Climate Cities
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The long and wind-powered road
The Danes have an enduring relationship with wind. This is symbolized by the big, honking wind turbine that looms like a bird of prey over the parking lot outside the Bella Center, the venue for the U.N. Climate Change Conference Denmark is hosting in December. It was a Dane, physicist H.C. Oersted, who discovered electrical […]
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Energy Trust and the Big Hope
If you’re like me, and spend a lot of the day drinking coffee and getting increasingly paranoid with the creeping suspicion that solving climate may not be possible, it’s good when you find glimmers of hope in the wreckage. One of those glimmers (actually more like a tractor beam) is called Energy Trust, an organization […]
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A $4 billion push to make affordable housing green
Norton hit Congress to testify about the value of green building in 2008.globalwarming.house.govA major investment in making affordable housing greener — a $4 billion investment, to be precise — was announced Wednesday. The injection comes courtesy of Enterprise Community Partners, a 25-year-old non-profit dedicated to community development and affordable housing. With heavyweight partners including NRDC, […]
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For public transportation to survive, we all need to … drive more?
Traffic is the answer!richardmasoner via flickrMeant to mention these two pieces last week, but things fell apart, as they say. (Do “they” say that, or is it just me?) Both relate to the connection between cars and public transportation, and both are a bit counterintuitive. The first, an op-ed by David Owen in the Wall […]
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Obama’s absurd Olympic boosterism
Arches, now deserted, built for the 2004 Athens Olympics. As healthcare reform shipwrecks and climate legislation lurches toward a similar fate, President Obama is … preparing to jet to Copenhagen to shill for Chicago as 2016 Olympic site? Really? What an absurd and ignoble use of time and prestige. When I think of the Olympics, […]
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Stockton Williams on urban retrofits, Obama, and the sexiness of caulking guns
This is part of a series of interviews with people working to make U.S. communities smarter, greener spaces. Got a suggestion for an interviewee? Send it our way or leave it in the comments section below. Earlier this year, officials from sixteen U.S. cities gathered in Cambridge, Mass., to compare notes on a surprisingly hot […]
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MacArthur genius award winners include climate and ocean researchers
Some of the MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winners are doing work related to climate change. And they now they each have $500 grand, no strings attached. Neat-o: Climate scientist Peter Huybers mines “a wealth of often-conflicting experimental observations to develop compelling theories that explain global climate change over time.” Biogeochemist Daniel Sigman unravels “the interrelated […]
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The social life of traffic
This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Traffic is essentially “an engineering issue,” says author Tom Vanderbilt. “But there’s also a layer of culture.” That layer of culture determines, to a large extent, how traffic can become a problem. This idea […]
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Will a greener White House complex mean a more productive president?
Arrrrr ye gettin’ more done now?Official White House photostream via flickr[UPDATE: A White House spokesperson called me to clarify that it’s parts of the White House complex, not the White House itself, that will be seeking LEED certification. Like many others in the blogosphere, I got swept up in the excitement of imagining hemp sheets […]
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Wal-Mart’s history of destroying sacred sites
A re-consecration ceremony was held this past weekend at a damaged Indian mound in Oxford, Ala. As we reported last month, the 1,500-year-old sacred and archaeologically significant site was partially demolished during a taxpayer-funded economic development project, with the excavated dirt to be used as fill for construction of a Sam’s Club, a retail warehouse […]
