Presentation: Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty

How should NYC plan for transportation, land use and public safety while facing huge uncertainties about energy and climate?

Join us for a presentation by Daniel Lerch from the Post Carbon Institute based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of “Post Carbon Cities,” the first major municipal guidebook on peak oil and global warming.

Daniel Lerch is the author of “Post Carbon Cities,” the first major municipal guidebook on peak oil and global warming. He is a program manager with Post Carbon Institute based in Portland, Oregon and has worked on urban planning issues for over ten years in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He is also a co-founder of The City Repair Project, an award-winning non-profit organization working on community public space issues. Daniel has a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies from Rutgers University in New Jersey and a Master of Urban Studies from Portland State University in Oregon.

This presentation will cover the following topics:

• the changing energy and climate contexts of the 21st century;
• the facts and fiction surrounding ‘peak oil’, and how the problem is really a much broader, more complex issue of ‘energy uncertainty’;
• what energy uncertainty means for cities, and why local governments in particular should take action on it;
• the parallel and evolving threat of ‘climate uncertainty,’ and what it means for cities and their local governments;
• what ‘early actor’ cities in the U.S. have already done in response to energy uncertainty; and
• recommendations for what local governments should do about the combined threat challenge of ‘energy and climate uncertainty’