By Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute

Most of us need cars to go about our daily lives –- cars fueled largely by foreign oil. Much of the food we eat was grown thousands of miles away, and delivered to us with oil-fueled ships and trucks. We are dependent on oil for our most basic needs, because oil has been relatively cheap and abundant for over 60 years of economic growth and urban/suburban development.

But the era of cheap oil is coming to an end (even big oil companies like Chevron and Shell are admitting this now) and we need to start thinking about our entire economy differently, especially how we move goods and people around. Our cities and suburbs were built around cheap oil: how can we prepare them for peak oil and the post-oil era?

In the last year and a half, local governments have turned out to be some of the most important players preparing us for life after cheap oil. Willits (pop. 5,100) in Mendocino County and Sebastopol (pop. 7,700) in Sonoma County were among the first to tackle peak oil, with citizen groups and city representatives working together to identify vulnerabilities and plan responses. Other cities throughout the U.S. and Canada have pursued peak oil studies and task forces, with the first truly comprehensive vulnerability and response report coming out of Portland, Oregon, just last month.

Why all this peak oil activity at the local level? For starters, following the federal government’s refusal to adopt the Kyoto protocol, many local governments have been working for over a decade to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals through energy efficiency and alternative fuels. Then in 2005, awareness of peak oil grew rapidly as damage from Hurricane Katrina caused fuel shortages in parts of the Southeast, and many local governments saw that they faced serious vulnerabilities in their energy sources -– vulnerabilities that their federal and state governments were not necessarily going to help them with.

What can local governments possibly hope to accomplish against the massive forces of globalization and the corporate oil and auto industries? It happens that local governments in the U.S. have a surprisingly broad range of responsibilities that influence how the community uses energy and meets its basic needs. Local governments can use building codes, zoning codes, ordinances, development partnerships, and especially their community leadership role, to meet important relocalization goals like these:

- Encourage the construction of buildings that produce their own energy, rather than buildings that depend on dwindling natural gas supplies and the next Enron to keep the lights and heat on.

- Protect local farmland so that communities can get more of their food from nearby, rather than from halfway around the world.

- Encourage the development of walkable, bikeable mixed-use neighborhoods, rather than low-density residential neighborhoods dependent on cars burning foreign oil.

Using local government powers to promote relocalization is no easy task. Local leaders must contend with a host of monied stakeholders who want to keep building and development costs low. Also, localities need to collaborate at the regional level to most-effectively address big-picture issues like land use and transportation – and regional planning is all but non-existent in the U.S.

Local governments are starting to meet these challenges, however, setting precedents that are making it easier for other localities to address peak oil. Post Carbon Institute has recently launched the Post Carbon Cities program to educate local governments about what these pioneering cities are doing, and to help local officials design and implement their own plans. This summer, watch for our guidebook for local officials and staff on responding to the challenges of both peak oil and climate change.