Last Wednesday John Kaufmann, Jennifer Brost-Sarnecki and I held a session on "Responding to Peak Oil and Energy Uncertainty" at the annual American Planning Association conference in Las Vegas -- the only session this year specifically on peak oil, and likely the first ever at this annual conference. (If you attended the session and want to our presentations or get on the mailing list we discussed, click here.)

This is not something I'm happy about. James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg and other scholar-authors sounded the mainstream wake-up call on peak oil over three years ago with books like The Long Emergency and Powerdown, among others. We planners, of all folks, should not have waited until 2008 to get peak oil on the agenda.

Still, better late than never. And judging from the reception we got at our last-of-the-day session (a near-capacity audience, most of whom stayed 45 minutes after the end for Q & A), APA members are starting to recognize that peak oil is a serious, serious issue for us to deal with.

At last year's conference in Philadelphia conference I was encouraged by the trends I saw toward integrating sustainability thinking into conventional planning practice. Last April, however, oil was trading around $60, not $120, and the 'acceptable' level of atmospheric carbon was a reasonable 450 ppm, not a daunting 350 ppm (daunting because we're already at 385 ppm). Things have changed. So this year I went to Las Vegas with a high sense of urgency, and sought to gauge --if only roughly-- two things:

Disappointing, to be sure. Indeed, the whole conference was somewhat discouraging to me: a massive missed opportunity to address sustainable community planning in this most unsustainable of cities. Not only was there not a single session on what was wrong with Las Vegas (and there is plenty to be learned from, there), the closing speaker, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, largely focused on how Las Vegas was an extreme extension of American anti-urbanism (per Venturi et al's groundbreaking 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas) that nevertheless has become 'accidentally urban' thanks to the massive pedestrian traffic the Strip generates. Well, the urban designer in me finds that interesting. But we're in a sorry state when thousands of planners come to Las Vegas and the focus is on architectural philosophy -- and not on the fundamental incompatibility of that sprawling city's economic, land use and transportation patterns with the increasingly uncertain flows of natural and human capital it depends on for survival.

In other words: We've got nearly 2 million people living out here in the middle of the desert; they're extremely dependent on distant and declining water sources; their economy absolutely depends on cheap aviation fuel, which will soon be a distant memory; their food, manufactured goods and construction material are all trucked and trained in thousands of miles with cheap diesel fuel, which also isn't getting any cheaper... Maybe this is something planners should be concerned about?

No, at the APA conference, as in planning offices around the country, I'm afraid it's still largely business as usual. I caught the tail end of a session on John Kasarda's 'aerotroplis' concept, which basically promotes public investment in airport-related development clustered around expanded airports. (This is exactly the kind of concept that Hamilton, Ontario abruptly reconsidered after a study pointed out that the air travel and freight sector will have a hard time expanding given a future of depleting oil reserves.) After the session was over, I asked a fellow on his way out if the speakers had discussed energy. He said "No. Absolutely not."

Disappointing, but not surprising.

For folks who attended our session at APA:

I also announced --in response to a suggestion by an audience member-- that I'd set up a mailing list for people to continue the discussion about advancing the peak oil message within the APA. I've done so and have added to it the people who gave me their cards after the presentation. If you'd like to be on this list as well and you're an APA member, please contact me with your email address, name, title, affiliation, and APA member number and we'll add you to the list. Please put the words "SCP list" in the title of the message -- I get a lot of email!