TRANSCRIPT
Stuart Ramsey: Oil, That Is
Recorded 8 February 2007 at Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation, National Resource Council Canada

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All right, just to jump right in here, this is the disclaimer slide. I have a wonderful employer that will let me stand up in public and say just about anything I want, as long as its clear that I'm speaking on behalf of myself and that I'm not representing that employer.

In practice, when they say I can say anything I want, I think they mean anything but the Mayor Corrigan jokes, but we'll just see how that goes.

So, we want to talk about energy and climate and transportation, and so here's a presentation in three parts, starting with oil.

And, as Justin has indicated, my background in this is primarily in terms of transportation, but as part of my work at the city of Burnaby, I was asked to write the first report on peak oil to be received by any government in Canada. And so this is just the front part of that report, and what our council chose to do, in terms of raising awareness was send it to every municipality and regional district in the province.

So we hear a lot about the price of gasoline: is it going up, is it going down, is it getting out of hand? And certainly there are a lot of people that argue it's too high, that it's getting to be a problem for people. So let's take a look at that. Here's a cup of Starbucks coffee. And that cup costs about $1.60. We take the same cup. [laughter] Fill it with gasoline. And that will run you about 39¢. One of these products is essential to society as we know it today. [laughter]

Now if we compare that price with what you get from it, what is the value of the energy contained in a barrel of oil? When you compare that to how you would achieve the same amount of work, the same amount of effort, if you weren't using the oil, that barrel will produce the same amount of work as 8 servants working for you full-time for one year. And so when you think of what that would cost you, even at $70 or $80 a barrel, the price of a barrel of oil starts to look like a pretty good bargain.

When people talk about peak oil, one of the things they do is look at oil production. And so here we have a chart showing global oil production over the last 70 or so years. “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” [laughter] That was said by an economist, so he's allowed to say that. But the point is clearly there, that just because we've seen exponential growth historically doesn't mean we can assume that will always be the case that that product will always be available, in a finite world.

Now, we compare that production curve, how fast we're pulling it out of the ground, how fast we're using it, compare that to the discovery curve for conventional oil. The stuff that flows most easily out of the ground, and what you'll see is that for the last 40 years or so, it's been steadily declining at an average rate of about 5% every year. And so, putting those two together, those two charts, is the simplistic basis for the notion of peak oil. The idea that we're not finding it as fast as we used to, production can't continue to rise indefinitely, you have to reach a point where production peaks and declines. And, there's no particular debate about that. There's a great deal of debate about when that might occur.

I put up here a sample of the dates that have been thrown out by various people that are in the predictions business. But ultimately, it's an incredibly complex question, because you've got all the geology and all of the things that we don't know about what's going on underground. But all of the societal factors and the political factors and the technology factors, such as the work that you guys are doing here. There are so many things that come into play in determining the peak that, in my view, it's not realistic for anyone to actually pull out a number and say, “This is the peak.” or “This will be the peak.” But, generally speaking, what you'll find is that the range of predictions fall somewhere between right about now and about 30 years out. So there's a 30-year window, and most projections would agree that somewhere in that range, we're going to hit a peak.

Some of that is expressed in this item from the website created by Chevron. They've created a separate site from their corporate site called willyoujoinus.com, and what they're doing is engaging the world in a discussion about energy. And so, as part of the advertising for this, they have a letter from their CEO, which opens with the following words: “Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over. What we all do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and beyond.” Slightly different wording, but basically the same principle as what Justin was indicating from the Nobel Laureate, that this is a significant issue for our society, and very much depends on the choices we make in the immediate future.

A few perspectives on oil production, this is the Wall Street perspective of looking at the last couple of months and trying to think what's going to happen in the next couple of days or weeks or months. Then you have the economists' perspective, looking at the longer trend, the pattern over history, and how the production of oil has continued to grow. You have the geologist perspective, just that it is a finite resort, at some point it must peak and go into decline, and the cultural anthropologists' perspective, which is that we are presently operating within a very narrow window in human history where our society has run on oil. And so of course, from that arises the question: “Well, okay, but what will that mean for our society? What will that mean to me?” And this links back to my work in transportation, planning and modeling, which is all about that gazing into the crystal ball and trying to understand what our future's going to be like, and to prepare for it.

And so in thinking about that, it helps to look at how we're using the oil today. 2% – these are U.S. numbers – 2% of this oil is being used to generate electricity. 6% for the heating of buildings, generally. 25% is used in the making of things: plastics and food, we use a lot of oil in our agriculture system, and so 25% goes into the making of things. Two-thirds, transportation. And so this is where my interest comes in. Clearly, when we get into a situation where oil production is declining, it's going to have a massive impact on transportation. The single biggest user by far of oil in North America today.

Second part of the presentation, talking about climate.

Here we are, no place like home. Nice planet. Now the ring that's appearing around the edge is the atmosphere drawn to scale. It is this tiny, tiny, thin little shell, and that is what distinguishes this place from the moon.

And let's take a closer look at that thin little shell, at what it's made of. And you guys, you're all scientists, right? I mean, you know this, right? This goes back to high school. Nitrogen: 78%, not a greenhouse gas. Next up, oxygen: 21%, not a greenhouse gas. Someone here knows the next one, right? Argon: 1%, not a greenhouse gas. What we're doing is messing with the trace gases. The tiny, tiny fraction of gases that are greenhouse gases. And it's because they're so tiny and yet so significant, so tiny in number, that the efforts of humanity have been able to have a significant effect. If we were dealing with nitrogen, it would be a lot harder for us to alter the nitrogen levels in the atmosphere, but in terms of the greenhouse gases, it's easier because they make up such a smaller portion of that atmosphere.

And so, looking at what that means, in terms of some of the impacts we might experience locally: mystery creature. Anybody? This would be the pine beetle. The mountain pine beetle, which we know is devastating large sections of the forests in British Columbia and is aiming for Alberta. And clearly, the significant impact for an economy such as BC's that has a substantial forestry sector.

Of course, as we get into drier seasons, we get things like this from the Kelowna area [picture of forest fire], about three or four years ago. And of course, much more recently, and much closer to home.

Now, we've gotten to a point where all of a sudden, what used to be a passing interest up here is now a major interest. What's the weather doing in the Gulf of Mexico? And this is because, in particular, of the 2005 hurricane season.

All those little sprinkles you see surrounded by the blue ring on the map: that's the oil and natural gas infrastructure in the Gulf. Those are all platforms and refineries and everything else, spread out in the Gulf of Mexico. And so along comes Hurricane Katrina, tracking across the Gulf, and then blasting up through New Orleans, and fairly soon thereafter, Hurricane Rita, taking another swipe, rather ironically, through all of that infrastructure and bringing us scenes like this on the evening news. [Picture of oil platform tilted and submerged in the water]

A little further away, but no less significant, we have this from the Larson B ice shelf in Antarctica, and the dashed line shows the edge of that ice shelf as it existed several years ago, at the start of 2002. And so here we have, in time lapse, the rapid disintegration of that ice shelf into a collection of ice cubes in the space of 5 weeks. 3200 square kilometers of ice shelf gone. Now of course, one of the things that can happen if we get enough ice melting in Antarctica or in Greenland is that we get sea level rise globally.

And so, for example, if either the West Antarctic ice sheet melts or the Greenland ice sheet melts, we get a global rise of about 6 to 7 meters in sea level. This is what that would look like locally here. I think you're on pretty good ground here, actually. [laughter] Might become oceanfront.

And so, one of the approaches that have been discussed from a climate change point of view is the idea of carbon capture and storage. The idea that if you have something like this, a power station that's emitting CO2, you can capture it, sequester it in a number of locations, whether it's underground in various locations or at the bottom of the ocean. And there's potential for that. All of the building blocks for that technology are already in place and in use on a small scale. And so there's the potential there to take that and ramp it up. Of course, there is the problem with mobile sources of carbon dioxide, where it would be far more costly and impractical to try and do that carbon capture, at least in terms of a gasoline burning engine that we have today.

So if we look at some of the things that we can do, as a society, as a government, one of the key principles is the idea of a national cap on carbon emissions. And so here we have a chart representing a whole bunch of different consumers, each with varying levels of emission, and if the government indicates a cap on the total emissions, then you have a situation like this, where some users are emitting more than the cap, and would need to acquire, in a market scenario, would need to acquire the right to continue emitting at that rate from someone who is emitting below the cap. And so you have an overall cap for the nation, and the market works out at exactly who does the emitting and who gets compensated for it by coming up with ways of doing business or of living that are lower in emissions. And then of course the idea is that the cap, each year, gets pulled down further and further until we've met a level that is sustainable and suitable for the planet.

So this is just to give a sense of the challenge that we're facing and the scope of the challenge, much of the literature indicates that we need to stabilize global temperature at not more than 2º Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, a third of that is already gone. We've already used up the first third over the last hundred years or so. The next third is going to be hard to avoid because we've already put all these gases up in the atmosphere. Even if we stop today, the gases that are already up there will continue to warm the planet. And so we basically got a buffer of about a third of a degree Celsius in which to start changing the way we do business. And in order to achieve that, if this bar represents our total annual emissions today, generally the targets that are put forward are somewhere in the range of 80-90% reduction in greenhouse gases emitted annually in an industrialized country such as Canada. And so, whether it's 80 or 90, the point being, its not 10. This is not simply a change to your compact florescent bulb and you're happy and you're done. There's a lot of work that needs to be done here to reach this target. Most commentators suggest that we need to reach that target by about 2050 if we want to prevent runaway global warming. Global warming that feeds back on itself and accelerates. Others, of course, have suggested that it would be even sooner than that, and so there are projections on the order of 2030 to 2050, in terms of the time frame we have to achieve this very substantial reduction.

Now it used to be that if you were walking around carrying a sign that said, “The end is near,” [laughter] you'd be considered a little bit out there, a little bit on the fringe. But not so anymore. According to this headline from the Vancouver Sun, the world will end in 2 to 3 generations in the view of 72% - 72%! - of British Columbians, if we don't take quick and drastic action to curb global warming. There is an enormous amount of anxiety in our society today that we are not coming to terms with this, that we are not grappling well with this, that we need to get off our butts and start doing something about it. And we're starting to see some of that, of course, reflected in federal politics in the last few months or so.

All right, third and final section of the presentation, on transportation. Given that we've got these issues about oil and about climate change, what does this mean for transportation, what sorts of responses can we make in the field of transportation? So, class project. We have some innovative types here. Design the world's most inefficient form of transportation. If you were given this as your assignment, if you were asked to perform this task, could you possibly surpass something that looks like this? [picture of SUV, laughter] Unless, of course, it was something like this. [picture of Hummer, laughter] Whether it's in terms of the cost to the user, the enormous cost of acquiring such a device, the time you spend focused on only transportation whereas on a bus you could be reading or on a bike you could be improving your fitness at the same time, the amount of space it takes up in our cities, the amount of pollution, greenhouse gases that it emits, and of course the energy that it consumes.

But we have a law. It's called a zoning bylaw. And while we do a lot of good things here in greater Vancouver with density and with town centers and mixed uses, even here, much of our city consists of: the stores are over here, and the homes are over here. And therefore, chances are, if you're going out shopping, this is probably how you're going to get there. And as a result, you're going to be using 1% of the energy to move your groceries, 99% to move the vehicle. And we require this, this is what our zoning leads us to. Oh yeah, “Everybody can't have two tons of metal to get a loaf of bread.” That was a quote from Professor Larry Frank here at UVC. It would be sort of like having a policy in the freight business requiring that only one car be used on every train, and the rest of the train be hauled empty. That's the level of efficiency we're operating at when we do our grocery shopping.

So, one round of Transportation Jeopardy. Answer: They haven't changed in 600 years. Anybody? Something in transportation, so much has changed in transportation, what hasn't changed in 600 years? [audience member speaks] Wheel? Not bad, I like that. The first good answer I've had to this question [laughter] It's probably been a bit longer than 600 years, actually. [laughter] It's: How long have commuting times remained constant? [laughter] As we develop fancier technologies and the ability to move faster, we just move farther out. We're not really accomplishing a whole lot here. And so this is reflecting in, for example, this study that was done in California, that a 1% increase in transportation supply, or in other words, the capacity of the road network, leads to a 0.9% increase in the demand for the use of that network, leaving only 0.1% for the originally advertised purpose of reducing congestion and delay.

So with that in mind, we can talk about transportation Plan A. And a lot of the things in transportation Plan A are things that we're already doing in greater Vancouver and can be doing more of. So for example, we have the Livable Region Strategic Plan. A regional planning document sets out a vision for the region as a whole, that all the municipalities are expected to abide by and work within. And I found it fascinating. Did anyone go to the World Urban Forum this past summer? It was in Vancouver, and it was a huge conference put on by the United Nations, and it was looking at, obviously, cities. Cities around the world, what we can be doing better. And, in going to the conference for a few days, and just casually bumping into people from all over the world, chatting with them about what they're doing, it was an amazing number of them that said, “We're doing that. We're doing the Livable Region Strategic Plan.” Not in those words, but it's like: “We're going with higher density, we're going with mixed uses, we're going with focus on transit,” and so there's a lot of good stuff there that we are helping with in other parts of the world. So we can do things with transit, right? We can provide priority for buses so that they get through congestion. We can provide better bus stops, where it's more comfortable to be, with benches and shelters and newspaper boxes and so on, schedule information. We've got, of course, you're aware out here, the U-Pass, phenomenally successful, a huge increase in the mode share for transit. Now being expanded to Community Pass, and this is being done starting at universities, but ultimately we might get to a point where cities have zoning bylaws, that instead of saying, “For every new apartment, you have to provide two parking spaces” perhaps we'll have zoning bylaws that say, “You have to provide two transit passes with your new apartment.” Completing the pedestrian network, little bit of work to go around here. [laughter] Quality urban spaces, places where they've just begged to be experienced on foot, that that's the only way you can satisfactorily experience them is by doing it on foot. Completing the cycling network, making it easier to travel those midrange to longer distances by bicycle. Going more to home delivery. We get organic food delivered by Spud, and that's a much more energy efficient way to get things from where they started out to your house than going to the store yourself, if you're driving a car. So lots and lots of good ideas, lots of things we can be doing, but there's a problem. It takes time. All of these things that we're talking about here are things that happen gradually over a period of years or decades. It's the reshaping and rebuilding of a city, and from what we've seen earlier, we probably don't have time on that scale to just rely on this gradual, incremental change, whether it's in terms of dealing with peak oil or whether it's climate change.

And here we have, to illustrate that, we have some commitment problem. So this is about climate change. Canada made its first commitment on greenhouse gases in 1990. And the red line represents what that commitment was. It said we'd stabilize back at the 1990 level within 20 years. How'd we do? [blue line representing emissions rises] Okay, so a few years go by, we sign the Kyoto Accord. Excellent time to start working on reducing greenhouse gases. Here's how we did. [blue line continues to rise] And again, the red line represents what we committed to as part of the Kyoto Accord. A few more years go by, we ratify the Kyoto Accord. So now it's not just the government, it's the Parliament of Canada, excellent time to start reducing our greenhouse gases. It would have been a little harder, because we waited a few years, but hey, great time to start. A few more years go by. Kyoto comes into force. Now it's been adopted by enough countries to become a legally binding document. And then, of course, just this past fall, this is what the conservatives put out, they've got everybody up in arms. This is what they said they were going to do on greenhouse gases, is that “Yes, we get what they said. We'll meet the Kyoto targets, just not the date.” [laughter] And sure enough, they missed the date by about 40 years. [laughter] Here's what the science is saying. This is what the science is saying we need to do: “We need to get on with this, and we need to get well below these numbers within the time frame that we've shown here at about 2050.” So there's a certain sense of urgency on that.

Similarly, on peak oil. Yeah, we might have anywhere from 0 to 30 years, but changing takes time. Changing our infrastructure, changing the way we operate takes time. And so there was a study done for the US Department of Energy and it said, “If we start preparing, if we go on an emergency program, sort of like getting ready for WWII, that level of commitment and effort. If we start on that kind of program twenty years before the peak, then we'll be able to keep up. We'll be able to pull through this okay.” If, on the other hand, we wait until 10 years before the peak, then the mitigation isn't going to be enough, and we're going to have a shortfall, and there's going to be some challenges in terms of how we adapt to that. If, on the other hand, we actually wait for the peak, then the mitigation is that much less effective and the shortfall, that much greater. Now I don't know of too many governments that have started on a crash program of anything 20 ahead of the crisis, so I don't have a whole lot of faith that we're going to be on that first graph. I think we're going to be a lot closer to the latter in an area where we need to be making some rapid changes. So it sort of begs the question: what do you do when the manure hits the windfarm? [laughter]

Or, to phrase it a little differently, one of the better questions I've ever heard, “How do you change the world using only the resources you already have available?”

And that's what the remaining part of the presentation is about. What are our resources? We have running shoes, buses, bikes, computers, roads – a lot of roads – lots of cars available. Cans of paint. [laughter] So let's see what we can do with our transportation system with just the resources we already have available.

Transportation, Plan B.

And this is about thinking outside the box a little bit, and coming up with some creative ideas that we perhaps haven't considered before. [person riding on dog, car with wind sails - laughter] They might not look quite like this, but here's a real one. This is from Cuba. This is a truck that's been converted into a bus that can haul 200 people. It's a very high capacity bus.

So let's talk about change, remember these guys? [Enron logo] Remember what they did to these guys? [Picture of California] California was in a position where they had to change rapidly in terms of their consumption of electricity. They did a lot of things to get there, but a big part of it was a marketing campaign that took the message out to their citizens and said, “This is the problem. We're only going to get through this if we all participate, if we all change, and here are the specific things that you can do, to participate and to help make a difference.” As a result, peak consumption declined by 14% in a single year. A very dramatic change. It's an example of least-cost planning, which is one of the principles behind BC Hydro's Power Smart Program.

If you look at the next kilowatt-hour of electricity, if BC Hydro was going to buy that externally, or expand their own capacity to generate another kilowatt-hour of electricity, it would cost them about 7 cents. But to persuade us, and to help us to forgo that same kilowatt-hour costs only 2 cents. And so, it's enormously cost-effective to start looking at the demand side rather than strictly saying we always have to provide the supply there. And so we have ideas like this.

We've been hearing about telecommuting for years, and it's gradually been picking up. It's been getting easier and easier all the time, the technology is making it easier, and there's some people for whom it will just never work. You don't want your nurse telecommuting to hospital or something like this. There's a lot of people it just won't work for, but clearly there's a lot of people for whom it would.

We can start looking at travel costs that are determined at the trip level. Right now, you buy a car, that's the big part of your transportation cost. The actual use of the car is much smaller. And so, you've got so much sunk cost in the thing you might as well get out there and use it. But you have organizations like this, the Cooperative Auto Network, where you become a member, and you share in a pool of cars. You only pay for the amount that you actually use on a trip-by-trip, kilometer-by-kilometer basis, and you're paying for the purchase, the insurance, the maintenance, the gas, all included, in your trip-based cost. And so it allows you to decide, on an individual trip basis, “How will I travel today for this particular trip?” What the municipalities can do to help out is assist in providing places where the cars can be stationed so that members of the cooperative know where to go to pick up the vehicle.

Now we can look at trip lengths. And what we see here, here's a typical chart, showing the frequency of various trip lengths. And so obviously, there's a huge number of trips that are relatively short, and a diminishing number of trips that are quite long. If we draw a line at 5 kilometers, as a trip length, what we find is that about 30% of the trips are less than 5 kilometers. Ideal for travel by bike or, in some cases, on foot. Now that's still only 8% of the vehicle kilometers, the total amount of travel happening, so it doesn't make a huge difference in terms of the total emissions or in terms of the total amount of oil consuming. But still, it's a significant step forward. And it's something that we already have the resources to do.

I'm amazed when I talk to people, people that I couldn't have imagined on a bicycle as a child, who still say, “Oh yeah, I've still got that old ten-speed sitting in the back of the garage. I should get that out sometime.” There's a lot of underutilized bicycles sitting around our country.

Buses, of course. We're going to need more buses. But, if we get to a point where we're serious about this and trying to change in a hurry, every other city in North America is going to be trying to get buses at the same time as we are, and so we can start looking at other buses, other utilized buses that are already out there, generally in private hands or in school district hands, or whoever it turns out to be, that aren't being used fully or at all times of the day when we may need additional bus capacity.

And of course, another way to make more buses, and this is where the can of paint comes in, is by designating lanes on our existing roads, and making them an area for buses that allow the buses to get through faster, means you can turn the bus around faster, carry it back to another load of people, it means the service is better, more desirable for people to choose.

Now, here's a chart that shows how the demand for travel varies over the course of the day. We've got a peak in the morning, the morning commute. And then, a larger peak in the afternoon. So the first message might be, “Let's work with the off-peak trips. We've got a lot of transit capacity available in the midday that's being underutilized, and if we can look at those trips that are happening in midday, and encourage more of those people to get on transit, we've already got the capacity there. The next thing we can do is look at what I've drawn here across the bottom, is simply 50% of the top curve. I've just drawn half the demand to illustrate that if we take the demand and shift it, shift some of the demand earlier in the day, some of the demand later in the day, and then if we add them back up again, we get a curve that looks more like this. The peaks are not so pronounced, and what we've done is shave 15% off the peaks. So we've provided ourselves with 15% of additional transit capacity.

We can also look at things like ride-sharing. Jack Bell: “Why can't we put more people in one car?” You won't hear a transportation professional coming up with crap like that, but he was a farmer, and as a farmer he could say things like that and get away with it. [laughter] And so he started the Jack Bell foundation, but of course it's a fairly fixed kind of thing. It's for people who are making the same trip everyday, at the same time, same origin, same destination. What we're starting to see various cities move towards now is something that's more dynamic. I want to travel to a given place from my house today. In about an hour maybe, or in about half an hour, and we can use something like the internet to make connections with other people that are making similar trips. And so here's a sample of the output that you get from this particular website. Here's you, here are the riders, here's where you need to pick them up, and at what times. We're getting to see that pushed even more where people can access this type of system from a cell phone. And so now you could be standing out on the street downtown, you've come out of your meeting, you're ready to go back to your office, and you punch your information into the cellphone, and hook up with other people that are making a similar trip. And so the whole exercise here is in moving towards a system that is much more dynamic and happening in real time.

A very low tech, but still very effective way of doing this has been operating in Washington D.C. for many years now, they call it Slug lines. And the way it works, they've got about 20 pickup points, these are essentially like bus exchanges, except that they also serve cars. And they're situated to take advantage of the carpool lanes in the Washington area. So, someone who has a car can go to one of these points and pick up people who are headed for similar destinations, and for each of these pickup points, there's anywhere from 2 to about 8 or 10 destinations served from that particular pickup point, and everybody knows, if you're heading to the Pentagon, for example, you go to the appropriate pickup point for that destination. To make it even easier, you can go to their website and download your very own destination sign to stick in your front window, you put it on the window, and when you show up at the pickup point, everybody that's waiting there knows exactly where you're going.

So if we take those principles and expand them and integrate them, what we can start to see is a situation like this. We have an existing rapid transit station with a bus loop adjacent, we could see adding a cycling hub adjacent to that, and then a Slug line hub in the same location, and you now have a multi-modal transportation station that provides you with options. And you can go there, and if the bus is there and it's got space, you can get on the bus, if you've just missed the bus, you can go over to the Slug line and get a car that way. You can choose, you can make your choices on a day-to-day basis.

And so if we start applying that, here's how we use our transportation modes today. And again, these are US numbers, and these are for commuting. And obviously, we've got about three-quarters of the trips are made by people driving around alone in their cars. But if we take some of those principles we just saw, we can increase the transit share from what it was. We can increase the pedestrian and cycling share from what it was. The telecommuting can also be increased, but if we're really going to cut down on the driving alone trips, where we really have the surplus capacity in the system, is in all those empty cars that can be converted to carpooling. As an energy bonus, of course, the road network becomes less congested, and so those cars that are out there are doing less accelerating and decelerating, and you can also pick the most efficient vehicle for every trip. If you know that it's commuting time and you think you're going to get a lot of riders, you get a minivan, right? I mean, there's no need for a carpool to be limited to two people. You can get much more substantial than that.

And in terms of the wallet, what would this cost to implement, for example, in greater Vancouver? Well, let's talk about the savings. $7 billion of transportation infrastructure that we presently have on the books in greater Vancouver that we are either building or designing or pursuing that wouldn't be necessary if we were aggressively pursuing these other alternatives. $7 billion dollars that we're spending to avoid carpooling. And we're not even having that discussion about whether or not that's a wise use of $7 billion. Plus, of course, the $8 billion in operating costs that each of us would rack up in doing all of that driving. So there's a direct personal economic benefit as well.

We are living on a finite world. Tightening oil supplies and global warming are two good reasons to reduce oil consumption. And whether it's due to a shortage of oil or some sort of carbon quota system, that consumption will decline. Time is of the essence. Clearly, the sooner we start, the better the outcome. It's about the choices that we make as individuals. Start now. Thank you very much. [applause]

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Stuart Ramsey is a transportation engineer and planner for the City of Burnaby in the Vancouver, British Columbia metropolitan region. Stuart’s 20 years of experience are primarily in long-range transportation planning and modeling, but also encompass transportation demand management, cycling, and transit. He authored the first peak oil report to be received by a municipal government in Canada.

Transcribed by Miranda Huey