Climate Cities

Reducing regulatory interference and barriers to clean energy — all at once

Creating a 21st century electrical grid is finally a priority and the possibilities seem enormous. Despite the grand potential, though, many of the most important decisions will involve painstaking regulatory and tax reform rather than sweeping mandates. What's politically intriguing about these reforms is that at least in principle they ought to appeal across ideological lines: Conservatives like less regulation and more rational tax policy, and progressives like removing barriers to renewable energy, so this seems like fertile territory for odd bedfellows.

In that vein I recommend two pieces, both adapted from reports from the conservative Manhattan Institute.

The first is "Growing NYC's Grid," an excellent piece in the New York Post from Hope Cohen of MI's Center for Rethinking Development. It notes a simple barrier to expanding the city's grid: transformers, the facilities that take high-voltage juice from transmission lines and convert it to lower-voltage juice for distribution lines, can only be built on industrially zoned property, which is increasingly rare and expensive in urban areas.

But today's transformers are smaller, quieter, and cleaner than they were when zoning regs were passed, and can be integrated into the urban landscape. (There's one in the base of 7 World Trade Center.) A simple regulatory change -- allowing transformers in commercially zoned areas -- can boost the reliability and efficiency of NYC's power. Imagine how many more rules and laws there are like this across the country.

For more on this, see Cohen's full report, "The Neighborly Substation: Electricity, Zoning, and Urban Design."

Obama doesn't need to back away from investment to appease conservatives

Conservative pollster Frank Luntz takes to the pages of the L.A. Times to share the news that everyone loves infrastructure:

Last month, I conducted a national survey of 800 registered voters on their attitudes toward infrastructure investment ...

The survey's findings were unlike any other issue I have polled in more than a decade. Iraq, healthcare, taxes, education -- they all predictably divide and polarize Americans into political camps. Not infrastructure.

Consider this: A near unanimous 94% of Americans are concerned about our nation's infrastructure. And this concern cuts across all regions of the country and across urban, suburban and rural communities.

This demonstrates yet another reason why Obama's attempt to appease conservatives by bumping transit infrastructure investments to make room for tax cuts is pointless. The people want infrastructure, they want stimulus, and those two happen to be the same thing, so who gives a f*ck what Republicans want?

Nate Silver follows up with this excellent point:

I'm not sure why Obama isn't doing more to highlight the green portions of the stimulus bill. The public seems to tolerate the spending on bridges and highways -- but they also see it, perhaps not wholly improperly, as make-work. The long-run benefits of the alternative energy programs, on the other hand, are far more intuitively appealing. If the central critique of the stimulus is that the debt we're creating will be burdensome to future generations, that concern could be mitigated if the spending in question is portrayed as a down payment made on behalf of those future generations toward cleaning up the environment and mitigating dependence on fossil fuels. It also provides for some sense of purpose to the stimulus: we'll come out of this, Obama can say, with the greenest, most energy-independent major industrial economy in the world, etc. etc.

Exactly. I really don't see why Obama has to trim his sails one bit on this stuff. It's overwhelmingly popular and substantively correct policy, a combo that doesn't come along very often.

Art and environment panel discusses price of public art

I was staring out the window at the Olympic Sculpture Park's beautiful landscape when, about 30 minutes into a panel discussion about art and the environment, moderator Lucia Athens finally mentioned the elephant in the room -- or rather, the sacred cow.

It came in the form of a question thrown out to the panelists -- architect Tom Kundig, style expert Rebecca Luke, and artist Roy McMakin -- about a new bill that would cut the money funneled to public art projects (about one-half of one percent of state building funds). Proposed by Washington Sen. Steve Hobbs (D-Lake Stevens), who has said he considers public art to be a "sacred cow that should be put out to pasture," the bill would save the state $5 million in the next budget.

"Absurd" was Kundig's response. Stand back and look at the proportion, he advised; this bill doesn't look at the big picture of how much money is put toward other, more wasteful projects.

It's not just about the money, McMakin said. Public art is about culture, and it's about jobs. "Art is woven into the culture of the built environment around us."

Why should you care about this public art battle?

Utah ORV trail system a poor model

The Paiute ATV Trail, in central Utah's Fishlake National Forest, and adjacent BLM land comprise a network of roads and "motorized trails" that have been linked and promoted for off-road vehicle recreation by public lands agencies. The routes range from custom-designed ATV-only tracks to paved roads through small towns. The majority of the trail uses ordinary dirt roads on federal public lands, sharing them with general traffic.

Its supporters promote it as a win-win model for public lands throughout the nation, bringing in tourism dollars and resulting in less damage to the landscape overall: Theory has it that when you build and sign roads for off-road use, there's no need to go off-road.

Only not. As this story in Wildlands CPR's journal The Road RIPorter states, it doesn't lead to less damage, only more: the Fishlake has a higher density of "user created" routes than do many other forests without a designated ATV-trail system. And the economic benefit to the local area is overblown: The study on its fiscal impact does not stand up to scrutiny.

My advice to these guys: Take a hike.

TreePeople founder discusses his Ashoka fellowship and green infrastructure

Andy Lipkis founded one of the largest independent nonprofit environmental groups in Southern California, TreePeople, which is famous in Los Angeles for helping battle the floods of 1978 and 1980, planting a million trees in the 1980s, helping teach the city to recycle in the 1990s, and, recently, working to green its schools. Lipkis just returned from a briefing trip to Washington, which he took because he and his team at TreePeople are concerned that President Obama's vaunted economic stimulus program will go mostly towards roads, bridges, and airports -- gray infrastructure -- and prolong some of the problems caused by it, such as flooding, water shortages, and pollution.

Lipkis sees an extraordinary opportunity to invest in greening cities, adapt to climate change, reduce energy dependence, and relieve the chronic unemployment of urban youth. It's a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Yet what's interesting about Lipkis, to this observer, is the nature of his advocacy. He finds ways to make his point without demonizing or dismissing his opponents. When a Los Angeles columnist named Bill Boyarasky warned in the Los Angeles Times that environmentalists could stall Obama's reconstruction efforts, Lipkis disagreed forcefully in an op-ed, but at the same time wondered out loud if he could find a way to bring Boyarsky over to TreePeople's side.

He sat for an interview last week.

Kit Stolz: You were just honored with an Ashoka Fellowship, which is an award given to social entrepreneurs to help bring their work to greater numbers of people. How did this feel for you, and where do you want to take your work next?

Lipkis: It's encouraging. I've been in this business for 38 years, and it's a nice pat on the back. Ashoka gives a three-year, stipend-funded fellowship that's intended to lead to bigger things. It's saying we're investing in you because of your track record as an activist, and because we think you could make a bigger difference. In the application process, Ashoka asks for a five-year plan. This meant we [at TreePeople] had to think hard about the next five years. Because a group of climate scientists had announced a deadline for [acting against] climate change, which is now 94 months, I made that part of my process.

We now have 94 months to make a difference. We're facing severe weather now because of climate change. We have to radically reduce our carbon output. For me, the missing link is not just to make my city sustainable, but to work profoundly to improve all cities, to protect people from climate change. OK, I say, that's my charge. What can I do to take these innovations, which we have piloted in Los Angeles and shown to be viable, to a larger arena? How can we scale this up? We can't just move along as we have been doing -- we don't have that luxury. We have had some success, but now we have to move much more rapidly towards climate protection and adaptation. So I said, that's what I'll do. They've given me this award, now I need to make use of it.

As housing starts slump, green building gains steam

Amid news of an epic slump in housing starts -- they fell 15.5 percent in December, to the lowest rate on record -- this tidy round-up of studies says green building will save us! OK, it doesn't quite say that, but it does show widespread support for green building, including for those sexy retrofits. Which is either my new band name or a column I'll be writing this year. Stay tuned.

Greening the alleys of Los Angeles

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Green alley projects are popping up in cities all over the U.S. and Canada, in an effort to make the concrete jungle a little better at absorbing rainwater. A new program in Los Angeles […]

In Oregon, bicyclists want to roll through traffic-free stop signs

In the '70s, the right-on-red wave passed through the states as drivers were increasingly frustrated by idling at red lights devoid of cross traffic. When one is stopped at a red light on a timer, a right-on-red and the even more daring left-on-red -- permitted in Oregon in some situations -- make sense.

What makes even more sense is to let bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs so they can roll through or stop when appropriate. Adopting a similar rule from Idaho, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance is trying to get the laws changed in Oregon to make biking easier while imposing no downside for automotive traffic.

This is an idea that should spread to all 50 states; it's the right-on-red movement of the 21st century.

New book offers a prescription for 21st century suburbia

Pay no attention to the images of skeletal subdivisions abandoned in the face of high gas prices (remember those?) and the burst housing bubble: Suburbia is not dead. It's not even dying. Half of all Americans live in suburban areas, and 40 percent of American jobs are rooted there.

But our suburbs are unsustainable, and not because we've rediscovered the joys of urban dwelling and a connection between vehicle miles traveled and quality of life ... and air. In fact, the greatest threat to suburbs over the next decade is this: "There might not be enough people to live in them."

So says June Williamson, author of Retrofitting Suburbia. In the 1950s, 50 percent of American households had children. Now, says Williamson, that percentage has shrunk to 35; by 2030, it'll be down to 25 percent. Without families to fill those McMansions, suburbs will need new housing types for retirees who want to downsize and grown children who wish to remain close to home (though this unearthed article has one housewife comparing suburbia to jail). Not all those folks want to shift into urban centers, or can afford to. So suburbia is due for a massive makeover. Yes, it's time for a retrofit.

Upgrade freight rail: Save 12 percent of oil, 4 percent of emissions, and jumpstart renewable grid

On the theory that many people who encounter Alan Drake's own words on greening freight end up overwhelmed by the details, I have presented a very simplified version of Drake's proposal with my own opinions. This is a deliberate attempt to focus on the most important points, and then steer people to read the whole thing. [Update: The Washington Monthly has a long article on this as well.] Obviously the disagreement with Drake, as well as the political analysis at the end, is my own judgment. In addition Drake does not know me, though we've corresponded briefly, and he has no responsibility for anything I wrote.

Grist has discussed Alan Drake's proposal for greening freight before, but somehow it's always mentioned in passing and without real recognition that it's such a game changer. By switching 85 percent of long-haul trucking to rail, we could reduce U.S. oil use by about 12 percent and total U.S. emissions by about 4 percent.

In addition, it would add long-distance power transmission across the lines of regional grids, creating a true U.S. national grid to share power from coast to coast and from north to south, and it would add-high speed passenger travel. Since it would depend almost entirely on existing rail rights-of-way, the environmental impact is small compared to transmission projects and transit projects that use new rights-of-way.

Drake starts with the fact that long-distance freight trucking consumes about half as much oil as passenger transport, and that unlike passenger transport, we have an existing heavy rail system that can move goods with about eight times the energy efficiency of trucking. That system already reaches most destinations where we want to move goods. If we switched to rail, we would still need to use trucks to move goods to and from freight yards, but containerization makes that simple.

That is the good news. The bad news is that our existing rail system won't let us make this switch on a large scale. Today's freight rail operates near capacity now, and existing rail freight is slow and unreliable as compared to trucking.

Drake proposes that we upgrade our system, add various new controls and infrastructure, build second tracks besides existing rail runs, and electrify the most heavily trafficked routes, which allows trains to run at higher speeds, giving a capacity boost over and above that provided by additional tracks. These modifications provide vastly improved capacity, speed, and reliability, and they reduce energy requirements per freight-ton. Moreover, this transformation requires only standard technology in use today throughout the world.