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The greening of San Fran

I knew some cool stuff was going on down in San Francisco, but this report from Clean Edge is pretty amazing. Apparently, when mayor Gavin Newsom said last year that he wanted to implement Clean Edge's recommendations, he wasn't kidding. Joel Makower reports on the past year's progress:

• The Mayor has named a clean-tech manager, Jennifer Entine-Matz, to coordinate citywide clean-tech initiatives, market and execute San Francisco's clean-tech business attraction strategy, and work with the new advisory council.

• The Board of Supervisors last month approved a payroll tax exemption for qualified clean-tech companies doing business in San Francisco.

• Several city agencies are working to create a fast-track permitting program for new commercial buildings that meet the LEED green-building standards.

• The Mayor recently signed the Precautionary Purchasing Ordinance, which creates a comprehensive system for the city to identify, purchase, and use environmentally preferable products. San Francisco is the first city in the U.S. to adopt an ordinance of this kind.

There's plenty more -- check out Joel's post and the report.

Looks like San Fran is on track to become the country's greenest city, and Newsom is on track to become one of my political heroes.

Steve Blackmer, founder of the Northern Forest Center, answers questions

Steve Blackmer. What work do you do? I’m the president of the Northern Forest Center, based in Concord, N.H. What does your organization do? We work to revitalize the rural economy and communities and conserve the forests of the 30-million-acre Northern Forest region of northernmost New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine — the largest […]

Umbra on waiting for warm water

Dear Umbra, You know how, when you turn on the hot water in an old building, it usually takes a while for it to kick in? Well, my question is, if I turn on the tap full blast, will the hot water come sooner? Is it the amount of water you let run, or the […]

Arup and at ‘Em

China hires British engineers to create self-sufficient urban centers Remember Logan’s Run, the futuristic 1970s sci-fi flick where sex-crazed twentysomethings lived in a self-contained city sealed off from the ravages of a devastated environment? Seems reality might be catching up with fiction: China’s hiring British firm Arup to design and build up to five “eco-cities” […]

But Please, Come on Back

Toxic nasties abound in New Orleans muck; big cleanup being planned Despite a well-publicized — hyped, even — recent study suggesting that Hurricane Katrina floodwaters weren’t so bad, turns out the muck coating much of New Orleans poses serious long-term health risks. The Dallas Morning News compared the government’s raw testing data from New Orleans, […]

Between Barack and a Hard Place

Obama will block EPA nominees until agency issues new lead rules President Bush’s latest U.S. EPA nominee has run into an obstacle no one anticipated: a Democrat with cojones. On Friday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) announced he was placing a hold on the nomination of Susan Bodine to head the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste […]

A different take

While environmentalists are generally inclined to celebrate recent moves by evangelical Christians to hop on the green bandwagon, Andrew Sullivan is concerned about the confluence of two big-government philosophies.

Brown alumni magazine profiles Grist leader Chip Giller

The latest issue of Brown Alumni Magazine (BAM!) contains a long and appropriately adoring profile of our brilliant, witty, and dashingly handsome leader, Chip Giller. My only beef with the piece is this bit:

The humor is most visibly expressed in its headlines; when the Bush administration tried to undermine European governments' efforts to test the public-health impact of industrial chemicals, Grist titled its story "No Chemical Left Behind."

Um, exsqueeze me, but that is one of our least funny headlines ever. The writer couldn't find anything better than that?

For future writers of adoring profiles, may I suggest the stone classic Cattle Star Redactica.

Market mechanisms are your friend

In the July-August issue of Sierra Magazine was an essay called The Common Good, a broadside against the market system and the field of economics generally. It didn't sit well with Jason Scorse, Assistant Professor of International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He wrote an article in response and sent it to Sierra; they passed on it. (Read the background in this post on the Environmental Economics blog.) I offered to run an abbreviated version of the essay. Part one follows; I'll publish the second half tomorrow.

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Economics is largely the study of incentives, resource distribution, and how institutional arrangements affect behaviors and outcomes -- and therefore, economics is largely the study of trade-offs. Above all, economics is based on simple principles of how people generally act in the real world, not necessarily how we would like them to act.

Let us begin with the primary problem surrounding open-access resources. Open-access resources are those for which there are no clear and enforceable property rights and to which it is very difficult to limit access. The world's ocean fisheries and much of the world's largest forests are prime examples. Unless there is some type of agreement by the parties who access the resources to better manage and preserve them, rational individuals acting in their own self-interest will exploit them (catching fish or cutting down trees) until the resources are exhausted. In this way they obtain all the benefits from their efforts while the costs (the ultimate degradation of the resources) are dispersed among the entire population. When large numbers of parties are involved and the geographic area is large, cooperative management is unlikely to occur. This basic logic underlies why 90% of the world's ocean fisheries have either collapsed or are near collapse, and why the Amazon rainforest continues to be cut down at unprecedented rates.

So what are the solutions?

Obama mia!

My near worship of Barack Obama is neither unique nor particularly well-concealed. I keep waiting for something to happen to break the spell, to start the inevitable backlash. But every time I hear his name, he's doing something at once politically savvy and substantively admirable.

To wit: On Friday, Obama put a hold on Bush's latest nomination to the EPA, and says he intends to put a hold on all future nominees. Why? He's sick of the EPA delaying new regulations on remodeling and renovating in houses that contain lead paint. Despite being ordered by Congress in 1992 to release such regulations by 1996, the agency has delayed again and again. Last year the Bush administration even looked into asking industry to adopt voluntary practices, to avoid regulation. (Shocking, I know.)

Obama considered putting a hold on last year's nomination of Marcus Peacock to the #2 slot at EPA, but held off when folks at the agency assured him they would issue regs by the end of the year. Then, last week, they told him they couldn't meet the deadline. So he called their bluff and placed the hold. Then:

EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said Friday the agency will meet the Dec. 31 deadline after all.

"We're working on doing the rule by the end of the year," she said.

"Even one child impacted by lead is one child too many."

Obama then demanded that agency officials put that in writing.

Nice.

Let us count the ways in which this is a smart move: