Green A City

Canada Green Review

We've just returned from the Energy Matters summit in Ontario, near Toronto, where a number of speakers from up north and across the pond gave food for thought at this unique event:

Peter Love, Ontario's chief conservation officer, and others from the province presented on its attempt to use a combination of renewables and more energy efficient ways of replacing 80 percent of its power grid by 2020. They've already:

• phased out coal-fired plants and now are developing aggressive energy efficiency programs across industry, government and residential buildings
• started implementing renewables (5% by 2007; 10% by 2010)
• have launched a "standard offer" program to have businesses sell clean power back to the grid
• sent out 800,000 smart meters to better regulate peak demand, during super hot days, for instance

Two congenial representatives of Sweden, Anders Franzen and Magnus Schonning, gave summaries of how that country has substantially reduced greenhouse gas emissions while increasing the nation's GDP. 

Sweden is using more local biomass for power, biofuels for transportation and district energy for municipal hot water supplies (Anders' city of Vaxjo, population 85,000, is almost 100% fossil-fuel free). Net result: greenhouse gas emissions in Sweden have decreased by 7 percent between 1990 and 2005 while economic output has increased 36 percent during the same period.

From the Canadian city of Markham, Bruce Ander, presented how district energy is reducing fossil fuel energy use in that city.

Wind powered light rail for public transportation in Calgary, Alberta, was the highlight of Dave Colquhoun's dog and pony show. The go-go economy of Calgary is taking taxes from the fast-growing local energy economy and is putting it back into something that will run clean and non-polluting in the form of its CTrain. 

In other big news from the north, Canada's federal government last week announced a $4,000 tax on SUVs combined with a credit for hybrids.

Some quick observations on Toronto: nice public transit system, however dated; cool curbside bike lock mechanisms and plenty of graceful street riders; stylish and large volume recycling/ non-recycling waste kiosks on street corners; nightlife and local businesses were bustling, even on a late Tuesday night. Runs With Kittens rocks!

Toronto downsides: locals say smog is getting worse; no pedestrian crosswalks despite the masses of people on foot at all hours; and poor interconnectedness with regional transit for outlying cities of Mississauga (population 650,000!!!) and Brampton (434,000). 

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.

Race for Solar City Title

It looks like San Francisco and San Diego are off on a race to be the leading cities for generating energy from the sun, after they both announced ambitious programs to increase solar generation by anywhere from 5 to almost 20 times current city levels.

San Diego unveiled in February a 1.135 megawatt solar plant, and the city said it plans to bump that up to 5 megawatts on other city facilities by 2013. The installation, at its Alvarado Water Treatment plant, is owned and operated by Maryland-based SunEdison at no upfront cost to the city.

San Francisco, currently with the largest city-owned single solar site in the nation with 675 kilowatts of solar operating at Moscone Center that was installed by SunPower (then PowerLight), announced it wants to increase its solar output to more than 35 megawatts from its current total of about 2 megawatts.

New legislation now allows the city to more easily tap a 2001 voter-approved $100 million solar bond, that was a direct reaction to the California's horrific 2000-2001 rolling blackouts. Turns out those rolling blackies were not caused by lack of generating capacity--which was the big myth perpetrated by DC and the media--but were the direct result of Enron and other energy trading companies' gaming the power market.

Whatever. There's more than enough sun, even in foggy San Francisco, to produce a great deal of non-polluting electricity while stimulating regional economic development in clean technologies.

Hello, Phoenix? Other Sun Belt cities?

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On Tuesday (11-11:50 a.m.), I'll be presenting an analysis of California city sustainability at the first Green California Summit, being held at the Sacramento Convention Center. Stop on by if you're at the event, which is shaping up to be a Hootenanny for state and local government and business leaders on all things green.

As far as solar goes, Sacramento is no slouch, as it leads the nation in combined individual business and residential solar installations, mostly because of Sacramento Municipal Utility District's (SMUD) efforts.

Which city has the Greenest Fleet???

Las Vegas!!

Most are surprised  that Las Vegas has the highest percentage of alternative fueled vehicles in its city fleet--more than 60% of its vehicles are burning biodiesel, or compressed natural gas or are hybrid electric. SustainLane Goverment released yesterday this ranking.

The top other cities are as follows:

2. Honolulu

3. Kansas City, MO

4. Albuquerque

5. Dallas

6. Denver

7. Phoenix

8. Los Angeles

9. Seattle

10. Portland, OR

These cleaner-fuel vehicles cut air pollution locally, but they also reduce carbon emissions that cause global climate change. They push further development of clean technologies that are likely to be rolled out to consumers, and, alternative fuels provide economic opportunities for regional farmers producing fuel crops--or better still ag by-products that can be used as to make fuel, such as used cooking grease. My latest favorite biofuel is bio-butanol, which is way more efficient than corn-based ethanol, and can be made from a variety of crops.

Final footnote: two of these cities, Denver and Albuquerque, vow to implement 100% alternative fuel fleets by the end of 2007 or so.

Appearance Tonight on KRON 4 TV in Bay Area

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can watch my appearance this afternoon at about 4 to 4:10 Pacific Time on KRON4 TV's "Rob Black and Your Money." Rob and I will be discussing SustainLane Government's Top 5 US Cities for Cleantech Incubation, including Berkeley and San Jose from the Bay Area.