I've been doing a lot of writing on peak oil and cities recently -- articles for a forthcoming resilience website by some folks at Ecotrust and the December issue of Planning magazine, as well as this one for the Sacramento Bee. Although I live and breathe this stuff now, I still find writing about it a challenge. The problems we face in peak oil are so complex --and the concepts behind peak oil itself are so complex-- that making coherent and, more importantly, useful observations is no easy task.

I deal with this in my presentations with the following progression of points (and a whole lot of detail in between):

1. The fundamental factors of oil supply and demand are changing.
2. "Peak oil" is a useful concept for understanding what's happening and why.
3. Peak oil creates system-wide challenges: it's not just an issue of rising energy prices.
4. These challenges can't be addressed just by markets or by national governments; there are important challenges (and solutions) that only local stakeholders can identify.

That takes me about twenty minutes to go through, which is also the minimum time John Kaufmann, another lecturer on peak oil and cities, told me he needs to make an effective case. Less than that, and you leave too many loose strings and sound like a conspiracy theorist. This is a problem not just because we often have only the "elevator pitch" moment to bring up the challenges of peak oil to colleagues and officials, but also because folks in general tend to tune out of a complex argument unless they've specifically made the time and mental space to absorb it.

Fortunately the messaging gets easier as oil price swings make it more and more obvious that we're no longer in the relatively stable market of the 1990s. I saw my colleague Richard Heinberg, probably the world's top lecturer on peak oil, give a 20 minute talk on Sunday that spent more time on the economic crisis than on oil. In my own presentations I find I can cut out a slide on oil every few months. People increasingly get it.

And yet, it was only some months ago that a senior member of one city's council of economic advisers responded to my talk with the usual "Well, we've heard that before. We don't need worry, the market will take care of it."

I'd only had five minutes to make my case that day. I've since adopted John's policy of politely refusing invitations to speak for less than 20 minutes. And oil has since gone on a wild ride from $87/barrel on that day up to $147 and back down to around $100. Hopefully that council of economic advisers has given second thought to the market's ability to deliver affordable oil to their city.

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Sidenote: When I chatted with the economic advisory council fellow afterwards he suggested that if the peak oilers were so certain about the price of oil going up they should put their money on it and bet high. Interestingly, around that same time the Association for the Study of Peak Oil - USA (ASPO) publicly made a $100,000 wager with Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA; one of the most looked-to energy market analysis firms and a firm believer in abundant and cheap oil well into the future) that oil won't hit CERA's projection of 107 million barrels per day by 2017.

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Photo credit: Aeioux