Green A City

Rocky Mountain Institute Turns 25: or The Distributed Generation of Amory Lovins' Brainpower

We repost Warren's August 15th article from WorldChanging this week. -Editor

One of the world's leading energy and environment think (and do) tanks celebrated its 25^th anniversary in characteristic style this past week. With numerous references to the looming risks of global climate change, peak oil and energy disruption, combined with developing nation social-political and national security challenges, the event took on the air of urgent practicality.

 

Besides the Rocky Mountain Institute'€™s stellar staff and its fearless founder/leader, Amory Lovins, the Aspen-based event attracted a jaw-dropping line-up. On stage were former President Bill Clinton, past CIA director R. James Woolsey, former New York Governor George Pataki, Sustainable South Bronx'€™s Majora Carter, Wal-Mart Chairman Rob Walton, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, technology luminary Bill Joy, Patagonia Founder Yvon Chouinard, and British Sky Broadcasting CEO James Murdoch.

 

Off stage things were no less dull, with a brain-pummeling cast of physicists, business leaders, authors and technologists mixing it up in perpetual reminiscing, scheming and celebrating. "€œYou can bet I will be so on your ass,"€ said a longtime corporate dematerialization expert to a clean tech incubation strategist he had just met, after they plotted how the United States can capture various sectors of global innovation markets.

 

What was extraordinary at the two-day session of panels and parties was how much RMI'€™s iconic founder has altered the consciousness of those present. It was as if little bits of his brain were implanted into the words, plans and outlook of those at the dias and congregating in the beaux arts hallways of the venerable Hotel Jerome.

 

Lovins has developed many world-changing concepts over his 35-year career including "negawatts"--€”reducing the need to produce energy through conservation--and its economic cousin, "the soft path."€ An Oxford-educated physicist, Lovins uses hard data as the basis for making the world'€™s economy radically more energy efficient through better planning, design and day-to-day use in both buildings and industry. More recently RMI has presented ideas on leapfrogging comatose American automotive innovation with superlight materials and hyper-efficient engine and drive train functionality.

"The demand side of energy efficiency is not as sexy as solar or wind energy, but it is much more effective,"€ said Joy. Working with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Joy is working on "€œlooking for something in green technology advances to make a factor-twenty change on a long-term basis."€

The Impact of "Boomburbs" on Metro Sustainability

The Brookings Institute recently released a new book, Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities, and we were astounded by the hyper growth of many places that few have heard of nationally.

What's troubling is the negative impact these cities will have on the best efforts of urban centers to green their communities.

Located in more than 25 metro areas in the US, so-called boomburbs have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled in size since the 1970s or 1980s, with metros such as Phoenix having as much 42 percent of its total population residing in these new clusters.

Photo source: Wikipedia

While the SustainLane US City Rankings of the largest 50 US cities included only two of these so-called Boomburbs--Mesa, Arizona          and Arlington, Texas--these and other cities such as North Las Vegas, Nevada; Hialeah, Florida; Peoria, Arizona; and Chesapeake, Virginia will be truly pushing the limit in impacting smart growth planning approaches for water, natural resources, air quality and traffic impacts.

The problem is many of these boomburbs lack city planning, and rely instead on housing developers for master plans, which may or may not be cobbled together to form the basis for transportation and resource planning.

Worse,  say authors Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy, boomburbs are quickly leapfrogging into cheaper agricultural land beyond metro cities, with even newer "mini boomburbs" that push into "increasingly remote locations and use legislation intended to promote rural economic growth to steal businesses from older, more developed suburbs."

Examples are provided of cities such as Frisco, Texas, which is outside Dallas-Forth Worth, poaching business from older Texas boomburbs such as Plano and Irvine.

"Boomberbs are truly 'driving cities'," say the authors. "Not only is public transit use low, but also average travel time to work is high." It's not surprising that Arlington, Texas (pop. 360,000), was the only city in the SustainLane US City Rankings to have 0 percent of its population commuting on public transit or biking to work.

The authors report on "freeway exit economies," where a community's economic growth potential is measured by the number of freeway exits and miles of freeway-facing frontage road it has. That's so it can pencil out how much land it can develop with low-slung strip malls, big-box retailers, corporate campuses and massive residential housing projects.

Boomburbs never mentions the environmental impacts boomburbs foist upon neighboring communities, regions and states (the book and supporting study were funded by the Fannie Mae Foundation).

But there is one glimmer of hope: most mayors and city councils of boomburbs are pursuing light rail as a solution to the congestion, air pollution, inconvenience and the resulting lack of prestige these mushrooming "driving cities" and their 10 million inhabitants are experiencing.

Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises

Announcing... SustainLane Government book reviews! Whip out a pen and start your summer reading list. Today, Research Associate Ramsay Millie reviews a book which should be considered by city planners, architecture consultants, and anyone interested in sustainable development. Over the next few days we will post more reviews.   -Editor

Edited by: Architecture for Humanity

Everyone who touches this book on my coffee table is instantly immersed. Design Like You Give A Damn showcases low-cost sustainable solutions that solve some of the most troubling issues of the developing world.  Colorful pages display more than 80 innovative and contemporary solutions to such urgent needs as basic shelter, health care, education, and access to clean water, energy, and sanitation.  Alice Waters states, “This book brings forth the values of sustainability and diversity in a beautiful way—values which are as essential to our housing as they are to food we eat.”  A very powerful and thought provoking read.

-- Ramsay Millie, Research Associate, SustainLane Government

Carbon Tools Scale up for City-Wide Footprinting

by Warren Karlenzig
Reposted from WorldChanging

While personal carbon calculators are turning into a dime-a-dozen offering across the web, the unveiling of Zerofootprint’s carbon counter at the C40 Climate Summit last week ushers in a new era of a large scale web-based data warehousing that can aggregate carbon emission information from city government, companies, universities, neighborhoods, groups or families. [Full disclosure: Zerofootprint provided offsets for the Worldchanging book tour in 2006.]

Toronto Mayor David Miller announced that his city would be using the tool, called Zerofootprint Toronto, to calculate carbon emissions for the city's 50,000 employees this July. The free tool will also be available to others in the city, so that it begins to build a “bottom-up” analysis of carbon emissions complementing the “top-down” analysis cities, counties and local government are currently engaged in with groups such as another Toronto-based non-profit, ICLEI.

The mayor said Torontoans will be able to use the Internet-based tool to calculate their own carbon footprint--which includes the amount of energy and water used, waste generated, how they get around, consumption habits and food choices. Results can then be aggregated and sliced and diced so that profiles of city, neighborhood to glean personal carbon footprints. Zerofootprint runs on a database architecture developed by billion-dollar software company Business Objects, said Zerofootprint founder and CEO Ron Dembo, so it can scale up to millions of users because of its enterprise software backend.

ICLEI, which has a membership of over 550 local governments worldwide, is also updating its limited-user circa 1990s carbon emissions software to a tool accessible on the web that can run local government carbon calculations and data reports. The international non-profit is working with Microsoft to release the software by the end of 2007, according to a Microsoft executive.

$5 Billion to Green International City Buildings

Former President Clinton announced this afternoon a program to finance the greening of existing government buildings in three large American cities and eight international cities as part of the C40 Global Climate Summit in New York.

"This $5 billion will more than double the global market for building retrofits," Clinton said at a mid-town Manhattan Waldorf-Astoria press conference with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and London Mayor Ken Livingstone. "We will reduce greenhouse gas emissions place by place, building by building and block by block. We know what to do (with the problem of greenhouse gas emssions), we just need to get organized and get after it."

I see the program as a well-needed way to systematically reduce global climate impacts of existing buildings--as I was quoted in the AP story above--while also addressing the issue of climate change adaptation for cities.

Antonio Villaraigosa, right, Mayor of Los Angeles speaks to John Street, center, Mayor of Philadelphia and Ken Livingstone, left, Mayor of London during the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in New York Wednesday, May 16, 2007.

Out of the 40 largest world cities, mayors from 32 showed up here to come up with financial and tactical strategies to combat global climate change. The event is being organized by the Clinton Foundation Global Climate Change initiative as well as the Partnerhsip for New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office.

"Unfortunately, it has fallen to the mayors to do it because at the federal level in this country and other countries, they seem to be tied up," Bloomberg said in statement.

U.S. cities that will benefit from the fund announced today at the conference include New York, Chicago and Houston. Companies funding the initiative include Citi, Deutsche Bank, ABN AMRO, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, which will each contribute $1 billion upfront to finance the $5 billion effort.

Sadhu Johnston, Commissioner of the Environment for the city of Chicago told me this morning, "We're already underway working this out with building managers and operators."

Los Angeles and Philadelphia, two cities that belong to the C40 group were noticeably absent from the announcement and are investigating ways in which they may participate, according to a Clinton Foundation official I spoke with. Other participating global cities include Rome; Delhi, India; Karachi, Pakistan; Seoul, South Korea; Bangkok, Thailand; Melbourne, Australia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

When Clinton was asked if he liked working with mayors versus working with Congress or governors as president, he said: "Doing this is more satisfying. Mayors are in the business of doing. We're back in the solutions business." Clinton also weighed in on the promise of economic development for everything from biofuels, to electric engines as "long as oil is above $50 a barrel." And he touted distributed energy sources such as solar and wind power, particularly stressing the need for alternatives to a centralized electric grid in developing nations.

Honeywell, Johnson Control, Siemens and American Standard companies will be among the companies providing services ranging from implementing reflecting or white rooftops (a topic I blogged about the need for after California's epic July heat wave last summer) to more energy efficient sensor-controlled heating and cooling networks.

GreenFest: It's a wrap!

"Great energy!!"
"Tropical weather..."
"Sunshine and people drinking coffee on sidewalks"
    --my coworkers who attended Chicago Green Festival

Guest Post by Ken Ott, SustainLane Government
A Wrap-up of Persephone's Festivities:::

Although I didn't attend GreenFestival, I heard that it was great fun and filled with amazing energy. For instance, as above, spring finally uncorked and everyone buzzed about from the nectar of sweet sunshine! (Which begs the question, where did the commercial honeybees go? Too much sun?!) I'm waiting to hear back from those too tired, asleep, or taking the red-eye back home.

Show highlights as seen from behind a computer screen in SF:

* Mayor Daley opens the show, urges people to be green and has his green cake too!

* TreeHuggers report from behind their green lemonade stands

* EcoRazzi: Jason Mraz Pushes Bamboo T-Shirts, Sara Snow All Smiles

* Green Options' David Anderson weighs in on being tired

* Local: Gapers Block checks off Bumper Stickerisms, with a similar opinion to many, including Sarah and Alex at WorldChanging ("Make this Earth Day your Last") and my housemate "it should be all year, not just one day."

* Local: The Veggie Voice speaks to a green attendee's POV

* Local: Another attendee gets jiggy about massively fun festa

I'll wait for my fellow SustainLane crew members to get much-needed sleep, work the organic caffeinated green drinks out of their systems and post their first-hand impressions soon!! Haru says that Warren really worked it, working the spinning wheel all Sunday, giving presentations and moderating panels both Saturday and today, etc. Richard says that in a restaurant the waiter asked him, Val and Netty if they were part of a club (everyone had the same SustainLane t-shirt on) and they were almost too tired to start replying with "no, we're actually a company. We have this website..." Working an expo, which I've done, is like working in a busy retail store which I've also done, times 10. You have to force yourself to take breaks!

Elsewhere over the weekend:

* Mayor Bloomberg announced NYC Green Transportation Plan

* Churches preached "Creation care"

* Google did its part to educate the masses, using art

Chicago: That Toddlin' Town

Looks like a big Earth Weekend shaping up in Chicago. Green Festival lands there for the first time since taking place for years in San Francisco and after debuting last fall in DC.

Here are some events I'll be attending and appearances I'm making. Hope to see you there if you're in town:

Thursday, April 19: Reading and signing of our new book How Green is Your City? at Barbara's bookstore at UIC (1218 S. Halsted), 7:30 p.m.

Friday, April 20: I'll be discussing How Green is Your City? on WBEZ radio, 91.5 FM (local NPR affiliate): "8:48 Show" airs 9 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Friday afternoon: Wrigley Field. The Cubs. One of greenest teams in the US? Accessible by multi-modal public transit, walking, biking--drivers are discouraged by lack of official parking; the beating heart of the Wrigleyville neighborhood's economy; natural grass and vines, fresh air off the lake. What more can I say? Way to rally, Kurt!

Saturday, April 21: Green Fest opens at McCormick Place. I'll be moderating a panel at 2 p.m. (room e350) on "Chicago's Journey to Become the Greenest City in the Nation" with Sadhu Johnston, Chicago Environmental Commissioner; Jacky Grimshaw, VP of Policy, Transportation and Community Development at the Center for Neighborhood Technology; and Jim Slama, President of Sustain USA.

At 4 pm. in Room 1 at the Green Fest on Saturday other SustainLane folks including Haru Komuro and I will be presenting on "Markets are Conversation" about the convergence of the green market with the internet and applied social networking.

At 5 p.m. and also I think at 3, I will be doing book signings of How Green is Your City? at the New Society Publishers booth.

Funky Buddha Lounge for Green Fest party Saturday night, 728 W. Grand. Yee-hah!

Sunday: More Green Fest: stop by the SustainLane booth to meet our team.

Monday: Brown bag presentation about How Green is Your City? at University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy, noon-1:30 p.m., 1155 East 60th Street, Chicago

Intergov Climate Change Report

The full story is out today from the latest release of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it aint pretty.

Seems the 2,500 international scientists that have been putting this report together for the past three years, were subject during the wee hours of the morning last night to supposed intimidation from government representatives from China, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

China's is the world's other big carbon pollution producer besides the United States, and Saudi Arabia and Russia have future economies tied almost exclusively to fossil fuel production. The charge of the scientists is that these representatives from these nations tried to water down the findings.

Besides stating "with high confidence" that human-caused global climate change is having significant effects on various aquatic and terrestrial global life forms, along with impacting human settlements and individuals, the policymaker summary report offered details such as:

• "The resilience of many ecosystems this century is likely to be exceeded by an unprecedented combination of climate change (and) associated disturbances (such as wildfires, floods, insects, heat waves, etc.)"
• "Coasts are exposed to increasing risks....the most vulnerable industries, settlements and societies are generally those in coastal and river flood plains..."  Take note New York, mid-Atlantic states, California, Hawaii, Florida and the Southeast.
• Warming in Western (North American) mountains is expected to cause decreased snowpack, more winter flooding and reduced summer flows, exacerbating competition for over-allocated water resources." This speaks most urgently to the Northwest, British Columbia, California, and the Southwest, much of which depend on year-round water supplies from melted snowpack.
• "Cities that currently experience heat waves are expected to be further challenged by an increased number, intensity and duration of heat waves during the course of this century with potential for adverse health impacts. The growing population of elderly is most at risk." Remember last summer's record heat wave in LA and the San Francisco area with some all time highs near 120 degrees? Or what about Chicago's 1995 epic heat wave that killed anywhere from 485 to 700 or more, many of them elderly? We must be better prepared for such future incidents through everything from building design and urban planning to energy management and crisis planning.
• "Adaptation will be necessary to address impacts resulting from the warming which is already unavoidable due to past emissions."

It's not all gloom and doom. The summary goes into solutions:

• "Sustainable development can reduce vulnerability to climate change by enhancing adaptive capacity and increasing resilience." Green building, renewable energy, energy efficiency, waste reduction, transit-oriented development, water conservation and increased local food supplies all come to mind.
• "Many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed by mitigation."
• "One way of increasing adaptive capacity is introducing consideration of climate change in development planning,  for example, including measures in land-use planning and infrastructure design."

Okay, try to have a great weekend now!