Results tagged “California” from Green Flow

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.

The top ten sustainability stories of the past decade was my last post. What trends are likely the next ten years? One thing for sure, 2010 through 2019 will be one day be looked at as 1.) the turning point for addressing climate change by using effective urban management strategies, or it will be remembered as 2.) the time when we collectively fumbled the Big Blue Ball.

 

 

 

1.      Bikes Culture 2.0

Time period: 2010-2019

 

Around the world, bicycles are becoming a potent talisman of our urban post-carbon future. The city of Copenhagen is making noise to replace the Little Mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen fame with something two-wheeled. Copenhagen residents use bikes for 37 percent of all their transit. But bikes in Europe represent more than utility; riding a bicycle with the Velib' bikeshare program in Paris now easily competes (42 million registered users) with taking a spring walk along the Seine. Bikesharing abounds in dozens of European cities as well as in Rio de Janeiro and Santiago, Chile. Look for North American burgs to continue their proliferation of bicycles-as-transit use and bike lane expansion (NYC bicycle use is up 61% in two years). Bikesharing on a large scale should follow new programs in Montreal, Washington DC, and Minneapolis. Note to China: time to reclaim your status as the world's "bicycle kingdom." 

Indoor bicycle parking will be common in commercial garages and offices even in businesses like cafes, bars (Gastalt Haus in Fairfax, California, is pictured above), stores and restaurants. On public transportation bicycles will be allowed access at any time. In short, bicycles and their riders will become legit, which will influence fashion, the economies and the design of cities in particular. As musician-turned-bike-rack designer David Byrne observed in his surprise 2009 bestseller Bicycle Diaries, US metro areas in particular might have to be re-engineered completely in some cases to accommodate this massive social transformation: 

I try to explore some of these towns--Dallas, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta--by bike and it's frustrating. The various parts of town are often "connected"--if one can call it that--mainly by freeways, massive awe-inspiring concrete ribbons that usually kill the neighborhoods they pass through, and often the ones they are supposed to connect as well.

 

2.      Mexico City, Climate Change, and the Future of Cities

Time Period: November-December 2010

 

Because "Nopenhagen" was a semi bust, the Mexico City United Nations Climate Change conference is taking on much bigger proportions than initially envisioned. The UN COP15 Copenhagen conference resulted in no binding treaty status among any of the 128 nations that attended for them to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. This year's late fall gathering in Mexico City is likely to set national binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions. If enacted, these targets will set the stage the coming entire decade's greenhouse gas reduction strategies, including sub-national efforts at the regional and city level. After disappointment in Copenhagen, UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon lost no time in preparing for Mexico City, calling on world leaders to sign a legally binding carbon-emission reduction treaty and to contribute to a multi-national fund for developing nations that will be opened this month. Let's hope such a fund adequately addresses sustainable urban development in Asian cities, whose currently unregulated hyper-growth is expected to contribute more than half the world's greenhouse gas increases between now and 2027.

 

3.      The Rise of Cellulosic Biofuels

Time Period 2014-2019

 

Creating conventional biofuels from corn, soybeans and palm oil as an alternative to petroleum-based gasoline hit numerous roadblocks in the past decade. Carbon-sequestering rainforests in Indonesia continue to be burned down for palm oil plantations; this unforeseen consequence of biofuel demand caused the European Union to back off on large orders of palm oil. Another big unintended consequence emerged when crude oil prices rose to record levels in 2007-2008. Biofuels, including corn-based ethanol created competition for agricultural land, resulting in an increase in the cost of food staples. Global corn prices, which biofuels caused to increase an estimated 15% to 27% in 2007 alone, were especially impacted.

 

Cellulosic biofuels, in contrast, offer the promise by the middle of the decade of creating a viable energy source (one of many that will be needed) from waste products, such as wood waste, grasses, corn stalks, and other non-food products. The trick will be to balance land use with energy production http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0602-ucsc_rogers_biofuels.html so that unintended consequences, particularly burning rainforests and urban food price riots (Mexico City in 2007 pictured above) will be a thing of the past. Backed by research funding from the Obama Administration's US Department of Energy (DOE), companies such as Mascoma Corporation and Amyris Biotechnologies (with former Amyris founder Jay Keasling now at the helm of the DOE Joint Biosciences Energy Institute) are some of the current leaders in the quest for a non-food biofuel.

 

4.      The marriage of ICT and Green Cities

Time Period: 2013-2019

Called "the great digital underbelly" of new and retrofitted sustainable cities by Gordon Feller of Urban Age, green ICT (information and communications technologies) holds promise for increasing the energy and resource efficiency of most aspects of urban development. If these technologies can offset their operating and production resource impacts (estimated to use 2-3 percent of total industry energy used, but forecast to double by 2022), the world could benefit from initial increased efficiencies in the 15-25 percent range (pdf). A crowded field that includes IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Siemens and others is positioning to implement new ICT for sustainability in cities, demonstrating applications at the pilot project level. Cities with pilot or operating projects in green ICT include Amsterdam, San Francisco, Masdar City (United Arab Emirates), Seoul, London, Singapore, Beijing, New Delhi, Mumbai, Stockholm and Oslo. The following are Green Smart City applications and examples of companies involved:

• traffic congestion monitoring and pricing systems: IBM, Capita Group
• water applications (leakage detection, purification): IBM, Siemens
• building applications (sense-and-respond technologies to monitor temperature, light, humidity and occupancy): Johnson Controls, Siemens, IBM
• intelligent public transportation and logistics: PwC, Samsung, Cisco
• public shared offices with telepresence (pictured above): Cisco, Hewlett-Packard
• home and office smart appliances that can tie in with smart grid energy applications: General Electric, AT&T, Whirlpool
• smart grids: General Electric, Schneider Electric, SAP, Oracle, ABB
• data centers for cities: Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco
• carbon inventories and carbon accounting: Microsoft, Oracle

     

 

5.      Implementation of Carbon Taxes

2010-2019

 

Exxon Mobil surprised many in early 2009 when it called for a carbon tax as a way to address global climate change. Whether the former denier of global climate change got religion remains to be seen. Carbon taxes have been proposed for oil, natural gas and coal by many as a way to adjust former so-called market "externalities," or impacts beyond classically defined air pollution, which now includes greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A handful of nations have some form of carbon tax, mostly in Scandinavia. On the sub-national level, British Columbia and the San Francisco Bay Area recently proposed some form of the tax. Costs for carbon taxes can be passed on to consumers directly, or they could be levied on industry, which would likely cause manufacturing and operating costs to be wholly or partially passed onto consumers.

 

Currently, the costs of producing and using fossil fuels do not take into account the vast damage these activities do to the earth's climate, which is gaining atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at a rapid rate, endangering the stability of natural ecosystems, people's health, and the economy.

 

6.      The First Big Urban Climate Change Adaptation: Drought

2010-1019

 

A major effort at climate change adaptation is underway in California as well as other urban areas that are experiencing or are likely to feel the early effects from climate change. Prolonged droughts consistent with the impacts of climate change are being seen in Beijing, Southwestern North America (Mexico City/ LA, etc.) and urban areas in Southeast Australia.

 

As Maude Barlow (above) writes in her 2008 book Blue Covenant, cities are becoming hotspots not only for suffering from the effects of water shortages, but in many cases urbanization may be actually creating or exacerbating the severity of drought:

 

Massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff -- vegetation and grass -- so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.

 

Adaptation strategies will focus on preparing government, business and citizens for extreme heat events, wildfires (including urban/suburban wildfires), disease, and large-scale migration of populations from impacted areas. Some of the efforts will involve education and community outreach, such as Chicago's efforts to alert the elderly and handicapped to imminent heat waves, or having people check on others that may be vulnerable when conditions warrant. Other measures will require huge chunks of investments in urban  public and private infrastructure to prevent coastal flooding and to store dwindling seasonal water supplies, while health care professionals are likely to be first responders to new climate change-boosted disease outbreaks, such as dengue fever. The military is also likely to be added to the mix of climate change adaptation actors.

 

 

7.      End of Cheap Oil/ Onset of Fossil Fuel Shortages

2012-2019

 

Besides fresh water, oil is the most threatened increasingly imported resource in developed economies. Energy shortages or supply disruptions are expected to continue to develop because of political acts, terrorism, warfare and natural disasters. The issue is not that the reserves are "running out," but that getting at the remaining oil in a cost-effective manner is becoming increasingly more difficult, as has been outlined in multiple books by author Richard Heinberg (The Party's Over, Peak Everything) and others. As former Shell Oil CEO Jeroen van der Veer said in a 2008 email to employees, "Shell estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand." Add the coming impacts of global climate change regulations to the scarce oil equation (see Trends numbers 2 and 5 in this post), and oil will continue to be an unpredictable flashpoint for the world economy. In 2007-2008, rapidly rising oil prices helped trigger a deep world recession; during the next decade oil may set off a chain of economic and civil events that could be far more severe.

 

With market uncertainty for oil prices and oil supplies, this new decade will witness the sunset of exurban-style automotive dependant sprawl in the United States and in many overseas copycat developments, particularly Asia. The overbuilt market for large, totally car-dependent single family homes in outer suburbia is expected by even some developers to not be viable for almost a decade, even if oil prices and supply stay relatively stable. A prolonged recurrence of oil prices above $100-150 a barrel will drive a stake through the heart of the exurban car-only model of real estate speculation, and will hit many other elements (food, imported goods, oil-based products) of the Western economy.

 

8.      Focus on Urban Agriculture and Foodsheds

Time Period: 2012-2019

As fuel prices rise and unexpected energy shortages occur, food prices will rise rapidly, especially for food that must be transported long distances via airplanes, stored and processed. The alternative is greater local and regional food production in and around cities. Existing cities in Latin America (Havana, Cuba--pictured above--and Quito, Ecuador), Africa (Dar Es Salam, Tanzania; Kampala, Uganda) and Asia (Seoul, South Korea), have produced significant quantities of produce or aquaculture within their city limits. Cities in North America that have maintained or are building or rebuilding strong regional food networks include Seattle, Honolulu, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some newly planned cities are being engineered to produce significant amounts of food that can also be used as a potential energy source or rich compost nutrient. Examples include Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) and a supposedly scalable community plan called NewVista that is expected to be prototyped in the United States and in Asia: both are innovating the production of food from algae and other low-energy input nutrient sources.

 

9.      Resiliency planning: cities, towns, homes

Time Period: 2010-2019

 

Resiliency is about making a system or one's self stronger and more able to survive adversity. As the previous items portend, there will no shortage of adversity during the coming decade from climate change and energy supply instability. One of the major social phenomena related to resiliency has been the emergence of the Transition Town movement, which has grown from a few villages in the United Kingdom to Barcelona, Spain, Boulder, Colorado, and Sydney, Australia. The founder of the phenomena, Rob Hopkins, also a Post Carbon Institute Fellow, has used his transition model of Totnes, United Kingdom, to devise a global organizational playbook. The purpose of transition thinking is to prepare people for potential shortages in global energy supplies and food caused by peaking oil and climate change. In contrast to earlier "off-the-grid" movements of the 1970s, Transition Towns can be located in urban neighborhoods as well as in the distant boonies, and they focus on community-scaled solutions in transportation, health, economics and people's livelihoods and personal skills. Tactics of local groups vary widely, with events ranging from the familiar--clothing swaps and art festivals to the seemingly more obscure--"unleashings,"--to policy-laden activities, such as launching a long-term (15-20 years) "Energy Descent Action Plan." The emphasis is on understanding and using collective community resources, including knowledge and skills, that people have in their own sphere of influence, versus waiting for top-down government decrees.

 

10.  Sustainability Movie/ Novel /Art/ Song

       Time Period 2010-2019

 

 

There has yet to be a significant work of popular art that I am aware of that captures the modern systemic aspirations of sustainability. In terms of modern life, some works have focused on environmental destruction, (Marvin Gaye's song "Mercy Mercy Me"), the terror of abrupt climate change (the unsuccessful 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow), the international political subterfuge behind oil (2005's Syriana with George Clooney, one of my personal favorite films), and the destruction of natural systems (Dr. Seuss's 1971 book The Lorax) or cultural/species depletion (James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar), but no novel, song, painting or movie has come close to depicting a fictional world of what holistic sustainability solutions might look like, even feel like. Any suggestions of existing or planned works that would fit the bill?

Odds are that breakthrough art successfully depicting sustainability will feature or draw upon urban culture in some fashion. After all, cities have gone from being perceived as the opposite of what the "environmental movement" has been trying to save, to the epicenter of this new revolution that is launching in a city or neighborhood near you.

 

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.

 

 

It's the end of the decade 2000-2009, and there has been progress as well as potential disaster for sustainability. In chronological order, I've chosen these ten stories to show a range of relevant global and national issues and events on climate, business, government, media, design, technology, language and demographics. Some of the entries are pegged to an exact date, while others cover a time period.

The first entry, climate change is impacting all aspects of sustainability thought, planning and action.

1.       Terror of the Decade: Global Climate Change Confirmed by...Climate, IPCC, Heads of State

Time Period: 2000-2009

 

The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that we humans are changing the earth's climate in ways in which millions are beginning to regret. Ten of the hottest years on record globally have been recorded in the ten years since 1997. Some of the impacts: rising overall sea levels from melting polar ice are already damaging low-lying areas in Bangladesh, India, Egypt and China, and threatening the very existence of island nations. More intense hurricanes (Katrina killed more than 1,300 in 2006 and helped shut down the oil and gas refining sector in the Gulf Coast); droughts, heat (the Europe heat event of 2003 caused more than 35,000 deaths) and wildfires (Australia's Melbourne-area deadly firestorm of 2009 exploded during one of the hottest periods ever recorded Down under, dramatizing the ravishes of an ongoing 8-year drought).

So what if these are chance events, unrelated to man's impact on the globe's climate? That's a fair question and an outside possibility, but odds are that these extreme events were at least partially due to the rising global concentration of CO2, which is now at about 390 parts per million (ppm), up from 315 ppm in the late 1950s. The real threat is that things will get much worse (heat waves, droughts, floods, depletion of glaciers and water supplies, agriculture and fisheries disruption) if our global greenhouse gases continue to increase. Human-based greenhouse gas emissions increased 70% between 1970 and 2004, according to the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, also known as the IPCC). The watershed IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 developed by 2,500 of the world's leading climate scientists, put the likelihood at more than 90 percent that the global temperature increase of .74 Celsius between 1906 and 2005 has been caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. How often have 2,500 scientists agreed on anything? The landmark 2007 "Stern Review on the Economic of Climate Change," by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, estimates that global climate change could negatively impact the world economy annually at 5-20 percent Gross Domestic Product, while Stern estimated that the annual costs of reducing the risks of global climate change are estimated to be about 1 percent of world GDP.

Unfortunately, the UN COP-15 conference in Copenhagen ended with a whimper, producing only a non-binding agreement to limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrialized temperature levels. Follow-up actions, including a potential binding treaty, will set the agenda for the next decade and beyond.  

2.       Word: Sustainability

Time Period: 2000-2009

 

The use of the term "sustainability" itself has been a major surprise this past decade. In 2000, only a few policy wonks and academics used the word, traditionally defined as "meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs." Now the public (maybe even more than the media) is gleaning that "sustainability" differs considerably from "environmentalism" as it is based on planning for an uncertain future based on economics, culture, resources and technology.

As the current decade closes many are searching for a term that could replace "sustainability," claimed to be almost meaningless now because it has been hijacked by greenwashing corporate marketing campaigns (I bet some such ads pop up next to this post somewhere in future digital ether!). "Resilience" is currently gaining  traction, but we'll perhaps need another decade to see if the "s-word" gets dethroned.

3.       Standards: LEED Green Buildings

Date: March 2000

 

The US Green Building Council formally released its Leadership in Energy and Environment Design building standards (LEED) full Green Building Rating system 2.0 in March 2000. The impact on the nation's building and construction industry over the next ten years has been wildly popular and transformational on numerous levels. The number of LEED-certified or registered buildings increased from 10,000 in 2007 to 20,000 by the beginning of 2009. Providing a system-based measurable standard of what "green" means is useful for policy, benchmarking and new market development. The LEED ratings, for instance,  were integral to my ability to develop an overall sustainability benchmarking of US cities starting in 2005 (which can found in my book How Green is Your City?). Critics have assailed LEED for providing standards in certification that do not reflect actual performance in energy efficiency. Nevertheless, LEED standards, are now being positioned for international markets (in competition with Europe's BREE-AM and China's emerging Three Star standard), and they continue to be a powerful teaching tool, not to mention an industry onto themselves. Today's savvy urban planner, construction manager or architect must possess the LEED-AP, "Accredited Professional" tagline on their business card. In addition to new commercial building construction, LEED is now being applied to homes, existing buildings, schools, neighborhoods and may even extend to cities, under the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard that was launched in 2009.

The next challenges for green building standards will be rating life-cycle impacts (carbon, water, scarce resources) of construction processes and material, while integrating measures of building performance--how much buildings actually save energy or water once they are occupied.

4.       Product: The Toyota Prius

Date: July 2000

Back in the 1990s, Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanbe helped birth the "G-21," later known as the Prius, when he decided that middle-class consumers wanted a car that used new motor innovations to be fuel-efficient. The Prius hybrid gas-electric car was introduced in the United States in July 2000. It quickly became a Hollywood status symbol after Leonardo DiCaprio bought one in 2001, and he and other stars such as Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart (remember her?) began showing up at the 2003 Oscar ceremonies not in chauffeured limos, but behind the wheel or driven in their own Priuses. By the decade's peak sales year of 2007, the Toyota Prius had sold 180,000 units in the United States. These cars get 40-50 miles per gallon but perhaps even more importantly provide a meter showing real-time and historic fuel efficiency; self-monitoring feedback is one of the greatest ways of changing behavior to reduce energy use.

Plug-in electric models of the Prius will begin to be released on  test basis in 2010, in a challenge to the introduction of GM's Chevy Volt. Plug-ins may create fuel efficiencies that can truly reduce carbon emissions and oil dependency, getting from 51 to 100+ miles per gallon. One problem with electric cars or plug-in hybrid electrics is that their true sustainability impact depends on exactly how the electricity they use is produced at the power plant: renewables or dirty coal? In parts of the United States that continue to burn large amounts of coal to generate electricity (Southeast, lower Midwest and Plains states), driving an electric car does little or nothing to reduce a person's overall carbon footprint when compared to gas-burning cars. When you consider cars and health, social, land use and material life-cycle impacts, driving less is better for people's fitness, the environment and the planet.

5.       Corporate Story. Wal-Mart Embarks on a "Green" Path

Time Period: 2004-2005

 

I must admit, I was a skeptic when I first heard of Wal-Mart's plan to go green in 2004 from Jib Ellison, founder of Blue Skye Consulting, one of the major collaborative forces behind Wal-Mart's transformation. Wal-Mart, at that point the largest company in the world (it's now number 3), had been known for its ruthless management style, questionable labor practices, and for helping put locally owned stores in towns across the country out of business. Ellison had met with Wal-Mart's then-CEO Lee Scott at the behest of Conservation International's CEO Peter Seligman, and Scott decided upon a serious campaign to make the company more resource and energy efficient. Since that meeting, the company has been streamlining its transportation fleet, buildings and some products to be less environmentally destructive. The company is now targeting its supply chain, which is primarily in China, in a loosely defined, greening protocol.

The impact of Wal-Mart going green helped awaken the nation's business leaders to the potential of making their own operations and supply chains energy and resource efficient, (just sounds like good business to me). Wal-Mart announced earlier in 2009 that it would require manufacturers to calculate and disclose the full environmental costs of ingredients and processes on product labels sometime in the next five years. Suppliers, formerly isolated or little regulated, are now assessing their operations in a way they never would have without the threat of greater scrutiny from their biggest customer.

6.       Regulations: California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32)

Time Period: 2005-2006

 

When California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made the declaration in June 2005 that, "I say the debate is over (on climate change),"  many were still heatedly arguing that climate change needed more studies before action was taken. The Governor and the California Legislature pressed ahead in 2006 to sign the nation's first major climate change mitigation legislation, known as AB 32 . Now AB 32 will soon be implemented across industries and even in local communities through follow-up legislation such as the regulation known as SB 375, the nation's first statewide regulatory attempt to limit suburban and exurban sprawl. Meanwhile, opponents of AB 32, are gearing up for 2010 gubernatorial elections, claiming AB 32 will cost the state $143 billion in auction taxes alone. Whatever happens next, California is being looked on by the Obama Administration and world leaders as the pace setter in climate change mitigation with its aggressive automotive fuel standards, green building standards and AB 32's goal of reducing greenhouse gases 80% over 1990 levels by 2050.

7.       Film: An Inconvenient Truth

Date: May, 2006

Released in Summer 2006 at the Sundance Film Festival, An Inconvenient Truth made the debate on climate change public. The documentary, which was actually just a series of lectures and slideshows that former Vice President Al Gore was giving around the world, hit a nerve. Despite "action scenes" that consisted of Gore either 1.) riding up elevators or 2.) riding down escalators, the film created a major public buzz and introduced the subject of climate change to popular culture. An Inconvenient Truth received an Academy Award in 2007 for Best Documentary and went on to set records for box office revenues in its category. An Inconvenient Truth offered very few solutions, suggesting compact fluorescent bulbs and little more. This critical learning opportunity was finally addressed when Gore released a follow-up book in 2009, A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

8.       Book: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Date: May, 2006

 

Michael Pollan's 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma made clear the benefits of sustainable agriculture and food production, and even foraging or killing your own food: it's healthier for people, animals, farmers, the land and nature. The ongoing popularity of this book has helped create a demand for sustainably raised food that has out-paced supply. The Omnivore's Dilemma patiently outlined what is wrong with industrial agriculture and livestock production, where highly subsidized ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup have become a surplus commodity to be forced upon products or animals in order to reduce the price of ingredients, without regard to health (diabetes, reduced nutrition). I had the good fortune of meeting Angelo Garro, the Italian forager, now based in Northern California who was profiled in the last half of the book. As we traded notes on wild huckleberry picking one afternoon at a friend's orchard party, he was pulling off some strips of meat from a boiled carcass. When the sun went down most were unknowingly eating a jack rabbit that Angelo had shot in the orchard a few hours before--it had made its way into a delicious bolognese pasta sauce.

9.       Design: Masdar City, First Planned Net-Zero Carbon City

Time Period: 2006-2017

 

Masdar will be a 50,000-person city based on applied sustainability research and technology that is being developed in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. While other cities have been planned to be net-zero carbon (Dongtan, China, which is not being developed because of local corruption and other issues), Masdar has been one of the few net-zeros that appear to be proceeding as planned. With financial partners Credit Suisse, Siemens and General Electric, Masdar is also backed by the city-state of Abu Dhabi, as well as technology partners from the UK and Spain. The complex is being used for cutting-edge research in: renewable energy (including dozens of active and passive solar and wind technologies), water conservation technologies that can distill drinking water from ambient moisture both indoors (sweat) and outdoors (dew), as well as local urban food production schemes. In fall 2009, the Masdar Institute of Technology opened, in conjunction with MIT, where students get degrees in engineering,  material sciences, IT, water and the environment, all with a relationship to the real world demonstration projects taking root in the city that in Arabic means "the source."

10.   Future Trend: Mega-growth of Unregulated Asian Cities + Mega Drought

Time Period: 2009-2030

Between now and 2027 Asian Cities will account for more than half of the world's greenhouse gas increases, according to a study by the Asian Development Bank. From Mumbai to Beijing, cities will add a projected 1.8 billion people over the next two decades; they are almost entirely unregulated in their growth, carbon management and environmental impacts, despite some new siloed attempts to manage their industries, power production and energy efficiency. The daunting challenge is that no regulatory structure exists to monitor this collection of Asian mega-cities, despite the fact that many of these cities has or will have populations of 10-20 million individuals. This megagrowth began around the beginning of the 00's, when Asian urban population was at 1.4 billion. Asia is projected to have about 3 billion urbanites by 2030.

Water is the first epic Asian city resource crisis. The Tibetan Plateau, source of most of the region's major sources of fresh water (including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Ganges, Irrawaddy and the Indus rivers) has been experiencing a seven percent loss of glaciers on an annual basis, according to a report released last week (pdf) at the Copenhagen climate conference. 

Beijing has been hit especially hard by a ten-year drought (pdf): the city of 17 million has enough water for only 14 million. Beijing has been forced to procure water from surrounding agricultural regions and rapidly diminishing groundwater, while some cities in India have completely run out of water during periods of drought over the past decade.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. 

 

Los Angeles Times photo

Sprawl is dead: That's the takeaway of a new report analyzing how toxic exurban real estate started the US economy on its downward spiral. Metro regions and developers are picking up the pieces and are vowing, "never again."

The unchecked trend of US exurbanization was one of the major factors setting off the beginning of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to a new research paper published by the Post Carbon Institute investigating the relationship of sprawled, completely car-dependent communities to real estate risk as well as to climate change and ecosystems.

Besides the inherent threats to climate change and dwindling resources, exurban development during the past decades put the United States in a vulnerable economic position when steadily rising gas prices in 2004-2005 began their march toward $4-5 a gallon in mid 2008. 

The research paper argues that many suburbs and most exurbs, which constitute the vast majority of urbanized areas in the United States, have been building up an infrastructure of complete auto dependence, which threatens the climate through multiple forms of inefficient energy, food and resource use.

Despite the emerging "green" urbanism trend, which can be found in a number of North American cities, unplanned exurban growth must be addressed and managed more efficiently, or the economy will face further severe national real estate shocks as oil prices rise again.

California's Senate Bill 375 is the first statewide anti-sprawl measure, and similar regulation and related regional planning processes will need to occur on a national basis to systemically reduce the combined risks of exurban development and financial speculation. 

The following is an excerpt from my complete paper, a publication pre-release of the "Roadmap for the Transition" series.

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In April 2009--just when people thought things couldn't get worse in San Bernardino County, California--bulldozers demolished four perfectly good new houses and a dozen others still under construction in Victorville, 100 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

The structures' granite countertops and Jacuzzis were removed first. Then the walls came down and the remains were unceremoniously scrapped. A woman named Candy Sweet came by the site looking for wood and bartered a six-pack of cold Coronas for some of the splintered two-by-fours. For a boomtown in one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, things were suddenly looking pretty bleak...

The recent decline of Victorville and other "boomburbs" may well prove to be the last gasp of the United States' decades-long suburban/exurban 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. In the meantime, exurban communities in general--and Victorville in particular--will face a daunting set of short term and long term challenges as the 21^st century shapes up to be very different than the world they were built for...

Within the United States, existing metropolitan areas can be retrofitted to take advantage of breakthroughs in sustainability and efficiency technologies, as well as new financial incentives.

The American Recovery and Re-investment Act of 2009 has provided some funding for the energy-efficient redesign of our buildings and our means of transportation. But much more ambitious projects need to be undertaken to retrofit our communities not only for energy efficiency, but to build their overall resilience.

Fortunately, a foundation for this work already exists. Barely ten years ago, "green buildings," downtown streetcars, urban farms, car-sharing companies, high-quality bicycle infrastructure and other physical features now associated with urban sustainability were found only in a handful of North American cities. Today, they are popping up everywhere.

Big cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are actively trying to "out-green" each other, while smaller cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Alexandria, Virginia are rolling out their own localized sustainability solutions.

Some communities have taken early steps toward protecting their surrounding agricultural lands, or "foodsheds," from well-established regional plans and policies in Portland, Oregon to San Francisco's 2009 comprehensive local food policy. Cities are starting to realize that they can't just "grow smarter"--they have to fundamentally remake themselves to be resilient for the unprecedented economic, social, and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Some metro areas rethinking themselves for resilience have simultaneously become home to "clean tech" centers with significantly high job growth rates. Clean tech clusters are emerging in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and Austin, as well as in some less-expected locations; in Toledo, Ohio, for instance, more than 4% of all jobs are now in research, development and manufacturing for solar energy. Other key areas of future job growth are in green building and landscaping, water conservation technologies, low-carbon materials design and advanced transportation...

If the "Great Recession" of 2008-2009 taught us anything, it was that allowing the unrestrained sprawl of energy-inefficient communities and infrastructure is not a sustainable economic development strategy; rather, it is a recipe for continued disaster on every level.

Twentieth century-style sprawl has destroyed valuable farmland, sensitive wildlife habitat, and irreplaceable natural water supply systems at great environmental, economic, and social cost. We can no longer manage and develop our communities with no regard for the natural resources and ecological systems that provide our most basic needs.

What lessons emerge from metropolitan areas that have begun to plan for the future by building their resilience with economic, energy, and environmental uncertainty in mind?

• Build and re-build denser and smarter. Suburban and urban population densities need to increase so that energy-efficient transportation choices like public transit, bicycling and walking can flourish. Multi-modal mobility cannot succeed at the densities found in most American suburban and urban communities today. Increasing density doesn't have to mean building massive high-rises: adding just a few more stories on existing or new mixed-use buildings can double population density--and well-designed, increased density can also improve community quality of life and economic vitality. Resource-efficient building technologies, as certified by the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Environment and Energy (LEED) or the US EPA's Energy Star rating, can be retrofitted for existing building stock and mandated for all new construction.
• Focus on food. Gardens (whether in backyards, community parks, or in and on top of buildings) may supplement people's diets with fresh local produce--but urban areas need to think big and plan systemically for significantly increased food production. In many Asian cities and towns--even big cities like Seoul, South Korea, the size of New York--there are thriving small farms interspersed within metro areas. Growing and processing more food for local consumption bolsters regional food security and provides jobs while reducing the energy, packaging and storage needed to transport food to metro regions.
• Focus on water. Our freshwater supply is one of our the most vulnerable resources in the United States. Water vulnerability is no longer just a problem for Southwestern desert cities--communities in places like Texas, Georgia and even New Jersey have recently had to contend with water shortages. As precipitation patterns become less reliable and underground aquifers and mountain snowpack dry up, more and more communities will need to significantly reduce water demand through conservation, restrictions and "tiered pricing."
• Think in terms of systems. If we think of our urban areas as living, breathing entities--each with a set of basic and more specialized requirements--we can better understand how to transform our communities from random configurations into dynamic, high-performance systems of resilience. The "metabolism" of urban systems depends largely on how energy, water, food, materials, labor and knowledge are used (and reused, where possible), or metabolized. From these ingredients and processes come products, services, and--if the system is efficient--minimal waste and pollution...

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, a consultancy based in San Anselmo, California with international projects on urban strategy and metrics. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and author of How Green is Your City?: The SustainLane US City Rankings.

Vancouver, Canada's new mayor Gregor Robinson is making good on his campaign promise to make Vancouver "The Greenest City on the Planet." 

Forget trying to be Canada's greenest city as Toronto has aspired to be, or North America's greenest city as Portland, San Francisco and Chicago have vied for. If it succeeds beyond its plans, the Vancouver region will have the makings of the world's first modern Eco City-State.

Mayor Robertson announced ambitious plans Tuesday at this week's Resilient Cities conference.

Whatever the outcome, Vancouver will be transformed by the process in reputation and mindshare. This plan should provide the city of 615,000 with an opening to make significant sustainability improvements to its economic competitiveness, infrastructure and use of resources.

With the 2010 Winter Olympics coming to town next February, Vancouver will be able to use an international media platform that key sponsors such as Coca Cola and General Motors are targeting for launches of new "sustainability" products and messaging. Besides the release of GM's forthcoming Chevy Volt, I've been told that Coca Cola is trying to completely reposition its brand in the face of climate change, bottled water rebellion and anti-soda obesity regulations.

As a result of such marketing, and with Olympic Village plans for operations under the Global Reporting Initiative on sustainability, the 2010 games might make history as the first international event associated with sustainability.

Corn syrupy water and automobiles aside, Vancouver is putting forward some serious plans and goals in its quest. Yesterday, I chatted with Melina Scholefield, Vancouver's Sustainability Group manager, and learned that the city as part of its Greenest City Plan will:

• Set up a low-carbon economic development zone to attract private equity investment in the green economy, with the goal of creating 20,000 new jobs.
  
• Try to increase its walkability, bikability and public transit ridership to more than 50 percent. The city currently has a rate of about 20 percent combined walking and cycling for commuting, one of the highest such rates in North America. Boston, for example, has a combined walking/cycling commute rate of 16 percent, the highest in the US.
  
• Develop its own green building standards, which are stricter and more thorough than existing standards such the US Green Building Council's LEED rating system or the US EPA's Energy Star rating system. The goal is to have all construction in Vancouver be carbon neutral by 2020.
• Reduce the amount of solid waste that goes to landfills or is incinerated by 40 percent.
• Provide all city residents with easy access to green space, so that by 2020 everyone would be within a five-minute walk of a park, beach or greenway.
• Reduce the per capita consumption of water by 33 percent.
  
• Reduce the carbon footprint of food production by 33 percent.
• The big one: reduce the ecological footprint of Vancouver by 33 percent. This means reducing the amount of arable land needed to support each citizen from 7 hectares to 5.7 hectares by 2020.
  

Eventually Vancouver wants to reduce its "four planet" Ecological Footprint down to "one planet." (Tuesday night, I gave a talk on urban resilience at the conference with the co-founder of the Ecological Footprint, William Rees, a professor at the University of British Columbia: our Post Carbon Institute-sponsored talk will be broadcast on 15 radio stations and available here on an MP3 at the EcoShock radio site.)

Vancouver's performance-based goals are impressive in that they are tangible and measureable. Having measured the sustainability performance, projects and capabilities of the largest 50 US cities in my book, How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings, I am looking forward to seeing how Vancouver will pull off developing transparent and verifiable results.

Already the city claims the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per capita of any city in North America, at just under 5 metric tons, with New York City being at about 7 metric tons and the US average being close to 25 metric tons. Vancouver claims 90 percent use of renewable energy, with much of it in hydropower, though I was unable to verify whether that hydropower is small-scale enough to qualify for accepted renewable energy standards, such as that used by the state of California.

Now comes the real test. How will Vancouver plan, manage, construct and fashion a more sustainable future so it can complement its already world-famous quality of life with new technology jobs and opportunities in urban agriculture and food production?

Vancouver will have to compete with clean tech clusters emerging in California, Boston, Austin and Toledo, Ohio, creating green job growth in renewables, green building and advanced materials, advanced transportation (beyond its already-leading fuel cell industry cluster), and water/ energy efficiency.

A final challenge surfaced yesterday afternoon during a panel discussion at the Resilient Cities conference with Scholefield and other members of the Greenest City Action Team (including Gordon Price, Robert Safrata, and Moura Quayle).

Vancouver's Greenest City Plan has yet to provide details on the participation of its surrounding metropolitan area, though the leadership of West Vancouver, a suburb of 44,000 appeared to be on board when I discussed the plan with its mayor Pamela Goldsmith-Jones and councillor Trish Panz.

Regional collaboration will be vital to ensuring effective land use and transportation planning, not to mention scaling up regional food and regional energy production, particularly biomass, wind, biofuels and small-scale hydro power.

"We'll start at the core with the hope that action in the core city will move the outer area along" said Price, Director of the SFU City program, in response to a question about the lack of sign-on from Metro Vancouver, a group of 22 communities in the region.

That strategy might work to kick things off. At some point soon, however, Vancouver will need to more fully enlist the metro area and the Cascadia bioregion to take on an active partnership and even select ownership of Greenest City plan elements. Mayor Robinson did meet with Portland, Oregon mayor Sam Adams, who came to Vancouver this week with a contingent to the Resilient Cities event--the two were said to hit it off well and spent much time together privately.

If Vancouver accomplishes its formidable goals, it would within ten years begin to more closely resembles the Eco City-State concept devised by William Rees.

The city would then be at the center of a regional economy capable of producing most of its own energy, along with a significant amount of its goods, services and food, while protecting its water, wildlife, biodiversity and cultural resources. And this would be without contributing further to the acceleration of global climate change.

Call it resilience, sustainability, or just getting ready for what's to come.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an international consultancy focused on  urban sustainability strategy and metrics.






 

The 5th Annual Conference on Climate Change in California wrapped up yesterday, and speakers took on the hard questions that follow on the heels of the scientific acknowledgement that at least some global man-made climate change is now occurring thorughout the world, and that includes California.

Greenhouse gases have "lifetimes of decades if not centuries," according to Scripps Institute of Oceanography's Dan Cayan, and there is likely to be ongoing impacts at every level of culture, society and the economy.

The so-called "wicked problems" the state faces--the term taken from Dan Cayan's label of "problems that are all tangled up in different processes"--are rife.

• Water allocation, with Sierra snowpack forecast to decrease 30-90 percent from 2020 through 2090, creating a scramble for water among users. UC Berkeley's Michael Hanemann noted that the state was not measuring current diversions of water or groundwater use.
• The costs of climate change mitigation and adaptation: How expensive will it be? Who will pay and will there be a way to allocate costs equitably? 
• Communcation of both the nature and scale of the problem to the American populace, media and policy makers is a challenge since scientific data can be misinterpreted, misunderstood or downright ignored. "We're not good entertainers," Dr. Cayan ad-libbed to the amusement of the large audience of mainly scientists.
• More and more data and information is needed, according to the California Department of Water Resources director Lester Snow, to better forecast and prepare for damage to human settlements and ecosystems through climate change induced flood, drought and wildfires.

So what were some of the best ideas that came forth during the Sacramento event once the caveats cleared?

Economics professor Hanemann suggested that the state come up with climate change adaptation plans similar to existing urban water management plans. Just as the water management plans do for extreme drought, climate change adaptation plans could scope what could be done by state, regional and local government to prepare for worst-case scenarios (drought, flood, heat stroms, wildfires) in land use, transportation and public health.

ICLEI's Gary Cook outlined how that international member-based organization is leading assessments and actions plans for climate resilient communities in four US locations: Keene, NH; Homer, AK; Miami-Dade County, FL; and Ft. Collins, CO.

Art Rosenfeld, longtime commissioner of conference host the California Energy Commission, spoke on day one about how cool roofs--a very low cost or even no extra cost technology--reduces cooling use by 20 percent in homes and businesses, while reducing overall urban heat islands.

This one step taken in all new construction in the world's largest 100 cities, which at the CEC's behest California is mandating for all new and rebuilt homes next year, would save 400 billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions. That is equivalent to more than the greenhouse gas emissions of all nations for an entire year.

And people would pay less on their energy bills, providing a net positive financial impact immediately for all homes that use air conditioning.

In addition to state policies like AB 32, which would reduce overall emissions by 70 percent come 2050 with myriad such policies to reduce building, transportation, government and industry carbon emissions, there is no one silver bullet. 

California is beginning to demonstrate that such wicked problems must be attacked with an almost endless arsenal of research, policy, programatic, product and management innovation.