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Introduction
Virtually any scenario for the future that is at all realistic envisages a drastic drop in energy consumption from fossil fuels – compared to affluent consumer societies today. It little matters whether you work out what has to be done to reduce greenhouse gases or you come to similar conclusions by noting the inevitable end of cheap oil. I will be considering the writings of three authors who begin with this premise to lay the groundwork for their plans for future cities – Ted Trainer, David Holmgren and Folke Gunther. All three also add two other premises. The first is that there is no kind of alternative energy available that is remotely as cheap or abundant as fossil fuels have been for us so far. This is partly a matter of cost – the more energy costs the less you can have of it. But it is partly a matter of absolute capacity – for example there is a limit to the amount of good sites for wind energy. Their final premise follows from this one. Given a reduced energy budget and an absolute cap on energy expansion there is no possibility of a capitalist growth economy. Nevertheless there are a range of other possible social structures that could operate within these energy constraints. While I will lay out some of these options, an interesting aspect of this debate is that plans for a future city are about the constraints of energy use and are valid whatever social option we end up with.
Given all these premises the aim of their plans for future cities is to consider how we could live well in a low energy future. Clearly the premises which form the basis of this approach are not uncontested. In the final part of this chapter I will consider two recent books on climate change that suggest that some version of an affluent growth economy is possible without a fossil fuel subsidy – David Spratt and Philip Sutton’s Climate Code Red, and Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. We could call this school of thought the technological optimist school.