Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Planning for Climate Change: A Community Toolkit for the U.S. Northeast
Christa Koehler and Steve Whitman, Post Carbon Cities
It pays to plan for climate change. Across the northeastern United States, community planners are emerging as key players in addressing rising energy prices and other effects of global warming.
One Northeast community where city planners have helped shape a comprehensive plan on climate change is Keene, New Hampshire. Residents and officials in Keene were concerned about a variety of potential impacts from global warming, including the losses of winter recreation, tourism, fall foliage, maple sugaring, and cold-water fishing. Keene became interested in improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions because such efforts made clear economic sense, while also offering benefits for community vitality. More immediate threats such as the northward spread of West Nile Virus and a devastating flood in October 2005 reinforced the need to take local actions in response to climate change.*
Keene isn’t the only Northeast community concerned about climate change and energy. Clean Air Cool Planet (CA-CP)**, the region’s leading organization dedicated to finding and promoting solutions to global warming, has partnered with cities across the Northeast, including Nashua (NH), Stamford (CT), Portland (ME), Montpelier (VT), Maplewood (NJ), Pittsburgh (PA), Boston, and New York City. These and other CA-CP partner cities are all taking steps that reduce energy consumption while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the things that communities can do to address climate change is to add sections to their Comprehensive Plans dealing with energy and greenhouse gases. Such additions can include efforts that address the following…
Christa Koehler is Community Program Manager for Clean Air Cool Planet and Steve Whitman is with Jeffrey H. Taylor and Associates
(9 July 2007)
Surviving the Century
Interview with Herbert Girardet
Michele Field, ABC
Herbert Girardet: ..I think for the future of cities compact urban development is very much the name of the game, there’s no doubt about that. But we are certainly stuck world wide with a situation where suburbs in Australia and in the United States, even in Europe and so on are very much the trend that has developed; people want a house and a garden, they want space, they want to have a few trees and that kind of thing. ..
The suburb has been described as a place that is particularly unsustainable because low density makes it very difficult to have public transport and all the other problems associated with low density means that energy use is very high.
Well we should take advantage of the fact that we have low density in these existing suburbs and say OK, we can solarise them, we can use the space between houses to actually put up solar arrays in ways that could not only power houses themselves but also supply electricity for motor cars. Now this is one of the proposals I made when I was in Adelaide and that was one of the few proposals that was not taken up. And I think it’s now important to say OK, it’s time to reconsider these issues. ..
I’m involved in a project in China called Dongtan Eco-city, which is regarded to be the world’s first eco-city that will start construction this autumn on an island just off Shanghai. And there we have said OK, how is it possible to build a city that is compound right from the start but nevertheless it is not high rise, where basically apartment blocks surround small parks and are themselves surrounded by green spaces and the city as a whole will then be surrounded by farmland, which will be used to supply the city. So this is the underlying concept for a compact city where people can spend much of their time as pedestrians rather than as people driving around in motor cars. ..
I see nothing necessarily wrong with fairly large cities, the important think is to make sure that large cities are aware of their environmental impact. I mean the ecological footprint of a city such as London is twice the surface area of the UK. If everybody worldwide lived like London you would need three planets. If you lived like a New Yorker we would need five planets. We only have one planet. ..
Well, in my own work over the last 40 years I’ve been most concerned with conditions of sustainable development and it has become increasingly apparent that humanity is on a collision course with its own future. And wherever you look at studies that look at what we are doing to the atmosphere, the fact that we have burnt a million years of fossil fuel every year, our lifestyle at the present time really it’s dependent on the capital of nature rather than the income of nature. ..
(12 July 2007)
Landlords wake up and smell the green
Richard Blackwell, Globe and Mail
Canada’s commercial real estate industry, like many other business sectors, is embracing change to make sure its environmental footprint is more eco-friendly.
The industry is now in the thick of efforts to broaden its “green” efforts beyond merely decreasing energy consumption in the vast stock of office buildings across the country. It’s a key issue because buildings are one of the biggest contributors to the greenhouses gases that are considered responsible for climate change on the planet. ..
The greening of buildings has become such a hot issue that large real estate firms are bending over backwards to make sure people know they are concerned about the planet. CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., the huge real estate service firm based in Los Angeles, said recently it will attempt to become “carbon neutral” by 2010. To do that it will cut energy use in it offices, make better use of space, and buy offset credits if necessary.
Perhaps more important than the internal goals, CBRE has set up a task force to help its clients become more energy efficient in the 1.7 billion square feet of office space they occupy around the world. ..
The poster child for environmentally retrofitted older buildings is a cluster of three mid-sized office towers in San Jose, Calif., owned by software maker Adobe Systems Inc.
Among the changes:
-45 energy management projects, including systems that shut power off automatically when not needed, and lower-energy lighting, saved almost $900,000 a year.
-Parking garage fans were reprogrammed so they didn’t run all the time, but only when needed. The cost was less than $200; the annual savings about $67,000. ..
(17 July 2007)
Birmingham pilots Sun-space scheme
Ian Morgan, 24dash
A pioneering eco-energy scheme which could shape the future of house-building across the country will be piloted at a Birmingham housing development.
Waterloo Housing Association has received £156,900 to provide cutting-edge ‘sun spaces’ on homes being built at its Brandwood End site in Kings Heath. ..
Properties in Sunderton Road will be the focus of the sun space initiative, designed by Axis Design Collective. The project involves designing and constructing eight sun spaces on a mixture of homes for rent, shared ownership and outright sale.
The two-storey glass features are designed to reduce heat loss and heating costs for residents. They will improve the warmth of the property, improve the efficiency of heat-recovery ventilation, and even pre-heat the water supply to boilers and showers. Maximising the use of renewable energy, they also reduce fossil fuel consumption, and so cut greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.
The homes on Sunderton Road have been selected because their backs face south-west and will gain heat from the low spring and winter sun. However, if successful, the trail-blazing scheme could be extended to other new Waterloo properties and adopted by other housing associations across the country. ..
(17 July 2007)
Pressure to preserve tree canopy heats up
Megan Rolland, Kansas City Star
Drive in downtown Kansas City and you’ll find yourself in the tropics — up to 8 degrees warmer than many of the city’s neighborhoods or suburbs.
The reason: More concrete, fewer trees.
Across the nation, scientists and government officials also are taking note of the threat to urban forests and the important role they play in decreasing temperatures, reducing pollution and protecting against floods.
A study soon to be released measures the canopy over cities — 26.4 percent of Kansas City is covered by trees. That’s not bad, according to preliminary figures from the urban forest division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some cities have less. But according to at least one other study, Kansas City has reason for concern.
About 2,500 trees under the care of the Kansas City Parks and Recreation forestry department die every year. No replacement program exists. Forester Kevin Lapointe with the parks department is asking for an increase of $3 million next year — and more later — to replace the dead trees and plant an additional 10,000 trees a year. “Trees are once in a lifetime,” Lapointe said. “When you defer planting a tree, you can’t make up that lost time.”
That’s because the benefits felt from a mature tree are significantly greater than those of saplings, he said. In all, the roughly 415,000 trees on city property save an estimated $51.2 million a year, according to the parks department. They absorb enough heat to significantly lower energy use and absorb enough rain to significantly lower storm water runoff. They also absorb greenhouse gases such as carbon, make the city more attractive and eliminate other pollutants. ..
(15 Jul 2007)
