Category Archives: ecology & energy & climate

Morsels

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* I feel sick. Why? Earlier today, I was hit (no damage, at midday, in the middle of the Loop) by a driver who was clearly in the wrong — double parked, no signals, suddenly backing up without looking (through an illegally black-tinted rear window) — and suddenly found myself with four cagers all simultaneously screaming obscenity-laced insults at me. (None asked if I was all right.) One person on the sidewalk, a woman smoking, seemed to care, and told me to take down details for the cops. Of course, the cops arrived 22 minutes later, moments after the driver finished his business and pulled away, and there being no blood, there was no way to press charges.

Yet when there is blood, as with architect Steven O’Rourke (evidently a friend of a friend) — his body dragged for one mile through the streets of Jefferson Park, knocked out of his shoes just steps from the home where his wife and three small children were sound asleep — it’s too late. Your best witness is dead.

Not one week later, a child riding in the middle of Critical Mass was violently struck by a car fleeing the scene of a crash; his bike was dragged under the car for six blocks. Not just any kid, either, but a regular, an eager boy whom I’d seen graduate from trail-a-bike to his own two wheels, whom I’d fed cookies to. He’s shaken and bruised, but the gall!

Soon, I won’t be able to count the number of people I know — or have known — struck by hit-and-run drivers with mere single digits. This fact, and the utterly nonchalant attitude that countless drivers and the authorities have towards this most soulless, evil-hearted cowardice, fills me with toxic rage.

* A text ad on that O’Rourke story directs readers to the Campaign for Global Road Safety, which points out that worldwide, road deaths kill more people than malaria and diabetes, and as many as either of two lung diseases (tuberculosis and lung cancers) — and that every minute, a child is killed or maimed on the world’s roads. Worldwide, most of these deaths are of pedestrians. This is beginning to get attention from the UN, with a General Assembly session on road safety set for this fall.

* How to end our long national nightmare. [Wonkette]

* At a recent event, new alderman Brendan O’Reilly mentioned one idea worth grabbing from NYC: camera enforcement of Gridlock Sam’s “Don’t Block the Box” directive. Between these, the Natarus sound cameras, and various anti-terrorist cameras, downtown could have a pretty thick network of cameras — pretty useful for also ticketing double-parkers, or for London style cordon pricing.

* Recently viewed and highly recommended: the Criterion Collection release of Tati’s Play Time. No plot whatsoever, but the views of oppressively modernist, traffic-choked “Tativille” alternating with his gentle physical humor made for an enjoyable (if long winded) viewing.

* Speaking of oppressive modernism, I was amused to see that an “urban quarter” (named Quartier sur le Fleuve, but that name currently generates no Google hits) at the northeast corner of Montréal’s Île-des-Soeurs was submitted for the LEED-ND Pilot. The place really looked like a Tati nightmare. [PDF from earlier planning process]

* Québec also passed a “carbon tax” last month, amounting to 0.8c per liter. Curiously, part of Illinois’ gas tax is really an “environmental impact fee” (415 ILCS 125/310). I’d be curious to see what kind of interesting local projects could be funded under a CMAQ-like regional grant program to cut carbon emissions: car sharing, bike sharing, hybrid cabs, beater car trade-ins, electric peak load conservation, whatever.

* “Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards.” So, billions of dollars in America’s most valuable workers’ time is wasted stuffing “Freedom baggies” and pulling off shoes, all to CYA over yesterday’s threats. [Schneier on Security]

* Pithy comment by Carrington Ward on the Obama-arugula flub:

It’s an interesting point about the price of arugula. One of the problems Iowa farmers face is a dependence on monocrop agriculture — corn, corn, corn.

It is a flipside of the problem that many urban neighborhoods face: bodies sculpted by corn syrup, corn syrup, corn syrup.

We’d be better off as a nation if Iowa farmers were paying attention to the price of Arugula (or apples) in Chicago.

* Portland has a Courtyard Housing Design Competition underway. I’ll be curious to see how they reconcile this type (among my favorites, as you probably already know) with parking. The jury is pretty solid; my sense is that they’ll tend towards the traditional, though.

Carbon plans

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City planners will have to directly address climate change whether they’re prepared to or not. New case law emerging in California, under AG Jerry Brown, will require municipalities (and developers) to bring their plans into accordance with state climate action goals (AB 32), say Steve Jones and Dustin Till from the Marten Law Group:

California’s adoption of statewide emission-reduction targets in 2006 supplied the basis for the State of California’s claims in State of California v. San Bernardino County. After San Bernardino County issued its CEQA analysis for a comprehensive planning update that would guide future development in the County, both the State and environmental groups sued, claiming that the County violated CEQA by failing to assess how the substantial development anticipated by the plan would contribute to climate change and by failing to adopt measures to mitigate the climate change impacts of future development in the County…

The City of Austin, Texas adopted a “Climate Action Plan” which contains strategic elements such as the use of a “Compact City” and “New Urbanism” development approaches…

These developments make it prudent for developers to begin to assess and be prepared to mitigate the climate change impacts of new projects. For their part, municipalities will need to take account of the impacts of climate change in their land use planning and development regulations – requiring mitigation of GHG emissions for new development, as well as adopting plans that are consistent with the states’ emission-reduction targets.

Interestingly, the San Bernandino case (reported by John Ritter in USA Today) is not the first CEQA challenge to a local planning decision on the basis of carbon dioxide pollution, according to law firm Bingham McCutchen:

It was only a matter of time before the issue reached CEQA actions. An early greenhouse gas challenge to a CEQA document came in November 2006. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the City of Banning, seeking to overturn the approval of a 1500 home development. The suit alleges that the project will result in large emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, because the project will increase vehicle trips, and the EIR prepared for the project fails to analyze those emissions or associated global warming impacts. That case remains pending. The Center filed a similar lawsuit on April 11, 2007, challenging San Bernardino County’s new General Plan. Two days later, the Attorney General also sued… In the short term, agencies and developers can expect lawsuits similar to those filed by the Center and the Attorney General. With no published case directly on point, the parties will seek to establish precedent that will shape California’s environmental future. (emphasis added)

It would be very interesting to see how court challenges under CEQA — particularly by third parties — will shape smart growth and/or transportation investments in California. One can see anyone planning a highway or coal power plant might be very worried indeed. Another question for the future might be whether California cases could be cited as precedent for similar challenges under NEPA, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s recent directive on EPA regulation of carbon dioxide. An EIS (or EIR) can say anything it wants to, of course, but municipalities will be in a much better position to respond to these cases if they have a binding climate action plan in place.

Of course, any analysis of American cities’ contribution to climate change must begin with automobiles. Julian Borger reports in the Guardian on a recent Environmetal Defense report on the magnitude of American cars’ pollution: nearly half of all tailpipe emissions worldwide come from American cars. “The amount of CO2 emitted from oil used for transportation in the United States is similar to the amount from coal used to generate electricity.”

Mayor Sam Sullivan of Vancouver’s EcoDensity initiative includes a call for provinces to tie capital spending decisions to big-picture ecological outcomes. From an editorial in the 13 Feb National Post:

As mayor of one of Canada’s biggest cities, Vancouver, I am frustrated with the nature of the debate on global climate change in this country.

Over the past several months, I have watched as environmental organizations, government agencies and the media provide advice on how Canadians can make small changes to our lifestyles, yet continue living in a fundamentally unsustainable fashion.

Instead of telling Canadians to simply check the air pressure in their tires to ensure better mileage, or put energy efficient light bulbs in their suburban homes, we should be talking about how better urban planning and densification of our cities can significantly reduce our impact on the environment.

Not once have I seen any prominent national news coverage on the link between increased urban density and the impact on our global ecology. It is time that we have this debate…

Prior to becoming mayor, in my 13 years as a Vancouver city councillor, the “D” word was not popular. In fact, the mere mention of increased density often meant the kiss of death for a civic politician’s career. But, with an ageing population, rising home prices and an increased public interest in protecting our local and global environment, the time has come for us to embrace density as a tool to make cities more sustainable and livable…

At a local level, cities should be seeking every opportunity to immediately use density as a tool to ensure we provide new and innovative forms of housing so that people can live closer to where they work. Through the creative use of our zoning powers, cities have a responsibility to become a major partner in the battle against climate change. But that will mean showing leadership beyond our three-year mandates and making the tough but necessary choices which may not always prove popular.

I also believe that provincial and federal governments should be demanding that cities commit to carbon-reducing strategies such as Eco Density before they provide infrastructure funding.

For too long, cities have built out to the far edges of our downtown cores, and then run cap in hand to senior levels of government demanding billions of new infrastructure dollars to fund these unsustainable planning and zoning decisions. Although it would be a departure from the status quo, future investments in infrastructure should be directly linked to the environment.

Update: Of course, some want to amend CEQA to pre-empt such challenges.

2030 Planning Challenge

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Recently, at CNU XV, 2030 °Challenge founder (and longtime solar advocate) Ed Mazria outlined the beginnings of a 2030 °Challenge for city planning — what we’re tentatively calling the 2030 Community Challenge. Elsewhere, I’ve brainstormed a few ideas on how planners can help to save the world from global warming. Mazria has been focusing on how architects can save energy for decades, so it’s taken a bit of education to get him to agree that planning can also have a huge impact on global warming. Here’s what Mazria had to say at CNU XV:

  • When planning a new or in an existing neighborhood, town, city, or region, planners should seek an immediate 50% reduction in fossil fuel consumption (greenhouse gas emitting energy), vehicle miles traveled (auto and freight), water consumption, materials (embodied energy), and “anything else you can think of that you deal with.”
  • Since planners are “larger scale folks,” they can have a broader impact than architects.
  • The targets should slide up: by 2010, a 60% reduction, etc., up to 100% (carbon neutral communities) by 2030.
  • How to get there? The first step is to implement a variety of design solutions [many of which are covered in LEED-ND]: density, infill, land reuse, location efficiency; transit- and pedestrian-oriented development and mixed-use; stormwater catchment and wastewater reuse; microclimate management; efficient infrastructure; and 2030 Architecture.
  • The second step is through community scale energy initiatives, particularly microgeneration.
  • The third step (a last resort) would be to purchase “green tags” or carbon credits. This, of course, is no substitute for real action.
  • Planners must also begin to think about many other environmental issues which architects haven’t had to consider, including wildlands conservation, wildlife migration corridors, and how to adapt to the major catastrophes (floods, hurricanes) that await us.
  • Most importantly, we have 5-10 years to start cutting emissions — or else we as a species probably won’t make it.

A follow-on speech by Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, added to the call for urgent action. Fully one-half of the built environment is infrastructure — that is, publicly built — and thus out of the reach of average architects, but well within the purview of planners. Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, in their influential Stabilization Wedges scheme [outlined here], have listed “doubling fuel efficiency from 30 to 60 MPG,” “decreasing VMT by half,” and “using best efficiency practices in all building” as three of their fifteen billion-ton wedges. (Seven of the fifteen need to be implemented to stabilize CO2 concentrations; another is “install 700X current solar capacity.”)

Although trends are moving in the wrong way — bigger homes house smaller households, VMT growth is still positive, although it has dropped off lately — groups like CNT have pioneered ways of combatting these trends. High-speed rail has the capability to displace many air trips. Research into last-mile connections (those highly dispersed trips between nodes and homes) has revealed a wide appetite for choices like car sharing — whose users “use the city, not just the cars” — and streetcars. Last-mile freight movement remains a challenge, but CNT is working with inner-ring suburbs around Chicago to capitalize on underused rail freight facilities. These tools and techniques could easily double the magnitude of Mazria’s 2030 °Challenge.

Beyond Austin (which we’ll undoubtedly cover in a future post), one city that has initiated a citywide dialogue about how New Urbanism is progressive, green, and responds to the environmental challenges of our day — not just global warming, but One Planet Living — is Vancouver, fittingly the birthplace of the ecological footprint concept. There, Mayor Sam Sullivan has moved his EcoDensity campaign into a new gear by hiring Brent Toderian as the new planning director, following on Larry Beasley. Bob Ransford writing in the Vancouver Sun:

The focus of new urbanists is changing, just as concern for global warming and peak oil is suddenly engulfing public opinion in all circles. New urbanist planners, like Toderian, are leading the way, reminding us that livability may be an important pursuit, but that livability means little if the planet no longer exists as a habitable environment for humans and all other creatures. Toderian has already come out and told developers, politicians and citizen advisors — and anyone else who wants to listen to his message — that livability will no longer be the first indicator used to measure the quality of development in Vancouver. He is leading the way in replacing that benchmark with what he believes is a more urgent measure of our commitment to sustainability. Ecological sustainability will now be the measure of expected performance when judging new proposed developments in Vancouver… neighbourhoods are going to change and change will be measured not by how much or how little they disrupt current lifestyle in a neighbourhood. Instead, proposed change will be measured by how much it influences future lifestyle decisions that have the potential to impact positively or negatively our natural environment and its ecosystems.

Bold moves and equally bold words are needed to jolt North Americans into the reality of our climate challenge. Canadian cities have set up informational sites, like One Day Vancouver and Zero Footprint Toronto, but will have to follow up these calls for citizen action with equal civic action. (Forthcoming posts will discuss cities’ efforts to date — but let’s just say that the US Conference of Mayors signed on to the 2030 °Challenge without implementing many action steps.)

One important final point to make about the wedges: they clearly demonstrate that humanity will need to use every possible approach to this leviathan challenge. Our lives will have to change; they will change regardless. No silver bullets, no magical breakthroughs, no panaceas will save us from ourselves; it’s far too late for those. We will not be able to choose between two different ways to cut emissions — that means no “either/or” arguments pitting factions against one another — because we will need to do “both/and” if we are to survive.

Green city bites

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  • The current (July) issue of Builder has a fantastic cover package of articles on affordability — about two-thirds of which is New Urbanism. It addresses both design and policy (finance, finance, transportation, inclusionary, and more) solutions, without any right-wing NAHB complaining.
  • PARK(ing) Day — a day to reclaim curbside parking back for the public realm — will be a national observation this September 21 (following on last September’s observation). My quick idea: perhaps some donated floorcoverings (carpet?* turf?) and a communal table, around which we will discuss The High Cost of Free Parking, perhaps not coincidentally APA’s Planners Book Club selection for August. I can think of a few sponsoring groups who could get behind that. Or perhaps two dozen kick stand-ed bicycles parked (and locked), plus work stands for two mechanics.
  • Mike Davis has a heartwarming article in Sierra about the last time Americans banded together to collectively fight a mighty foe — and downshifted the whole economy in the process.

    Would Americans ever voluntarily give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald’s, and lawns?

    The surprisingly hopeful answer lies in living memory. In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation, called on Americans “to change from an economy of waste–and this country has been notorious for waste–to an economy of conservation.” A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered the call…

    Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national “Food Fights for Freedom” campaign. By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables–freeing the nation’s farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia… Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn’t yet exist) and self-reliance…

    With recreational driving curtailed by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike. In June 1942, park officials reported that “never has bicycling been so popular in Yosemite Valley as it is this season.” Public health officials praised the dual contributions of victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the already ominously increasing cancer rate…

    The total mobilization of the time was dubbed the “People’s War,” and while it had no lack of conservative critics, there was remarkable consistency in the observation of journalists and visitors (as well as in later memoirs) that the combination of a world crisis, full employment, and mild austerity seemed to be a tonic for the American character. New York Times columnist Samuel Williamson… pointed out that American life had been revolutionized in a single generation and many good things seemingly lost forever; the war and the emphasis on conservation were now resurrecting some of the old values. “One of these,” he wrote, “may be the rediscovery of the home–not as a dormitory, but as a place where people live. Friendships will count for more.”

* Did you know that Interface FLOR is based in Chicago?

We can too give up our cars

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The high-profile launch of Paris’ Vélib’ [French] program (actually, one of several such schemes in Europe, but certainly the highest-profile implementation of a turnkey free bike-sharing system to date) has put mayor Delanoë’s strategy of reducing urban traffic — no, not reducing its supposedly inevitable growth, but actually getting people who currently drive to drop the keys and step away from the steering wheel — into the spotlight. Delanoë has promised to cut traffic by 40%, and making bicycling as easy as walking — first with bicycle facilities, now with bicycles — is a big part of that.

First, some info gleaned from Vélo’v, the pioneering bike share in Lyon. JCDecaux will launch seven new city-bike schemes [French] over the next year, with over 25,000 bicycles in Paris, Seville, Marseille, Dublin, Aix-en-Provence, Besançon, and Mulhouse. Barcelona has also launched an independent bike share company, Bicing [Spanish]. Bicycle traffic grew 44% from 2005-06. So far, Vélo’v customers [French] mostly fit the profile of bicyclists; nearly half are twentysomething, 60% are male, a full third are students. 85% of daytime trips are for work or school. More than one-third of Vélo’v users drive (even occasionally) in the city; over half of them drive less since the program’s start. 10% of Vélo’v’d trips would otherwise have been in cars. (You’ve got to love the French term for non-motorized transport: “déplacements doux.” Sweet, indeed. And the newsletter’s welcome is written by the municipal “vice-president in charge of new ways of using public space.” Now, that’s a title fit for me.)



Vélo’v Station, Lyon Uploaded to Flickr by laughtonb

Pasadena recently commissioned a report on traffic reduction strategies; the draft report and the appendices (with many case studies of municipalities that have lowered VMT or trips) are available online.

The July/August issue of New Urban News points out the tremendous success of transit oriented development in Arlington, Va. I recently had dinner in a smart new restaurant a few blocks from the Clarendon Metro, at the heart of Arlington’s booming Wilson Blvd./Orange Line corridor. In my lifetime, the three-mile corridor has added 19,000 DUs, 15 million sq. ft. of offices, and 1.9 million sq. ft. of retail, worth tens of billions of dollars — yet traffic on Wilson (at Clarendon) has fallen 16% since 1996. Over the same time, transit use grew 37.5%, with Metrorail ridership growing 43% and local ART bus ridership growing 926%. Of course, Arlington has an aggressive, holistic TDM strategy.

And then, there’s that most obvious way of dissuading driving: taxes. Another Tribune editorial endorsing a high gas tax, instead of those clunky CAFE standards:

The most efficient and straightforward way to persuade Americans to conserve gasoline would be to raise gas prices. A gas tax increase of, say, 50 cents per gallon would persuade people to drive fewer miles, without limiting their car-buying options. That’s preferable to the fix approved by the U.S. Senate: a mandated rise in fuel economy standards for automobiles.

Update 23 July: it appears that Steve Chapman wrote that one. From a 22 July opinion piece, a crisp distillation of how CAFE is not just poor policy, but it backloads economic costs and increases the social costs of driving:

Higher fuel economy standards, likewise, would have results that are not quite what we envision. The first is that they won’t reduce gasoline consumption much anytime soon. The reason is simple: The only vehicles affected by the change would be new ones…

The second is that among those people who buy the new, improved vehicles, higher mileage requirements won’t actually discourage driving. Just the opposite… A 2002 study by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies found that if Congress raised the fuel mandate to 35 m.p.g, the average new light truck “would log about 1,080 more miles per year.”

The result will be more congestion and more accidents. The more people drive, the worse the traffic jams. The higher the number of cars on the road at any given moment, the likelier it is that one of them will run into yours.

Economists almost unanimously agree that if you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions by curbing gasoline consumption, the sensible way to do it is not by dictating the design of cars but by influencing the behavior of drivers. If you want less of something, such as pollution from cars, the surest way is to charge people more for it.

A carbon tax or a higher gasoline tax would encourage every motorist, not just those with new vehicles, to burn less fuel — by taking the bus, carpooling, telecommuting, resorting to that free mode of transit known as walking, or buying a Prius.

Many people are inclined to resist a higher gas tax because it would cost them money. What they overlook is that a law requiring cars and trucks to be more fuel-efficient would not come free, either. You wouldn’t pay more for each visit to the pump. But you would pay more for a car. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over time, a gas tax would cost 27 percent less than a higher fuel-economy mandate.

None of these inconvenient truths, however, got much attention from the Senate. Raising mileage standards has great allure in Washington because the price inflicted on consumers is hidden from view, assuring that no blame will fall on our elected leaders.

P.S. two snarky phrases in my head lately: “gizmo green” and “tapas-based economy.”

Buying our way to greenness

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An article by Alex Williams in the Sunday NYT talks about “light” and “deep” green, timely given the recent rocketing ascendance of pricey green gear:

“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.” […]

“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” [Michael] Shellenberger [of market research firm American Environics] said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”

Still no grand green plan

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A mole at the recent Clinton Global Initiative conversation reported that Chicago was being held up as an example of a “green city,” a theme echoed in the Massive Change exhibition now up at the MCA. It’s quite fashionable to talk of Chicago as a deep-green city, but the real accomplishments to date have proved rather scattershot. As with the nascent approach to obesity, there is no approach, just photo opportunities.

Why? It’s a classic case of hacks vs. wonks, as Bruce Reed calls it. The way machine politics works — “I’ll create a little exception for you to get your vote, and your people’s votes” — inhibits Chicago politicians from thinking, much less acting, in a manner which considers broad impacts and bigger plans. Its deep skepticism of technocrats leaves no room for cold policy analysis, whether of the celebrity-driven “green ribbon commission” sort used to develop the climate action plan for Seattle or even for a Comp Plan (sure, it’s mandated by state law, but we’ll let that slide) or a regional plan that has about as much authority as Houston’s.

Hence, the biggest polluters — like the ancient coal power plants or the rivers of cars flowing oh-so-freely down freeways and through downtown, unimpeded by flitting concerns like pedestrian lives — get off scot-free, while expensive solar panels sprout in conspicuous locations and the transit system rots. This results in odd scenarios, like Daley championing a
Climate Protection Agreement at the recent US Conference of Mayors convention that he hosted, effectively signing on USCM to Kyoto (as he already has for Chicago) — even though there’s not even been discussion of how to even begin planning for the agreement’s 2010 deadline. (Pertinent text of the Agreement below the fold.)

A few years ago, some photo opportunities might have been sufficient to proclaim one’s green-ness, but thankfully most other places have moved their sustainability initiatives beyond symbolism. Even other old-line cities are doing so. NYC (which similarly has no comp plan and, unlike Chicago, allowed a zoning rewrite to die on the vine a few years ago) recently recruited away former Massachusetts smart-growth czar Doug Foy to lead a new Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability. In Providence, a rare city with more corruption per capita and even more hardened white-ethnic politics, the mayor has convened Providence Tomorrow, a weeklong charrette to guide a comp plan rewrite.

Indeed, ICLEI, an international organization that helps countless local governments with sustainability plans, defines planning as absolutely crucial to every step of achieving sustainability:

We help local governments generate political awareness of key issues; establish plans of action towards defined, concrete, measurable targets; work towards meeting these targets through the implementation of projects; and evaluate local and cumulative progress toward sustainable development.

So far, the Environmental Action Agenda is a start, but outlines mostly basic purchasing decisions: switching solvents, adding hybrid vehicles, starting capital projects. In the “mobility” section, the only “good” goal (5% of short trips by bike) comes from the Bike Plan, not the EAG. It doesn’t add up to the big goals that the mayor has set by adopting Kyoto, nor does it attempt to work backwards from that goal to create quantifiable near-term targets. Viewed as a response to the Agreement, it’s skipping straight past the Big Picture items that start the list and jumping right to the small-bore items — not what we expect in the city of Big Plans That Stir Men’s Blood.

Continue reading →

Meet the other end of your gas pump

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_Chicago Tribune_ reporter Paul Salopek spent the last year on “an energy safari,” working backwards from the customers and night-shift clerks at a single Marathon gas station in exurban Chicago (and the downstate refinery that supplies it) to the exact fields where the oil first left the ground. Last September, for instance, 71% of its gas came from the U.S., 20% from Africa, and 10% from Saudi Arabia.

The “eight stories”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-oilsafari2-htmlstory,0,3163462.special and related multimedia (photos from Iraq, Louisiana, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and a 12-part video documentary) neatly tie together the disparate lives on both ends of the petroleum pipe: an angry gang recruit in Itak Abasi, Nigeria, an oilfield manager in Basra living under what amounts to solitary confinement, fiercely Chavista village elders in Venezuela, the gas station manager who spends a third of her pay on gas, and a “concerned” Hummer-driving realtor in St. Charles, Illinois. The Tribune calls our “globe-spanning energy network” “so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever” — a bit out of character for a Republican newspaper with a suburban circulation base.

[xpost: “gristmill”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/31/12236/0077%5D

Incidentally, I read the story during a brownout on Saturday, the second in a week. Talk about lack of energy…

The war we ought to fight

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Matt Yglesias points out in an American Prospect article that the ultimate $1+ trillion cost of the “Iraq misadventure” could have gone a long way towards making America safer, but for… well, that thought’s too depressing. What’s most shocking, though:

In a May 10 Washington Post op-ed piece, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein argued that “the economic burden of the Iraq War is on the verge of exceeding the total anticipated burden of the Kyoto Protocol.” Sunstein’s argument, predictably, came under attack from the right, but in fact he seriously understated his case. The estimated $325 billion cost of Kyoto refers not to direct budgetary costs — most academic studies have concluded that these would be extremely small. Instead, the figure refers to indirect costs to economic growth. This is a large price to pay, but as with the rest it’s significantly less than the economic impact of the war. On top of the $1.27 trillion in direct expenditures, however, Bilmes and Stiglitz also anticipate an additional trillion or so in indirect reduced economic growth. Without the invasion, in other words, we could have both gotten a jump on the emerging challenge of global warming and enjoyed higher levels of overall prosperity than we’re seeing today.

The same blithering administration idiots who claim that meeting our Kyoto Protocol targets will prove too expensive have no problem asking Congress for blank checks towards the war — when, in fact, the cost of the former comes to a small fraction of the latter. Our descendants will not smile upon us for this.

Point of no return

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[xpost: Gristmill]

The cover story for this week’s “NYRB”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19131 comes with an odd preface: author Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (and sometime darling of the New York press, as he’s the city’s best known climatologist), is expressing his “personal views under the protection of the First Amendment.” This needs explaining only because the Bush administration has appointed -state censors- media minders for federal officials who “dare tell the truth”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/10/AR2006021001766.html about global warming.

Much to the minders’ chagrin, Hansen clearly contrasts the “Do Something” vs. “Do Nothing” scenarios. “Do Nothing” results in several big feedback loops spiraling out of control: _in my lifetime_, either the climate will warm slightly and remain stable, or a runaway greenhouse effect causing total collapse of the ice sheets and complete thawing of the permafrost could happen, and we have but a few scant years to seal our fate. Time’s a-wasting.

bq. [F]urther global warming exceeding two degrees Fahrenheit will be dangerous… [that] limit will be exceeded unless a change in direction can begin during the current decade. Unless this fact is widely communicated, and decision-makers are responsive, it will soon be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undersirable consequences. We have reached a critical tipping point…

bq. [W]e have at most ten years — not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating… [I]f we stay on the business-as-usual course, disastrous effects are no further from us than we are from the Elvis era.

“It’s true that we’ve had higher CO2 levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs.” — an unnamed NOAA scientist quoted by “Elizabeth Kolbert”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/050425on_onlineonly01