The last few weeks have been a particularly interesting time to follow reactions to surging oil prices. In addition to the spate of news stories about cities struggling with energy costs in their transit services, school districts, and even police departments, we're now hearing about shifts in urban land values and cutbacks in airline service. Perhaps the biggest canary in the coal mine: General Motors is moving to dump the Hummer in favor of subcompact and electric vehicles.

Unfortunately, we're also hearing more of the same old short-sighted solutions, now in their latest repackaging. In just the last few days I came across the same three talking points in four different publications (not to mention one presidential contender's speech):

Plenty of folks have explained already why points 2, 3 and, yes, 4, are pipe dreams, so I'll focus instead on the much more interesting solutions that some sensible local government leaders in the US and Europe recently started pursuing:

• We recently learned that Alachua County, Florida (county seat: Gainesville) created an Energy Conservation Strategies Commission last year, charged with reviewing the potential effects of global oil decline and recommending actions the County can take -- report due by September of this year. This marks the first official response to peak oil (which is our criteria for listing on our ever-growing Peak Oil Responses page) we've heard of from the US Southeast.
• Two weeks ago, Whatcom County, Washington and its county seat of Bellingham created the second task force in that state, following Spokane a few months ago. This marks the first (as far as we know) joint city-county task force established to address peak oil.
• This week we learned that a resolution is underway within the parliament of German city-state Hamburg to establish various bodies for identifying the local vulnerabilities created by peak oil, develop suggestions for responding to them, and coordinate activities to mitigate them. While this is not yet an adopted resolution, it's the first major peak oil effort by sub-national government officials in Europe that we've heard about. Ausgezeichnet!

This month I'm spending nearly two weeks total in my old stomping grounds of the New York City metro area. I'm excited to be doing presentations at three institutions that have important roles to play as we plod through the peak oil years: the New York Institute of Technology, the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council. Economically, this is one of the most dynamic and resilient parts of the United States -- communities, businesses, institutions and governments here have centuries of experience in dealing with crisis and change, and time and again they've pulled through and the region has come out the better for it. I predict it won't be too long before we see some truly sensible and clever solutions to peak oil emerge from this most urban corner of the United States.