Just Stop Oil?
The letter in my local paper sounded almost gleeful.
'To all the "Just Stop Oil" enthusiasts,' it starts, 'you are currently getting a small taste of what would happen if your ridiculous dream actually came true.' It goes on to talk about the importance of diesel fuel in agriculture, that life becomes harder as fuel becomes more scarce, before suggesting, naturally, that climate change is a hoax.
Yes, the economy depends on oil and suddenly stopping the flow makes life harder and does not lead to a green utopia. Just Stop Oil campaigners are naïve in that sense. But the letter writer misses the point: we won't continue burning fossil fuels in the volumes we have been forever. As I've written before, we'll either voluntarily wean ourselves off it on the demand side (all evidence to date says this is unlikely, despite the obvious consequences), or geological and/or geopolitical supply-side constraints will restrict the flow.
On the geological front, this report shows how we just aren't finding that much new stuff to burn, while the system-wide energy return on energy invested consequently falls by the day. Meanwhile, on the geopolitical front, we are currently being reminded just how vulnerable supply is. Either way, it's easy to see that abundant, cheap fossil energy can no longer be taken for granted.
The current energy crisis, then, is not an 'I told you so' moment. It's a reminder that we need to find new ways to thrive that don't need billions of barrels of oil equivalent. Of course, to do this we need to ask some questions of the current system that demands fossil energy. Questions like:
What is GDP for? Our whole system is predicated on growing this metric, which even its originator, Simon Kuznets warned against. This leads us to prioritise economic activity in a way that's divorced from the biophysical world, pursuing low cost over high value. In the built environment, this means decisions come down to what something costs in measurable monetary terms, rather than what it costs in immeasurable environmental, social and relational terms.
What do we value and what does this look like in the physical world? Google 'what do people regret on their deathbed?' and you won't find 'I wish I had more money'. I've boiled several listicles into three overall trends which can be addressed, in part, through good planning and design:
Better relationships: Do spaces enable and encourage relationships with other people? What about other species?
Less time working (and I'll include commuting here): Can people walk or cycle to work? Is the public transport easy and affordable? Does data infrastructure (and policy) allow work from home?
Less loss-avoidance: The environmental movement often focusses on going without, which is a terrible incentive, rather than presenting a more compelling vision than the standard. The most sustainable developments, then, will be places people want to live and which will protect them from climate and other shocks.
How do we transition to a different system that we want to live in and which can sustain us long term? I don't know. No one does. But that doesn't mean we carry on as before when we know where our current path leads: it means we try new things to see what does work or, more sensibly, trying proven things in new situations.
These are big questions that need open and honest discussion. In the physical world, the smart money is looking to resilience as a no-regrets approach, free of ideology. In infrastructure delivery, design requirements for flood levels and maximum temperatures are increasing. At home, enquiries for rooftop solar and EVs are up, and people are planting vegetable gardens.
But in some of the master planning projects I've been working on recently, there's been a disconnect between these personal- and asset-level trends, and the systems in which they exist. Design disciplines are all too often treated as distinct, as opposed to mutually-reinforcing. Worse, on some projects I've seen the sustainability consultants brought on after the master plan is fixed, meaning project inertia and sunk cost all but disables meaningful and often cost-saving contributions. Doing the thinking up front, on the other hand, integrates energy, water, landscape, transport, waste, and more. Done right, this has less need for redesign, lower capital costs, lower risk of stranded assets, and higher resilience.
Now is the time to challenge accepted norms and find new ways to thrive. If you want to talk about how your project can be made more resilient for an energy-constrained future, we'd love to hear from you.
