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Climate change policy, energy and cities

a
Adrian Atkinson
a
Consultant in Development Planning, Geneva, Switzerland

Available online: 25 May 2010

To cite this article: Adrian Atkinson (2010): Climate change policy, energy and cities, International Journal
of Urban Sustainable Development, 1:1-2, 133-139

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 International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development
Vol. 1, Nos. 1–2, May–November 2009, 133–139

Climate change policy, energy and cities

TJUE

Adrian Atkinson*
International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development

Consultant in Development Planning, Geneva, Switzerland

Urgent public policy debate on energy is currently highly fragmented with one party not wishing to hear
what the other is saying. There is continuing pressure to find and exploit more oil and gas. This, how-
ever, contradicts the recent Copenhagen Climate Change Agreement to limit global warming - caused
mainly by burning fossil fuel – to no more than another 2°C. Then we have the ‘peak oil’ debate that
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indicates that in any case oil, and shortly after gas, production will imminently be diminishing on the
way down to total exhaustion later this century. This should, actually, be good news as NGOs attending
the Copenhagen Conference indicated that it will take a rapid exit from the use of fossil fuel to achieve
the Copenhagen limit. However, if we are to maintain even our present energy demand, let alone fur-
ther growth, then we would need a crash programme to obtain more energy from renewables and nuc-
lear. The International Energy Agency, that recently confirmed that oil production is very likely soon to
go into rapid decline, has expressed scepticism that even if such a programme were politically and
financially feasible, the available technologies are not up to the job. Whether the Copenhagen Agree-
ment is implemented through political decision to reduce energy use, or whether we are forced to
reduce energy use by lack of supply, the consequences for our present lifestyle are dire. The second half
of this article discusses some of the issues and debates that are currently emerging that try to face up to
these consequences and what this might do to our cities
Keywords: Copenhagen Climate Agreement; peak oil; economic decline; compact cities; Transition Cities

This commentary is about the future of cities in
the light of policies to mitigate climate change and
an increasingly problematic energy future. Before
focussing on cities – and related modern lifestyles
– it is, however, necessary to outline what prob-
lems we are talking about.
At this time we have three discourses under-
way that ostensibly are about the same thing, or at
least about closely related things, that are, how-
ever, not communicating with one another. These
are as follows:
• ongoing concern to access to the energy we
need to increase economic growth;
• a growing debate on climate change, what
should be done to mitigate it and the politics
surrounding this, coming to an apparent
head at the recent Copenhagen Conference;
and
• a debate about the emergent decline of pet-
roleum production as a consequence of
‘peak oil’.
Although there is a generalised belief that access
to energy, and most importantly oil, be available
for ongoing development, actually we should be
reducing not increasing our use – or at least the
burning – of fossil fuels if we are to combat climate
change effectively. However, it appears that the
availability of fossil fuels (in the first instance pet-
roleum upon which the world’s transport system is
overwhelmingly dependent) is about to go into an

*Email: atkinson@newsynergies.ch

ISSN 1946-3138 print/ISSN 1946-3146 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19463131003654848
http://www.informaworld.com
 134 A. Atkinson
accelerating decline. Perhaps these issues need a
little more explanation.
(1) Discussion in the (particularly economic)
press about energy is unthinkingly con-
nected to the issue of economic growth,
which is a fundamental good, that should
not be questioned and where ‘economic
recession’ is seen as the greatest problem
that humanity faces. Scarcity of energy –
and consequent price hikes – jeopardises
economic growth. Scanning the pages of
the Financial Times, we recently saw dis-
cussion on one page of the auctioning of
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the Iraqi oil fields seen as an unmitigated
good and on another page progress in
Copenhagen Climate talks noting the lack
of agreement among participating politi-
cians. These issues are not allowed to inter-
act. What should be being discussed is that
the exploitation of Iraqi oil will contribute
significantly the failure to control climate
change.
(2) Although Time magazine expressed the
opinion that the Copenhagen Climate
Conference was a success, in that it drew
the heads of states – and particularly
Barak Obama – into what has hitherto
been a rather neglected area in the polit-
ical arena, most commentators deemed it
to be a failure because the ‘Climate
Change Treaty’ (United Nations 2009)
failed to set any legally binding targets on
who should reduce greenhouse gas emis-
sions – and hence consumption of fossil
fuel – by when and how this might be
accomplished. Although expressing the
universal recognition of the urgency of the
issue and asserting that the world’s climate
should not be allowed to increase by more
than 2°C, this was the limit of precision
reached in the final accord.
Briefly it is necessary to look at just
what draconian measures will need to be
taken to keep the global temperature
increase below 2°C. The World Wide
Fund for nature, together with the parti-
cipation of a number of other concerned
NGOs, produced a much longer proposal
for a Climate Change Treaty (2009),
which they hoped might influence the out-
come of the Copenhagen Conference. The
measures necessary to limit global warm-
ing to a ceiling of 2°C are stated as follows:
• industrialised countries’ fossil fuel and
industrial greenhouse gas emissions
would have to drop from present levels
rapidly and almost be fully phased out
by 2050;
• deforestation emissions would need to
be reduced globally by at least 75% or
more by 2020;
• developing countries’ fossil fuel and
industrial greenhouse gas emissions
would need to peak before 2020 and
then decline, which emphasises the
need to provide high levels of binding
support by industrialised countries.
The reason why the accord emerging from
the Copenhagen Conference remained
incorrigibly vague is that nobody wants to
face up to the fact that this is highly likely
to mean a crash reduction in the use not
only of fossil fuel but of energy as such in
that some 80% of greenhouse ‘forcing
effect’ comes from burning fossil fuels and
80% of our energy comes from the burning
of fossil fuels. It takes a heroic assumption
– as noted by the IEA in its 2008 World
Energy Outlook – to conclude that alternat-
ive energy sources (renewable and/or nuc-
lear) could make up anything like the
difference in the time span in question:
Even leaving aside any debate about the
political feasibility of the 450 Policy
Scenario (maintaining a ceiling of a 2°
increase in global temperature), it is
uncertain whether the scale of the trans-
formation envisaged is even technically
feasible ? (IEA 2008, p. 38)
 International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development
Of course if the political will were there,
there are extremely easy ways of inducing
what the IEA (2008, p. 47) refers to as ‘hun-
dreds of millions of households and busi-
nesses around the world (who) would need
to be encouraged to change the way they use
energy’, beyond over-sophisticated ‘carbon
trading’. Simply annual ratcheting of tar-
geted energy taxes and using the proceeds to
ameliorate hardship among those most
needy but above all planning the restructur-
ing of economies and lifestyles outlined
below would do the job.
But, as George Bush Sr. put it at the
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1992 UN Conference on Environment and
Development: ‘The American Way of
Life is not Negotiable’ and we are cur-
rently witnessing a rapid growth in the
Internet of extreme negative reactions
(much simply garbled ranting) emanating
from the United States regarding any kind
of ‘Climate Agreement’ and on the virtual
shelves of Amazon a proliferation of
books denying that global warming is a
problem or even that it exists as a
phenomenon!
(3) Since the closing years of the last century,
it has become increasingly clear that pet-
roleum (and fairly soon after this other
fossil fuels) will imminently start to
decline in availability because of a phe-
nomenon known as ‘peak oil’. This asserts
that when only half of the known accessi-
ble resource is exhausted, difficulties in
production and inaccessibility initiate an
accelerating decline in availability. The
exact date of the global oil peak has been
greatly disputed but by now very few
experts – and this includes the major oil
companies – are prepared to put the peak
at no later than 2020 and most estimates
arrive at a considerably earlier date – like
right now such that last year’s oil price
spike was a first sign that peak oil has
arrived (and oil consumption – particu-
larly in the United States – actually
135
declined as a consequence). The Interna-
tional Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2008
World Energy Outlook opened on the fol-
lowing note (IEA 2008, p. 37):
Current Global Trends in Energy Supply
and Consumption are patently unsus-
tainable – environmentally, economi-
cally, socially.
This was supplemented by a graph, pre-
sented to the press conference releasing the
report, which indicated a possible decline
in production from current sources starting
imminently. Although remaining more
optimistic than most independent experts as
to the oil peak – wishing to continue the
upward passage of global energy use – it
nevertheless appended a comment that
64 mb/d of gross capacity needs to be
installed between 2007 & 2030 – six times
the current capacity of Saudi Arabia – to
meet demand growth & offset decline.
It will clearly require a lot of luck in the
search for new resources and thence
immense investments to maintain their
hoped for upward path in supply for too
much longer.
So where do we go from here? The rest of this com-
mentary looks at the impacts on today’s urban liv-
ing resulting from a rapid decline in the use of
energy either due to there being less available or
due to a sudden achievement of the kinds of
policies and planned actions that will be necessary
to achieve the Copenhagen objective. The effect,
after all, will be the same, only in one case it will be
achieved chaotically and probably through escalat-
ing conflict that will jeopardise any reasonable mit-
igation measures, and in the other case measures
will be planned and implemented in such a way as
to provide future populations with a reasonable life-
style that is also genuinely sustainable.
Of course there is a third way that can by no
means be ruled out which is that current lifestyles
 136 A. Atkinson
continue to spread onwards and upwards, and suc-
ceed in achieving the energy growth scenario of
the IEA, such that by the end of the century the
earth’s temperature rises by as much as 6°C. This
could, for instance, be played out through resort to
the ever more polluting use of so-called non-con-
ventional sources of oil from tar sands, from oil
shale and by the liquefaction of coal.
This will certainly lead us by the end of this
century to the radical reduction or even entire
elimination of the earth’s ecosystems and with it
the elimination of humanity. There is little point in
discussing this further here; however much we
might fear this will be the outcome based on what
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we see happening around us today in terms of
determination of the world’s consumers to con-
tinue their current lifestyle and the vacillation of
politicians to confront this.
So how, assuming we do take the reasonable
path, might we plan to rapidly reduce the amount
of energy we consume – or react to a de facto
decline in energy? And what, more specifically, is
the role of cities in this?
First the basic facts: insofar as ‘development’
increases inexorably the per-person energy use, this
generally starts from a level of maybe a third of a ton
of oil equivalent per year (typical of ‘underdevel-
oped’ countries). Through the process of industriali-
sation and urbanisation (e.g. the cases of Korea over
the past 30 years), we reach somewhere between 3.5
and 4 tons of oil equivalent per person (almost 8 tons
in the United States) to maintain the lifestyle that we
consider to be the goal of development.
There is some pride in the fact that the energy
to produce goods has continually decreased per
unit of production over the past decades (a general
reduction in energy intensity). But increased
demand for goods (of ever decreasing durability)1
has ensured that industrial energy use remains
very significant. The real killer, however, is the
inexorable growth in the demand for electricity
and above all the growth in the use of the private
automobile. These two stand out as the great con-
sumers of energy in the developed countries – and
increasingly in the developing world and particu-
larly China.
There are many significant energy uses that
perform no very meaningful function but that titil-
late our lives. These include the use of so many
gadgets and appliances to be found around the
average home today. The IEA (2009) recently
completed a report on energy consumption in
household electronics noting that the little twin-
kling lights around the house – on stoves and TVs
and video machines, telephones, computers, print-
ers and even simply on multiple socket outlets –
have become a significant electricity load. Fur-
thermore, at night billions of streets right across
the globe are brightly lit throughout the night
although along the majority of these few if any
people are there to appreciate this display. Such
cases of how we brighten our lives in this brief era
of profligacy are manifold.
But the automobile is truly the heart of the
matter. It has got to a situation in the rich countries
where almost every adult capable of driving owns
or at least has access to a car. Although this
started as a luxury and then a convenience, today
it has become for large sections of the population a
necessity. This is a consequence of choosing to
live in houses at a low density difficult to serve
economically any other way than by car and then a
long way from the place of work or, indeed, any
facilities. Not only car ownership but also car use
has been increasing year by year everywhere. We
are all more or less aware of this such that it is
almost a banality to mention it.
But its link with energy use, eventual exhaus-
tion of the resource and its lethal aspect in terms of
global warming simply are not allowed to disturb
our use, our love of, our obsession with and our
dependence on our cars (Flink 1988, Sachs 1992,
Wolf 1996, Miller 2001). It is this, above all, sac-
rosanctness of our freedom to own and use these
machines as and when we wish – and indeed to
possess and use machines that use far more energy
than necessary to perform their ostensible func-
tions – that silences the politicians when it comes
to proposing concrete measures to reduce energy
consumption.
So what would a sharp decline in energy mean
for our cities and what can be done to ameliorate
 International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development
the negative impacts? The first point is that subur-
bia – especially of the US variety in its present
form – will rapidly become unviable as a lifestyle
option for vast numbers with relatively modest
means. Already in 2005, a group of academics, oil
experts and even bankers came together to pro-
duce a video under the title of The End of Subur-
bia and for anyone interested in these issues, this
should be viewed.2
A longer academic debate has been ruminating
over energy use and built form since at least the
mid-1980s (Owens 1986, Braheny 1992), prolifer-
ating in recent years (Jenks and Burgess 2000,
Williams et al. 2000, Jenks and Dempsey 2006).
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Whilst focussing on a problem of immense
importance for any future policy on using energy
more frugally while maintaining a reasonable
‘modern’ standard of living, the problem has kept
leaking out into areas beyond simply built form
and the configuration of land uses.
Although prima facie and, in theoretical terms,
‘compact cities’ might have the potential to use
less energy per person and per unit of activity –
certainly than US-type suburbs – it is also evident
that in practice, high-rise city centres, again of
the US type, are enormously energy-voracious.
Indeed, according to the IEA, cities that currently
contain about half of the world’s population
consume two thirds of the energy used by human
societies.
Clearly settlements need to be designed with
intelligence concerning the configuration of land
uses and the design of buildings, bearing in mind
the reduction of energy needs to a minimum and
that the energy that is required comes from renewa-
ble sources. This also means that they be adapted to
particular climatic conditions – as one saw in the
vernacular past before the advent of fossil fuels.
But the problems that will emerge as energy
availability decreases, or the decision is taken to
maintain global warming below 2°C, spread way
beyond simply physical buildings and urban land
use planning. Let us start with food production and
distribution as here a lot has already started to hap-
pen. The problem is that 90% of the energy that
goes into our food comes from sources other than
137
the sun and overwhelmingly from fossil fuels. This
includes the application of agrochemicals, fuel for
tractors and harvesters, transport to the processing
plant and processing – often refrigerated – transport
to the supermarket, packaging, transport from
supermarket to home and finally refrigeration for
however long before it is cooked and eaten.
An interesting statistic here was revealed in a
study of ‘food miles’ (just one part of the problem)
carried out by the UK Department of Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA 2005), discover-
ing that it is neither air freighting nor trucking of
food but rather journeys from home to the super-
market and back that comprise the lion’s share of
food vehicle-kilometres (but not CO2 emissions) in
transporting food. This points again to the issue of
the problematic way in which we configure our cit-
ies and at the same time to our reliance on cars as a
central component of our lifestyle.
Countering all of this, we already have mass
movements in places as diverse as Osaka, St.
Petersburg and Havana where organic ‘urban and
peri-urban farming’ is bringing much of the food
production back home and getting rid of the tread-
mill of agrochemicals. Interestingly, in the Cuban
and Russian case, the movement got going under
conditions of energy starvation at the time of the
collapse of the Soviet Union but has now become
a part of the local culture even though energy is
again (temporarily!) flowing freely. Obviously
this is one element confusing any too-theoretical
an approach to ‘compact cities’ nevertheless
throwing into question in other ways the configu-
ration of cities as we know them today.
But that is just the beginning, because we can
expect that substantial reduction in available
energy will also make nonsense of our now glo-
balised manufacturing system, transporting mate-
rials and components and then finished goods
round and round the world before being sold and
consumed. Manufacturing will, like food produc-
tion, also be coming home again necessitating fur-
ther restructuring the cities to accommodate the
manufacturing workplaces that systematically dis-
appeared in recent decades at a minimum to the
suburbs but mostly to huge concentrations of
 138 A. Atkinson
manufacturing – notably in Asia. And there will
be a shift in employment from the current predom-
inance of servicing to working with the hands to
make things.
As the century progresses, major issues will
include a shift from importation of raw materials
and goods to the recuperation of materials from
abandoned excesses of the consumer age. Above
all there will be the issue of how to transform mil-
lions of ‘dead’ cars that will no longer be useful
with very high petrol prices or altogether lacking
fuel into goods that will be useful under the new
conditions. A second major issue will be how to
reconfigure settlement patterns – including con-
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siderations discussed above – and reuse the mate-
rials in now-unusable buildings for the job of
reconstruction. Clearly there cannot be any simple
return to the twentieth- or nineteenth-century past.
There will also be an increasing problem of where
the electricity is going to come from to continue
using our sophisticated electronic life-support and
communication systems and probably relatively
rapidly, solutions of some sort – in many cases
simple abandonment and a return to simpler ways
of communicating, lighting, preserving food, etc.
– will have to be found.
It is perfectly clear that all of this is currently way
beyond the social imagination, and thus the greatest
problem in the coming decades will be the psycho-
logical adjustment out of the liberal consumer men-
tality and approach to life, to one which accepts that
one’s sphere of life is reduced down to the locality in
which we find ourselves and that the re-invention of
civilisation itself will require intense cooperation
with one’s neighbours. When these issues are
brought up – I often lecture on the subject – one
senses in many a kind of depression descending on
the audience that doesn’t want to think about it.
But on the other hand – I have mentioned
already the urban farming movement – there are
positive initiatives. Notably in the last couple of
years, the ‘Transition Cities’ movement has taken
off (Lerch 2007, Hopkins 2008, Chamberlain
2009) and although in the first instance not deeply
aware of the fundamental changes that we are
going to be witnessing, it is nevertheless making a
start and, above all, has an optimistic attitude that
the transition can be made.
The greatest tragedy will happen in the coun-
tries of the South, pushed and dragged and then
seduced and ‘developed’ by us northerners along
pathways that have destroyed perfectly sustainable
lifestyles and societies and created problems that
nobody has even started to think about how to deal
with. These will certainly result in the most dire
(re)transformations before a sustainable future
emerges – assuming, of course, that our vaunted
northern society decides in time not to allow the
global temperature to rise by 4°C, 5°C and 6°C....
Notes
1. If you have not yet seen it, please go to the Internet
and look at www.storyofstuff.com for a wonderfully
laconic look at the profligate wastage embodied in
our lifestyle!
2. This can be ordered from many sources through the
Internet.
Notes on contributor
Until 2008 Adrian Atkinson was Professor of Develop-
ment Planning in Berlin. He has spent a lifetime work-
ing with international agencies, governments national
and local, and civil society organisations in over 50
countries on urban and environmental issues. He is cur-
rently writing a book on the coming decades concerning
amelioration of the catastrophic consequences of our
unsustainable world.
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