An interview by Steve Heimel of Alaska Public Radio Network (APRN).

The emergency fuel assistance measures passed by the Alaska's Legislature may be just the beginning of a major public policy adjustment to the high price of oil. Renewable energy is the buzzword of the day. Already windmills are popping up all over the bush, and an experimental hydropower turbine is going into the Yukon River at Eagle. Transportation projections are being rethought as commuters drive less and begin pressing for mass transit. Daniel Lerch, a speaker at the Renewable Energy Fair in Anchorage, says that places like Alaska will be among the first to make the changes needed to face an era of great energy uncertainty.

Listen to the segment.

ANNOUNCER: The emergency fuel assistance measures passed by the Legislature yesterday may be just the beginning of a major public policy adjustment to the high price of oil. Renewable energy is the buzzword of the day. Already windmills are popping up all over the bush and an experimental hydropower turbine is going into the Yukon River at Eagle. Transportation projections are being rethought as commuters drive less and begin pressing for mass transit. One of the speakers at this weekend’s Renewable Energy Fair in Anchorage says that places like Alaska will be among the first to make the changes needed to face an era of great energy uncertainty. APRN’s Steve Heimel reports:

STEVE HEIMEL: Surrounded by the new construction outside downtown Anchorage’s City Hall, Daniel Lerch said he’s here to help city leaders find ways to make their infrastructure more resilient. He says that adaptation is more likely to take place on a local level than nationally and more likely to happen here than elsewhere.

DANIEL LERCH: Alaska is at a bit of an advantage, you could even think of it that way because the public and even the political consensus is going to start developing rather quickly to recognizing that energy uncertainty is a legitimate and urgent issue. You get there faster.

SH: Lerch has written Post Carbon Cities - Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, and was meeting with municipal leaders on Friday. He advocates for what he calls a systems approach to see where the vulnerabilities are to high fuel costs. Is it in how food gets here, in the way the aviation business is changing, in the movement of rural populations into the hubs or where? The growing realization that there is no going back from these high fuel prices goes under the name of “peak oil”. In its simplest form it’s the idea that the world’s fossil fuel production has peaked. As Lerch’s Post Carbon Institute puts it “regardless of the vast amount of hydrocarbons still left undiscovered how much faster can they be produced?”.

DL: Ultimately, recoverable reserves is absolutely part of the issue. The main issue however is flow. “Peak oil” is the maximum flow rate.

SH: Lerch says this makes it a prudent bet to invest in infrastructure that reduces demand and to do it now.

DL: We have a limited window of opportunity to build infrastructure at a certain price, it’s only going to get more expensive. So we have a choice - do we spend the next ten years and invest in renewable energy and invest in public transit, invest in densifying our cities and building zero energy buildings and that sort of thing or do business as usual and build this very oil intensive land use pattern and end up basically having the same problems twenty years from now but with far fewer opportunities for changing what we’re going to do.

SH: Looking at systems is best done on a local level, Lerch says, while major spending decisions about the highway trust fund or such things as renewable energy tax incentives get made on the national level, only local government has much hope of projecting such things as how land use and demand for municipal services are likely to change.

DL: As we start to have these big changes in the national economy, we’re going to have all sorts of different changes at the local levels and it’s only people at the local level who know what local resources are, who can identify what the local vulnerabilities are and can determine what the local solutions can be and how to prepare for them locally. We can’t look to higher levels of government to solve this problem for us.

SH: In his book Lerch has a list of examples of things local governments are already doing based on forty interviews with planners, engineers and public office holders. He says resilience planning is already well known in the business world and it’s time to move it into local government. In Anchorage, I’m Steve Heimel.

Photo credit: Steve Schroeder