by Katherine Garvey

Katherine Garvey's interview of Sustainable Bellingham's David MacLeod regarding the Resolution to create a Peak Oil task force in Bellingham and Whatcom County. The interview took place in late May 2008 via email.

Q. What is your experience with peak oil or environmental issues in general?

I have been concerned with environmental issues for years, but this concern jumped up a few notches when I read a "state of the world" report in the local newspaper in the late '90s. I became aware of the peak oil issue in 2004, when The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream was shown in Bellingham. I didn't just accept the viewpoint of this documentary, but instead spent the next 6 months researching the issue until I was convinced that the evidence for a near term peak (2005-2010) was very strong. I've continued to study this issue for the past four years.

Q. What is your title? In other words, in what capacity were you addressing the city and county councils over the peak oil briefing?

I am a member of the Vision Team for Sustainable Bellingham, which is what other organizations might call a steering committee or a Board of Directors. Sustainable Bellingham was born out a community response to the showings of The End of Suburbia, so peak oil has been a central concern to our group from its inception.

Q. What was your contribution to the briefing?

The Resolution and the Briefing Paper that accompanied it was a collaborative effort from the ad-hoc group that has been working on this idea of creating a local Peak Oil Task Force. Clare Fogelsong, Environmental Resources Manager for the City of Bellingham, wrote the first draft of the briefing paper. The rest of us then added to it and suggested edits. My final contribution was some fact checking and adding the footnotes.

Q. What inspired you to participate in its creation? How long have you been working on getting something like this task force created?

Last October I was organizing a showing of the movie What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, that Sustainable Bellingham was sponsoring. [Whatcom Community College] instructor John Rawlins suggested it might be a good idea to pass around a petition in support of a peak oil task force at that event, but I didn't have time to get that together. Soon after that I read a candidate questionnaire in Whatcom Watch, and they specifically asked the candidates about supporting the creation of a peak oil task force. I noticed that the majority of answers were supportive, and I noticed the strongest response was from City Council candidate Jack Weiss, who said it was a moral imperative. Shortly after the election I contacted Mr. Weiss to arrange a meeting on the topic. At the same time another citizen, Bill Dean, was also trying to set up a meeting on the same topic, so we joined forces and have been having meetings since December.

The original inspiration was that Portland, Oregon had a peak oil task force, which had already completed its process and issued a report. John Rawlins, Bill Dean, and I all thought that Portland provided an excellent template that we could model after. A number of other cities and communities have also initiated task forces, and the Post Carbon Institute had begun a Post Carbon Cities project with a book by program director Daniel Lerch. All of these were helpful and inspiring.

Q. How prepared do you think Bellingham and Whatcom County are for this potential crisis?

I think I would rather be in Bellingham/Whatcom County than most other places. We have wonderful assets and wonderful people here, and we also have numerous organizations working towards sustainability in different ways. We have a healthy Farmer’s Market selling locally produced food, and we also have potential for growing a lot more food locally in Whatcom County, which is very important. Having said that, however, I think we are woefully unprepared for this crisis. As the Hirsch report for the Dept. of Energy stated in 2005, "...without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs [of peaking world oil production] will be unprecedented." We have a long ways to go towards being prepared for this potential crisis.

Q. What do you think will be the biggest obstacle that Whatcom County will face with peak oil?

The biggest obstacles are not unique to Whatcom County. Long term energy descent presents tremendous challenges. Author James Howard Kunstler calls it "The Long Emergency." Big changes in our transportation infrastructure will be required, and will take a long time to fully implement. Food production, distribution, price, and availability will most likely be very problematic. Since abundant and cheap fossil fuels are the lifeblood of our economy, the economy as a whole can be expected to suffer significantly, and when you have all of the above happening simultaneously, you can only hope that the wheels don’t fall off of the social services that are in place.

The biggest obstacle that comes to my mind at this moment, however, is the obstacle of conveying accurate information and understanding for good decision making. Look at what is happening now on the national level. We see a lot of finger pointing, and a lot of short-sighted solutions that seem to reveal that the problems have not been accurately understood. Oil companies are blamed for price gouging, investors are blamed for speculating, OPEC is blamed for not pumping enough, and environmentalists are blamed for restrictions and regulations on drilling. Relatively little attention is given to depletion of oil reserves, and rapidly rising demand around the world. And the “solutions” being offered? A gas tax holiday, halting deposits to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and suing OPEC. None of which will have any effect on current conditions.

Thankfully, and wisely I think, our locally elected officials have unanimously supported the resolution to create a task force to look at the issue of energy scarcity and make appropriate recommendations for Bellingham and Whatcom County. Having an accurate understanding of the problem will be very important in order to avoid jumping to misguided solutions.

Q. Will any of the categories (transportation, energy, water, etc.) be stressed more than others by the task force, do you think?

I think the Food and Agriculture category might be stressed more than the others, simply because eating is extremely important to most of us, and none of us wants to go hungry. 17% of fossil fuel consumption in the U.S. currently goes toward food production, and as this energy becomes more scarce and expensive, we can expect the amount and variety of food available to us to decrease, and prices to increase dramatically. Our group felt that as good as the Portland Peak Oil Task Force report is, they could have done a more thorough job on this topic. Hopefully our task force will make a good contribution in this category.