Green A City

Carbon Reduction? How About Community Enrichment?

With all this talk and action around cutting carbon emissions by cities and states, there is a rare opportunity to impact the other side of the ledger: economic and community enrichment coming from healthier, more vibrant planning and living.

Portland, Oregon, featured in today's New York Times, for instance, was the first U.S. city to develop carbon-reduction goals in 1993. Today, the city has walkable neighborhoods, free public transportation, a booming economy, and one of the hottest local foods scenes outside pricey San Francisco Bay Area.

These strategies were based on the consideration, planning and execution of much more than just carbon reduction. Portland has preserved its open space, so farmland and vineyards are available nearby to supply all those farmers markets (thirteen in a town of 500,000, a significant amount) and trendy restaurants. As the Times article headlined: "Chefs flock to a City Where Food Is The Star, Produce is Stellar and Real Estate is Cheap".

Portland's carefull planning, neighborhood redevelopment and green building strategies are also reaping epic rewards in real estate valuation. The enigmatic Brewery Blocks of the city's Pearl District, only recently a dingy post-industrial  neighborhood, is now the most desired location in the Great Northwest for residents, local businesses owners and anyone who sets foot or rides a rail in town. A developer bought the Brewery Blocks in 1999 for $19.5 million and just sold three of the buildings in the blocks for $291.6 million to JP Morgan Asset Management.

Take a look at Denver, which spearheaded the nation's largest public transit ballot measure a few years back, before cutting carbon was de rigueur.

Now Denver is on the cusp of a jolt from its transit oriented development economic strategy. In the first year of light rail expansion, 2005, public transit ridership rates increased more than 10 percent. Businesses are thrilled to have opportunities to locate in high foot traffic areas with bikeways, walkways and events. Besides creating a more compelling destination for people or businesses that want to relocate, people get healthier walking more.

The city hopes to maintain such excitement over its ten year build out.

During this period, Denver is designing infill mixed-use housing to accompany the business, shopping and entertainment along transit lines. The end result is that the city's non-automotive access will make life more convenient and engaging for residents, businesses and tourists, while reducing local air pollution.

Oh, and the carbon outputs decrease.

Other cities of all sizes are chasing cleantech industry development. In this red-hot business sector, reduction means a very nice gain for regional economies. Unlike old industrial centers, cleantech has smaller scale nimble production; cleantech is built around intellectual capital more than massive production lines. It will also be more distributed to meet the needs of exploding demand in local markets for solar, green building, alternative fuels and advanced transportation.

Cleantech and carbon busting are creating economic development options that must be weighed and capitalized upon as local carbon reduction plans go into effect.

For instance in cleantech industry incubation, Austin and San Jose may have the early-mover advantage for massive scale, but other locales including Troy-Albany, New York (fuel cells); Seattle and Portland (biodiesel) ; Atlanta (green building technologies) are forging vital innovation centers. Other hubs and minihubs serving these massive potential markets will surely emerge. 

Finally, there is the tree planting part of carbon-reduction plans. Should this be part of an international or local program? International efforts will be critical, of course. But even more important to local community development will be deciding strategies for regional wildlife diversity and preservation, including parks and urban canopies. Trees can even be used to reduce heat gain in buildings. Properly placed shade trees can reduce building energy cooling costs by up to 50 percent a year.

As carbon-reduction plans get into the nitty gritty of fleets, energy sources, landfills, and buildings, communities must carefully consider how the very fabric of their lives can be improved through integrated sustainable planning, land use, and economic development. If your eyes glaze at the mention of those words, think instead eating, drinking, enjoying family and friends, recreating, shopping, working, preserving nature and enriching local culture--which of course is defined by local knowledge and ways of life.

Sounds like more a more tangible and interesting future than one guided solely by a carbon-reduction action plan model, doesn't it?   

Impact of Mexico Pipeline Terrorism on Energy and Cleantech Sectors

The news report of multiple terrorist attacks on Mexico's oil and natural gas infrastructure today should be watched as a possible precursor to increased terrorist activities on global fossil fuel energy infrastructure.

Mexico produces more than 4 percent (3.7 million barrels per day in 2006) of the world's oil supply, and any actions there could either be part of a larger global effort to disrupt world markets, or it could prompt copycat actions. Either way, oil prices in particular might reach record levels this week.

In early 2006 a terrorist attack on Saudi Arabia's Abquiq oil processing facility was thwarted, preventing the disruption of the 5-7 million barrels a day that is processed at that single location--equal to about 7 percent of the world's daily use.

Hopefully, the Mexico incident, which is the second series of actions by a small terrorist group since July, has occurred in isolation. Mexico's attacks have been also on smaller pipelines that aren't likely by themselves to impact world prices.

But oil infrastructure security risks, whether natural or man-made, and energy price instability will continue to drive interest and applications for alternatives. If such risks play out in the near future to a greater degree, look for an even greater surge of interest in non-fossil fuels such as renewable energy that is distributed and thus far less subject to terrorism, and in alternative fuels produced domestically.

Such growth will continue to capitalize on government or utility-backed contracts that can amortize over a set period the higher upfront costs of renewable technologies and alternative fuel vehicles as a hedge against wildly fluctuating fossil fuel prices.

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."€

World’s Largest Solar Energy Farm to be Built in California to Meet Community Choice Aggregation Demand

As reposted 7/13/07 on WorldChanging -Editor

 

Fresno, California sits at the south end of one of the sunniest and hottest valleys in North America, the San Joaquin. The San Joaquin Air District is also one of the most polluted in the nation, with asthma rates many times higher than the rest of the nation and numerous air quality action days every summer causing significant health and business impacts.

Upon this tableau, the city of about a half million residents along with 11 surrounding communities and two counties announced last week they would together be developing the largest solar facility in the world. It will be more than seven times the size of the earth’s largest solar energy farm, now in Germany.

Map sources: geology.com, WIPP.Energy.gov

The planned 80 PV solar plant, eventually covering one square mile, will be developed by San Francisco-based Cleantech America and managed by the Kings River Conservation District (KRCD), one of the state’s new community choice aggregation districts.

“We’re so excited about what community choice can do for us,” said Dave Orth, Manager of KRCD.

Community choice allows a city, county or group of communities such as the KRCD to band together to build and produce their own energy and then transmit that over lines owned by public or investor-owned utilities. In the case of the KRCD and other California communities following in its path, the goal is to control development of new energy sources, particularly renewables, which can be solar, wind, biomass or other non-polluting technologies. 

Bike Capital of the World?

We repost Warren's June 14th article from WorldChanging this week. -Editor

The Future of Carbon-Free Transport: Groningen, Netherlands

The future of carbon-free transport lives strong in Groningen. This Dutch city of 185,000 proves that bicycle transportation can reign supreme: people there make about 150,000 trips by bicycle every day.

Bicycles and pedestrians entirely rule the medieval-era city hub, cruising along on car-free dedicated pathways and short cuts with no traffic signals in some instances. But people also commute on bikes in large numbers from suburban housing spread out around the city to downtown jobs, via a ring-and-spoke network of paths. Overall, 37 percent of area commutes are made on bikes.

Boasting an official town bicycle planner, Groningen has created an infrastructure it refers to "continuous and integral," which includes massive surface and underground bicycle parking facilities, dedicated bike paths, and two-way bike lanes even on one-way auto streets.

Since the early 1980s, 30 city bicycle parking facilities have been developed, including one underground facility at the central train station that sells bikes, repairs bikes and offers valet and secure parking for more than 4,000 bikes. Parking is financed through a low-cost annual membership program that costs $50 a year, while bike valet positions create significant numbers of jobs at the public parking facilities and also at 15 local schools.

Bike parking and paths, however, are only the physical manifestation of the careful cycling cultural nourishment that has been provided by city leaders collaborating with citizens. In 1986 Groningen developed what is believed to be Europe’s first dedicated bike policy document, which focused on a broad spectrum of bike transportation and awareness programs. Educational programs now include teaching the health and economic benefits of cycling.

"We think we can boost the numbers of cyclists even higher," said bicycle planner Cor van der Klaauw on Josh Hart’s Car Free Blog. "We have programs to introduce new immigrants to cycling. Many of them came from places where the car is the ultimate status symbol. We need to show them that in Holland, they can get around very easily by bicycle, status symbols aside."

Groningen's bicycle planning has not occurred in a vacuum, but rather complements an integrated scheme that includes low-priced parking facilities for cars, strong public transport and careful public transit linkages between car parking areas and centers for employment and education. With these amenities, cars use, especially in the city center, was successfully restricted without impacting local business.

Other so-called northern European "cycling cities" may be more known (Amsterdam; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Ghent, Belgium) but none can match Groningen for its complete vision and high rate of daily velocipedic participation.

The Netherlands averages a 26 percent national cycling rate, Denmark scores just under 20 percent and Germany achieves about 10 percent, according to a report published by Dutch research group Fietsberaad (Number 7).

While bicycles in the US currently comprise only 0.4 percent of all commuter trips, some North American cities are actively promoting bicycle transportation--through planning dedicated mapped routes and facilities--as a way of reducing global climate change-causing carbon emissions. San Francisco, for instance, has announced a goal of having bicycle trips make up 10 percent of all city trips by 2010.

What’s behind the high rates in Europe, besides the history of bicycle use and culture? According to Fietsbaraad: "Accepting the cyclist as a 'normal' traffic participant with equal rights in the '50s and '60s has been a crucial factor; (so has) the realization of a motor car infrastructure (that) is not at the expense of the cyclist….”

Warren Karlenzig is Chief Strategy Officer at SustainLane, where he directs the company’s US city rankings, and SustainLane Government, an open-source best practices sustainability knowledgebase for state and local government officials and their constituents. Warren is lead author of the newly released How Green Is Your City? The SustainLane U.S. City Rankings (New Society Publishers). His blog is www.greenacity.com

San Francisco Moves Toward Renewable Power Majority

A significant step toward having the nation’s first renewable-powered city was taken yesterday by the city and county of San Francisco. Its board of supervisors went forward with a request for the public utility commission to study a plan’s feasibility that would develop more than half the city's total electric power from renewables.

“It’s high time for San Francisco to chart its own energy future,” Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi told the board.

The city’s power currently comes investor-owned utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which also owns the transmission lines along with the power-generating facilities. About 12 percent of the city’s PG&E power now comes from renewable sources, with the remainder coming from large-scale hydroelectric dams, natural gas-fired power plants and nuclear facilities.

California requires 20 percent of all its power to come from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020, but San Francisco is attempting to shoot for the moon with its new approach.

The plan, called “community choice aggregation,” would have San Francisco developing and owning its own power-generating facilities, which it proposes consist of 51 percent renewables such as solar, wind, biomass and small-scale hydroelectric by 2017.

San Franciscan residents or businesses then would be able to “opt-out” of the program if they chose to continue to receive power generated by PG&E, otherwise they would automatically receive the new greener energy from the PG&E lines and would be billed by PG&E, just as always.

Community choice was legislated as an option by the state’s General Assembly (AB 117) in 2002 after rolling power blackouts of 2000-2001 and skyrocketing energy prices--now proven to be influenced by Enron and other out-of-state power companies--spooked the state into action for more energy independence. San Francisco voters also approved a $100 million solar bond in 2001 to back development of renewables, though most of that funding has remained untapped.

Aggregating purchases of energy by a city differs from publicly owned utilities that can be found in cities such as Austin, Texas’ Austin Energy. Fresno and a consortium of other adjacent California Central Valley cities are the furthest along in developing consumer choice aggregation.

PG&E, in apparent opposition to the community choice campaign, has been running an aggressive marketing campaign in San Francisco across buses, billboards and media called “Let’s Green This City,” touting the city’s green potential.

One board supervisor, Michela Alioto, cautioned the board that the city would have a big challenge in developing energy generation sources separate from PG&E—renewable or otherwise—on such a massive scale: “I have not had one conversation with anyone from PG&E...(but) I want you to tell me how this will provide better service at a better price.”

Currently San Francisco is the national leader in city-generated solar power, with about 1 megawatt of solar capacity out of the city’s current 900 daily megawatts of total consumption. The new plan scopes out the need for 360 megawatts of renewable energy to replace a big chunk of the non-renewable portion of PG&E's supply.

Green Economy versus the Gray Economy

The following is from a presentation given by SustainLane's Warren Karlenzig at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on May 2, 2007, on the subject of green cities, with Jared Blumenfeld, director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, and Ian Kim from the Reclaim the Future program at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland.

Thank you to the Commonwealth Club, and to the contributors of How Green is Your City?: Richard Young, Ken Ott and Frank Marquardt (and in absence, Rachel Yaseen and Paula White).

SustainLane.com has the largest directory of green businesses in the nation: 12,000 businesses and services, all part of an exploding green economy

That’s the Green Economy versus what I’m calling the Gray Economy.

What is the Gray Economy? Some might call it the “Old Economy” but that’s so old economy, ala the Dot Com era.

The Gray Economy is a larger and more timely concept than the so-called gray market, which is marginally legal but not ethical. Like the gray market, the Gray Economy is off the books. Get away with it if you can. Take the money and run: carbon, toxic pollutants and catastrophic global climate change are someone else’s—or another generation’s--problem.

Commonwealth Club Panel: How Green is Your City?

Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 2, I will be leading a panel from noon to 1 p.m. at the venerable Commonwealth Club in San Francisco ("The nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum") on our new book How Green is Your City? The SustainLane U.S. City Rankings.

Appearing with me will be the ever-entertaining Director of the Department of the Environment for San Francisco, Jared Blumenfeld--abandon your notions of a staid city bureaucrat--and Ian Kim from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, which is leading up a "green collar" jobs program for the city.

It should be an enlightening discussion about the future of green cities, local jobs, economic development and clean tech in the 21st century, with representatives from the #2 city (San Francisco) and #5 city (Oakland) out of the largest 50 US cities profiled in How Green is Your City?

I'll be signing copies of the book and all three of us will field your questions. For those who can't make it because you're on the other side of the world, if you have any questions you want to post on this blog I'll try to ask them during tomorrow's panel.

Spotlight: Fairfax, California

Sometimes you need to look no further than your own backyard to find inspiration. I live in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Next door to our town is Fairfax, California. Last night I got together with Fairfax's mayor, Larry Bragman, and a few others from that town of about 8,000.

We talked about Fairfax's significant sustainability factors: it's one of the few towns with no permitting fee for solar installations; it helped ban herbicide use on its neighboring watershed a few years back; and its 30 or so vibrant local businesses are almost all locally owned or operated--no chains in town that I know of.

People are so attached to their local shops that when a devastating flood ripped through this valley north of Mt. Tamalpais on December 31, 2005, citizens put together a massive fundraiser with local musicians, food and drink (there's a great local brewpub, Iron Springs Brewery) to help keep impacted businesses flourishing.

Fairfax also is home to two heavily solar-powered public schools, White Hill Middle School and Manor Elementary School, the latter which has a nationally awarded Green Team 4th grade teacher, Laura Honda.

In transportation, Fairfax was the partial birthplace of the mountain bicycle during the 1970s (co-inventors Gary Fisher and Joe Breeze still live here); it has a massive bike-to-school and walk-to-school contingent that was co-sponsored by a local volunteer group of parents called "An Inconvenient Group," and has more plans for being a national model for transportation by bicycle and foot, through the national Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program.

The town has a wonderful farmers market that features locally grown produce from within the county and state, and it has one of the nation's best food markets, featuring mostly organic and sustainably produced food, called The Good Earth. The Good Earth also prepares and provides organic and locally grown food for a number of the county's school lunch programs.

If you're good, you'll get organic and locally made ice cream from The Scoop for desert, which features locally grown blackberries and strawberries mixed with organic milk from free-ranging Straus dairy herds in West Marin.

Fairfax knows how to be green and have a good time, with four clubs supporting live music every night of the week, and parades galore. This Saturday will be the Little League Opening Day parade, where the younguns from West Marin Little League walk--or skip--down main street in their uniforms, and then in summer comes the human-powered parade.

The townsfolk have put up signs recognizing local steelhead trout populations in their streams and have replanted native plants around the schools and baseball field.

Paradise? Take a look in your own backyard or alley and see what you can dream up to make your community healthier, more sustainable and worth living in.

Berkeley-BP Biofuels Brouhaha

A public forum at the University of California at Berkeley last week explored how the new Energy Biosciences Institute may impact life on campus and earth. Besides Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, public policy professor Robert Reich and those leading research in biofuels and biodiversity had the floor.

Just a few weeks back, SustainLane Government ranked Berkeley as one of the top five US cleantech incubation clusters because of the biosciences center announcement Feb. 1. Unless the center's agreement is not signed, we would continue to rank it so. Thursday's forum was meant to suss out the unpublicized details of BP's $500 million grant to the biofuels research center, which will be managed by the federal Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories. 

At stake are three sometimes competing interests:

1. Addressing global climate change, which Chancellor Birgeneau characterized as the most urgent need facing humanity today;

2.  The ability of the university to remain reasonably independent of multi-national corporate control, and;

3. Maintaining planetary plant biodiversity and integrity in the face of genetic engineering--gentically modified organisms (GMO) are a supporting strategy of the biosciences center.

Chemical engineering professor Jay Keasling spoke to how the center's research will for the first time be "evaluating markets and (business) risks directly as a parallel part of the research pipeline." Keasling also spoke about how the center will be "educating people in government about the possibilities of biofuels."

Beth Burnside, vice chancellor for research for Berkeley, said that 70 percent of the biosciences center's work follows the standard industry sponsorship guidelines for the University. As for the proprietary 30 percent: "We won't have any control of that," Burnside said. She said that outside funding for Berkeley will increase from 3.5 percent to 5 percent as part of BP's largesse. The national university average for such funding is 7 percent, she said.

Evironmental sciences professor Ignacio Chapela said the center's funding and GMO research will compromise the university's integrity as well as the earth's biodiversity. "(Genetically modified) biofuels show tragic aspects of insatiable consumption. It's a solution for a crazed consumer binge."

Former US Labor Secreatry Robert Reich was compelling laying out for analysis some risks of major corporate sponsorship of a public university. "The gravitational pull (of BP, the center's funder) may be apparent even though invisible, like a black hole in space." He concluded: "The Energy Biosciences Institute's safeguards will determine if this is a feather in Berkeley's cap or a huge noose around it's neck."

There is no easy answer for how UC Berkeley should proceed, besides that it must use transparency, caution and dilgent financial, ethical and proceedural analyses, in addition to continuing its well-established scientific and economic research. What is clear is that the challenge to confront global climate change will produce not only unprecedented new industries and economic development opportunities; it will also produce unintended consequences that will require many more discussions--public and private--similar to Berkeley's.