Oh, the life of a member of the city’s Peak Oil Task Force. There’s so much to think about — everything from hybrid cars to manure.

City commissioners late last year appointed a Lawrence Peak Oil Task Force that is supposed to come up with recommendations on how the community could protect itself against a significant supply disruption or major spike in the price of oil.

The group began meeting in January, and had hoped to have a report completed at the beginning of 2010. Now, it looks like the recommendations likely won’t come until this summer.

“We realized there is a lot to consider here,” said Michael Almon, a member of the task force and one of the residents who urged commissioners to create the group.

Some issues up for consideration are fairly conventional, such as how the city could begin converting its vehicle fleet over to electric hybrids or other alternative-fuel vehicles.

But some issues require more outside-the-box thinking. Almon said a good report needs to include recommendations on how the city will react when residents start dramatically changing their lifestyles.

“When people start feeling the effects of Peak Oil and their budgets are pinched and their mobility is impaired, people will start doing lots of things on their own,” Almon predicted.

For example, creating large-scale gardens in their backyards.

“When people start bringing in lots of manure to their backyards to compost, what is the city going to do when their neighbors start complaining?”

Almon also can envision the day that some people will start riding horses in the city because of high oil prices, and start using wood stoves on a large scale to heat their homes.

“What are we going to do to make sure they don’t deforest the city?” Almon said.

Pieces of the whole

Whether the task force’s final report will delve deeply into such issues isn’t yet known. For the past year, the task force has broken itself into groups to study specific issues. In the next couple of months, the task force will begin pulling the pieces of information together to create a report.

Mayor Rob Chestnut is on the task force, and said he hopes the report will take a broad “emergency management” type of focus.

“I want the report to look at how the city could take its energy footprint from where it is now to about half of that, if we had a major oil event,” Chestnut said.

When that oil event is likely to happen won’t be a focus of the report. There’s been much disagreement in environmental and energy circles about when the world will reach the point of Peak Oil, which basically is defined as the time when worldwide oil production begins its descent. Some believe the world has just years to prepare for the time. Others believe such a day is at least multiple decades away.

The city’s task force decided not to dive into that argument, but rather just prepare for it no matter when it comes.

“Somebody could come up with new technology that negates the need for gasoline, and then this wouldn’t have been worth the time,” said Rex Buchanan, a member of the task force. “But just because that could happen, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan. I think it is a worthwhile exercise to begin thinking about how we would deal with volatility.”

How far will it go?

A major question left unanswered is whether the final report will have recommendations to change city policies in advance of Peak Oil’s arrival.

For example, some communities have used the threat of Peak Oil as a reason to put additional restrictions on the conversion of farm ground to nonagricultural uses. Other possibilities could include new street standards that would require streets to be narrower to use less asphalt, or new residential standards that would require larger yards to accommodate future gardens.

Several members, though, said they don’t believe the task force’s recommendations — which will be presented to the City Commission — will result in dramatic, immediate changes.

“This isn’t going to be a revolution,” said Tom Kern, the president of the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce and a member of the task force. “It will be an evolution. We do want and need to evolve to have a smaller carbon footprint. We need to look at how we can do that over a period of time.”