Cities, Energy, and Security: Tackling
Climate Change and Fossil Fuel Risk
by Peter Droege
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.
M King Hubbert
T
he world economy is based on cities: cities are its very home. Global financial
flows are structured within urban systems; city networks physically articulate national
and international markets. Historically, cities have been built around markets, too.
Founded on trade routes, they formed growing economies in themselves; they gave
rise to and nurtured the dynasties and institutions that manage the decisions that
guide national economies. Cities are settings of political command and control, and
centres of culture. Here societys leading images and messages are produced and
packaged, shaping social reality and articulating aspirations. The great urban centers
of yore were the main stages of their respective political settings. Democracy was
developed by urban societies, and it was shaped and supported in the public spaces
and institutions of major cities.
Today, most population growth occurs in urbanized areas, with half of the
worlds population dwelling here. But cities, their form, economies, and growth
dynamics have also been very much defined by the energy systems dominating their
eras. The manner of this interaction helps define the security profile of an age, a
nation, or the balance of global relations. Global trade, sprawling cities, or periods of
large-city formation are not new historical phenomena. The stories of hegemonic
urban networks involving Babylon of the 18th century BC, Angkor of the 12th
century AD, or London of the late 18th century are testimony to this fact. But the
speed and sheer mass of the current urbanization wave, and the formation of super
and mega-sized cities as a widespread, simultaneous, indeed, global phenomenon is
unprecedented; it has only been acknowledged as a significant force during this past
half-century. While rampant urbanization had not found wide recognition prior to
Peter Droege is an international expert on energy and water in development, infrastructure, and
urban design. He has served at major universities in Australia, Japan and the United States, and
currently holds professorial positions at the Universities of Newcastle, Australia, and Beijing. He is
a Chair of the World Council for Renewable Energy, representing Asia Pacific, and directs Epolis,
a Sydney-based advisory service active in sustainable urban change. His publications include
Intelligent Environments, The Renewable City, and, forthcoming, Urban Energy Transition.
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the 1970s, it has also not been particularly well understood in the time since. The
massive explosion of the worlds urban population is relatively new, gathering
momentum in the first half of the 20th century and accelerating from the 1950s on.
From the 1970s, a burgeoning research literature genre formed to give meaning and
voice to this phenomenon.1 Since then, these urban centers have been described as
world cities, global cities, megacities, or referred to broadly as the global urban
system. Regardless of the label used, this conception connotes primacy of global
markets, corporate control, seats of national power, homes to regional security
apparatuses and, above all, the agency and relevance of technological innovation in
surface, air & sea transport, defense, and the advent of advanced
telecommunications.2
If the global urban system is the skeleton of the world
economy, then fossil fuels are its lifeblood.
Cities mushroomed during the 20th century, and this trend has continued into
the 21st century, and been recorded across many metropolitan regions. However,
broader population increase could not serve as more than a secondary driver for this
growth, as urbanization rates far outstrip general population growth rates. Other
powerful dynamics are at work, boosting the primacy of cities, including expansion
in global trade and the concomitant structural changes in many agrarian states. No
other common denominator underlying most, if not all of these, can explain urban
growth better than the agency of the all-dominant global fossil fuel economy, and
the global network of production, distribution, and consumption underpinning it.3
Overwhelming oil dependency and abundant, cheap coal power have boosted the
drive to urbanization, transforming regional economies, revolutionizing urban supply
lines, and increasingly disconnecting cities from the agrarian hinterlands. The
circumstantial evidencethe prima facie casesuggests that global city formation
is a phenomenon of the fossil fuel age. While this characteristic has remained
virtually unsung in either the urban or energy literature, it is self-evident that the
major risks to global security, markets, and prosperity faced in the 21st century stem
not from the much studied occurrence of urban expansion and primacy, but from
the very driver of this expansion: pervasive fossil fuel use at low prices.
Indeed, while the fossil-fuel driven revolution has powered an unprecedented
level of prosperity across industrializedor better, fossilizedstates, the finite and
geographically limited nature of terrestrial fossil fuel, and uranium, sources poses a
major threat to both the viability of markets and global security. 40 large oil fields
supply 60 percent of the global oil consumption, with 75 percent of these in risky,
contested, or war-torn regions.4 More than three-quarters of the worlds proven oil
reserves are in the hands of national oil companies, capable of being used as foreign
policy tools or weapons. The United States produces only 40 percent of its domestic
consumption. And geo-physically speaking, oil, gas, and coal are preciously limited
resources: natural gas and oil only marginally more so than coal. Additionally, high-
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ENERGY, CITIES, AND SECURITY
57
grade uranium is an extremely limited resource as well; if it were to have to replace
oil and gas, it would be depleted within a decade, using current technology.
PETROLEUM-DEPENDENT CITIES: THE CIVIC FACE OF GLOBAL
SECURITY RISKS
If the global urban system is the skeleton of the world economy, then fossil
fuels are its lifeblood. With a share of 85 percent, the global commercial energy
supply largely consists of fossil fuels.5 Within the Organization of Economic
Cooperation and Development member states, three-quarters of this flow is
consumed by cities for stationary and transport use.6 Global transport is essentially
fossil fuel-based, with almost all commercial transport in the air, on sea, road, or rail
petroleum driven.7 The global dependence on urban systems in itself constitutes a
massive energy risk, but the present energy crisis is deeper than infrastructure
dependencies. Global poverty levels are structurally tied to the global fossil fuel
regime; a mounting nuclear crisis is looming due to an opportunistic and misguided
call for an atomic renaissance; a global water depletion crisis exacerbated by the
primary thermal power generation systems; a global health crisis brought about by
fossil-based air, water, and soil pollution; and an agricultural crisis brought about by
the global dependence on petrochemical fertilisers, pesticides, and wider processing
systemsthese only add to the twin risks of petroleum peaking and climate change.8
Oil peak and fossil fuel depletion
While all constantly consumed, finite resources follow the classic bell curve of
depletion, the architecture of oil and gas wells and their deposits explains why fuel
production peaks across Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East have occurred in
such a sequential nature. While liquid fuel supply reserves may stretch to the middle
of this century, the historical plateau of global oil productionthe composite superpeak of all wells life cyclescould well occur within the next decade. Price hikes
now make steam injection, tar sand, and oil shale production financially feasible, as
environmentally costly and/or waterand energyintensive practices are
increasingly utilized. Indeed, projections of global oil production plateaus have not
shifted significantly since American geophysicist Marion King Hubbert publicized
his compelling model fifty years ago,9 correctly predicting that US oil production
would peak by 1970. Furthermore, he predicted that the horizon for a global peak
would occur by 2000,10 though a recent estimate has placed it at 2010.11
Regardless of the precise year, this is the era of the looming super-peak, while
fossil fuel consumption continues to increase, and the global population has become
accustomed to the illusions of limitless supply. The clear and present risk is the
opening up of a massive and rapidly widening gap, triggering price hikes and adding
further to military confrontations around the globe. The present drive toward more
costly, risky, and polluting recovery methods in so-called non-conventional and
speculative areas, made attractive by rising prices and profits, only confirms that we
have entered an unsettling era, in the shadow cast by the looming super-peak.
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If current trends could be projected forward, then 85 percent of the increase in
global energy demand to occur by 2030 would be attributed to oil, gas, and coal.
However, this is unlikely, given impending supply costs and risks. Nevertheless, this
myth is still used to keep alarmed minds placated, as evidenced in the 2004 World
Energy Outlook, issued by the International Energy Agency.12 Oil supply is so
preciously limited that, had any strategic planning taken place in lieu of merely
managing strategic oil reserves, it would be treated as a rare commodity and not
squandered at such a precipitous rate. Instead, modern civilization has been lured
onto a dangerous path, through its linear, ad-hoc, incremental pursuit of thriving
energy markets, the euphemism for unfettered oil, gas, coal, and, to a lesser extent,
uranium flows. Indeed, most estimates on the size of conventional global oil
reservesthose that are known and reasonably accessibleaverage around two
trillion barrels. This figure has remained essentially unchanged since the 1960s.
Furthermore, the era of oil discovery is waning as well: the annual number of new
discoveries has declined steadily since the 1970s.
At the present degree of fossil fuel dependency, the risk of catastrophic supply
disruption to cities and urban markets is sizeable. The vast bulk of oil resources is
limited to a shrinking number of brittle regions: the Middle East, Africa, and the
Caspian Sea. And like natural gas, coal is geographically limited: 90 percent of coal
reserves exist in only six countries. The literature supporting the likelihood of an
imminent global fossil fuel supply peakespecially of natural gas and oiland its
consequences is as large as it is persuasive.13
Urban risks from climate change
Even if fossil fuel supplies were to be unlimited, their end is nevertheless in
sight, due to the need to slow climate change. Neither the speculative and at best
distant clean-coal technologies, nor costly new nuclear power systemstwo
dangerous illusionscan change this fact. The epochal phenomenon of fossil fuel
technology has brought modern cities to life and, at the same time, to the brink of
unprecedented calamity. One risk is posed by the ephemeral nature of supply alluded
to above; the other, by the devastating effects of its combustion. It is accepted by
many that human activities, largely fossil fuel burning and, to a lesser extent,
deforestation, are the cause of the current warming trend of the earths biosphere.14
It took an astonishing 111 years to come to this realization, after Swedish physicist
Svante Arrhenius published his theory of the greenhouse effect as resulting from the
widespread venting of carbon dioxide through fossil fuel incineration.15
Cities, towns, and villages along the base of mountainous regions, across the
Alps, Andes, Rockies, and Himalayas, from Afghanistan to Canada, to India and
Peru, all exhibit unmistakeable symptoms of fresh water depletion, exacerbated by
rapidly retreating glaciers and snow cover. Elsewhere, urban areas face an uncertain
future as well; aquifers and surface water resources have begun to fail because
shifting precipitation patterns stress fresh water resources, which are already
stretched by generations of inefficiency, pollution, and abuse. The early victims of
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this pandemic include cities in regions of the world as diverse as Australia, China,
and the United States. Unsustainable modes of consumption, evident in agricultural,
industrial, and mining practices, have only compounded the underlying freshwater
challenge posed by the fossil fuel and nuclear power regime. The immense demand
for water from electricity-generating plantscoal, oil, and nuclearepitomise their
inherent wastefulness. As a rule of thumb, the freshwater uptake of a standard 500megawatt coal fired power plant equals that of 100,000 households.
Some urban regions affected by climate change risk slow decline through the
gradual erosion of their economic base while others face more dramatic and
cataclysmic damage. Inundation, flooding, storm damage, and coastal erosion
these are some of the already visible effects of climate change on cities. Indeed,
greenhouse impact costs are not merely a distant possibility, but a historical fact, long
chronicled in the statistics of many reinsurers, such as Munich and Swiss Re. Severe
weather-related damage has increased globally ten-fold since 1950, with much of the
recorded economic damage occurring in urban areas. Insured damage rose 60-fold
in the United States, during the same period, to $6 billion annually.16 like
Tuvalu Islands have begun to disappear, while compensating measures for sea-level rise have
focused on urban assets, from China to the Maldives and Italy, absorbing significant
capital planning and construction budgets. By contrast, poorer, exposed island
nations, such as the Philippines, or low-lying countries such as Bangladeshand
their populous cities and townsare financially incapable of such adaptation
measures. Those least able to adapt are also those least culpable for the climates
destabilization, as their emission levels are the lowest.
Indeed, cities in coastal regions, on low-lying islands, and in river deltas around
the world are most immediately at risk, with extreme weather, storm surges, and
hurricanes posing the most tangible threat. The spectacular drowning of New
Orleans in late 2005 throws a spotlight on the most recent victim of hurricane-driven
storm surges. Such failures in infrastructure are bound to inundate large cities in the
future, and not only the easy prey, like the Big Easy, weakened by poor engineering
and even worse environmental management. Most low-lying, even inland cities are
under short- and long-term threat.
CLIMATE RISKS TO URBAN MARKETS AND GLOBAL SECURITY
Physical changes such as retreating shorelines are most frequently mentioned as
urban and infrastructure threats. However, these do not represent the gravest
impending danger to the fragile balance of urban life. While many adaptation
programs for climate change focus only on the most obvious emergency response
techniques, the risks, and costs already incurred, of the social and economic impact
is far more profound. Examples of the potential economic impact include the
chance of dramatic shifts in oceanic, agricultural, trade, and industrial productivity.
Social costs would include health threats, such as heat stress, dehydration, malaria,
dengue fever, and other tropical diseases. Furthermore, psychosocial damage and
disruptive demographic shifts, such as migrational pressures from the hundreds of
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millions of climate-change refugees, must also be taken into consideration. The
precise dynamics and range of these potential global shifts are not known. Much will
also depend on agency of feedback mechanisms and the behavior of warm ocean
currentsthe thermohaline conveyorconsidering the massive amount of cold,
fresh water released into the Atlantic. For example, it is feared that this may be bound
to trigger an abrupt climate change to more Arctic conditions in the northern
hemisphere, with the result of equatorial drying and a further shrinking of rainforest
cover.17
Although many urban priorities and threats have been discussed since at least
the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the urban planning community is only slowly
becoming aware of the dangers. Planners have begun to develop notional adaptation
measures, but many still studiously avoid climate change mitigation as the millennial
adaptation challenge. It is clear, however, that all climate change adaptation must
involve mitigation: the immediate and sustained move from coal, oil, and even
natural gas to the massive deployment of renewable energy.
The question is sometimes raised of whether petroleum decline may be, in fact,
good news, as its combustion is the main culprit in climate degradation.
Nevertheless, the limits in the global supply of oil and natural gas do not promise to
lead to rational action: following the logic of the market, dips in oil supply are
followed by price hikes, which then allow for increased marginal-oil resource
production and coal conversion. Furthermore, nuclear power is neither a good shortor long-term option, as high-grade uranium in known reserves could serve as a
substitute for global fossil energy production for only a few years. There is also a risk
that rising carbon costs will not sufficiently restrict fossil fuel in order to successfully
combat climate change. Nor is there sufficient evidence that carbon trading and clean
development agreements alone will lower emissions significantly.18
Renewable energy means security
The only persuasive response to the twin threat of fossil fuel depletion and
climate change is world-wide, focused action to de-fossilize and de-nuclearize the
global economy, urban infrastructures, and regional development dynamics, and
embrace a framework of freely available and distributed renewable power. The most
significant urban development challenge is to boost the supply of sun, wind, water,
and biomass energy, while simultaneously improving efficiency and conservation
practice in both stationery energy use and transport. Urban regeneration impulses
will be triggered by a broad emancipation from fossil and nuclear dependence.
Regional industrial and agricultural assets have been put to the service of a globalized
marketplace in which the energy cost of production is grotesquely discounted in a
regime of risk-externalization, paired with massive hidden and overt subsidies.
Current fossil fuel costs have begun to rise for three powerful reasons: (a) actual
petroleum prices rise due to mounting shortages, particularly worrisome for global
security due to the massive pressure exerted on the poorest countriessome 40
nations already spend more on petroleum imports than their export earnings; (b)
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structural outlays increase due to higher prospecting, production, and processing
costs in increasingly marginal fields; and (c) inexorably rising carbon penalties and
the long-awaited internalization of fossil fuels enormous health and environmental
costs, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and oil spills, in analogy to the partial
cost internalization that occurred with tax increases on tobacco and alcohol
products. There are powerful reasons for this; for example, Chinas air pollution has
given rise to $50 billion in annual health costs.19 Both conventional energy-cost
increases and risk internalization measures can help create local renewable energy
production markets, regional development of renewable energy infrastructure, and a
widespread boost in conservation and efficiency if paired with regulations and
incentives. The move away from fossil fuel systems triggers powerful growth in local
and regional employment in renewable, more labour-intensive energy industries.20 A
liberation from fossil fuel dependence boosts regional economic strength, as is
beginning to be evident in a growing number of countries. Nevertheless, such forces
and trends will require a careful allocation of local and regional renewable-energy
production space and food supply systems.
The move away from fossil fuel systems triggers powerful
growth in local and regional employment in renewable,
more labour-intensive energy industries.
On the spatial planning front, a number of important improvements will reduce
the risk of climate change. These involve regional planning measures, agricultural
reform, and institutional changes, in order to prepare cities and regions for an era in
which extreme weather events will become an everyday occurrence. Notoriously
ineffective crisis response modes will give way to strategic planning, and will result in
dramatic, though necessary, institutional reform. This is a time when enhanced
regional autonomy in energy, water, food, and trade capacity will be rewarded by
long-term viability and prosperity. To avert an epic calamity, urban civilization must
be steered from its short-lived single-resource energy addiction toward a path of
innovation in sustainable diversification, including energy independence and
emission-mitigating forms of climate change adaptation. The key is to cut reliance
on high-risk global fossil fuel supply lines and begin to foster local and regional
systems of resource autonomy instead.
Twenty-seven years ago, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency issued
a report calling for transcending the fossil-fuel regime for reasons of national
security.21 It was quickly ignored, and profound security concerns were sacrificed to
safeguard vast, if short-term, profits for a relatively small but powerful group of
beneficiaries. During a generation of relative inaction, these national security
concerns have now escalated into global threats, and expanded from fuel importinduced economic and military risks, to far-reaching climate change hazards, more
deeply entrenched global poverty problems, and a host of other security challenges.
All of these can be traced back to continued fossil fuel dependency, while misleading
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and inappropriate technological answers are being offered, in the form of terrestrial
carbon sequestration or boosted nuclear generation.
In cities and towns around the globe, new policy and practice frameworks are
beginning to be shaped, in the hope to steer urban economic, social, and
technological development toward a more secure and promising path of innovation.
Such developments almost always imply a move toward more autonomous, locally
powered forms of development, founded on renewable energy supplies, sourced
locally or regionally. Increasing numbers of community leaders begin to pursue such
paths. They understand that this is not a conventional engineering challenge or urban
planning problem; it is foremost an issue of social equity, community development,
and economics. Indeed, the prevailing system of subsidies favored monopolistic
fossil fuel regimes over the broadly shared, incomparably more secure, and less costly
sources of the sun, wind, water, biomass, and geothermal power. There is no
insurmountable physical, technological, or logistical barrier to overcoming fossil fuel
dependence. This change is a cultural and political task: the hope for achieving a
global energy transition rises most strongly within a human innovation that has
manifested global cultural achievements more than any other: our cities.
Notes
1 For example, see K.A. Doxiades and J.G. Papaioannou, Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future (Athens:
Athens Center of Ekistics, 1974); John Friedmann and Robert Wulff, The Urban Transition: Comparative Studies
of Newly Industrialized Societies (London: Arnold, 1976); Peter G. Hall, The World Cities (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1977).
2 Peter Droege, The Renewable City: Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution (London: John Wiley & Sons,
2007).
3 Hermann Scheer, The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future (London: Earthscan
Publications Ltd., 2002).
4 Hermann Scheer, Energy Autonomy: The Economic, Social and Technological Case for Renewable Energy (London:
Earthscan Publications, 2007).
5 Central Region Energy Resources Team, United States Energy and World Energy Production and
Consumption Statistics, United States Geological Survey, 1998. Available at:
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html#WProduction (accessed February 20, 2007).
6 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Urban Energy Handbook (OECD, 1995).
7 Martin Lenzen et al., Climate Change, in Handbook of Transport and the Environment, ed. D.A. Hensher and
Kenneth J. Button (Boston: Elsevier, 2003).
8 Scheer, Energy Autonomy.
9 Marion King Hubbert, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, Drilling and Production Practice, Publication
No. 95, 1956.
10 Marion King Hubbert, Energy and Power (Washington: Scientific American, 1971).
11Association for the Study of Peak Oil, Newsletter 74 (February 2007) Figure 1. Available at:
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletter/en/htm/Newsletter74.htm#794 (accessed February 20, 2007).
12 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook (Paris: IEA, 2004).
13 Colin J. Campbell and Jean H Laherre, The Worlds Oil Supply 1930-2050 (Geneva: PetroConsultants S.A.,
1995); Colin J. Campbell, The End of Cheap Oil (Geneva: PetroConsultants S.A., 1998); Colin J. Campbell, The
Essence of Oil and Gas Depletion (Brentwood: Multi-Science Publishing Company and Geneva:
PetroConsultants S.A., 2003); Colin J. Campbell, Revision of the Depletion Model, ASPO, Article 624,
Newsletter No. 58.; Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of Americas Growing Dependency
on Imported Oil (Metropolitan Books, 2004); R. Heinberg, The Partys Over: Oil, War and the Fate of
Industrial Societies (Gabriol Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2003); David Goodstein, Out of Gas:
The End of the Age of Oil (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).
14 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for
Policymakers (Geneva: IPCC, 2007).
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15 Svante Arrhenius, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,
Philosophical Magazine 5, no. 41 (April, 1896).
16 E. Mills, Insurance in a Climate of Change, Science 309, no. 5737 (2005): 10401044.
17 P. Schwartz and Doug Randall, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United
States Security, October, 2003. Available at:
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3566_AbruptClimateChange.pdf (accessed February 20,
2007).
18 J. Byrne and Leigh Glover, Climate Shopping: Putting the Atmosphere Up for Sale, TELA: Environment,
Economy and Society Series (2000).
19 H. Geller, Energy Revolution: Policies for a Sustainable Future (Washington: Island Press, 2002).
20 D.M. Kammen, et al., Putting Renewables to Work: How Many Jobs Can the Clean Energy Industry
Generate? Report on the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (Berkeley: University of California, 2004).
21 Dispersed, Decentralized and Renewable Energy Sources: Alternatives to National Vulnerability and
War, Energy and Defense Project (Washington, DC, 1980).
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