Julian Darley: First thing I would like to ask you is when did you first realize that there may be some difficulties with the oil supply?

John Hickenlooper: Well, I've always... I spent five years as an exploration geologist long before I ever thought of running for elected office. So I was always aware of M. King Hubbert's curves, and as you consume an oil field at a certain point you hit a peak and after that no matter what you do in that oil field the ultimate production is gonna decline dramatically. In essence, ultimately the world would function like that. I got elected as mayor of Denver two years ago, and about a year ago I was listening to a guy named Tom Petrie, Petrie Parkman. He gave a presentation describing the parameters and the variables that might affect when that peak, in terms of world oil production, might occur. He was saying that it could perceivably happen 2008-2010, and that the consequent price fluctuations and generally dramatic increases in price could have profound effects. I came back to my office and started talking to people and began thinking about it. And as a city government, one of the first things we should do is make sure people are aware of it and that there's information and some sense of ownership of the community - that this change is gonna happen, if not in the next five years, within the next 20 years. So that's where this peak oil conference came from, at least doing one in Denver, to reach out to the regional business community and get them involved. But it also allowed us the impetus to begin going through the city of Denver's use of oil and petroleum-related products and begin to explore where we're wasting, where are our opportunities to wean ourselves off of such an intensive lifestyle or intensive petroleum-based quality of life.

Julian Darley: Are you doing other things to tell the populace, the people here in Denver, that there'll be difficulties?

John Hickenlooper: Yeah, we've had a number of press-conferences on sustainability, how do we make sure our economy is not full of these peaks and valleys, these booms and busts, which are... generally the effects are always concentrated on those least able to endure them. So the poorest, the most disadvantaged when you go through these booms and busts. So we want to make sure that we really address that issue, and by doing so by really building an initiative within the city for sustainability. We've been able to reach out, have press-conferences, and talk about it. It's not just about economic development, it's about economic development that is environmentally sound, so that we won't have degradation of our environment that'll cost more money and health care down the roads. And that it also is socially just. You need economic development, but it's gotta be environmentally sound and socially just so that every member of the community gets a fair opportunity of a high quality of life. I think that framework has allowed us to really go out and talk to TV stations, newspapers, and we'll begin to build up an understanding, a foundation.

Julian Darley: Can you tell us about some of the initiatives that you're putting in place?

John Hickenlooper: Well, we're looking at a broad range of things. Denver was the first Green Fleet city in the United States, where we began to look at what vehicles are in our fleet and how much diesel or gasoline do they consume. We've gone beyond that now and say: well, how many vehicles do we really need, is there some way that we can take all the snow plows that we have in our waste/water management, or all the trucks we have in waste/water, and the trucks that we have in parks & recon, the trucks we have in our road crews and put snow plows on all of them so that we can clean our snow clearly and not have to own as many trucks and have those trucks that we do have be more fuel efficient. We'll be able to pay more for those trucks since there are less of them. We've looked at going to all our stop lights and taking out the old incandescent little red, green, and amber lights and putting LEDs, light emitting diodes, that use 80% less fuel. They use 20% electricity of the old lights, they are brighter and safer and they last 10 times as long so you don't have to drive a truck up there every year and a half or two years and have somebody take their time out to fix the lights. All those little initiatives, we're using - with all our diesel engines - we're using a mixture that's partially biodiesel. Renewable resource and extending the ability to use more of the traditional diesel and again we've been able to demonstrate that it doesn't harm the diesel engines and it does create a much more efficient use of the fuel.

Julian Darley: Have you given any consideration to some more radical measures such as the car-cooperatives in Vancouver, whereby people actually would physically get rid of their cars and they share cars by booking them online?

John Hickenlooper: Certainly you can see that a car-coop is gonna have the ability to increase the economic benefit of car-pooling because people actually don't have to own that second car. That really is a significant thing. That's all part of our push at transit. We're building a light rail system in Denver that will be, when completed, somewhere close to 150 miles. At least when we finish this phase that we've already passed. We're really focusing on getting each stop to become a little village, so there's not a sea of parking spaces and commuter parking. That people will actually be able to walk right from their home to the light rail and take a light rail to work. And that more families will be able to be a one car family, instead of being a two or even a three car family. It's the same kind of idea. Some of the car-pools, it's a funny thing, I know that they've been tried in Seattle, Portland I guess there's an incipient effort in Chicago. But Americans are funny about their cars, we'll have to see whether it's gonna be transferable to our culture.

Julian Darley: It's not just Americans, Europeans and Canadians are pretty keen on their cars too.

John Hickenlooper: Exactly.

Julian Darley: Could you tell me about some of your conversations with some other mayors in North America?

John Hickenlooper: The National Government, and not just the United States but all over the world, it's hard to get National Governments to really pay attention or make dramatic changes to something like this because there are so many special interests, so many affected parties that have a real significant economic stake. They invest large amounts of money to make sure that Federal policy doesn't change too dramatically and might have a negative impact on their business. We don't have that same pressure at the local level. The impact to the local business really is much less consequential, so we're at liberty to be more aggressive and trying to find what is the low-hanging fruit. How can we find ways of saving fuel-costs, whatever fuel you're talking about, how can we save diesel, gasoline, or even electricity at much as possible and get to the point where the whole community is consuming less. And really have the city be a model. I think this is gonna be a bottom down, a grassroots change up and sit like Greg Nickels in Seattle who started an initiative to get all the mayors in the country to sign the Kyoto protocols. He has already got a 180 mayors who have said that they as local jurisdictions are gonna commit to reducing the amount of carbon their burning, in accord with what was agreed to at Kyoto. The Federal Government is miles away from getting to that whereas the local governments are much more willing to embrace it and see: hey, this isn't gonna cost us that much money. In many ways there's gonna be economic opportunities that come along with this transformation.

Julian Darley: Are there any formal meetings between other mayors that are planned?

John Hickenlooper: We actually are having a sustainability best practices conferences here at the end of November where we're getting the mayors of Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and some of the more progressive cities that really are kind of ahead of the curve. Just to come together and begin looking at what are our best practices, what are we doing that really works. How can we take our successes and make sure that we're all on-board and then expand them to every city in the country.

Julian Darley: Several of the speakers, including Matt Simmons and Chris Skrebowski who have considerable weight in the world, have suggested that we've really got very little time. Matt was on camera this morning suggesting we had four to seven years. Just in case they might be right, are you considering emergency transition plans, emergency energy plans?

John Hickenlooper: Well, I don't think that I agree completely with their... I mean four to seven years is right that that's when the peak occurs. I don't think that's when the real... I think the price of oil will jump another ten or twenty bucks a barrel. I certainly think it's not out of the realm of likelihood that we could have $100 oil in the next seven years, but at that point people drive less, and people do begin to walk more and they ride bicycles more. I don't think it's catastrophic, I think there's a lot of elasticity in how we use fuels and energy in our everyday lifestyles. If you step back and look at it, the metropolitan Denver area, 2.7 million people average per household 11 car trips per day. It's staggering! I mean, every time they think that they need a quarter milk or they wanna go get a newspaper they hop in their car and they drive 20 blocks. When the price of oil gets up above $100 a barrel and the price of gasoline gets to 4-5 dollars a gallon, I guarantee you that people will rethink how many trips they take and they won't be driving so much. That doesn't really affect anyone's quality of life. I don't think it'll affect the consumption of consumer products. It's not gonna have a dramatic negative impact on our economy. We're just gonna drive less. Even though, now that's one example and there are other examples that Matt pointed out that are, I think the consequences become more on the negative side, we'll have to address this. I don't think they'll happen so dramatically that we need to be shouting alarms or worrying about the sky has actually fallen. It'll happen slowly, and if even the price of oil were as now, once it sits here for another six months, which I think it will, even at $50 oil suddenly oil companies begin to explore more, people are looking at different technologies to bring more hydrocarbons into the market all around the world. It's very hard environmentally to get a refinery passed in the United States. That's not true about other places in the world and I think we're gonna see more refining capacity all over the world.

Julian Darley: Matt Simmons and Colin Campbell and several other people, again people who are well-known voices...

John Hickenlooper [interrupts]: Real experts that know a lot more than I, yeah.

Julian Darley: ...more than most of us, surely. They've actually said statements, and Matt made the statement yesterday that he is positing the end of growth. Sustainability is another word, normally, for sustainable development and development is another word for industrial growth. If that turned out to be the case, are there any thoughts? Is it something that can even be discussed or is taboo?

John Hickenlooper: No, you gotta discuss it because I think it's just like the... What peak oil is really saying is that it's not the end of oil, it's the end of $20 oil, or $40 oil, or $60 oil. I think what we're gonna have is the end of easy growth. That's happening outside the realm of energy. If you look at what the Chinese government has done, what success they've had with controlling their population. The Mexican government, a dramatic decline in their growth rate during the last 20 years. The United States. Clearly Europe has had two greater declines in their birthrates and they don't have enough young people coming into their work force to generate an economy that will provide a high quality of life to all the people that have retired. I think the challenge is to find how do we have economic growth without easy growth, without more people. That's what we've always relied on as we incorporate more people worldwide into our economy and more people in our country into our economy. That makes for easy growth. Anybody can have a shoe store or any retail store or manufacture widgets if there are more people buying your products, more people coming into the economy, it's pretty easy to grow. The growth in the future is gonna be harder growth. How do you design things that people didn't know they wanted but suddenly do want, and whole new products taking the existing market without it growing and building your business from there. I think growth will certainly slow, we won't have as rapid growth. But that's not a terrible thing. Again, if the population is not growing so much we don't need so much growth to continue to expand the opportunity of a high quality of life to more people.

Julian Darley: Thank you very much.

John Hickenlooper: You bet.