c.Figallo

Archive for June, 2008

Climate Progress did us a service last week by reporting on an analysis of the impacts of rising oil prices by CIBC World Markets.  Think of these in terms of your life in the very near future:

• 7-dollar-a-gallon gas in 2010
• 10 million less vehicles on U.S. roads in 2012
• the continuation of the steep drop in total vehicle miles travelled

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The U.S. Climate Change Science Program – yes, the one that reports to the current Executive Branch of our government – says – according to the Washington Post – that “as greenhouse-gas emissions rise, North America is likely to experience more droughts and excessive heat in some regions even as intense downpours and hurricanes pound others more often.” Extreme weather is just giving us a hint of what’s to come with more extreme droughts and heat waves, more torrential downpours, It doesn’t seem to matter to these scientists that the link between human-caused carbon emissions and the extreme weather can’t be proven.

In a conference call with reporters, Karl and the other co-chair, Gerald A. Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there is no doubt that human-generated heat-trapping gases have helped intensify both the Southwest’s current drought and heavy downpours, which have been increasing at a rate three times that of average precipitation over the past century.

“That’s a certainty,” Karl said. “People aren’t questioning whether there’s been an increase in heavy downpours.”

By the end of the century, he added, models predict that intense bouts of precipitation that might have occurred once every 20 years will take place every five years.

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The state of California’s air board released a report last week calling for local governments to change land-use practices to help reduce the need for driving. In the state’s effort to reduce carbon emissions, it must deal with the fact that a third of those emissions come from vehicles on the road. And with current development and land-use patterns favoring suburban sprawl, it’s important that a reversal in that trend be initiated at the local level.

I continue to hope that ICLEI-Worldwide will lead governments at every level to a higher level of sanity about climate change and I pray that ICLEI-USA will prove to be the local government antidote to stalemate at the federal government level.

The sad truth of it, though, is that most of the money needed to fund the changes we need is bottled up by the impotence of our federal government. Local efforts have a ceiling to what they can afford to accomplish, beyond which they’ll be powerless. Still, there’s so much to do in terms of assessment, preparation, public education and public leadership, that it’s not like the local governments have time to sit around waiting for the money to put them to work.

True to what pResilience is all about, the fast-developing ICLEI-USA site now includes a Learn From Others section where they’re just beginning to post, Model Ordinances, Best Practices and Case Studies along with Success Stories and guidance on local activism. Finally, an adult has arrived in the classroom. This is exactly what needs to happen at the government level and I’m doing my part here to advertise their work, not only to encourage kudos, but to inform more people about their valuable content.

A month ago, ICLEI – in partnership with the Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers – held the first ever Municipal Adaptation Workshop where , in ICLEI’s words, it “provided an outstanding opportunity to learn more about regional climate impacts as well as mechanisms for preparing for those impacts.” The workshop included cool useful stuff like:

• Up-to date forecasted regional climate impacts;
• Training on conducting a community vulnerability assessment;
• Break-out sessions on planning for public health, coastal, freshwater, and ecological impacts;
• Hands-on adaptation action prioritization exercise;
• Assessment of the financial implications of inaction; and
• Exclusive peer networking forum on local climate protection best practices.

Sessions were structured such that attendees were able to begin obtaining the knowledge and skills necessary to begin enhancing resiliency to a changing climate in their respective communities.

Doesn’t it seems like shit is hitting the fan from a lot of different directions? I mean how fucked up is our economy? What’s with the killer tornados hitting in so many new places? Who stopped the rain from moving away from the Midwest, where the corn crop is underwater or just plain stunted, forcing world food prices up even further. Mortgage crisis. Gas prices. Still the wars go on, burning up ungodly amounts of lives, goodwill and money.

I don’t have to focus on climate change as the ultimate fly in the global ointment because it’s all proving to be linked together now – politics, economics, technology, population, the basics of human life – all are inseparable from our need to prevent catastrophic climate change. And yet all of these problems serve to distract us from doing the work that needs to be done to change our lifestyles and priorities at the national (political) level. Congress will debate the prescription for reversing the recession forever, wasting their attention on a by-product rather than focusing on mitigating the greatest risk to our wellbeing.

They used to talk about the Domino Theory in the Sixties, where the loss of one country to communism would lead to the loss of its neighboring countries. Or at least that’s what the fonts of conservative wisdom told us. Maybe today’s dominos will force people to make choices about how they live following disasters and setbacks that will prove to have been smarter than maintaining their status quo. Maybe the high gas prices and natural disasters like wildfires and floods will provide enough of a blank slate that communities will plan appropriately for the future we can now begin to see.

It is too bad, though, that for so many people less fortunate than Americans, letting Nature determine the future may mean death and misery. When you live on the edge, the storm doesn’t have to be perfect to get you.

Local action to mitigate, prepare for and adapt to climate change can arise out of strong social agreement and collaboration, but it really gets a boost when the local political leadership is both wise and vocal about it. I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Ron Simms, the Executive of Kings County, Washington. He leads like the coach of a championship football team, creating a philosophy and a playbook that sets an example for his staff, the entire local government, local businesses and citizen groups alike.

Another exemplary local government leader happens to be Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City. Maybe it’s because he’s a billionaire, not a career politician, and is not beholden to anyone, but he’s proving to be just the kind of climate change leader that our largest city needs to tame its appetite for carbon-emitting fuels.

In a speech he gave at the inaugural World Science Festival in his city, Bloomberg described his belief in the sciences and his determination to follow scientific findings in setting the standards and plans for New York. Andy Revkin was considerate enough to publish the entire speech. Here’ a key excerpt:

I believe strongly in leading by example. That’s why last October, I signed an Executive Order directing City agencies to shrink City government’s carbon footprint by 30 percent by the year 2017 and to start acting now. To do that, we’re committing 10 percent of our annual energy costs – equal to roughly $80 million a year – to reducing City agency production of heat-trapping gases. We’ve taken major steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from autos; the world’s largest yellow cab fleet is slated to go green by converting to hybrid or hybrid-equivalent power by the year 2012. We’ve focused on replacing old and heavily polluting power plants with newer, more efficient generators. We’ve taken steps to put New York in the lead in energy-efficient power co-generation. And we’re on course to more than double production and use of solar power in New York City by this time next year.

That’s not only going to shrink our carbon footprint; it’s also going to take deadly pollutants out of the air we breathe. For New York, as for other great cities, cleaner air and a greener environment go hand in hand. As with tobacco control, this is another area where ‘science and the city’ is going global – and New York City is leading the way.

As we become a more urbanized world, we’ll also certainly become a more science-friendly world. The leaders of the world’s cities are the great pragmatists on the world’s stage. Our concern is protecting the health of our people and increasing the wealth of our economies. So we’re interested, not in ideology, but in results, and that makes us natural allies of science.

It’s also true that ‘science and the city’ is a relationship as old as history itself. Cities have always been science-friendly. That was true in ancient Alexandria and Athens, true in the city-states of Renaissance Italy, and it’s truer than ever in New York City today.

It’s been a while since I last blogged here. Not for lack of stuff to blog about; this is a topic that will just get louder and more active as time goes on.  But I’ve been busy serving clients.

In my early communal days, I can honestly say that I lived almost completely off-grid for a couple years. This was living an ambitiously autonomous intentional community called The Farm (which still exists, coming up on its 37th anniversary), when we settled on a large piece of property in Tennessee, lived in school buses, tents and a few simple houses, lit our homes with kerosene lamps, had our water delivered by a horse-drawn wagon, and had no utilities provided by an external agency except for the propane company, which would fill our communal tank at the head of the roads. We did have TVA power to the one house that existed on the property when we bought it. A couple years after we arrived, we did allow TVA to run power into the farm, for a few service drops to run our motor pool, our laundromat, our flour mill, clinic and food processing plants. Today – to my knowledge – all of the homes on the Farm have TVA power.

The Farm never dedicated itself to remaining off the grid, even once photovoltaics and wind generation reached the consumer level. We could have been a pioneering effort of sufficient size to serve as a model, but, well, frankly we were too broke to buy the hardware. We did power some remote CB radio installations with PV in Guatemala in 1978, and named our little tech company Solar Electronics, but we did not become the poster community for energy independence. Meanwhile, as prices for renewable energy sources have come down, more individual homesteaders have been able to realize off-gridiness in their lifetimes, proving that it can be done if you can afford the investment, and that one can live what has become accepted as the standard of American living – with satellite TV, computers, good lighting and appliances.

Still, a bunch of scattered individual homes living off-grid does not a community make. Eventually, we would hope to see neighborhoods sharing energy sources, then villages, then towns, counties and cities. For now, one of the closest examples I’ve seen to an off-grid community is the one described in this Reurters article distributed on Climate Ark.

With energy prices going through the roof, an alternative lifestyle powered by solar panels and wind turbines has suddenly become more appealing to some. For architect Todd Bogatay, it has been reality for years.

When he bought this breezy patch of scrub-covered mountaintop with views to Mexico more than two decades ago, he was one of only a few Americans with an interest in wind- and solar-powered homes.

Now, Bogatay is surrounded by 15 neighbors who, like him, live off the electricity grid, with power from solar panels and wind turbines that he either built or helped to install.

Of course, living off the grid does not mean that grid-based electricity wasn’t used to produce many of the products you use and consume, including the solar cells and windmills that power your household. But it does mean that you are no longer dependent on whatever primary sources are used for generating grid power. Add to that, you can live where the local power company has not run lines. And some power companies even provide incentives for citizens to go off-grid, relieving them of the responsibilty and unrecoverable costs of running new remote lines and providing power.

Now – as the article describes – there are even deliberately off-grid subdivision developers.

One clear sign that the off-grid lifestyle is moving more mainstream is that developers and other organizations starting to look at off-grid alternatives, drawn by both environmental arguments and simply the bottom line.

Lonnie Gamble, a developer behind an off-grid subdivision in rural Iowa called Abundance Ecovillage, offers plots at $40,000 that include free wind and solar power from shared systems, as well as water from a rainwater collection system, waste recycling and access to shared amenities including a farm.

The cost of building such a home is little different from that of building any other home, and with a range of energy sipping appliances such as refrigerators, hi-fis and even hairdryers now available, the forced austerity associated with off-grid living is also changing.

“You can have hot showers and a cold beer,” said Gamble. “You have no water bill, no sewer bill, no power bill and you can harvest something fresh from the greenhouse … why would you ever do anything else?”