Science Forward

Last week I sat in on the ecology lecture given by Dr. Eric Sanderson.  With the brief introduction that Prof. Branco gave us, I expected the lecture to mainly focus on his Mannahatta Project and on his historical findings of New York City, but he focused instead on his other book, Terra Nova.  Terra Nova focuses on our country’s oil dependence and the vision for cities without that dependence.  Dr. Sanderson proposed that we are highly oil dependent primarily because we received oil at low costs between 1910 and 1970. The facts that he presented were that in or around 1910 the US used more oil than it had produced, by only a minimal amount. From that point on the consumption of oil increased dramatically to something like 150 billion barrels above the US production. Sanderson comically pointed out, by use of a clip from the Daily Show, that our past eight presidents (including incumbent President Obama) have spoken about reducing and even eliminating our country’s oil dependence but yet we are still dependent on oil.

Sanderson’s main proposal was to begin to utilize our roads in a more efficient manner. He pointed out that the roads are public property and we can decide how we use them. His solution consisted of a rehashing of an old mode of transportation, the street car. If cities were to reinstitute street cars (which run on electricity), we would be able to utilize the roads in a more efficient matter without the pollution of OIL fueled cars. He illustrated that the same street that allowed something like 100 cars to pass by in an hour, would be able to support 1000 bikes, and 2000 pedestrians in that same hour (the numbers are most probably off, but they demonstrate the idea that he was proposing). Cities like San-Francisco and New Orleans were cited as bustling cities with streetcars, although I am not sure if those streetcars translated into a reduction in the amount of cars in those cities or to the oil dependency that is associated with those cars. Another way to reduce/eliminate oil dependency is to use wind and solar powers. Sanderson showed a graph which stated that there could be three scenarios in which wind power could provide energy to the entire country: If wind turbines were placed along the east coast, along the west coast, and in the Dakotas. He said that the wind energy that passes through these three areas of the country would be sufficient in providing energy to the country. If this is true, I wonder why this country hasn’t utilized this information to cut our oil dependency as our past eight presidents spoke of.

The two things that I found most interesting from today’s lecture were the way in which oil is formed and the way in which a reduction in oil dependency would reinforce itself economically and socially. Oil is formed from masses of phytoplankton that died (around the time when dinosaurs existed), but did not have a chance to sink to the ocean floor. Since they have not reached the ocean floor, they did not fully decompose. The dead phytoplankton, on its descent to the bottom of the ocean, was displaced by water into porous layers of rock. The mass of dead phytoplankton ascended through these porous layers until it reached a stopping point at a layer of non-porous rock, where it built up and stayed until today. Drilling for oil involves drilling through rock to find these pockets with the collection of oil.

Dr. Sanderson showed a process that involved an increase in cars (dependent on oil), which caused people to move farther away from their jobs (in cities) over time due to costs. His solution to oil freedom involved bringing cities back into the main picture, which meant bringing families and people back into the city and closer to their jobs. Im not sure that increasing the population density in New York City is the best idea to put forth (as the current density is something like 67,000 people per square mile in Manhattan- the highest in the country), but I agree that if less cars were driven, our oil dependency would decrease. Also, I think that many people would lose their jobs when (and if) the automobile market and American oil market would be hit with less people buying cars in Dr. Sanderson’s world. Maybe the technology to have completely electronic cars will come out sometime soon which would end our oil dependency, but cause electricity prices to skyrocket. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It was an interesting lecture and I am glad that I attended.