Results tagged “energy efficiency” from Green Flow

Portland, Oregon and General Electric announced this afternoon they were signing a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to consider co-developing green technologies, businesses and eco-districts, particularly around energy efficiency, power generation and job creation.

Portland Mayor San Adams said in a Portland City Hall ceremony, "The signing of today's MoU is a milestone in our efforts to move forward aggressively on our city's economic development strategy and our climate action plan. I'm proud to bring Portland and GE together to benefit local entrepreneurs and innovators."

According to the MoU and an associated press release, GE will partner with Portland to:

-- Engage with local companies to help them develop and expand into new markets via global product licensing;

-- Implement residential and commercial energy efficiency retrofits, and develop neighborhood "Ecodistricts" throughout the city;

-- Explore city finance needs via municipal, state and GE resources.

The Pacific Northwestern city has been a US sustainability leader in everything from regional green building and light rail development, to renewable energy implementation and farmers markets. Mayor Sam Adams announced the agreement today in a city hall ceremony: "It is an opportunity to take Portland products and services and sell them all over the country and around the world."

The agreement states that both Portland and GE will inform one another of new products, services, technological developments and business opportunities related to sustainability.

Sustainable urban planning leader Portland State University might also benefit from attention surrounding the agreement with its planned Oregon Sustainability Center research and development supporting related practices, policy and education.

Other US cities attempting to develop sustainability "eco-districts" include San Francisco, which announced a Civic Center district sharing renewable energy generation and project development, and Seattle.

Vancouver, British Columbia, is also investigating new green economic development initiatives. (Portland Mayor Sam Adams visited Vancouver last fall for series of appearances and meetings when Vancouver announced it had aims of becoming the "greenest city in the world.")

Meanwhile, General Electric, which has long-running marketing program called "Eco-Imagination," has invested $50 million in a new sustainability R&D center called Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, with the GE focus of the planned 50,000 population center concentrated in smart grid appliance development.

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. 



 

 

A new report by a United Kingdom industry taskforce predicts steep oil price rises and gasoline supply shortages by 2014-2015, which will put the global economy at similar risk to the 2007-2008 rapid rise in oil prices that helped trigger the Great Recession.

"The time period would be 2014-2015 when the oil market would be starting to experience rapidly rising prices and tightening oil supplies...It is notable that the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, is already warning of such an outcome in the 2014/15 period," says the report, "Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security," funded by Virgin Group, Arup Engineering, Foster and Partners, and Scottish and Southern Engineering.

What can cities, businesses and individuals do to prepare for such energy price volatility, buy hybrids? Actually, the report asserts, "there is real danger that the focus on technological advances in cars is making consumers and government complacent."

More urgent steps need to be taken by policymakers in particular to avert this impending crisis:

• Support greater planning and funding for public transit, including taxation to benefit public transit and allocate road space based on most fuel efficient modes (i.e., congestion pricing).
  
• Support planning for less energy-intensive forms of development (less sprawl, more transit-oriented housing, retail and businesses).
• Transition to more energy-efficient transportation fleets or vehicles.
• Coordinate policy mechanisms and organizational practices to create a behavioral shift from private car use to other more sustainable forms of mobility, including public transit, car sharing, cycling and walking.
• Encourage, enable and practice smart green city tactics: telecommuting, video conferencing and public work centers, such as those being piloted in Amsterdam with Cisco.
  

At the state and national government level, preparations for another "oil crunch" similar or worse than 2008 and 1980 should include: 

• Ending subsidies for oil in order to reduce economic dependence on oil-based industries.
• Transition agriculture and food production from operations highly dependent on the use of oil-based products such as diesel fuel, fertilizers and crop treatments, while encouraging bio-regional food production from urban foodsheds for nearby population centers. 
• Planning and support for high-speed rail networks (though this would be a longer-term preparation for post-carbon transportation era beyond 2020)

Daniel Lerch of the Post Carbon Institute authored a guidebook for cities and local government on how to prepare for an oil crisis. I have also written a study looking at US oil crisis readiness in the largest 50 US cities, "Major US City Post-Oil Preparedness Ranking" (second publication from top).

Whether, it is called "peaking oil" or an "oil crunch," many experts see total global oil production reaching a plateau of around 91-92 million barrels a day by 2012-2014 unless, as the report says, "some unforeseen giant, and easily accessible, finds are reported very soon."

With fast-growing demand for oil in developing economies such as China (which overtook the US in 2009 for total automobile sales), India and the Middle East, developed nations in North America and Europe need to consider wholescale industrial and societal shifts.

The United State and Canada in particular should start reducing oil dependency now in preparation for oil price volatility and possible supply disruptions that would force such shifts without warning, with dire consequences for the economy, nationally and locally. Many cities (New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington, D.C.) are already somewhat prepared to make this shift because of infrastructure for public transit and other oil-free mobility options.

The world is heavily dependent on 120 oil fields that account for 50 percent of world production, and contain two-thirds of remaining reserves of fields in production. New discoveries of oil fields off Brazil's coast, under the Arctic and elsewhere, will not be enough to replenish the "drawdown" that is occurring. Besides, many of these fields take investments that require oil to be priced over $100 or $120 a barrel, so they will not be producing for a number of years after such investments are made: in other words, far beyond 2015.

"The challenge is that if oil prices reach the levels necessary to justify these high-cost investments, economic growth may be imperiled," says the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security.

Another so-called energy "ace in the hole," oil sands deposits in Canada, are not a viable option. Oil sands produce at least three times the amount of atmospheric carbon over conventional oil when they are processed and used, which would exacerbate global climate change significantly, while also fouling the region's water supply.

What is being raised by this report is that the era of cheap oil is over, and that the consequences will be ugly, unless we start preparing for this profound change.

"Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did," said Virgin CEO Richard Branson and other corporate executives in the introduction to the report

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.   

A presentation last night in the Silicon Valley, by Mark Hartney, program director at ARPA-E, the Stimulus-funded offshoot of the Department of Energy, explained how the new agency is  trying to leapfrog existing energy technologies with wild ideas hatched in the nation's public and private labs, maybe even a garage or two.

Creating fuel to run cars by combining CO2, water and sunlight with bacteria? ARPA-E just funded it for $2.2 million. Such "out there" innovation might be the secret recipe needed to get the nation back into the game of energy-related economic innovation that is now being played largely outside US borders. 

"We are not really keeping up with the world," said Hartney, who pointed out that the US share of the global PV solar market alone went from 30 to 50 percent in the 1990s down to 7 percent this year. "It's similar in fuel efficiencies and the situation in batteries is much the same."

ARPA-E's mandate is to reduce greenhouse gases, reduce dependance on foreign oil and increase economic and energy security. It is based on the Department of Defense's DARPA program, started in 1958 in response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite. DARPA funding resulted in the Stealth fighter, the M16 assuault rifle and the backbone of the Internet (or ARPANET, as it was known in the day), among other innovations.

ARPA-E was first authorized in 2007-2008 and was sprung from theory earlier this year with funding from the The American Resource and Recovery Act of 2009. ARPA-E has $400 million to distribute for "breaking the barrier--supporting high risk, high-pontential programs," Hartney said. 

So far, as of October, a total of 37 projects were funded for a total of $151 million. ARPA characterizes the main areas funded as:

• petroleum-free vehicles
• low-carbon transport fuels
• industrial energy efficiency
• building energy efficiency
• low-carbon power (which includes carbon capture)

The breakdown of who got funded so far: 45% for small businesses, 35% universities and 20% large companies, Hartney told the audience, which was invited by CALCEF, a clean-tech fund initiated through a legal settlement with a California public utility.

ARPA-E is putting out additional requests later this year and early next year for the remaining $249 million. The money has to be out the door by September 2010. In this year's earlier funding round, the agency received 6,000 proposals that it whittled down to the 37 awards.

"We have strong support from the Secretary (of Energy), The President and Congress," Hartney said. "Even so, we couldn't handle any more funding than we have." 

The CALCEF presentation also featured an update on California's new 33% renewable energy portfolio standard, which Governor Schwarzenegger signed as an executive order in September. The 33% renewable rate for the state's power supply needs to be hit by 2020. The previous renewable portfolio standard, explained the California Public Utility Commission's Jaclyn Marks, was 20% by 2010, a level that the state is significantly short of at this point.

How do we put the pieces together to make our cities and metro areas stronger than they were before climate change, energy volatility and the Great Recession?

(See "*answer" at end of this post...)

That's what I'll be discussing tomorrow (Tuesday) night on a panel, "Urban Resilience in Post-Carbon World," in Vancouver with Bill Rees, of Ecological Footprint fame, and Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty.

The panel, sponsored by the Post Carbon Institute, will be open to the public and is part of a larger event on urban resilience bringing together local government leaders from Canada and the United States, as well as academics and practitioners in urban sustainability--er, resiliency--management.

Vancouver has been viewed for a decade as a success story in sustainable planning and programs. From the city's emphasis on increased downtown density, bikability and green buildings, including its sponsorship of a "21 places for the 21st century" contest, to a city farmer program for exchanging surplus fruit, Vancouver is on the vanguard of urban resiliency innovation. It also is one of Canada's most diverse cities, home to significant numbers of Asians from many countries, including India, as well as indigenous North Americans.

The rich offerings of the Resilient Cities event demonstrates that Vancouver is thinking ahead once more. Besides its Mayor Gregor Robertson, minions of regional and local government, non-governmental and business leaders will be putting on events, including:

• The Vancouver Design Nerds and Open Space Network will be facilitating an urban agriculture ideas jam while another group of food system experts and producers will examine "Planning Metro Vancouver as if Food Matters."
  
• A local university campus (BCIT Burnaby Campus) will be having a design charette, led by Ecocities founder Richard Register, to reduce its ecological footprint by a factor of four.
• City government and groups including TransFair Canada will examine how to invigorate local economic development through fair trade and sustainable purchasing.
• The city's "Greenest City Action Team" including the manager of the City of Vancouver Sustainability Group will share advice on engaging people in change.
  
• BC hydro will lead an interactive session on sustainable community energy.
• Provincial official will examine convening action throughout British Columbia (Vancouver's province) that achieves settlement in balance with ecology.
• Real estate experts including David Suzuki Foundation author Nicholas Heap will explain how climate change could impact the region's real estate.
• Other cities, from New York City, with former Sustainable South Bronx's Majora Carter, (a Fellow at Post Carbon Institute along with Bill Rees and myself) to Berkeley, California, will have case studies presented. AAt in 

Key to a successful event will be how well presenters and activities engage systems approaches for resilient communities, rather than just repackaging siloed sustainability chestnuts under a new label.

Besides regional government organization Metro Vancouver's hosting of a session on "The Politics of Decision-Making for Sustainability," Vancouver is making attempts at coordinating with Seattle and Portland on how to make the Cascadia region a more interconnected and better managed bioregional market. Cascadia forces helped push Amtrak to connect Portland and Vancouver for the first time without border fees, for instance.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams will be at the event with a contingent from that Oregon city, as will Jim Diers, author of Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way.

* The easy answer to my opening question, by the way, includes providing better regional collaboration, particularly in the area of land use, planning and transportation.

Unfettered growth in car-dependent sprawled communities proved during the past few years to be the biggest economic risk factor in real estate, endangering the whole US economy. Exurban Sun Belt homes and entire neighborhoods went from being hot properties to foreclosed or even largely abandoned, as rising gas price rises changed speculative economics from 2006-2009. 

Sprawl also has which has massive implications for higher average water, building and infrastructure energy use, increasing greenhouse gas production beyond tailpipes.

Which means that because of climate change, the issue of how to control and rethink sprawl on the regulatory and policy level should become a leading order of business in metro areas, states, nations and the world.

The unplanned sprawl that already exists will need to be re-engineered or "undone," which means that the alternatives provided by the Vancouvers and Portlands--transit-oriented development, multi-model mobility (including walking and biking), regional energy and food production--will need to be applied at regional levels throughout North America.

The suburbs and exurbs are ground zero for change, particularly in the United States, where though most people live in urban areas (79% in 2000), they do not live in big cities. Only a quarter of US residents live in cities above 100,000 in population, so no matter how green cities become, we must think in terms of metros and their smaller cities if we really want to prepare for the future.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and co-author of a forthcoming book from the Post Carbon Institute on urban and societal resiliency     

President Obama will be bringing together the US EPA, The Dept. of Energy with NASA and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in a confab next week (Feb. 13) to create green jobs while reducing climate change, according to Gerald Geernaert, Director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The text of President Obama's speech on Monday devoted to sustainability was surprisingly not reported in the media beyond a few nuggets on automotive fuel standards.

In Obama's comments we get a sense of how this century's challenges will be wound up in planning for energy and climate security, transportation, infrastructure and economic development while systematically reducing reliance on foreign oil.
 

Obama drew upon what the European Union has been devoted to for the past four years (and Sweden for 30 years) in preparation for the Gazprom-like incidents, energy terrorisim and climate security incidents that will be flaring up on a regular basis for all the industrialized world. 

No surprise that the one place I could find the complete text was in the Houston Chronicle, which demonstrates how the energy industry "gets" what is unfolding in a way the rest of the nation does not. 

Obama laid out a systems approach to solving multiple problems. It's astounding to have a politician that will actually discuss the "elephant in the room"--our nation's foundational addiction to increasing amounts of foreign energy while generating ever-growing amounts of greenhouse gases. 

Smart planning focused on wise investments in infrastructure and technology, can be applied on a massive scale with the "American Recovery and Investment Plan" that is making its way through Congress.

In highlighting what the Green Economy will look like, Obama artfully put forward the best foot of sustainability policy in terms of energy for buildings. He didn't even touch on the number of jobs and benefits that will come from making the US transportation, agriculture or manufacturing sectors more sustainable and thus more competitive.

Here are the numbers on what the building energy sector plan will generate:

• 460,000 new American jobs
• doubled capacity to generate alternative energy over the next three years
  
• 3,000 miles of transmission lines to deliver this energy to every corner of our country
• $2 billion a year in taxpayer by making 75 percent of federal buildings more efficient
  
• Working families will save hundreds of dollars through weatherization of 2 million homes (that's on the order of $600 million - $1 billion yearly saved through a fraction of investment!)

    

Here are the top ten sustainability related stories of 2008 that we have been watching and participating in at Common Current, a global sustainability consultancy. True to sustainability system dynamics, most of these items impact the other items on the list, and they will continue to unfold in 2009 and beyond.

1. Election of Barack Obama

After Barack Obama's historic November 2008 election, he continued to demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the risks posed by  global climate change and the nation's dependency on foreign energy. In addition to making green jobs and clean technologies a major part of a national economic stimulus package and a precondition for many cabinet appointments, Obama's view of sustainability as an opportunity shows he will take on vexing problems with new solutions.

 

Obama's statement on "60 Minutes" when asked about his energy priorities with oil going from $147 a barrel to under $60 a barrel was telling: "We go from shock to trance. You know, oil prices go up, gas prices at the pump go up, everybody goes into a flurry of activity. And then the prices go back down and suddenly we act like it's not important, and we start filling up our SUVs again. And, as a consequence, we never make any progress. It's part of the addiction, all right. That has to be broken. Now is the time to break it."

 

Obama's dipping into the Clinton well to appoint former EPA politcal warhorse Carol Browner as Energy and Climate Czar demonstrates that his new solutions don't necessarily mean new people will be addressing them.

Barack Obama with new Energy Secretary Steven Chu, EPA chief Lisa Jackson and "Energy and Climate Czar" Carol Browner (AP photo)

 

One of Obama's sustainability-related appointments, though, does demonstrate how multi-sector collaboration will reshape the US economy to be more energy efficient and less carbon intensive. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy is a savvy choice. Chu, a Nobel-prize winning director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has piloted economic-development enhancing climate change solutions with the energy industry, the green building sector, venture capital firms and alternative fuel academic researchers. He also supervised the Helios Project, which is trying to bridge the gap between transportation and solar energy technologies.

And to bolster the administration's science-based approach on policy further, Obama selected Harvard's John Holdren as Chief Science advisor. Holdren is respected as one of the leading experts on global climate science (he advised Al Gore on An Inconvenient Truth), and is well versed in clean technologies.

2. The 2008 Presidential Campaign

Unlike previous elections where "The Environment" garnered nary a mention, the months leading up to the 2008 election of Barack Obama saw the big-time advent of sustainability topics.

 

Both McCain and Obama supported carbon cap and trading for industry to reduce greenhouse gases. Obama also made a vague campaign pledge of investing $150 billion over 10 years on clean tech and energy efficiency.

 

But the most memorable sustainability campaign moments came in spring when gas prices began to hit their historic high of more than $4 a gallon. McCain's call for a consumer federal gas tax holiday was met with derision from most including Obama, as it would only make foreign oil dependence worse, not to mention increase carbon emissions. The McCain "gas tax holiday plan," supported by then-candidate Hillary Clinton, died on the vine during the heat of June.

3. 2008: The Highest Gas and Oil Prices Ever

When oil reached $4-5 a gallon at the pump and more than $145 a barrel in July, a future of energy volatility and potential energy scarcity came into sharper focus. Record numbers of Americans took to public transit, while others reconsidered where and how they could use less gas not only in their cars but in their lives: "Mixed-use" real estate (neighborhoods with shops, jobs and homes) with good public transit were suddenly hot tickets. Meanwhile, people started using web tools such as "WalkScore" to judge whether potential jobs and homes were easy walking distances to shopping, schools and entertainment. Offices or homes that were too car-dependent were suddenly out of fashion.

 

4. 2009: The Lowest (Relative) Gas and Oil Prices Ever?

The world economic meltdown of 2008-2009 demonstrates how closely energy supply, particularly oil, greases the gears of commerce--and vice versa. As the stock market and demand plunged, so did oil prices. Oil reached a year low of under $40 a barrel in late December, when OPEC's announcement of production cuts did little to stop the slide.

The real hand on the throttle of pricing is the economy, as global demand has slowed considerably. When the economy does pick up, scarce supply (or speculation about scarce supply) might again force steep price hikes, as private oil companies and nationally owned oil producers are canceling development plans for refineries and exploration because of the large drop in prices. In the meantime, alternative fuel development will be hurt as this emerging market, when unsubsidized, requires a minimum oil price of about $50 a barrel to be competitive with crude.

 

5. Arctic Ice Cap Melting Accelerates Wildly

The surprising loss noted by scientists in 2008 of the Arctic ice cap and inland Arctic ice is major cause of on-going global environmental, economic and geo-political concern, with the area now up to ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the 1980s. The newly open Arctic waters will cause even warmer temperatures in the region and beyond, as water absorbs far more heat from the sun than does ice.

 

Besides releasing the trapped methane (worse than carbon dioxide in terns of greenhouse impacts) from permafrost, melting inland ice is raising global sea levels. Two trillion tons of arctic ice has melted since 2003, according to NASA. Sea ice in the arctic region broke up earlier in the season, opening up a potential permanent shipping lane around the former polar ice cap and precipitating an international scramble for the region's energy resources.

 

6. Super Storms and Global Climate Change Adaptation

The strength, duration and location of major storms in 2008 led many to speculate how much global climate change is contributing to deadly and economically devastating events.

• Burma's coast was inundated with a tropical cyclone that left an estimated 135,000 dead and up to a million homeless and/or without food. The cyclone's intensity and course was unprecedented for this Asian region.

 

Burma's southern coast before and after (May 2008) Typhoon Nargis. A present day image providing a snapshot of what many climate change forecasts project for some coastal areas.

On the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Ike came ashore as a dangerously large hurricane (though only officially Category 2 strength) near the Houston-Galveston area, killing at least 17, and destroying or damaging thousands of homes as well as knocking out refineries, oil platforms and major supply pipelines. Southeastern US cities such as Atlanta and Charlotte, NC were hit with severe price hikes and gas shortages for the month that followed Ike, demonstrating the vulnerability of the nation's economy to storms that may be intensified by climate change.

 

7. China's Industry Impact on Olympics, Consumer Products, Global Food and Air

(Thanks to Jared Press on this)

After taking up a "Blue Skies" campaign and relocating or ceasing industrial production and much of Beijing's downtown traffic, China barely cleared its polluted skies in time for the opening Summer Olympic ceremonies. Air, water and toxic waste pollution have been increasing steadily in the nation as a result of consumer demand in the United States for inexpensive products. Only one tenth of the nation's sewage is treated, according to a University of Hong Kong scientist. This "ask no questions" mentality has created runaway cancer rates, turned rivers bright green or black, and smudged the atmosphere so much that at times in Beijing airplanes have not been allowed to land.

 

China also by 2008 became the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It spews a dangerous blend of particulates, sulfur, mercury and other deadly compounds, as new coal plants are fired up at a rate of two per week. Air pollution on the West Coast of United States and Canada has been recently shown to contain as much as one-third of its air pollutants directly from China.

 

Then there is product contamination from China, which began with lead-tainted toys and jewelry, and spread to exported poisonous toothpaste by 2007. In 2008 the industrial and agricultural by-product melamine, first detected in animal feed for chickens, cattle, and fish has now gone up the food chain into eggs and milk. The tainted baby formula has caused kidney failure and illness in 294,000 Chinese infants and six deaths. Tainted chocolate, chickens and hogs have been found in the US, though the meat was not recalled, so it's likely that many Americans have been unknowingly exposed to China's dangerous practices not only in the air that they breathe, but in the food they eat.

 

As for the ballyhooed "Eco-City" of Dongtan that China was said to be developing with Arup Engineering, groundbreaking has not occurred and the permit for development has lapsed.

 

 

 

8. Foreclosure Crisis: Recipe for Smart Growth?

 

The foreclosure crisis that started in 2007 when gas prices began to skyrocket and that magnified in 2008, had its beginnings in the areas of the United States that largely lack public transit, walkability and mixed real estate uses. Meanwhile as gas prices rose to record levels, metro areas that had housing and jobs close to good transit and walkable amenities saw their value hold steady. Any plan for preventing future housing sector meltdowns needs to include an analysis of how gas and transportation prices pushed many over the financial edge, despite the plentiful supply of distant housing from job markets that seemed (or seems) affordable with low gas prices.

One smart move in policy in 2008 was California's Senate Bill 375, the nation's first law designed to limit sprawl and provide communities and developers incentives to build transit-oriented "infill."

 

9. US Auto Fleet to go Electric? 

With the survival of the current US auto industry in doubt, whatever rises from the ashes will likely be greener and cleaner than anything Detroit ever thought possible before the 2008 downturn. Leading the "charge" for an electric US fleet is none other than Ford Motor Co. Chairman William Ford III, grandson of Ford founder Henry Ford. Bill Ford met privately with Obama during the campaign and with Obama and his advisors after the election: Ford is reportedly advocating for a mostly consumer electric fleet as a way of restructuring the industry to be competitive with imports while reducing climate change emissions.

 

10. Green Jobs

Through the leadership of Van Jones, president of Green For All, the reality of "Green Collar Jobs" came roaring into the United States during 2008, culminating in the "Green Jobs Act" which could be included in Congress's 2009 economic stimulus package. The act aims to provide 25,000 jobs in solar panel installation, home and business energy retrofitting and other high-paying jobs for Americans, launching new training centers and education programs in high unemployment areas with disappearing manufacturing jobs. The US Conference of Mayors estimates growth of 4.2 million new "green collar" jobs in the nation over the next 30 years. Welcome news after a sobering year.