are some suggestions for organizing and running a peak oil task force, based on the experiences of the cities discussed in Section 4.1. The actual scope and structure of your inquiry, however, will depend on the size of your community, the available resources and your ultimate goals.

Organizing the task force
Recruit the right members and staff
When the City of Portland set up its Peak Oil Task Force in 2006, the City’s Office of Sustainable Development used an interview and referral process to ensure they were selecting people who knew their fields and knew how to work effectively in a collaborative group process. The Portland task force also benefited greatly from having a few City staff on hand to assist the process and assemble technical data, allowing members to concentrate on interviewing experts, researching impacts and digesting information.

There can be problems with volunteer task forces, however, including lack of clear direction, disruptive volunteers, and lack of time. While the organization and execution of any special inquiry must be done with care, municipalities should be especially mindful when undertaking volunteer-staffed inquiries to avoid wasting people’s time.

TIP: Involve key staff and influential community members in discussions right from the start.
Don’t just rely on interested volunteers: recruit the editor of a local newspaper, the owner of an important local company, and the leader of a local religious or minority community. In addition to your own municipality’s staff, consider involving key staff from neighboring or overlapping jurisdictions. The right mix of leaders, advocates and staff will add expertise, open doors and increase the credibility of your task force.

Define the problem
If you plan to launch a peak oil task force you will need a clear problem statement. Otherwise, it’s easy for the people working on it to end up thinking about the problem in divergent ways, or to get too caught up in details.

Municipalities need to address peak oil and energy uncertainty in ways appropriate to unique local needs, resources and context. For example, one community may see peak oil as a threat to affordable gasoline; another may see it as a broad threat to their regional economic competitiveness; and yet another may need to focus all its attention on urgent electricity or heating and cooling needs. Whatever the objective, a clear, documented statement of the problem or objective will keep participants focused.

Define the process and the goals
Once you’ve defined the problem, you need to get everyone together on the process. Announcing the start of an organized process is an opportunity to tell staff and community members how they can contribute and toward what end. Are you undertaking a comprehensive, community-wide energy assessment, or developing an oil price shock contingency plan? Will your community want a long-term initiative to develop sustainability across all sectors, or is there only support for an ad hoc committee to find potential cost savings in energy diversification?

Structuring the inquiry
As mentioned above, the way you define the problem will help guide how the task force approaches it. In the same fashion, the way the task force structures its inquiry will define what kinds of information it will find and what conclusions it will reach. Thus it’s very important to structure the inquiry with its end product in mind. For example:

• Departmental inquiry. Are you only interested in identifying potential fiscal vulnerabilities of official municipal responsibilities? Then you may want to organize an internal assessment divided by department, with a focus on potential cost scenarios and clear roles for managers and staff to drive the process.



• Sectoral inquiry. Are you interested in general vulnerabilities of the entire community? Then you may want to establish a volunteer citizens commission and divide your assessment into broad areas like "Transportation," "Local Economy," and "Food." You’ll need to carefully consider how to deal with challenges like overlapping data, and structure the inquiry in such a way that you don’t get overwhelmed with information from the volunteer committees.

There are many different ways you can structure the inquiry. Risk analysts in the insurance industry use categorized checklists to identify vulnerabilities in well-understood conditions. On the other hand, a "blank slate" approach that uses brainstorming, expert interviews and multiple discussion rounds may be more appropriate for situations where there are more unknowns.

Identify crucial information needs early so you can structure your inquiry in the most useful way. If your community has one major employer, or is extremely dependent on one kind of trade or one mode of transportation, you will want to plan extra time for investigating the vulnerabilities that may affect such key points.

Be sure to enlist the help of the people who know your community and its economy intimately: agency managers and staff, business owners, community leaders, professors and researchers from a local college, etc. Whether as committee members or as interview subjects, nobody knows the specific challenges that volatile oil and gas prices may present to different sectors better than the people who work with them on a daily basis.

TIP: Have a clear structure for your assessment.
Are you dividing up areas of inquiry into sectors like land use, food and economy, or by municipal responsibilities like emergency services, planning and public finance? How are you dealing with issues that fall into multiple categories? How are you differentiating between immediate needs and long-term needs?

TIP: Keep scoping, analysis, and solutions separate. It’s easy to start talking about impacts, risks and potential responses all at the same time. Make sure you’re not talking about possible responses until you’ve actually identified your community’s most important vulnerabilities.

Running the inquiry
Start big
Before you begin asking detailed questions you should first collect basic supply and demand information from a "high altitude." You’ll need this information to understand how the potential impacts of energy uncertainty will specifically affect your community. How are oil, motor fuels and natural gas delivered to your area? What agency or corporation operates the delivery infrastructure? If there is a shortage, who gets cut off first? What and who are the biggest users of oil and gas in your community?

Then move on to the most basic functions in your community: How does your food get there? Where is your main water supply? Where does your electricity come from and who controls the transmission infrastructure? What are the main industries in your community? As you collect information you may find you need to adjust the structure of your inquiry: for example, instead of one committee looking broadly at the local economy it may make more sense to split the effort between the traded sector (export-oriented) and non-traded sector (local market-oriented).

TIP: Identify key questions and information needs early.
Is your local economy centered on a key industry? Talk to a representative business leader and learn what their vulnerabilities might be. Is your community expecting a lot of growth and new construction? Find out how current regulations are shaping the land use and transportation patterns that new development will produce.

Be comprehensive
The more wide-ranging your inquiry is, the better chance you’ll have of capturing all the possible vulnerabilities that may affect your community. Identify the main influences on local economic, land use and transportation patterns. Don’t think immediately in terms of oil and natural gas--oil and gas affect just about everything, so if you focus too narrowly at the outset, you may well miss an important vulnerability later on that at first didn’t seem to have anything to do with oil or gas. Look especially to basic systems like water, sewer and emergency services.

Follow leads
As you develop a broad picture of your community’s reliance on oil and natural gas, you can gradually determine where best to focus your assessment efforts. You may also come across intriguing information that points to unsuspected vulnerabilities. Take the time to look (if only briefly) into these tangents to see if they warrant further investigation: a key part of uncovering how a complex system works is following the leads that take us to something we didn’t see before.

TIP: Avoid getting sidetracked. Since oil and natural gas affect everything from the structure of the global economy to the way we go about our daily lives, it’s easy to get sidetracked on details and "potluck conversation." Save discussions about the geopolitics of oil or the intricacies of plastics manufacturing for after the meeting, and keep your assessment focused on the impacts and vulnerabilities specific to your community.

Analyzing vulnerabilities
The goal of this step is to have the information from your inquiry digested and organized enough so that people can start making informed, grounded decisions about responses. In other words, you’re not trying to uncover every vulnerability in your community, but rather you’re trying to paint a clear enough picture of impacts and their potential ramifications so that leaders of agencies, departments, businesses, and neighborhoods have a basis for thinking through their own vulnerabilities and possible responses. Concentrate on the systems and the relationships.

To get the information to that usable point there are three kinds of analysis that are helpful: digging in to what you’ve collected so you can identify more specific vulnerabilities; categorizing vulnerabilities so that you can organize them in a way that is more in line with how you may actually respond to them; and ranking your vulnerabilities to indicate possible priorities for action. Again, depending on the structure and goals of your overall effort, there are different ways you might approach this step and different methods you may choose. The important thing is to process the information from your inquiry to make it as useful as possible and to ensure that it accurately and thoroughly describes your community’s situation.

Digging in
It’s easy to predict that higher oil prices will impact people’s ability to drive, or that higher natural gas prices will impact people’s ability to heat their homes--but how do we dig deeper to be sure we’re developing a comprehensive picture of our vulnerabilities? There are many methods available for assessing the implications of risk and uncertainty, and we can use different methods to learn different things. Let’s look at two methods that will give us different but useful results: (1) thinking through general impacts of different scenarios, and (2) thinking through the different levels of impact on one sector:

• Scenarios. The problem at hand is oil and gas price volatility and increases, so to capture an appropriately wide range of possible impacts it can be helpful to imagine different scenarios of oil price and supply. "What challenges might the community face if the price of oil gradually rose to $100 per barrel over the following year? How might those challenges be different if oil prices jumped erratically between $50 and $200 over the next ten years? What would happen if there was a natural gas shortage in February?" Then you can think about how the actors, functions and systems you identified in your inquiry might respond.
• Levels of impact. With this approach you focus on an issue, such as "emergency health care," and a general scenario, such as "significantly higher oil prices within the next few years." Then within that scenario, you list the things in your issue of focus that would be most immediately affected, and then think through how those first-level effects would cascade down to second, third and further levels.

  For example, taking "emergency health care" as your topic, you might identify:

  • First-level impacts on transportation costs, which then create...
  • Second-level impacts on transport of patients, commuting costs of medical specialists, and delivery of materials, which then create...
  • Third-level impacts on timely treatment of patients, ability to retain medical specialists at remote institutions, costs of providing care, and so on...

Categorizing
Toward the end of your inquiry and initial analyses, you will have a big list of potential vulnerabilities covering many different kinds of issues and functions. Even if you had researched impacts by sector, department, or some other division, you may decide to categorize (or add a layer of categorization on to) these vulnerabilities for final analyses and later discussions for possible responses.

The right set of categories can be particularly useful for delineating who will be responsible for developing and implementing responses to these vulnerabilities. For example, you may combine vulnerabilities from "Transportation", "Food" and "Emergency Services" and recategorize them primarily as "local issues," "regional issues," and "national issues," or "shortterm," "medium-term" and "long-term." A good practice from the risk assessment field is to categorize risks by the way in which they will ultimately be addressed (for example, by the responsible department).

Ranking
As you develop the picture of potential impacts and vulnerabilities, you’ll recognize that some are more probable than others, and some are potentially more serious than others. A common approach for ranking risks is to identify both the potential effect (magnitude) and likelihood (probability) of each risk.

The Portland Peak Oil Task Force sub-group on transportation and land use used this method, starting with a list of potential impacts:

1. There will be an increase in car sharing and carpooling.
2. There will be a reduced demand for parking, freeing up land for other uses.
3. There will be an increased demand for compressed work week, telecommuting, etc.
4. There will be shorter, fewer car trips.
   etc.

They then ranked these potential impacts in a matrix by likelihood of occurrence and potential magnitude of effect:

Thus the committee felt that impact #3, "There will be an increased demand for compressed work week, telecommuting, etc.," had a 50-50 chance of happening, but would have a minor impact on the city. In contrast they felt that impact #4, "There will be shorter, fewer car trips," was both highly probable and would have a major impact on the city (i.e., in the local economy).

Ranking can be a useful way to sort through a large number of ideas from a brainstorm to pick out the most significant issues. It can also be helpful for identifying the kinds of impacts that may call for further inquiry, perhaps with a scenario approach or level-of-impact approach as above.

Developing Conclusions
Once you’ve identified and ranked your community’s vulnerabilities, develop responses to these vulnerabilities as action points for the community and the local government. Don’t get sidetracked: refer back to the task force’s initial charge, and develop your responses to address the original problem statement. Also, be sure to keep the big picture in mind. Don’t develop a recommendation that makes sense for one particular sector or application, only to find that it would be premature, ineffective or even counterproductive from a broader system perspective.

Below are four guidelines for developing useful responses to you community’s peak oil vulnerabilities. You will also find ideas in following the "five principles" for local government responses to energy and climate change listed in "Section 5.3 What your city can do."
1. Start simple
When the Willits (California) Energy Committee was discussing energy vulnerability responses for their first recommendations to City Council, they set a guideline to only consider options that were proven and immediately available: no relying on future technological developments, no complicated strategies, no overly expensive investments.

Energy consultants often advise clients to first find energy cost savings with the "low-hanging fruit." This often means doing relatively easy energy efficiency initiatives, but it can
also mean looking through existing policies and programs for relatively easy adjustments that, collectively, will significantly reduce overall peak oil vulnerability. With creative approaches, such as allocating funds saved through new efficiencies to investments in more efficient technologies, easy initial steps can produce big returns over the long term.

2. Keep it appropriate
The recommendations of your task force need to be appropriate for the people who will be acting on them. Focus on recommendations that move specific processes forward, rather than broad mandates that require significant organizational and political momentum.

For example, a recommendation like "Build an inter-city rail system for the region" is not very useful on its own, as such big decisions are made through complex processes of regional transportation planning and investment that take decades, and involve thousands of stakeholders across multiple jurisdictions. A more process-oriented recommendation like, "Study the feasibility of developing high-quality public transit service that connects cities in the region," would likely be more useful.

3. Keep it broad
A short-term initiative that encourages people to drive less is a good, basic response to energy uncertainty: it spurs people to consciously reduce their dependence on oil. A longterm policy that encourages urban development in transit-friendly regional centers, and less development in outlying rural areas, is a better response: it creates land use patterns that make it easy for people to reduce their dependence on oil while also protecting regional farmland. Avoid "silo" and quick fix solutions, and instead develop broad responses that cross issues and share resources. Comprehensive sustainability planning frameworks like The Natural Step are excellent tools for this.

You may also be able to achieve a broad effect by initiating a specific action that touches off a chain of events. For example, a new policy like, "The City requires all transportation planning activities to consider future oil/gasoline price volatility as a key factor" would effectively engage a whole set of professional managers, planners, and engineers on the problem, with results that will go far beyond anything a time-limited task force could do.

Finally, a broad response also plans for ongoing uncertainty and assumes that changes will occur over time, taking a page from "adaptive management" practices. Don’t plan specifics too far ahead or make unfounded assumptions, otherwise the decisions you recommend this year may unwittingly constrain your options for dealing with next year’s situation.

4. Seek out examples and experts
There is no lack of examples throughout the world of communities that are thriving economically while minimizing their dependence on oil and natural gas. For example, hundreds of European cities of all sizes have implemented energy-smart policies and initiatives in the last fifty years, many of which are easily transferable to U.S. and Canadian cities.
Cities in other parts of the world are pursuing urban sustainability as well, and often in extremely creative and low-cost ways. For example, the modern commercial center of Curitiba, Brazil (pop. ~1.65 million) has been lauded as "the most innovative city in the world" thanks to its unconventional and highly successful public transit, pedestrian mall, recycling, small business incubation, and flood control projects.

Presenting your findings, and cycling back
The way you present your task force findings will depend on the task force’s charge, its audience, the urgency of its recommendations and other factors.

For example, the task forces in Portland and Sebastopol both developed sets of recommendations for their respective City Councils. The Portland task force identified eleven major recommendations (see Box 7, page 43), accompanied by recommended action items. In comparison, the Sebastopol task force (see Box 8, page 48) made 66 individual recommendations across nine different sectors (such as "Vehicles," "Water," and "City Revenues"), and then grouped them in summary as five "first steps," eight "implementation steps," and four steps for "making broader connections." Both task force reports described the vulnerabilities and impacts they identified.

As part of your task force recommendations you might include an item for reporting and follow-up, both to ensure that recommendations are acted upon and to adjust recommendations as needed. This is a good management practice for any program, but it’s essential for dealing with energy uncertainty: if recommendations are not adjustable, then they may eventually be locked on to solutions for problems that have changed. Keep in mind that as the situation changes, the available options and the ability to forecast change as well.