We've had a few minor surprises here at Post Carbon Cities over the last few days.

First: The day after the price of oil burst through its all-time high of $103.76¹, Common Current's Warren Karlenzig, author of the widely-acclaimed How Green is Your City? sustainability ranking of the 50 largest U.S. cities, released a new report on the preparedness of those 50 cities for $100+ oil and $4 gasoline.

The surprise? Neither super-green Portland (Ore.) nor super-dense New York City topped the list. The big city most prepared for an oil crisis turned out to be very-green and relatively-dense San Francisco, thanks in part to its high levels of public transit use, population density and telecommuting. Portland and New York took sixth and second, respectively, with Chicago, Washington and Seattle (in that order, which is also a bit of a surprise) rounding out the top five.

Second: A few weeks ago we reported that the medium-sized city of Spokane (Wash.) was the first city we'd heard of to create an official task force tackling peak oil and climate change together. At a presentation Laurel and I attended last week by renowned Australian sustainability scholar and author Peter Newman, we learned that Brisbane, Australia convened a joint task force in 2006, and released their final report a year ago yesterday. This means that Brisbane was most likely the first in the world; as far as we know, however, Spokane was still the first in North America.

I've only had time to skim the report, but at first blush it's quite impressive, particularly with its ranking of recommended actions by benefit, cost and level of local government control.

Third: The sharp eyes over at Energy Bulletin noted yesterday that incoming New York governor David Paterson has been outspoken about the challenges posed by peak oil. If Paterson acts on these views once in the Governor's chair, we hope New York's influence helps spur peak oil responses throughout the Northeast -- particularly in the neighboring states of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, where we've heard rumblings of possible peak oil action in the state legislatures.

In the coming weeks, look for updates on these and other state actions on our local and state/provincial tracking page at www.postcarboncities.net/peakoilresponses.

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POSTSCRIPT
We just learned that Corporate Watchdog Radio has posted the radio interview they did with me last week. This was one of the most substantive interviews I've done -- hosts Francesca and Bill asked some great, incisive questions.

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FOOTNOTE
1. There are various ways of calculating what the record oil price of April 1980 was in inflation-adjusted dollars. I'm using the most commonly-cited figure I've found, as seen here.