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The road to enlightenment
70% of cuts in emissions will need to be made at local level
John Vidal, The Guardian
It is now known that 70% of cuts in emissions will need to be made at local level. Have councils woken up to the challenges ahead?
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At the start of this year the Guardian wrote to all English and Welsh local authorities asking if they had planned any climate change schemes to improve household behaviour. Most, it seemed, were doing nothing and did not even reply; 64 admitted they had nothing on their books; 26 said they had introduced limited incentives to encourage better green behaviour; and only six said they were taking “significant steps” to curb household emissions.
Almost 12 months later, with a phenomenal amount of new awareness at all levels of government and society, there is a real sense that things have moved on. Now, some 277 authorities have signed the Nottingham declaration – a voluntary pledge to tackle climate change – a 30% increase on last year. Scotland and Wales have their own versions and all local authorities are signed up.
Meanwhile, more than 100 councils are in the process of adopting the Merton rule, which requires new commercial developments to generate at least 10% of their energy needs from renewable energy.
Equally significantly, on a bigger scale it now looks as though major cities outside London are starting to really commit themselves to cuts and timetables for action.
(14 November 2007)
Chicago takes a shine to Portland
Toby Van Fleet, Portland Tribune
As cities press environmental agendas, alliances could help them do more green work
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CHICAGO — It’s getting serious between Portland Mayor Tom Potter and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.
The two met privately here last week to discuss forming a sort of city partnership that would enable the two cities to collaborate on research and development in the areas of energy efficiency, renewable energy and green building.
While specific goals for such a collaboration have yet to be set, Susan Anderson, director of the city of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development, who also attended the meeting, said that together cities often can achieve more with less money, especially in the areas of research, including market research.
(13 November 2007)
Wales: How green is my valley?
Christina Zaba, Western Mail
When it comes to putting good eco principles into practice, Wales is ahead of the game.
LAST month Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed a citizens’ jury to help choose the design for 10 new eco-towns to be built across England – but Wales is way ahead of the game.
We have already started putting the eco-town agenda into practice across the country, with schemes that prove there’s more to sustainability than solar panels. From Wales’ own zero-carbon eco-city in St Davids in Pembrokeshire to the new grassroots Transition Town movement – spreading fast since an inaugural meeting in Lampeter in April – communities throughout the nation are fast putting politicians’ rhetoric into practice.
Andy Middleton, arch-surfer, West Wales businessman and sustainability pioneer, saw the writing on the wall when he founded St Davids eco-city six years ago as a way of testing out green principles in practice.
The father of four and owner of TYF Adventure, an adventure sports, management training and hotel business, is a key employer in the community, with a staff of 30 or so and a £1.5m annual turnover.
But he admits that when the eco-town idea was first mooted, he had no idea of the magnitude of what he was taking on.
(10 November 2007)
Also posted by Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture.
Post-carbon Cities and the Future of Growth
Adam Brock, The Wild Green Yonder
A review of Daniel Lerch’s “Post-Carbon Cities” lecture at the NYU Law School on Wednesday, November 7th.
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Like climate change, peak oil is a difficult concept to understand, and its implications are difficult to accept. It’s no wonder, then, that the theory is still pretty much off-limits to policymakers: openly discussing the fact that we might be in for some serious economic woes courtesy of dwindling oil supplies isn’t exactly a vote-winning platform. But, also like climate change, peak oil presents a pressing and potentially catastrophic threat to our future, and the sooner we take it seriously the better.
Daniel Lerch, author of the recently released book “Post Carbon Cities,” might be the best messenger for yet for the peak oil cause. I attended one of Lerch’s presentations at the NYU law school last Wednesday, and while it wasn’t quite up to Inconvenient Truth standards, I found it to be the most digestible explanation of peak oil I’ve encountered yet. Unlike Albert Bates, the engaging but decidedly forest-hued peak oiler that spoke in New York about a month ago, Lerch came across as practical-minded and sympathetic to skeptics. His target audience is planners and municipal policymakers, and he framed the dimensions of the peak oil crisis in language familiar to those groups.
The talk began with a few fundamentals: the demand for oil is accelerating, while the supply seems to have hit a plateau. Sooner or later, supply will outstrip demand, causing oil shortages that will get ever more severe as the remaining reserves become more difficult and expensive to extract. This much, to me, seems pretty hard to refute.
But why do most peak oilers predict that this energy gap will wreak havoc on the economy? Can’t we just scale back our consumption slightly for now and eventually replace the gap with energy efficiency and renewables? That’s certainly the popular consensus among politicians and grass greens. To quote Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who hosted a peak oil conference in 2005, “I don’t think it’ll affect the consumption of consumer products. It’s not gonna have a dramatic negative impact on our economy – we’re just gonna drive less.”
But according to Lerch, oil shortages are a lot less simple than having to turn down the A/C and line up to refill the gas tank. For one thing, models predict that once production starts slipping, it’ll slip fast – far faster than it’ll take to replace our needs with wind, solar or even nuclear. And as Lerch explained, In the last five decades we’ve become dependent on petroleum in countless ways, and seemingly insignificant disruptions in supply can have far-reaching repercussions. During the summer of 2006, for example, the spike in oil prices doubled the price of asphalt, a low-grade petroleum product. Routine road repairs were suddenly wildly overbudget, and many municipalities were forced to defer maintenance on their roadways.
Another chilling example is urban food supply. Many grocery chains nowadays stock their food on “rolling warehouses”, where food comes straight out of the factory or shipping dock and onto the truck to cut down on overhead. As a result, very little food is in storage near cities, so if an oil shortage like the one we experienced in 1973 were to occur today, many grocery stores could be empty within a matter of days.
One of the key concepts in Lerch’s talk was “energy uncertainty”: the notion that peak oil won’t just make energy prices higher, but also increasingly volatile. This makes it almost impossible to make long-term plans: how is a city supposed to cut a budget for its vehicle fleet if it doesn’t know whether gas will cost $3.50 or $6 a gallon?
Energy uncertainty is, of course, analogous to the “climate uncertainty” that the IPCC’s been talking about with regard to global warming. Put the two together, and you’re left with a frightening conclusion: two of the most complex systems on earth, the biosphere and global economy, are set to become much less stable within the next few decades.
Lerch’s proscription to city governments: start planning now. First off, follow the lead of Portland and Oakland, and create a peak oil task force to determine how petroleum shortages would effect your city. Strategize on how to relocalize energy production and manufacturing, plan infrastructure investments for the long-term, and, most importantly, start adopting a nonlinear, systems-thinking approach.
Peak oil or no, I couldn’t agree more.
(12 November 2007)
