For the last two weeks, NYC has experimented with an idea of making a major avenue in Manhattan car-free for no particular reason than for the enjoyment of residents and visitors. There were no streetfair vendors hawking $3 tube socks or blended drinks from noisy & polluting generators. Nor was there any excuse like the Marathon or a parade where only invited guests are allowed to run or walk down the middle of the streets.

This was different.

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Summer Saturdays purely for locals and anyone who happened to be in town and want to get a little exercise by taking a stroll, jogging, roller blading or biking. It was for anyone of all ages and abilities. There were little children and senior citizens. There were world class athletes and people in wheelchairs. There were people from all over the world and local residents venturing into the middle of the street for the first time without fear of automobiles running them over.

But most of all, there was peace and quiet in the middle of the city and it was not a park – it was Park Avenue, experienced as it had not been experienced in perhaps 80-100 years. No engines roaring, no horns honking, no fear for your life. Just a pleasant place to enjoy a great Summer day in the city.

For generations now, the Summer has been seen as a time to escape the heat, smell and hectic pace of the “the city”. But it was not the city itself, but the automobiles (mostly from outside the city) that made the city so unpleasant.

The first two Summer Saturdays in NYC have been a huge success and show the possibilities of simply making a long continuous route car-free. There were dance classes, churches selling lemonade for Katrina rebuilding efforts, families having picnics, people exploring places that only cars previously ventured – like the elevated roadway around Grand Central terminal.

I walked all the way from my apartment on 97th street through Central park and all the way down to Union Square where I enjoyed a wonderful picnic with my wife at the greenmarket. Watch Clarence’s video courtesy of StreetFilms and you’ll get a little taste of what it was like.

Enjoy.

Source: Geology.com

New York State is about to approve Hydro-Fracture Drilling permits for Upstate New York in the area of the Marcellus Shale. There is a major concern about the impact on waste water containing many toxic chemicals, including areas near NYC drinking water reserviors.

Here’s a slideshow of some of the key images. I’ll have more on this as information becomes available. Kudos to WNYC and ProPublica for uncovering this in a great example of investigative journalism.

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Here a transcript of one of the reports:

NEW YORK, NY July 22, 2008 —The Marcellus Shale is what industry people call an unconventional play. It’s loaded with natural gas, from Eastern Ohio to the Catskill Mountains. But the gas is very hard to extract. It’s packed tight 7,000 feet deep.

Today, with energy prices at record highs, extracting that gas looks to be affordable, and energy companies and landowners are lining up to reap profits potentially worth billions.

But WNYC has learned in a joint investigation with ProPublica – a non-profit investigative news organization – that New York state regulators have been actively promoting the safety of a practice that has caused environmental damage elsewhere. And they may not be ready to handle the regulatory complexities. WNYC’s Ilya Marritz has the story.

REPORTER: For over a decade, gas companies have been intensively tapping unconventional plays in western states like Colorado. Drill rigs have brought a lot of wealth, but at the same time they’ve dredged up a host of environmental problems – contaminating water supplies and drying up aquifers.

The culprit is a practice called hydraulic fracturing. It’s never been done much in New York. But it’s the only way to get gas out of the Marcellus Shale. Basically the driller blasts the bottom of the well shaft with water, sand, and chemicals, under very high pressure in order to free up the gas. Hydrofracking demands a huge amount of water of water – up to six million gallons per well.

KAPPELL: How are you gonna dispose of that water?

REPORTER: Bill Kappell works for the U.S. Geological Survey. He says there are serious questions that have to be answered,

KAPPELL: It’s going to be a learning process. How are you going to treat that water so you can properly dispose of it without despoiling the water resources of New York State?

REPORTER: The US Department of Energy considers the waste water that is produced in gas drilling some of the most toxic of all industrial byproducts. Kappell is particularly concerned about the chemicals used – he doesn’t even know what they are.

KAPPELL: Nothing. They’re proprietary; they’re particular to the company. They don’t have to divulge it.

REPORTER: But in sworn testimony before Congress last fall, environmental health analyst Dr. Theo Colburn – an opponent of drilling – said she was able to obtain a list of one fracking chemicals to be used in Colorado drilling. She says there were 171 substances on the list, and that 92 percent of them had health effects ranging from sinus irritation to reproductive organ damage.

All this has just landed on the desk of Bradley Field, the Director of Mineral Resources and a career employee at the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. It’s his job to consider new applications for drilling permits.

FIELD: Based on what we have in front of us now, we don’t expect to see any permits being issued for horizontal Marcellus well until, it could be mid- to late fall.

REPORTER: WNYC and ProPublica found Brad Field and his agency unable to answer many questions. Given that the federal government exempts disclosure of the chemicals used in drilling – will New York State demand disclosure?

FIELD: We’d have to take a look. I can’t say for sure right now.

REPORTER: Why not require full disclosure?

FIELD: Because it would be a departure from how we typically do this. So I just want to make sure that what we ask for is something we can look at and be sure of. So I haven’t really come to terms with that just yet. We’re still in looking into it phase.

REPORTER: Field says a few treatment plants in Pennsylvania would probably take the waste water from drilling. But four private waste treatment plants we spoke with say they are close to capacity already. Could municipal treatment plants also accept waste water?

FIELD: I don’t really know right now. I’d say that as this development starts, that that’s an issue that’s going to be addressed. I’m not up on municipal treatment plants in New York, and what they can or cannot take or at what volumes.

REPORTER: If no one except the gas company knows what’s in the fluids, how can the public be sure that even treated waste water is safe?

Following our interview, DEC said it had sent out letters to interested energy companies requesting detailed information about chemical additives. But the agency still has not made it a requirement.

Near the source of the Delaware River in the Catskill Mountains sits the picturesque town of Walton. A few miles to the west, the stream widens into reservoir that holds drinking water for New York City. And 7,000 feet below all of this, there’s natural gas.

One pleasant evening last month, a couple hundred citizens gathered in Walton’s old movie theater. For three hours, they listened as community activists from Western States shared their experiences of gas drilling. A slide projector showed aerial photographs of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. Well pads dotted the landscape right up to the horizon, like dabs of calamine lotion. Longtime resident Jill Morrison told the audience the drills didn’t just extract gas, they spoiled drinking wells.

MORRISON: Now people are dealing with groundwater contamination from the chemicals used in the drilling process.

REPORTER: Afterwards, Laurie Spaeth from Colchester, New York – also in the New York City watershed – said her thinking about drilling had completely changed since she and her husband were first approached about leasing their acres a few months ago.

SPAETH: When we first got phone call and letter, it sounded like it had possibilities. And the more I searched and the more I learned, the more I thought there is absolutely no way that you can ever make enough money from this to pay for the damages.

REPORTER: But the while Spaeth is worried, the DEC has been vouching for the industry, reassuring legislators that hydraulic fracking is safe.

On May 29th, as the legislative session was winding down, the DEC was pushing a bill through the legislature to get the gas drilling process started. Brad Field gave a reassuring pitch to state legislators. In a PowerPoint slide presentation later supplied to ProPublica and WNYC, the DEC declared:

“Adequate state regulatory programs already in place.”

And the agency entrusted with protecting New York’s environment put a slide on the screen that read:

“All oil and gas states surveyed. Not one instance of drinking water contamination in over one million frac jobs.”

Brad Field:

FIELD: That was a survey taken by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission of the states that do hydraulic fracturing and that statement was made in testimony.

MARRITZ: Is that true?

FIELD: That’s what he said. So.

REPORTER: After our interview, the DEC said a 2002 EPA study was actually the source. But state regulators in New Mexico have compiled hundreds of instances of groundwater contamination resulting from gas and oil drilling. In Colorado, an industry watchdog group has gathered evidence of contamination in 300 cases. And in the Barnett Shale in Texas – the formation geologists consider most similar to the Marcellus Shale – the state has overseen the cleanup of radioactive material dredged up at hundreds of gas drill sites.

That information was not presented to legislators. Republican Clifford Crouch is an Assemblyman from Binghamton who saw the PowerPoint.

CROUCH: I was much more reassured of what was going on after seeing the presentation, yes.

REPORTER: On the last day of session, June 23, the gas well spacing bill was passed – along with a dozens of other bills. Democratic Queens Assemblywoman Toby Ann Stavisky says she – and most of her colleagues – first heard about DEC’s bill just hours before they voted on it.

STAVISKY: Why didn’t I have more information was my first reaction because it’s very detailed scientific language. What’s going to happen to the environment, to the air quality, noise pollution, what about pipelines?

REPORTER: But the DEC’s Val Washington rejects the idea that the bill would speed things up. She says the state has 13,000 conventional wells pumping gas right now, with no instances of groundwater contamination.

WASHINGTON: If there’s any doubt in anybody’s mind about we’re going to proceed with these applications without full consideration and protection of the environment, they’re just wrong. This is not New Mexico, this is not Colorado, this is New York.

REPORTER: New York does have a lot more environmental regulations than some other states – a point Tom West is eager to make. He’s an energy industry lobbyist who spoke with the DEC as it was writing this bill. He says there was a healthy back-and-forth between the agency and the companies he represents.

WEST: The byproduct was a compromise which is very common in the legislative process that’s acceptable to industry, acceptable to the department, acceptable to some of the other stakeholder groups.

REPORTER: West estimates gas companies are ready to spend a billion dollars or more on infrastructure investments in upstate New York.

WEST: I can’t think of any other example where an industry is willing to come in to New York State and spend that kind of money developing local resources, without asking for a handout. The oil and gas industry is doing this on their own. They’re asking for a regulatory environment that makes it work.

REPORTER: Environmental groups are dismayed. The Sierra Club’s Roger Downs says the DEC is enabling industry, when it should be planning for all the hundreds of things that can go wrong when a company receives a permit to drill.

DOWNS: Every step of the way there are problems and there are chemical solutions to those problems. So if you get a shaft stuck in the well, how do you get it out? Well there are certain lubricants you use. Are those lubricants safe?

REPORTER: Almost all the city’s drinking water comes from reservoirs on the Marcellus Shale’s Western edge – like the one near Walton. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection is known as a fierce guardian of those waters. Yet so far it has issued only a perfunctory statement, saying it’s committed to protecting drinking water.

The DEC in Albany says it still hasn’t managed to get together with the city to discuss.

FIELD: We’ve had some extensive phone tag and vacations and whatnot but no, we haven’t exactly yet. No.

REPORTER: DEC’s bill to streamline permitting in the Marcellus Shale in on the Governor’s desk. He has until Wednesday to sign it.

For WNYC, I’m Ilya Marritz.

If anyone has any expertise on this type of drilling technique, please offer your thoughts in the comments section.

As we consider how to re-design our car-centric landscape, one idea that may be taking hold across the country is to close streets to automobile traffic at times and return that space to the people as a public space to be enjoyed.

We took a look at Bogata’s Ciclovia earlier this year. Last month in Portland, they held a first ever “Sunday Parkways”. What is “Sunday Parkways”?

What is Sunday Parkways?

6 miles, 6 hours, zero traffic~!

A circular route of city streets open to walk, bike, run, jump & skip – without having to watch out for cars!

A 6 mile “temporary park”, connecting North Portland neighborhoods and residents.

A relaxed, non-competitive, FREE event featuring a variety of activities in 4 parks and along the route.

What you see here is people having fun close to home. The places we drive dozens or hundreds of miles to visit – quiet places without cars and trucks – can exist in our own front yards if we only have the will to say no to cars. Next Stop is my hometown: New York City.

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Here’s the news conference where New York’s “Summer Streets” was announced:

Here’s more description from Streetsblog:

On three Saturday mornings in August, the Department of Transportation will ban cars from nearly 5 miles of city streets to make way for cyclists, joggers and walkers. Starting at the beginning of Centre St. in Lower Manhattan, then moving north onto Lafayette St., Fourth Ave. and Park Ave., people will be able to travel all the way to 72nd St. and then to Central Park by walking down the middle of a street.

The streets will be closed to cars on August 9, 16 and 23 from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. On 15 major east-west streets, like Canal, 14th St. and 42nd St., cars will be allowed to cross the car-free zone.

This is moving forward despite a slew of complaints and people feeling that this might turn out to be a huge mess for traffic moving through the city. As the Mayor says, we’ll see how it goes, but we need to try new things. If we only worry about the inconveniences we’ll only stay in the same rut we’ve been in letting automobiles have the run of the land.

Personally, I plan to participate and stay close to home and enjoy my front yard.

The growth paradigm for the last fifty years in the US (and many other parts of the world), which accelerated in the 1990s has been away from cities and more in the suburban and exurban areas outside of major metropolitan areas. While large US cities have rebounded from their nadir in the 1970s and 1980s era of white flight, homelessness, drugs and crime, much of the infrastructure investment has been made toward developing auto-centric development instead of walkable mixed use zoned areas along mass transit corridors. I’ve long thought that good urban planning and mixed use zoning is a large part of the answer to dealing with our dependence on automobiles/oil as well as having many social, public safety and environmental benefits.

Now that $4 gas is here and looks like it might be a short stop before $5-$10 gas, Smart Growth is getting more attention as the best method to maintain a high standard of living and promote economic growth.

So let’s take a look at some videos from around the country on what’s happing on the Smart Growth or Transit Oriented Development front to reduce out dependence on automobiles.

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Starting in my backyard, here’s Public Service Announcement from Vision Long Island, trying to stimulate debate on reorienting local priorities away from auto-based development and toward walkable mixed use towns around mass transit corridors like the LIRR and the emerging Long Island bus system.

Here’s a short 2 minute spot explaining why the American Planning Association (APA) gave Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes their 2007 Award to her for revitalizing Smart Growth in downtown Kansas City.

And finally, here’s a look at Sacramento’s strategy of using infill development to manage it’s growth.

The Wall Street Journal picked-up this story today.

Gasoline was less than $2 a gallon when Mike McKeever brought his gospel of bikes, light rail and tightly packed neighborhoods to this state synonymous with cars, freeways and suburban sprawl.

“The development industry was very concerned,” says Mr. McKeever, head of Sacramento’s regional planning agency. “The environmental community was openly negative,” concerned that it was “just more talk, talk.” Seven years later, with gasoline hurtling past $4 a gallon, Sacramento has become one of the nation’s most-watched experiments in whether urban planning can help solve everything from high fuel prices to the housing bust to global warming.

“They’re really the model,” says Steve Winkelman, a transportation expert at the Center for Clean Air Policy.

Please leave comments below about what’s going on in your area of the world.

We’ve heard all sorts of different ideas on how to ease the pain at the pump this Summer for motorists. The Bush administration has argued for OPEC to increase production and Congress to ease restrictions on drilling. In reply Congress wants to sue OPEC over high prices and tax oil company’s windfall profits. Senators Clinton and McCain have called for holiday for the Federal gas tax. All of these various ideas have made a lot of headlines, but none of this has done a drop of good so far.

More long term, price induced demand destruction will take hold and people are making better decisions factoring in oil price – they are buying smaller cars and not snapping up McMansions in the hinterland, but with oil near $140/barrel right now what’s the short term answer?

The secret answer to curbing high oil prices in a supply constrained world that no one seems to be talking about is for buyers to go on strike. And no, I’m not talking about a meaningless “Don’t fill up on this day” but keep driving.

My back of the envelope estimate is that if there were a concerted effort by the major economies (hello G8 ministers meeting in Japan) to have demand pulled back sharply (10-15%) over the Summer, we could see oil prices go down fairly rapidly.

What prospects do people think there is of it? Would it be politically feasible? How much would demand need to decline to make a substantial impact of oil prices?

This is a guest post from Max Arturo Alcala Sainz.

Currently, the list of academic institutions offering relevant and
up-to-date information and courses geared to confront the imminent
energy slope is awfully short. If you have ever tried to enroll in your
local university for some hands-on Peak Oil learning experience, you
may have found yourself disappointed in knowing that no such course is
offered.  Even in certain high-level
economics courses that
scrape at energy depletion and natural resources, you will probably be
able to teach your professor a thing or two (if you are a keen
reader of TOD).
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Now, this is a very wide generalization. There are quite a few
universities that are currently pushing the envelope in Ecological Economics,
Energy
Economics and developing some very insightful research (Dr.
Hall’s EROEI
paper is a good example of students and  prof.
working together in these issues). Every day, more and more faculty is
ramping up on their knowledge of Peak Oil nationwide and passing on the
news to students. Still, if students are not fortunate enough to be
near the handful of universities that offer Peak Oil-related syllabi (including Duke, Oregon U, URI, Vanderbilt and
others), chances are they will be stuck without any classroom
education regarding declining energy and what to do about it. Even in
universities where one may find Peak Oil information, open conferences
and non-official meetings are
significantly more frequent than formal classes and structured courses.
Given
that universities are the ideal spawning grounds for elaborating on
and raising awareness
of declining energy-related topics, it’s worth to
analyze a bit more why such a weighty matter is not being fully
discussed and integrated into university curricula all over the
country.

note: Some of the links are kinda old. You might do well
contacting the university directly if you are interested in taking
classes.

It
might not seem that Peak Oil is taking a long time to propagate itself
in academic circles, because the standard protocol for new theories
dictates a hefty amount of time for discussion, peer review, and proven
results(in fact, some may say that this issue has been spreading out
incredibly fast for academic standards). There is no getting around
this buffer, since it puts a barrier against unfounded knowledge and
weak arguments ever getting into the classroom. Nonetheless,
the inherent urgency of Peak Oil and the disastrous consequences
entailed command a higher priority in the list of newcomer theories to
be tried and proven by academic circles in all disciplines. One might
dream as far away as to think that Peak Oil theory will be included in
syllabi for children in elementary school in a near future, but even climate change being taught to kids
is still receiving attacks nowadays. It is a good bet to first tackle
university settings.

Here is a tiny list describing some of the problems Peak Oil runs into
while trying to get into the classrooms.
In this post I wish to remain focused on the academic,
administrative barriers for Peak Oil in the classroom; other elements
that also affect the acceptance of Peak Oil in the media, politics and
general public have been discussed far more skillfully in other
posts(and here,
and here).
I will gladly accept contributions from readers. For the time being,
some of the most noticeable issues in my opinion are:

- The University’s
flexibility regarding course syllabi and lecture
acquisition:
The location of the university, its funding (state or
private) and the university’s internal regulations will all affect how
much liberty a professor has while teaching his classes. Different
states will have unique requirements for university syllabi and these
affect how much cutting-edge discussion (Peak Oil included) a lecturer
will be able to inject into his class. Many professors will use
seminars and open discussions to discuss topics not neccesarily
included in their syllabi, but we are interested in full-fledged,
compulsory classes that will hopefully reach all of the students and
let them know about Peak Oil.

- The conservative
approach of many Economic schools.
Let us think of “conservative” as a broad, neo-classical economics
perspective where growth is considered to be exponential and infinite
without taking into account the geophysical limitations of planet
Earth. This stereotype only serves to
help paint the typical situation in
an Economics school of a “typical” university. I am aware that the
logical structure I
am following has several flaws, but I intend to use it only for
illustrating purposes.

This conservative approach we are talking about will busy itself more
with the financial, socioeconomic, equity, and international aspects of
economics, rather than the energy standpoints of sustainable economics.
We can stereotype this approach as what has been taught in Economic
schools for the last decades: everything but sustainable,
energy-measured economics with strong ties to Natural Sciences, Ecology
and Geophysics.

Now, if “Peak Oil 101″ existed, it would more
than likely first be housed in the School of Economics (Maybe the
school of Natural Sciences?) of the “typical”
university. If this is to be true, then that means that at least a
group of lecturers and professors from that School have a good
understanding of Peak Oil and consider Economics to be a wholesome,
interconnected discipline that lacks many current “conservative”
assumptions. From point A of current conservative economics,
to point B
of energy econometrics-orientated Economics, a number of situations
could take place.

One possibility is that the change in economic schools could take a
great deal of time (or never happen at all), regardless of the
forthcoming consquenes of Peak Oil. It’s all too easy to throw the
blame around, especially with Peak Oil. In this scenario, experts and
academis would go back and forth, blaming the government, the society
and Tuna fish for the eventual break-down of financial systems and
conventional institutions. Thus, the real cause of economic failure
would never be subject to academic study. Another more hopeful
alternative is that Economic schools trace the symptoms of market
failure and societal breakdown to their roots on their own, and
eventually come to terms with Peak Oil knowledge. The acceptance of
Peak Oil would imply a
change in many fundamental economic
assumptions that would, in turn, take a great deal
of time to take hold of classrooms. Then again,
the would not be the first time that academia lags behind on
accepting evidently visible facts. Only time will tell how Peak Oil
knowledge will trickle down from the Sustainable Economics roots it is
based upon to commonplace Economics, but in my personal opinion it is a
bleak immediate future. It will take fierce determination from both
students and professors to put Peak Oil in the university map, at least
in the Economic disciplines.

Note: This
is a particular situation of the School of Economics. I am personally
inclined to think that other schools (such as Geophysics) would more
easily understand Peak Oil, and embrace it faster. I would like other
ideas regarding this.

- The multidisciplinary
nature of Peak Oil. Peak Oil is multidisciplinary in
nature: Geophysics, petrophysics, Economics, Forestry, Physics,
Sociology, Chemistry… the list goes on. If it would take a
determinate amount of time for a single School (Economics, say) to
fully adopt Peak Oil as a reality, it is likely that the other
disciplines would be more inclined towards following suit. But the
amount of time for multiple disciplines to take full swing would be
deadly in the long run, as some
predictions state. Economists
have been taking a liking to introducing Psychology, Sociology and
other interdisciplinary elements into their work in the last years. Let
us hope that this trend continues into the Natural Sciences and the
other disciplines that help Peak Oil make sense.

- Funding orientation
and Trustee objectives. Many universities don’t exactly
have their focus placed upon promoting new ideas, such as Peak Oil.
While private universities have the most lax funding available, they
also have diverse priorities: promotion, prestige, and grants all play
a decisive factor as to how much incentive professors have to get
entrepenurial. State educational systems have the strong money leverage
to play a big part in promoting Peak Oil, but policy decisions and
politics also constrain that budget.

There is a multitude of other reasons why Peak Oil isn’t quite taking
off in many universities, and even the above points would each make for
essays of their own. But it seems as if we won’t be able to expect
classes like Peak Oil 1101 available throughout all universities to
freshmen anytime soon. This is no light topic, and
requires deep, thorough analysis and discussion. But I think this is a
good start to put issue out there. I would also like to open this up
for discussions on how to get the ball rolling in many universities
through the help of the excellent contributors we have here in TOD. I
know we already have some faculty here on board, so it would be great
to hear from them!

Gail the Actuary’s University
syllabus seems like a good start for any potential classes regarding
Peak Oil. I will try pushing harder in my own university to see if we
can crank up some sort of seminar, at least. With any luck at all, I’ll
be able to register for some Peak Oil-ish class before I
graduate.  Please leave your opinions!

I think it might be safe to say that the peak oil movement has long had a mostly older male and perhaps somewhat, erm, geeky set of spokespeople – from James Howard Kunstler to Richard Heinberg to Matthew Simmons–in that they’ve all tried to convince people through logic, facts & figures and long speeches at conferences that we should be worried about PO. And even our own staff here at the Oil Drum–aside from Gail and Leanan–are middle age to older men. (Though it should be noted that we are making some changes soon to add a little more diversity and different types of media to TOD…but more on that later!)

So how else can we generate Peak Oil awareness? Kriscan – a young woman with a video blog that’s making her PO pitch using all sorts of innovative marketing techniques – asking people on the street, making a song about peak oil, and yes even resorting to the types of suggestive body language more typical of an MTV music video (think Christina Aguilera) than college professor lecture.

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Here’s her recent attempt at asking random people on the street if they even know what Peak Oil is:

And a public service announcement that you will not be seeing on network Television:

Now watch it again and try to concentrate on the words. Believe me, it starts to sink in after the fifth or sixth viewing. JH Kunstler has even commented about her and she has a video response to him.

What innovative ideas have you seen out there to educate people about peak oil in your area?

With gas prices across the country reaching $4/gallon, forcing many to complain about the impact of gas on their budgets, we’d like to hear about what’s going on in your county, town, city or suburban/exurban subdivision.

I found some really great examples of how people are adapting from different areas in the US and the world (including examples from high schoolers, employers, and commuter “slugging”–no it’s not violent), they are under the fold.

What’s happening in your part of the world? How is your area adapting?

(Also, make sure to check out our call for TOD:Local contributors.)

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High school kids seem to be leading the way with, kids walking to school on the side of the highway in Alabama and fighting to get bike parking at their school in New Jersey.

Employers seem to be interested in helping employees reduce their commuting costs, lest people start demanding more pay. In Jacksonville, FL the Mayo Clinic has started a carpooling program.

The Mayo Clinic not only encourages its employees to carpool, it also rewards them with better parking. “They’re interested in the fact that they can help the environment, reduce their carbon footprint and saving money. Also, there’s a camaraderie that’s being developed,” said head of Mayo Clinic campus planning Robert Fontaine.He said so far there are currently about 60 carpools at Mayo Clinic, but he expects that as gas prices continue to go up, so will the number of workers willing to share a ride.

And Virgina commuters have restarted an old practice of “slugging” it to work with complete strangers:

Each weekday morning, in large parking lots in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, hundreds of people stand in lines waiting for free rides to work from total strangers. The practice, which famously began in the Washington area in the 1970s, is known as “slugging.”

By taking on extra passengers, or “slugs,” a Virginia driver can use the state’s High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes, which can require up to three people per car.

For the last three decades, members of this underground suburban society have believed that everybody wins; the entire carload is ensured a traffic-free ride up notoriously clogged Interstates 95 and 395 to work at the Pentagon and other office buildings in Arlington, Va., and downtown Washington.

What’s happening in your part of the world?

Eliot Spitzer’s historic fall from grace was a blow to many progressives who believed that he would reform New York’s dysfunctional state government, but his replacement may be equally transformative, but from a Peak Oil perspective.

David Paterson will be the nation’s first legally blind Governor and only the fourth African American governor (New York’s first)since Reconstruction ended. As I wrote back in 2006, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson is not only peak oil aware, but willing to make public speeches about it and fairly eloquent on explaining peak oil to ordinary folks.
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He also has a 20+ year history with the state legislature, holding the minority leader post for the Democrats in the State Senate. News coverage has brought to light the high level of respect he gets from both Republicans and Democrats, many noting his soft touch and collegiality as very different from Spitzer’s “I’m an effing Steamroller” approach to getting his way.

It’s not clear yet what his adminstration’s priorities will, but he has a good record on environmental and alternative energy issues. But if tackling oil dependence is high on his agenda, it is possible that he will be able to find the right bargain to strike with legislature and assemble a working majority on key issues.

I can’t find a current version of the speeches he gave during campaign that used to be on the campaign website, but here’s what I captured at the time from a campaign speech that summarized his views:

Eliot Spitzer, my friend, and I, outside of our goals, have a little polite competition. We try to find the most obtuse quotations to work into government policy, and I still haven’t been able to match Eliot’s presumption, which I think is very, very applicable to energy policy, in the words of Yogi Berra: If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up someplace else.

Tell me if this verse sounds familiar: “And then one day, while he was shooting for some food, up from the ground there came a bubbling crude.” Those light-hearted lyrics from the CBS 60s comedy series, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” in my opinion poignantly portray the mass availability of oil and gas in American society, in the society at that time.

But the situation comedy that allowed a poor mountaineer to become a Hollywood millionaire may have obfuscated the work of a Shell Oil geologist who was offering a different interpretation at the same time.

In 1956, Dr. King Hubert offered a prediction that United States’ oil production would, in effect, plateau somewhere between 1970 and 1971. This was the culmination of research where the first drilling for oil in this country came in 1859. By 1870, we had a network of oil pipes, starting the first network of delivering of oil as a fuel alternative at that particular time, and the curve went up steadily and steadily until, alarmingly, October of 1970 when we were producing 9.5 million barrels of oil per day. That’s the highest we ever achieved.

Currently, we’re producing about 5.1 million barrels of oil per day. We will go under half of the oil production of 1970, 37 years later, sometime in the middle of next year. Now this is staggering because, in addition to that, the United States Department of Energy – and I don’t know how they got this past Phillip Kooning, Bobby – offered a paper describing the mitigation of oil peak downside, meaning that, after the production of oil slips below half of the peak production, at that point the energy return on energy investment becomes negative.

In other words, it takes as much energy to bring the oil out of the ground as it would to realize energy benefits from the oil that’s actually drilled. So the reality is that in the flourishing 50s, we were getting 30 barrels of oil out of the ground for every barrel invested, and we are now somewhere between five and 10 barrels of oil for every barrel we invest.

So the question is: when is the oil going to run out? The answer is: nobody knows.
There were alarmists in the 70s after the fuel shortage crisis that said that we’d run out of oil in the 80s. There are bloggers on the Internet who say we’re going to run out of oil in the next 10 years. No one really knows. Discoveries in the Yucatan Peninsula, the Gulf of Mexico, and in Credo, Alaska, have certainly extended that period of time.

But then the drilling that took place in the Caspian Sea in 1998 that was supposed to yield 400 billion barrels of oil is now being estimated at 40 billion barrels of oil. So it goes back and forth, how long the oil supplies are going to last.

But what’s more important than that would best be represented by this example: The human body has 21 quarts of blood contained in it. We don’t die at the moment we offer our last drop of blood. What’s more important is when our first drop of blood is spilled, and that’s what Shakespeare taught us in the “Merchant of Venice.” The problem is that if a person loses 20 to 25% of his own blood, it severely impairs the systems of the body, and death will not be long.
This is the problem we are going to have if there is any cutoff of our oil supplies in the immediate future.

Remember the 1970s oil shortage only involved a 5% lessened amount of oil than we actually have now, than we actually had at that particular time. What we’ve got to start concentrating on, as a society, are alternatives to what has been the lifeblood of our economy.

The Spitzer administration’s policy on energy can be summed up in four words: conserve today, renew tomorrow.
We have got to stop throwing good energy after bad. We will use conservation for immediate results, and we’ll hope that we can find alternative sources of energy for long-term and future positive results. These are not new ideas. They’re not dramatic. They don’t even cost that much, but they are effective.

And the most effective and immediate way to establish some kind of impact on our environment is through conservation. Conservation doesn’t mean privatization. It doesn’t mean austerity. It just means doing more with less, not just doing with less.

We’re asking New York businesses to raise profits by reducing their utility costs, not by reducing their businesses. We’re asking the families in New York to lower their utility bills, not to lower their expectation of a lifestyle. Conservation is good business sense, because if it saves energy; it saves money. Because energy is the new currency.

We want to make sure that the community action agencies, the not-for-profits and the weatherization organizations, get the proper funding that they will need. So we will use conservation in the short-term. We will implement it to get immediate results, but we want to pursue renewable energy sources as a long-term solution to New York’s energy uses.

This is the long-term solution that can liberate America from its dependency on foreign oil importation. And we certainly think that this is an avenue that we can go on now because it will decrease greenhouse gas effects, create high-skilled, high-paying jobs around the state. It can stimulate in-state investment and generate huge tax revenues.

There is an ancillary benefit to bringing renewable energy, and it is that every dollar invested in renewable energy can create 40% more jobs than the conventional sources and more widely-used sources of gas and oil.

And this typifies Eliot Spitzer’s view of dealing with crisis: he believes that crisis creates opportunity, and opportunity is enhanced by more jobs and economic development for this state.

Paterson is expected to lay out his priorities as governor later this week and then be formally sworn into office on Monday, March 17th at noon.

In part 2 of “what the rest of the world could learn from Bogota, Colombia”, here is a good video that gives an overview of how their bus rapid transit system works. In part 1 we looked Ciclovia, a weekly auto-free Sunday on main streets and boulevards opens them to cycling, skating and all sorts of public events. (much more discussion under the fold…)

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The Bogota bus rapid transit system is fairly unique in the world. It leverages much of the same infrastructure that was in place for main roads and highways so there was no major investment in building new rights of way. The stations are pretty low cost, but highly functional. The main investment is in the rolling stock (buses).

This system bring mass transit access to almost every corner of a major sprawling city. It also serves to create transit oriented development along the major corridors instead of auto-centric development.

If a major city in the Developed or Developing is looking to quickly develop a mass transit system, but does not have the capital to invest in new heavy or light rail, bus rapid transit offers another option.

There are over 100 BRT projects in operation or in development all around the world. You can see a complete list at Go BRT.

Here a description of the Orange Line in Los Angeles:

The Metro Orange Line, operated by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), is dedicated bus transitway located along an unused rail right-of-way. The Orange Line provides a rapid transit extension from the Metro Red Line and improves connectivity to the Metro Rapid bus system for San Fernando Valley transit riders. The system is also intended to reduce congestion on US 101, a major freeway that runs parallel to the Orange Line. The Orange Line debuted in October 2005.

Construction of the busway was briefly halted in 2004 following a court finding that Metro had not considered multiple Metro Rapid bus routes as an alterative to the busway. Following additional analysis, a revised Final Environmental Impact Report indicated that the Orange Line busway was still the preferred alternative since:

- The busway generated the greatest number of transit riders of all the alternatives–this would offset higher capital costs, making the busway alternative the most cost effective on a per passenger basis.

- Operating costs were anticipated to be lower than the Rapid Bus network alternative.

- The busway supported the city’s land use plans to locate a mass transit project along the former railroad right-of-way and was consistent with local land use plans.

- The Orange Line would offer the most improved travel time, since the dedicated busway would not be impacted by increased traffic congestion.

The Orange Line’s debut on the last weekend of October, 2005 drew about 83,000 riders who tried out the new system free-of-charge. Eleven additional buses were required to meet passenger demand. Regular fare service began the following Monday.

Ridership on the Metro Orange was expected to grow steadily, building to 22,000 average weekday boarding passengers by the year 2020. Initial ridership during the first year was predicted to be between 5,000-7,000 daily riders. However, the line has proven immensely popular – ridership soared to more than 21,000 daily riders within the first six months of opening.

A January 2006 rider survey found that riders overwhelming approve of Orange Line features and time-savings: 95% indicated that they like the Orange Line Metroliner vehicle, 91% like the pre-paid boarding system. 92% normally have a seat for the trip. Additional findings were that:

- More than 50% of riders previously took a Metro Bus before the Orange Line opened.

- More than 1/3 of riders had a car available for the survey trip.

- 17% of all riders are new riders to Metro. 14% had been riding for less than a year.

- About half of respondents said they would connect to a Metro Bus or Rail line to complete their trip.

- 85% of respondents who made the same trip prior to the Orange Line indicated that the Orange Line has reduced their travel time.

- 18% of respondents had previously either driven alone or carpooled, with 79% previously using the 101 Freeway. Of the former 101 Freeway drivers, 68% indicated that their trip time had been reduced.

Information for this summary was gathered from the Metro website, federal documents (US Department of Transportation, Federal Transportation Administration) and news stories.