planted city

From Bill Moyers:

The country’s best opportunity to mitigate climate change came three years ago, soon after President Barack Obama took office, with a friendly Democratic Senate and House of Representatives. The American Clean Energy and Security Act (otherwise known as Waxman-Markey, after its sponsors) passed the House – barely.

It later failed in the Senate, punted along until it was eventually abandoned in July 2010. Since then, our elected officials have largely ignored the heat-trapping gases causing enormous disruptions across the planet.

The 2009 bill saw lobbying efforts unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Environmental groups pushing for the legislation, including the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, spent a record $24.6 million lobbying in 2009, employing nearly 500 lobbyists in their hefty effort.

But even that kind of cash was grossly outmatched by the oil and gas industry, which also had a record spending year in lobbying: $175 million and 807 lobbyists. No wonder the bill didn’t stand a chance.

No piece of legislation since Waxman-Markey has been anywhere near as comprehensive in lowering carbon emissions. And smaller efforts have been decimated by the oil and gas industry’s influence on Capitol Hill. Take a recent vote to end $24 billion in tax breaks for big oil companies. 43 Senate Republicans and four Democrats filibustered to block the bill. All told, the 51 senators in favor of ending subsidies had received a paltry $5.9 million in career contributions from oil and gas. The 47 who protected the subsidies got $23.5 million.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• ‘Unburnable Carbon – Are the world’s financial markets carrying a carbon bubble?’ (Carbon Tracker)
• ‘The great carbon bubble: Why the fossil fuel industry fights so hard’ (Energy Bulletin)

(Image sources: Will Blog for Food; Carbon Tracker Initiative)

Climate Cartoon: A Big (Oil) Barrier to a Clean Energy Future… 

(Source: Dayton Daily News via The Oil Drum)

Related:

• ‘The Great Carbon Bubble: Why the Fossil-Fuel Industry Fights So Hard’ (Grist)
• ‘Clean Energy Switch to Cost Fossil Industry $4 Trillion by 2020’ (Clean Technica)
• ‘Today, ALEC Hosts Legislators & Big Oil — Topic? Undermining Clean Energy’ (Clean Technica)
• Memo: Group Wants To Create Fake Grassroots Wind ‘Subversion’ Campaign That ‘Should Appear As A Groundswell’ (Climate Progress)

A big barrier to a sustainable future: ‘When scientists predict calamity, politicians plug their ears’ (LA Times)

A few paragraphs from the CityFix article, ‘User Preference Key to Implementing Sustainable Transportation’, highlighting some important lessons for improving the walkability and bikeability of cities. The article profiles a new report, ‘Integration of Biking and Walking Infrastructure into Urban Communities’, which “highlights best practices and identifies program characteristics associated with high levels of non-motorized travel.” You can check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: TheCityFix)

From the Vancouver Sun:

Since retrofitting buildings to make them sustainable is both more expensive and less effective than building them right in the first place, we create 50- to 100-year consequences when we construct buildings without consideration for sustainability.

Such buildings are leading sources of greenhouse gases, guzzle up our natural resources and are expensive to maintain for their century-or-so-long lifespan. The encouraging news is that many of these 100-year consequences are avoidable. Next-generation green buildings can be built now with mostly off-the-shelf technology at a cost similar to equivalent conventional buildings over their life cycles (in other words, higher construction costs are offset by lower operating and capital renewal costs). The University of British Columbia’s new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is one such example.

CIRS captures energy from the sun, the ground and a neighbouring, less-efficient building. In doing so, it not only covers its own heating requirements, but returns energy to the less-efficient building, thus reducing the campus’ natural gas consumption. Its wood structure — much of which utilizes pine beetle-affected wood from B.C. and Alberta — sequesters more than 600 tonnes of carbon and offsets greenhouse gas emissions from other non-renewable materials used in the building’s construction. It satisfies its own water needs by collecting Vancouver’s abundant rainwater and treats it on-site, leaving it cleaner.

Why are such best practices, increasingly adopted in Europe, still not universally adopted by developers and construction companies in North America? The barriers are not technical and rarely are they purely economic. Rather, they are institutional: codes of practice, regulatory requirements, performance criteria, even job descriptions push us toward less sustainable choices. To give one example, it is very difficult institutionally to transfer the benefits of lower operating and capital renewal costs from the operating side of the ledger to the capital side. As a result, sustainable buildings that have higher capital costs but actually cost less on a total cost of ownership basis are typically not built.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Inhabitat via UBC)

Above is response given by biologist Walter Reid to the following question:

Given the current state of the world and of ecosystem services, what changes are most critical in order to move toward a sustainable and desirable future for humanity?

(Source: Solutions Journal; Graphic credit: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment via US E.P.A.)

~ A quote from the recently translated Peak Oil analysis written by the German Military (via ASPO). You can read a summary of the report over at Energy Bulletin.

(Image credit: Johns Hopkins Public Health)

A  Presentation from the 2011 Eco-City World Summit: ‘Networked Urban Sustainability: Breaking the Integration Barrier’

Here is a presentation from urban sustainability researcher and planner Alex Aylett at the 2011 Eco-City World Summit. On his blog, he explains that:

This presentation is something I put together for a general audience. It’s jargon free, and aims to get across a few key points that have emerged in my research over the past four years.

It all centers around one question: “How  can we go from small scale changes in  urban processes, to large scale sustainability shifts that take place across a city as a whole.”

Check out more on his blog or over at Sustainable Cities.

From Yale e360:

From the first quarter of 2010 to the fourth quarter, installations of U.S. residential solar systems rose from 62 megawatts to 74 megawatts (enough to power about 15,000 homes), and the Solar Energy Industries Association reports that the first quarter of 2011 saw similar gains over the same period in 2010. Considering that the total installed solar capacity in the U.S. — residential, commercial, and industrial-scale of all types included — still hasn’t cracked 3,000 megawatts (enough to power roughly 600,000 homes), this feels like progress.

Yet if you look at residential solar’s share of the total U.S. solar market, the picture is less bright. In 2009, 36 percent of all installed solar systems were on homes; this dropped to 30 percent in 2010, and some experts think that will continue to fall. 

…

In some European countries — most notably Germany — generous government incentive programs and ambitious renewable energy targets have created a far more robust solar sector, including residential solar. In 2010 alone, Germany installed 7,400 megawatts of photovoltaic systems — more than double the entire existing solar capacity in the U.S. About 700 megawatts came from 100,000 small, residential-sized systems. Shiao said that Germany’s and Italy’s solar markets have traditionally been driven by residential and small commercial installations.

The primary issue stopping most U.S. homeowners from putting solar panels on their roofs is cost. Solar systems are expensive — on the order of $20,000 to $25,000 or more, depending on the system’s size and other factors. And even though these systems can end up paying for themselves in the long run with lower electricity bills, most families cannot find tens of thousands of dollars for the upfront costs. Prices of solar panels are steadily coming down, but are still not low enough to prompt a mass movement to solar, especially at a time of economic stagnation.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Ballard News Tribune)

David Suzuki & Thich Nhat Hanh in Conversation About the Health of the Planet

[Sustainable ecology expert] David Suzuki, Zen Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, and David Suzuki Foundation Chair Jim Hoggan in conversation about mindfulness, climate change and how to bring about the collective public awakening needed to restore health to the planet.

Read more about their conversation here.