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Mayors, Looking to Cities’ Future, Are Told It Must Be Colored Green
William Yardley, New York Times
SEATTLE, Nov. 2 – The mayor of Fayetteville, Ark., gushed through a slide show about how his city was in the midst of great change. Bleak roads and bland shopping strips were being redrawn to a more human scale. Downtown condominiums were going for a million dollars. Streets once silent at night now bustled.
Besides being great for the local economy, the mayor, Dan Coody, told his counterparts from other cities gathered here, the redevelopment is also helping Fayetteville go green.
“I’m so excited to be here and talk about this I can’t stand it,” Mr. Coody said at the end of his presentation on Thursday. “Let’s all go save the world!”
They settled for lunch, at least for the moment, but the 100 or so mayors who attended the two-day Climate Protection Summit, convened by the United States Conference of Mayors, heard a clear message: Cities that are “walkable,” workable and livable add up to the “s” word: sustainable. Cities that are centered on people and public transit, not cars, and built to higher standards of energy efficiency will save money, hum with new development and create jobs to suit a greener way of life.
(2 November 2007)
U.S. mayors find it’s not easy to be green
Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times
SEATTLE — America’s mayors, responding to a growing sense of urgency over climate change, are rapidly stepping up programs to weatherize buildings, capture methane gas from landfills, switch municipal fleets to hybrids, promote mass transit and buy cleaner electricity.
But changing the carbon footprint of their cities is turning out to be harder than they thought.
To help fund the mayors’ ambitious plans, Congress has included block grants in energy legislation now under consideration — up to $2 billion a year in a House bill — to jump-start “green jobs” initiatives, training low-income workers to retrofit buildings and install climate-friendly energy systems.
“Green energy is going to be the oil gusher of the 21st century,” New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg testified at the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Summit in Seattle on Friday. “This is going to be a huge industry.”
(4 November 2007)
U.S. Mayors Climate Conference: Bloomberg
David Roberts, Gristmill
Four principles that should guide federal climate change policy
…Bloomberg decried the political timidity of national leaders. He laid out four principles that should guide our response to climate change:
1. We need way more energy R&D — we’re only spending a third of what we spent in the ’70s.
2. We need to stop determining tax credits and tariffs based on pork barrel politics. In particular, it’s ridiculous that we subsidize corn ethanol and penalize imports of sugar ethanol.
3. We need to get serious about energy efficiency.
4. We need a carbon tax.
You can read the speech yourself for details. I’ll just make a couple of general observations.
(5 November 2007)
U.S. Mayors Climate Conference: Clinton II
Working with cities to create markets for green products
David Roberts, PUB
My first impression of Clinton was that he’d just woken up, or that he was under the weather. He had a little bedhead, his voice was a bit croaky, and he was speaking slowly. This definitely wasn’t the virtuoso Clinton of the 1998 SOTU. The fireworks were mostly muted, though there were a few flashes here and there. Still, on his worst day Clinton is never less than engrossing.
He began by laying out the main three challenges of the 21st century:
- persistent inequality, abroad and at home;
- identity conflict, between peoples who think their differences are more important than their commonalities; and
- unsustainability.
The good news is, he said, that tackling the third will also do wonders for the first two. The clean energy revolution will spread jobs democratically, and it will offer us all something we can do together, a shared purpose.
Climate change is “a godsend, not castor oil.” It’s the greatest economic opportunity since the U.S. mobilized for WWII.
(4 November 2007)
Ken Livingstone on climate change (video)
Guardian
The London mayor, speaking at the Guardian’s climate change summit, outlines his plans for reducing the capital’s emissions
(5 November 2007)
Review: Renewable City
John Berthelsen, Asia Sentinel
In a new book, the author paints a dire scenario but he underestimates the pain of the solution
Renewable City
A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution
By Peter Droege
Published in 2006 by Wiley-Academy
As China and India increase their rates of car ownership, the amount of oil they use is going up at a staggering pace. There are now nine personal vehicles per 1,000 eligible drivers in China and 11 for every 1,000, compared with 1,148 for every thousand Americans, according to the Nov. 5 New Yorker Magazine. Given fast-rising prosperity, those figures will skyrocket.
If car ownership in India and China rose to just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through 100 million additional barrels of oil a day. Were they to match US consumption levels, they would require an extra 200 million a day, which would put an unbearable strain on world resources, draining away crude supplies very quickly, not to mention drastically driving up the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Cities, according to Peter Droege, are not mere agglomerations of individuals for commercial and societal purposes. From Babylon to Beijing, they are creatures of their energy regimes, “shaped by methods and tools founded on biomass, animal strength and human power augmented by the forces of the wind and sun.” Three quarters of the world’s total energy consumption, Droege writes, is urban-based.
The Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy for the Asia Pacific region and an academician at universities in Newcastle, Australia, and Beijing, Droege has aspired to write what he calls “a manual for a revolution in the making,” a guide to move the world away from fossil fuel and nuclear power and other forms of what he terms unsustainable energy generation.
If Droege is right, over the next few years the changing dynamics of energy are going to mean cities will have to redefine themselves.
(5 November 2007)
