Katherine Garvey's interview of Sustainable Bellingham's David MacLeod regarding the Resolution to create a Peak Oil task force in Bellingham and Whatcom County. The interview took place in late May 2008 via email.

Q. What is your experience with peak oil or environmental issues in general?

I have been concerned with environmental issues for years, but this concern
jumped up a few notches when I read a "state of the world" report in
the local newspaper in the late '90s. I became aware of the peak oil
issue in 2004, when "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion
and the Collapse of the American Dream" was shown in Bellingham. I
didn't just accept the viewpoint of this documentary, but instead spent
the next 6 months researching the issue until I was convinced that the
evidence for a near term peak (2005-2010) was very strong. I've
continued to study this issue for the past four years.

Q. What is your title? In other words, in what capacity were you addressing the city and county councils over the peak oil briefing?

I am a member of the Vision Team for Sustainable Bellingham, which is
what other organizations might call a steering committee or a Board of
Directors. Sustainable Bellingham was born out a community response to
the showings of The End of Suburbia, so peak oil has been a central
concern to our group from its inception.

Q. What was your contribution to the briefing?

The Resolution and the Briefing Paper that accompanied it was a
collaborative effort from the ad-hoc group that has been working on
this idea of creating a local Peak Oil Task Force. Clare Fogelsong, Environmental Resources Manager for the City of Bellingham,
wrote the first draft of the briefing paper. The rest of us then added
to it and suggested edits. My final contribution was some fact checking
and adding the footnotes.

Q. What inspired you to participate in its creation? How long have you been working on getting something like this task force created?

Last October I was organizing a showing of the movie "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire,"
that Sustainable Bellingham was sponsoring. WCC instructor John Rawlins
suggested it might be a good idea to pass around a petition in support
of a peak oil task force at that event, but I didn't have time to get
that together. Soon after that I read a candidate questionnaire in Whatcom Watch,
and they specifically asked the candidates about supporting the
creation of a peak oil task force. I noticed that the majority of
answers were supportive, and I noticed the strongest response was from
City Council candidate Jack Weiss,
who said it was a moral imperative. Shortly after the election I
contacted Mr. Weiss to arrange a meeting on the topic. At the same time
another citizen, Bill Dean, was also trying to set up a meeting on the
same topic, so we joined forces and have been having meetings since
December.

The original inspiration was that Portland, Oregon
had a peak oil task force, which had already completed its process and
issued a report. John Rawlins, Bill Dean, and I all thought that
Portland provided an excellent template that we could model after. A
number of other cities and communities have also initiated task forces,
and the Post Carbon Institute had begun a Post Carbon Cities project
with a book by program director Daniel Lerch. All of these were helpful
and inspiring.

Q.How prepared do you think Bellingham and Whatcom County are for this potential crisis?

I think I would rather be in Bellingham/Whatcom County than most other
places. We have wonderful assets and wonderful people here, and we also
have numerous organizations working towards sustainability in different
ways. We have a healthy Farmer’s Market selling locally produced food,
and we also have potential for growing a lot more food locally in Whatcom County, which is very important. Having said that, however, I think we are woefully unprepared for this crisis. As the Hirsch report for the Dept. of Energy stated in 2005, "...without timely mitigation,
the economic, social, and political costs [of peaking world oil production] will be unprecedented." We have a long ways to go towards being prepared for this potential crisis.

Q. What do you think will be the biggest obstacle that Whatcom County will face with peak oil?

The biggest obstacles are not unique to Whatcom County. Long term energy descent presents tremendous challenges. Author James Howard Kunstler calls it “The Long Emergency.”
Big changes in our transportation infrastructure will be required, and
will take a long time to fully implement. Food production,
distribution, price, and availability will most likely be very
problematic. Since abundant and cheap fossil fuels are the lifeblood of
our economy, the economy as a whole can be expected to suffer
significantly, and when you have all of the above happening
simultaneously, you can only hope that the wheels don’t fall off of the
social services that are in place.

The biggest obstacle that comes to my mind at this moment, however, is the
obstacle of conveying accurate information and understanding for good
decision making. Look at what is happening now on the national level.
We see a lot of finger pointing, and a lot of short-sighted solutions
that seem to reveal that the problems have not been accurately
understood. Oil companies are blamed for price gouging, investors are
blamed for speculating, OPEC
is blamed for not pumping enough, and environmentalists are blamed for
restrictions and regulations on drilling. Relatively little attention
is given to depletion of oil reserves, and rapidly rising demand around
the world. And the “solutions” being offered? A gas tax holiday, halting deposits to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and suing OPEC. None of which will have any effect on current conditions.

Thankfully, and wisely I think, our locally elected officials have unanimously
supported the resolution to create a task force to look at the issue of
energy scarcity and make appropriate recommendations for Bellingham and
Whatcom County. Having an accurate understanding of the problem will be very important in order to avoid jumping to misguided solutions.

Q.Will any of the categories (transportation, energy, water, etc.) be stressed more than others by the task force, do you think?

I think the Food and Agriculture category might be stressed more than the
others, simply because eating is extremely important to most of us, and
none of us wants to go hungry. 17% of fossil fuel consumption
in the U.S. currently goes toward food production, and as this energy
becomes more scarce and expensive, we can expect the amount and variety
of food available to us to decrease, and prices to increase
dramatically. Our group felt that as good as the Portland Peak Oil Task Force report
is, they could have done a more thorough job on this topic. Hopefully
our task force will make a good contribution in this category.