Recently in Climate Change Category

The BP oil gusher should remind us that our civilization relies on unseen, not very well understood forces, especially energy and the environment, for our day-to-day economies.

Our institutions and communities have recently failed stress tests that pushed system designs beyond intended limits: whether it's toxic exurban real estate assets, climate-altering pollution or deepwater oil drilling.

The Post Carbon Institute just published my report, "The Death of Sprawl: Redesigning Urban Resilience for the Twenty-first Century Resource Crises." Random exurban sprawl and informed urban systems are the opposite ends of a spectrum. In this continuum, the interplay of economics, energy and natural resources management can be optimized (or wasted or ignored) through planning, design, behaviors and technology to yield astonishingly different outcomes.

The chapter will be in a Fall 2010 book being published by The University of California Press and Watershed Media.

We need to understand what stresses will hit before the levees reach their breaking point. When stresses do hit, we will better know how to respond quickly and systemically. Meanwhile, we're stuck with the impacts of scores of towns like Victorville, California, which were overbuilt during the height of 1990s and early 2000s speculation. I examine in detail just how Victorville became a poster child for foreclosures and why it is a harbinger for our economy, resources and oil use. Chances are if you are in the West, Sunbelt or Midwest, there's one of these towns out on the fringes near you.

Location of hyper-growth US Boomburbs 2000-2009 (click to enlarge)

Quickly developed and poorly planned exurban communities, called "Boomburbs," require cars for virtually every human activity outside the home, going to school, eating out, shopping, dating, seeing a movie, playing and of course, working. But working actually comprises only about 25 percent of the driving we do as a nation: the national reliance on cars goes far beyond our jobs, and is more based on how our communities and streets are designed.

(If that "Green Home" you see in so many magazines doesn't analyze how people get to and from that home, then it's probably far from being sustainable.) 

The foreclosures started in these exurban areas after gas prices started rising in 2006, impacting local communities, lenders and housing or strip mall developers that formed the points of the triangle, or a pyramid, you might say. A bank, rig or smokestack regulator won't limit the flood of bad paper, crude or carbon emissions if rules can be circumvented in order to make more money. That's the point when stresses build up, exposing failures that at first seem an outlier, then become more commonplace as the very fabric of the system gives way. 

Historically cheap gas was enabled by the federal government and foreign producers, combined with no-holds barred real estate development encouraged by the feds, states, and local communities, and of course the banking industry. Zero down homes are still being offered by developers and their agents in these sprawled communities. To be fair, many low-income individuals wanted to own or invest in their first home, but greed greased the transactions.

Sprawl was one of the major factors requiring more driving and more cars, leading to more time spent commuting, poorer health and ever-greater oil consumption. As a nation we needed to Drill, Baby, Drill in ever-more precarious situations, be it Iraq or the deep waters of the Gulf. 

Meanwhile, the ongoing foreclosure crisis in sprawled California, Arizona, Florida and Texas is undermining a national economic recovery, and will eat away at resources for decades to come: energy, water, time, investment, and security.

 
Real estate prices in or near transit-served Washington DC (green arrows indicate prices going up) and in car-dependent outlying areas (red arrows mean prices decreasing): Credit: Kaid Benfield, NRDC, 2010

Even before the oil gusher, smart institutional money started to avoid sprawl like the plague for the first time. Now, there is a new wrinkle: will the BP Deepwater Horizon incident change global access to oil and the public's cognitive understanding of what burning gas and driving really mean?

So far the reaction in this nation has been to talk about developing renewable sources of energy, including wind, solar and nuclear energy. None of those forms of energy have been used to power our cars and trucks on a meaningful scale--though they will in 10-20 years--so such talk is premature.

Other nations, such as China in wind and solar, are leading US development in such technology, so we are falling down in preparing for the distant day when cars will be powered mainly by renewable energy and alternative fuels (Brazil has gained dominance in producing non-food based ethanol).

Euro nations have tempered their oil addiction by taxing gas at a higher rate while also building denser communities requiring much less driving, and allowing many people to walk or cycle to their destinations. Besides being more energy efficient for residents, these cities and suburbs are also more attractive to businesses and tourists, with their density and mixed-uses (cheese and wine markets, parks, schools and office buildings) being a big part of the charm.

China and India are embarking on ambitious programs to build new cities and redesign existing cities, which is a necessity, considering their exploding urban populations. While automotive growth is a given in these nations (China just overtook the US in auto sales last year), both nations are weighing innovative metro-area designs. Tianjin, China has an "eco-city" district (one of 40 in the nation) that is planned to have 90 percent of all trips by public transit, bicycle or walking.

 

Denver, meanwhile, passed an innovative update to its zoning codes this week that will make its transit-oriented planning and investments more successful, reducing auto-dependent development and integrating more mixed uses into the city's neighborhoods.

Not everyone wants to or is able to afford living in a city or dense suburbs served by transit. But as "The Death of Sprawl" illustrates, we need to find a way out of the institutional, economic and environmental hangover from the last days of cheap and easy oil.

We can deny there's a problem and continue our delusional ways, or we can put the bottle down, sober up and get to work on seeing what the rest of our lives can really be.    

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active consultancy based in San Anselmo, California. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and author of How Green is Your City?: The SustainLane US City Rankings.  

Stranger than fiction: methane hydrate, a potential source of energy that may dwarf the supply of earth's existing fossil fuels likely caused the April 20 Deepwater Horizon-BP explosion and then prevented the containment of the resulting spill this weekend.

Reports that methane hydrate gases shot up the well before the Deepwater Horizon explosion appeared on Friday, while the attempt Saturday by BP to put a containment dome over the leaking oil well was foiled by "slushy methane hydrates" that built up in the structure.

Unknown risks associated with our society's fossil fuel reliance are suddenly coming into sharper focus, and it's beginning to look like a well-conceived science fiction movie. Only this is real, it's happening now, and a happy ending appears out of the question.

We can't turn it off.  

An out-of-control oil spill is coming directly out of the earth, with seemingly unlimited quantities of crude fouling the nation's most productive fishery, where 80% of the country's domestically produced wild seafood supply is harvested. The oil spill is accompanied by one of the most potent known greenhouse gases, which stymies rescue efforts with acute volatility, threatening far more global climate damage than existing fossil fuels.    

Also known as "ice energy," methane hydrate is layered below the global ocean floors around the world in a frozen, yet highly flammable state. Occurring in permafrost as well, this enigmatic substance has more than three times the carbon than natural gas, coal and oil combined, so it presents incalcuable risks to the global climate if it is released into the atmosphere without sequestration.

What makes methane hydrate and recent Gulf events so remarkable is that this substance, formed by high pressure and cold temperatures and discovered only in the 1960s, has more potential energy than all the world's coal, natural gas and oil combined.


The US Department of Energy (DOE), China and India have all been pursuing methane hydrate deposits and research because of its potential as the ultra high-powered energy source. Russia (in conjunction with Japan) has been the first country to successfully harvest this game-changing energy source.

Oil companies and drilling operations, however, had been wary of its dangers before the Deepwater Horizon event, according to the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory: "(The oil and gas) Industry has concerns about drilling through hydrate zones, which can destabilize supporting foundations for platforms and production wells. The disruption to the ocean floor also could result in surface slumping or faulting, which could endanger work crews and the environment."

The happy ending of our Sci-fi flick: The Gulf oil spill is stopped by drilling a relief well; the millions of gallons that did "spill" are not as damaging as thought; and methane hydrate is safely harnessed and sequestered of carbon worldwide, which phases out oil and natural gas as energy sources. Oil wars largely cease as a result, as methane hydrates are bountiful enough for most coastal nations to secure their own 100+ year energy supply.

Let's see what the focus groups think.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Utilities, energy businesses and clean tech companies have all taken a big hit with the stall of the Climate Bill in the Senate. Don't look for the favored immigration bill to create many jobs or boost innovation in technology or manufacturing.

The Wall Street Journal reported tonight that business leaders from energy, utility and clean tech sectors have protested Congress and the Obama administration's apparent decision to put an immigration bill ahead of a climate-clean energy bill in Congress. Some clean tech related stocks also lost market valuation today with this change of priorities.

The North American clean tech venture-funded market totaled about $3.4 billion in 2009, 62% of the global $5.6 billion market. Such investments are much more at risk if no action is taken on climate and energy in Congress, the likely result of immigration's new status at the top of the Congressional agenda.

The Wall Street Journal quoted the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, "The U.S. faces a critical moment that will determine whether we will be able to unleash billions in energy investments or remain mired in the economic status quo."

So where are the jobs and financial gains from an immigration bill? How about law enforcement? There may be an uptick of enforcement personnel hired, particularly in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. These jobs pay about $34-$39,000 on an annual basis and this agency has 19,000 jobs.

Border patrol jobs pay up to $50,000 and there are about 18,000 of these jobs. Let's say both those numbers of jobs double if immigration reform goes through Congress, with about 75,000 jobs, tops. Throw in an extra 50,000 jobs in other miscellaneous agencies or companies. So that's 125,000.

In contrast, clean tech's lowest earning jobs for those with a high school degree pay from $36,100 a year to $72,900 a year. Executive clean tech jobs can earn well over $200,000, with middle management opportunities for those with college degrees in the $60,000-$180,000 range.

The clean tech industry also is likely to produce far more jobs in sheer numbers. Last year, there were an estimated 770,000 clean tech jobs. These jobs are distributed across the nation (California, Colorado, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas) whereas most immigration-related jobs are concentrated in southern border states (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, California only).

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla recently credited California's 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) with encouraging innovation on the order of creating "ten Googles because of it."

So the move to the head of the queue in DC for immigration reform is obviously not about the economy. But shouldn't just about every major national initiative at least cast a sidelong glance at job-creation potential, especially if we want to continue on the road to recovery?

Then there are critical issues such air pollution, US lack of leadership in math and science, as well as national security implications from foreign energy dependence.

Our climate's abrupt change is, of course, also paramount, endangering health, the economy and the environment, on a global basis. 

Sounds like there are some seriously misplaced priorities inside the Beltway.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.  

Legendary technologist and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla spoke last night about how his funded companies will soon enable cars and coal to be a big part of the climate change solution, instead of the major part of the climate problem.

All that pesky advice for people "trying to be green," even expert energy and technology forecasts, will be made unnecessary or erroneous once Khosla and his Khosla Ventures posse reinvent the world's energy and transportation technologies.

He took potshots at everything from small business "eco-bikinis" to corporate greenwashing, such as Shell''s advertising of "sustainable tar sands." "Environmentalists are spending too much time on things that don't matter," he told the San Francisco Commonwealth Club audience.

Such bravado would be particularly annoying were it coming from someone without as much commitment--in the form of $1.3 billion and many years of effort--as Khosla.

Khosla highlighted four portfolio companies in his presentation, which focused on, "inventing the future, not predicting it....Who would have imagined Twitter two years ago?"

"We need to get rid of fossil oil, which is 70 percent of the climate problem," he said. Khosla's goal as a venture backer is to fund companies that are "90 percent likely to fail," as they have the best chance of leapfrogging current technologies, leading to the demise of monopolies such as Big Oil. He called these disruptive types of companies or ideas, "Black Swans."

He said smaller companies in the $7 to 70 million range that are taking the big potential high-return risks should be the highest priorities for funding, whether from his own funds ($1 billion large VC fund; $300 million "science experiment" fund) or another source. Khosla credited the US Department of Energy's year-old ARPA-E program with "doing a great job" in terms of the funding it has provided for smaller, innovative clean tech companies.

Khosla Venture's current flock of Black Swans include:

• Calera: Trying to turn the climate change pollutant C02 from coal emissions--along with other hazardous emissions including mercury--into an energy and cement feedstock. "It will be able to reduce the carbon footprint twice as much as solar," Khosla predicted.
• Kior: The start-up is aiming at turning wood waste such as wood chips into oil.
• Ecomotors: Attempting to produce non-hybrid engines that are 50-100 percent more efficient, aimed at cutting world oil consumption in half.
  
• Soraa: Engineering circuitry that may use ten times less electricity for lighting.
  

Khosla said his investments all share the goal of being available at "relevant cost, relevant scale and relevant adoption." With some current green technologies, he said, "the average person in India could not even turn on the light."

Regarding the growth of India, Khosla's homeland, he said Indian car ownership is forecast to increase 5000 percent in 30-40 years (what, trusting a forecast?) and that to meet this demand, "biofuels are probably the right solution."

He proposed using the 1 billion acres of abandoned agricultural land worldwide to produce biofuel crops such as miscanthus that will replace or improve that degraded soil, and also suggested using cropland for biofuels in the winter that is not being utilized year-round for food crops.

Overall, Khosla and his funded companies are pushing the envelope with some intriguing new ways of addressing our climate and resource crises.

These companies are based in The Bay Area's Silicon Valley and in Southern California, as well as in more traditional centers of energy (Kior is based in Houston), and transportation (Ecomotors is in the Detroit area). The design innovation and the hundreds or thousands of green jobs they are producing will be critical in transforming our industrial economy.

Khosla suffers from the myopic view, however, that technology alone can triumph without the need for new behaviors, planning, policies and systemic approaches (though he did credit California's Global Climate Change law AB 32 with encouraging innovation on the order of "creating 10 more Googles because of it").

Such thinking about the absolute superiority of "progress"--cars, electricity, chemicals, engineered food--has in the past presented us with so many of the dilemmas that we now face.

Global climate change, along with massive resource and species depletion, demands that we not risk betting everything on the hope of techno-fixes, no matter how enticing these partial solutions may be to someone breathing the rarefied air of California's Silicon Valley.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. 



 

 

Did runaway exurban sprawl--particularly in hypergrowth Sunbelt communities--help create the conditions for gaming in the financial industry? In other words, Goldman Sachs and other financial firms gave us what we wanted as a nation and then bet against us when they saw too many suckers entering the game. 

These issues loom large as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused Goldman Sachs of fraud last week tied to collateralized mortgage debt obligations that contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Goldman made large profits on the housing boom through 2006, then essentially bet on the market to fail so it could profit on the national housing bust, which raged in 2007-2009.

The first domino of that financial panic was the 2006 spike of foreclosures in the most sprawled, car-dependent communities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Bernardino-Riverside, California and Tampa, Florida.

Goldman started betting against the mortgage market in 2007, which thereafter began its well-publicized death spiral, particularly in newly developed suburbs located far from city centers of public transportation and jobs. 

The Post Carbon Institute will soon be publishing my report examining the sustainability impacts of such "easy credit terms" and subsequent speculation. The study also provides planning solutions for greater metro area resilience, which The Natural Resources Defense Council recently highlighted: "NRDC has chosen sustainable communities as a strategic objective for the next five years. Karlenzig's advice seems right on target as we further refine that agenda." 

Here's an exerpt from, "The Death of Sprawl: Designing urban resilience for the 21st century climate and resource crises." (The study profiles a fast-growing exurban city in Southern California, Victorville. Victorville, now wracked by foreclosures, grew in population from 60,000 in 2000 to 107,000 by 2007, largely due to zero downpayment home loans for newly built subdivision homes):

Relatively cheap real estate, flat land, and single-purpose zoning meant big profits for real estate developers and construction companies. Builders could easily and quickly build vast residential neighborhoods without thinking about where residents would work or how they would get there. Relaxed federal regulations on the financial industry meant first-time homebuyers could "own" their home without a downpayment, and sit back while home prices climbed. 

And for a few years, climb they did. When home prices were rising in the region in the early 2000s, Victorville seemed like a sound investment. But by 2006 the price of gasoline began its steady ascent above $2 a gallon and a bubble burst in Victorville and other exurban market housing prices creating the first wave of foreclosures that helped set off a national economic crisis.

A complex and devastating chain of events began with people losing confidence in the seemingly ever-upward growth of exurban economies. Across the country, home foreclosures began to appear overnight in exurban hyper-growth markets, most notably inland Central and Southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix and much of Florida.

The nationwide exurban decline that ensued may prove to be the last gasp of the Sunbelt's decades-long development frenzy. We will be absorbing or trying to erase the unwanted surplus of this end-of the-twentieth century building spree for years, if not decades.

Whether Goldman was guilty or not, we are all paying a high price for unfettered housing growth and financial speculation. The impacts of the financial and housing sector "gone wild" includes a much greater carbon footprint, wasted resources, significant traffic and air quality impacts, not to mention now-blighted communities.

We can learn much from such lessons, but who will take responsibility so that it won't happen again? Local, regional and state government that allowed the crazy-quilt growth surely are to share the blame with national financial oversight agencies.

But to a certain degree, this chapter in our nation's history was a reflection of ourselves.

We sacrificed our domestic jobs so people could instead live off their housing deal or "property flipping" income and home equity loans. We built over our best farmland, forests and watersheds, greedy for tax revenues from endless housing subdivisions and strip malls. And we sacrificed our historic communities and walkable neighborhoods for mass-produced completely car-dependent chimeras.

Make no mistake about it, we are Goldman Sachs.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

 

 

With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games as the setting, Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson, has invited cities including Vancouver to join a public-private consortium against global climate change. The idea is to use Branson's Carbon War Room to rally cities as a vehicle for financing and capacity building, maybe a Keiretsu among Vancouver, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Chicago, London and Portland with whoever else walks down the tarmac from a corporate jet.

Sir Richard lauded Vancouver for reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels, which it accomplished while increasing population 30 percent. According to the Vancouver Sun, Jose Maria Figueres, chairman of the Carbon War Room and former president of Costa Rica, the group is trying to, "create a new blueprint for the creation of jobs, driving economies and greener cities around the world."

The Carbon War Room wants to harness the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change. The war, according to their website, operates on "seven fields of battle": electricity, transport, built environment, industry, land use, emerging economies and carbon management.

Branson also mentioned the depletion of oil in a speech, and the need to switch to alternative fuels. A new report funded by Virgin Airlines predicted shortages of oil in the global market by 2015, a prediction made by a former Shell oil CEO and reported here previously.

It's not clear how the Carbon War Room will work with governments, whether it's cities or other government entities. An example of a project or even a potential project would make the whole thing more real.

Vancouver under Mayor Gregor Robertson vowed in October to become the world's greenest city by reducing its environmental footprint by a factor of four. Thanks to oodles of regional small-scale hydroelectric power and admirable city and transit planning, Vancouver has the lowest per-capita carbon emissions of any North American city.

South of the border Seattle, has pledged carbon neutrality by 2030, but apparently Seattle did not get the invitation, nor did sustainability focused burgs such as New York, Amsterdam or Toronto attend. Also conspicuously absent were Asian city reps. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro did attend a panel with Branson and other mayors earlier in the week.

I couldn't find an explanation about how the Carbon War Room differs from or complements such efforts as the Clinton Climate Initiative's C40 group. The C40 approach is working on all inhabited continents with some of the world's largest cities, in a very similar vein: financing a $5 billion deal in 2007 on energy retrofitting older city buildings of New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Berlin, and Tokyo, for instance.

Most recently C40 cities announced in Copenhagen the creation of a C40 electric vehicle network as part of one of the few COP-15 "wins," the Climate Summit for Mayors. 

Anyone active in the green economy is already seeing many alliances taking shape, a few which have employed savvy marketing and visible leadership. Winning green city public-private partnerships, however, will also draw upon compelling business cases and urban performance analytics while clearly putting forth their value proposition.

Richard Branson versus Bill Clinton, now there's a match that could rival the Olympics. Could a more effective approach besides individual competition be a relay or other team event, perhaps?

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.   

This weekend I volunteered to warn shopkeepers and officials in my San Francisco suburb about dangerous urban flooding potential during the next week.

Every Friday noon in San Anselmo the "flood siren" (not disaster siren, mind) is tested. Within fifteen minutes of the last time it blasted for real in 2005, at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday, three to four feet of water was soon gushing down the main street (see photo above) into homes and businesses. People here are acutely sensitive to heavy rain and the level of the town's creek, since they are still trying to rise up from that cold watery blow four years ago.

Up and down the California coast, metro areas including Los Angeles and San Francisco, are experiencing a series of El Nino-generated Pacific storms. Further inland, Phoenix will also take a big hit. The forecasted 6-10 inches of rain over the next days will almost certainly bring localized flooding and mudslides. Ocean storm swells will reach 20-30 feet on some parts of the coast by Thursday, lashing roads, infrastructure and housing. (Update Jan. 22: the storms this week luckily did not flood San Anselmo, but did cause heavy rains, some flooding and infrastructure damage throughout the state and Arizona, while also reducing the region's drought).

NOAA 5-day precipitation forecast from 1/16/10: small purple circles in California represent areas expected to receive 8+ inches.

How much of this weather and its impacts can be directly attributed to global climate change, I will not venture. The coastal and tidal flooding that is expected in California, however, will be one of the hallmarks of a changing climate. Another effect will be drought---which California and the Southwest have been experiencing for three years--the flip side of climate change's growing precipitation impacts. Coastal and desert urban areas in particular need to steel themselves for such a schizophrenic future.

Leaving things up to "officials" to figure out disaster plans is not recommended; true community resilience will require research, networking and knowledge sharing within and outside one's normal sphere. In my case, I think I was able to plug a few vital holes that may have been missed.

Most store owners in San Anselmo (pop. 12,000) that I spoke with were savvy about imminent flood danger. Based on their experience with the New Year's Eve flood of 2005, a few shopkeepers had excellent information and resources: they referred me to online creek-level readings ("anything over ten feet and I'm out of here," one man said), and email alerts that can be sent to email or phones from Nixle.com, a national information mass customization service that localizes updates on disasters, road closures and crime.

Nixle, for instance, has newly updated postings from the San Anselmo Police Department about potential hazards for flooding and safeguards. There's even a local AM radio (1610) station dedicated to disaster updates for the area.

But none of that seemed to be enough to really prepare people. One friend, a council member from the neighboring town that was also flooded in 2005, did not know about the severity of the forecast weather when I chanced to run into him at a musical performance over the weekend. He had me send him the forecast links from NOAA showing him exactly how much precip is expected to fall. He emailed back, "We're trying to get our flood plain residents to batten down the hatches. This should help."

Other small business owners that I spoke to were new to town, including immigrants. Unlike long-time business owners who told me they were warned by the police (or that had vivid mud-damaged inventory and moldy wallboard memories), the new shopkeepers knew almost nothing about flooding dangers or where to get the free sandbags.

Those who were around in December 30, 2005, have learned that floodgates (above, white board) for each business offers the best protection. In actuality, these are just rails installed on each side of entrance door where a piece of plywood can be inserted as a barrier against the torrents of water can come crashing against and under the front shop door (usually glass). Gates work even better than sandbags, but sandbags will prevent the glass doors from being smashed open.

The town and surrounding communities, even the federal government, tried to take some larger-scale policy actions after the 2005 flood, which caused almost $100 million in property damages county-wide. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) developed a new local flood risk map based on the 2005 event, and insurers offered policies that residents within the areas were urged to purchase. An extensive engineering study of the region's watershed is being made, a $125-per-property flood fee narrowly passed a controversial vote, while creek debris clean-ups have become popular all-age volunteer events each fall before the winter rainy season arrives.

Some houses have been rebuilt and raised above the flood-prone region along San Anselmo/Corte Madera Creek. This normally placid creek empties seven miles later into San Francisco Bay. High bay tides back the creek up so that it can't empty into the bay quickly.

San Anselmo/ Corte Madera Creek Watershed: San Anselmo is in center, San Francisco Bay, on right

Unfortunately, it doesn't take much time for San Anselmo/Corte Madera Creek (watershed in brown above) to back up from San Francisco Bay and rise in the Marin communities lining its flood plain, since it is surrounded by steep canyons that channel rainfall off nearby hills. Asphalt parking lots, impermeable pavement and poorly planned development have also increased the speed by which rainwater runs off into the creek. For instance, when I checked creek levels online Sunday the 17th, the creek was 2.9 feet, but after heavy rains Sunday night and Monday morning the creek was already over 6 feet. Flood stage is 11 feet (update 1/20/10: after heavy rain, the creek level went from 4 feet to 10 feet in matter of five hours, before receeding slightly) .

The irony of California's winter storms is that they bring needed water to reservoirs and mountain snowpack, promising to reduce or temporarily end the region's ongoing drought, which has been costing the agriculture industry and some cities hundreds of millions in lost revenue and in water purchases. Marin County last year was the first in the Bay Area to approve desalination from San Francisco Bay water, despite energy and marine environmental impacts along with a hefty $100 million-plus price tag.

Not surprisingly, the state's residents have a love-hate relationship with their winter weather. To make the affair even more volatile, climate change may be swinging the status from drought to flood in a matter of a few weeks.

Indeed, California's coastal metros (along with the Gulf Coast, including Florida and New Orleans) may be the first litmus test for how to adapt to the unpredictable excesses and scarcities of a changing climate.

 Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.