Climate Cities

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  • What Berkeley can teach us about taking clean energy programs to scale

    Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, which allow private property owners to finance energy-efficiency and renewable-energy projects via their property taxes, has been taking off around the country. These programs are designed to spur private improvements to reduce our nation’s energy consumption, create green jobs, and lower energy bills. The first PACE program was announced […]

    Mimi Frusha Cities

  • Talking Vancouver and successful urbanism on the radio

    Photo courtesy BinoCanada via FlickrThere’s only so much to say about the Olympics and climate change. If you’re going to have the games, you’re going to have a lot of air-travel emissions (which account for more than half the climate impact of the Vancouver games). The city of Vancouver, on the other hand, presents a […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • Smarter grids, appliances, and consumers

    More and more utilities are beginning to realize that building large power plants just to handle peak daily and seasonal demand is a very costly way of managing an electricity system. Existing electricity grids are typically a patchwork of local grids that are simultaneously inefficient, wasteful, and dysfunctional in that they often are unable, for […]

    Lester Brown Cities

  • Is public transportation scary for women?

    This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Transit agencies are failing to bring women into the planning process, according to a new report from the Mineta Transportation Institute. I talked with UCLA’s Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, author of the study, about what she […]

    Tim Halbur Cities

  • Want to green the Olympics? Stop moving them around

    Photo courtesy BinoCanada via FlickrFor all the efforts to minimize the impact of the Olympics, one big solution never gets taken seriously. So much of the environmental and financial cost of the games comes from cities trying to build facilities that suit both a massive, two-week influx of athletes and spectators and also the long-term […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • The 10 greenest and brownest things about Vancouver

    Courtesy Ecstaticist via FlickrAll eyes are on are Vancouver this month — not just on the Olympics, but on the city itself.  Is the world’s biggest athletic circus making the city a better place to live in the long term?  A worse one?  Or is it just putting the global spotlight on strengths and weaknesses […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • Smart Growth even makes snowstorms better

    Mixed land use is a tenet of Smart Growth development that has a lot of virtues. But the name is boring and not very descriptive. Here’s Matt Yglesias describing what it’s like to live in a mixed-use D.C. neighborhood: The building where I live turns out to be a really good place to pass a […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • The little solar that could

    I spotted a rare critter on the streets of San Francisco this week — a smiling, optimistic businessperson. Then again, Ron Kenedi is in the solar panel business.  “The big news as I see it is the demand — demand keeps growing everywhere,” says Kenedi, vice president of Sharp Solar, the renewable energy arm of […]

    Todd Woody Cities

  • Freeway in LA…for bikes?

    Advocates in famously car-centric Los Angeles are advocating for a new freeway system.  For bikes. The weather is great, the streets are gridlocked, and the city is flat-ish.  No brainer.

    Adam Browning Cities

  • Cities get rebuilt more often than you think

    When I hear folks like Alex Steffen talk about “remaking cities,” my gut reaction is that U.S. cities seem mostly permanent, like they’re already built and we’re stuck with them. (Quick reminder: The world’s cities cause 75 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions, according to several measures.) But then there’s this new slideshow at Slate, […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities