Climate Cities

The Big Yapple

World’s mayors gather for climate-change summit in New York City Gone are the days when mayors chomped cigars and handed out keys to the city. Today’s civic leaders face a somewhat more monumental task: saving the planet. This week, mayors from more than 30 of the world’s biggest cities — from Bangkok to Berlin, Sydney […]

Just what every taxpayer wants

This is super, super smart: A Depression-era program to bring electricity to rural areas is using taxpayer money to provide billions of dollars in low-interest loans to build coal plants even as Congress seeks ways to limit greenhouse gas emissions. … The beneficiaries of the government’s largesse — the nation’s rural electric cooperatives — plan […]

It could be fantastic, but nobody’s built any

CNET’s summary of its own story perfectly captures the highs and lows of solar thermal: Bottom line: A large-scale solar power plant with a large energy-storage system that is close to other solar-power systems and the customers they serve could produce electricity for about the same cost as that from standard utility plants. Such a […]

Reclaimed Brown Fields

Leading British candidate announces plan to create eco-towns Gordon Brown, the man widely expected to take Tony Blair’s place as prime minister of Britain this summer, has made headlines with a splashy green announcement. Brown, currently the U.K. finance minister, said he intends to create five eco-towns that would meet a demand for affordable housing. […]

LEED competition

Speaking of green building, it looks like LEED may be facing some competition: Lake Oswego-based Green Building Initiative, a nonprofit formed in 2004 with money from the timber industry, is bringing a popular Canadian sustainability program to America. … Green Building’s leaders argue that the U.S. edition of Green Globes is Web-based, interactive and inexpensive […]

Madrid, May I?

Spanish activists up in arms over unchecked urbanization This weekend, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Spain to voice their fury over … rampant urbanization. Yes, it’s true, residents of la piel de toro have had it with the bull. A building boom that started in the 1960s is overrunning rural areas and […]

You know you love it

This AP story is a bit old but it’s incredibly significant so I’m going to go ahead and get in a tizzy about it. It’s about efforts by the city of Stamford, Conn. (among other places) to establish a micro grid district. What’s that, you ask? Within these special zones, sometimes referred to as “energy […]

How to reduce your household energy consumption, easy-like

Last Sunday's New York Times honed in on the dubious practice of Americans buying carbon offsets to brand themselves carbon-neutral. Andy Revkin, the paper's global-warming reporter, quoted me saying, "There isn't a single American household above the poverty line that couldn't cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures."

My claim has hit a nerve. Despite the absence of a link, already a dozen readers have tracked me down on the web and written to ask what measures I have in mind. This article is for them and anyone else who might be interested.

First, a confession. As often happens, assertion preceded analysis. But my claim didn't come from thin air -- I have experience in energy analysis and a feel for the numbers. With a bit of figuring, I made a list of 16 energy-saving (hence carbon-reducing) steps that together should do away with a bit more than one-quarter of a typical U.S. household's carbon emissions.

The top five:

Building the world’s largest eco-city

The May 2007 issue of Wired Magazine has a piece about the development of the world's largest eco-city, Dongtan, underway on the outskirts of Shanghai (as we reported in May of last year). The article focuses on Alejandro Gutierrez and his team from Arup (project info here).

Recommended reading.

Happy birthday!

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

"Sustainable development" is 20 years old this week.

On April 27, 1987, after four years of deliberation, the World Commission on Environment and Development released its report. The inquiry -- also known as the Brundtland Commission -- was led by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland.

I was at university then, and devoured the contents of the report, which was later published as the book Our Common Future. Here, at last, was someone tying together the environment and development agendas. The report had much to say, too, about the relationship between poverty and environmental degradation. And as a female leader, Brundtland was such an antidote to our own prime minister; she was pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher was not.

The report gave us an enduring definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need."

So 20 years on, what is the legacy of sustainable development as a concept?