June 18 and 20
Board full of topics at our Food Open Space Day, January '09Two Events:
“The Low Energy Future of Transportation” with David Fridley, Lawrence Berkeley Labs
Thursday June 18th, 7 pm
$5-12
Community Conversation: The Future of Local Transportation & Land Use
Saturday, June 20, 10 am-4 pm
Free admission; $10 lunch
Both events at the First Congregational Church, 900 High St., Santa Cruz
Will our automobile use decline with the end of the cheap energy era? Or will it continue, as many want to believe, with battery vehicles and bio-fueled vehicles?
To help Santa Cruzans grapple with that question, Transition Santa Cruz will host David Fridley, an energy analyst with Lawrence Berkeley Labs and the best person we know to turn well-researched technical information about energy into easy-to-understand language. Mr. Fridley will discuss the feasibility of alternative energy sources to fill the gap created by declining oil and gas production. Fridley recently finished a study for the State of California that showed that “even if we diverted all 2 million acres of California’s pastureland to switchgrass for ethanol production, we could only supplant 2% of California gasoline use”.
Fridley worked as a consultant to the oil industry, where he came to realize that the end of the oil economy was inevitable. More recently, he was the author of the City of San Francisco's Peak Oil Resolution, which established a task force to plan for the City's future under a low-energy-supply scenario.
Smarter transportation and land use policies are ways we can smooth the transition from our dependence on fossil fuels to a resilient low energy future. You are invited to come to our Saturday Open Space Workshop with your passion and ideas to help solve some of Santa Cruz’s toughest transportation and land use challenges. An "open space" event is one in which the participants set the agenda for the day, by calling all the breakout group topics at the start of the workshop. There are sure to be many juicy discussions on various issues such as redirecting investment from auto infrastructure to projects like the rail line, designing pedestrian friendly neighborhoods, optimizing urban density, living within our water limits, ensuring that housing be affordable to the workforce, to name a few. Particpants will be invited to become part of an ongoing working group on Transportation and Land Use after the workshop.