Oil Now and in the Future

Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog, Dot Earth,has an excellent article on the implications of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The article looks at the future of oil, the spill itself, and policy changes that will need to be made.

The article will be found here.

Well worth reading.

The City Fix Highlights Noteworthy Stories

The City Fix, an excellent blog on sustainable cities, has inaugurated a new Friday series "highlighting the newsy and noteworthy" stories about cities that appeared in the past week. The series will cover five general themes

• Mobility;
  
• Quality of life;
  
• Environment;
  
• Public space, and
  
• Technology and innovation
  

The first two in the series are full of useful links:

February 26: Driving on the Rise, Transport Contributes to Climate Change, Sidewalks Improve Relationships

March 5: Olympics Transport Legacy, Obese Cities, BRT in NYC

Well worth following.

Three Modest Proposals

Buildings and transportation are the sectors of the U.S. economy that generate the most greenhouse gases. Refitting our houses, public buildings, and neighborhoods to make them sustainable will take time. It will create new industries and jobs, but it is a long-term, not a short-term solution.

Transportation is both a long-term and a short-term problem. The Cash for Clunkers program, which recently concluded, was touted partly as a way to cut fuel use, and therefore greenhouse gases. Most reports showed that it effectively cleared auto dealers' inventory but did little for fuel use or the environment.

Cash for Clunkers was a camel—a horse designed by a committee—but it is not too late for other ideas that could, if implemented, have more impact on fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Herewith, three such ideas. They are simple in principle and easy to understand. They would help lower fuel use and emissions. They are not, however, camels, and because they are not, they may never make it through Congress. I present them in the order of likelihood.

• Delivering the Goods: Driving to a store and back uses fuel. Multiply this by tens of thousands of cars, and it uses a lot of fuel. If more stores offered free delivery service, more people could avoid driving to the store and back, which in turn would economize on fuel because one delivery truck on a well-planned route uses less fuel than hundreds of cars driving to the store and back. Free delivery would also allow small businesses to compete with big box stores, which generally do not deliver. To encourage delivery services, why not offer businesses below a certain size an up-front tax credit if they provide free delivery? This would be simple to do; it would be a tax cut for the sector that generates more new jobs than any other; and it would economize on fuel.
  
• Cap and Reward: Why not create a voluntary fuel-saving program for households? Households which enrolled in the program would receive a fuel card based on their annual use of fossil fuels. They would present the card each time they paid for fuel, and it would be debited according to how much fuel they used. At the end of the year a household that used less fuel than the previous year would get a tax credit for economical fuel use. There would be no penalty for going over the previous year's usage—just a strong incentive to economize. The program would be voluntary, and hence not intrusive. It would be popular—who doesn't want a tax credit? And it would almost certainly save fuel and help to cut emissions.
  
• Rides for Clunkers: The original Cash for Clunkers program was designed to move cars off dealers' lots. Rides for Clunkers would try to cut fuel usage and move people to public transit. A family which traded in a high-fuel-use car for one that was more economical would, instead of cash, receive a transit card worth, say, $3000 in free rides on public ground transit, including trains, buses, and light rail. Transit riders who commute often pay less than half of this amount in a year, so the card might provide as much as two years in free rides. Those who abandoned their cars entirely and sold them for scrap would receive $6,000 in free rides. This program would require some setup, and Congress doesn't really like public transit very much, so it has the least chance of being implemented. Still, it is worth presenting for discussion.

In the long run, cutting fuel usage and emissions will become so important that, if we don't find alternatives based on incentives and attractive voluntary programs, we will almost certainly have to resort to rationing in some form. Starting now, with programs that encourage economy without coercing it, is the best way to go in a free society. Whether Congress and state legislatures will see that is quite another matter. One can only hope.

Car Sharing Reaches a New Milestone

The City Fix reports that Zazcar, a Brazilian company,has launched a car-sharing service in Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo thus becomes the 1,000th city in the world to have a car-sharing service, and the first in Latin America.

Getting There from Here—Mobility and Freedom

First in an occasional series on the ethics and practicalities of mobility.

How, in a finite world, can we get from here to there? Should we even be traveling at all? How much, and how freely?

For most of us most of the time, broad questions like these do not come up. We worry about getting to work, keeping the car fueled and running, getting to the train on time, and similar problems. Underlying all of these, however, is the question of mobility—how much we should have and how we can achieve it most efficiently.

Any discussion of mobility has three aspects:

• The Ethics of Mobility: Should we be able to move freely from place to place? If not, how are we to determine restrictions on our movements? More important, who can legitimately make that determination? (Here I am speaking about policy decisions; the ethical questions facing individuals are different from those facing policymakers.) If we have some sort of right to mobility, we face a series of decisions about the best modes of transport. Hence the second aspect of the discussion:
  
• The Efficiency of Our Transportation: How can we move individuals and large numbers of people from place to place at the lowest cost in fuel, money, stress, and emissions? Once we have a proposal to do this, we need to determine how to apply it in practice:
  
• Implementation of Transportation Plans: How can we persuade people to use the most efficient method to get to their destination?

I begin with ethics because most commentators don't discuss them. Most of our discussions concern how to make our transportation more efficient and less destructive, how to manage traffic, the state of our highways, and similar questions. To the question of whether we should be able to travel from place to place, most of us answer, "Of course," without further justification.

This is the most defensible position, but it never hurts to remind ourselves why we adopt it. The ability to move from place to place—to change cities, to change countries, to get from home to our place of work—is a fundamental component of human liberty. Countries that have restricted it, as Czarist Russia did with internal passports, are unattractive models for the future. An internal passport under the Czars was a means of social control that required a large and intrusive enforcement apparatus. Unlike a mere identity card, it could be, and was, used to restrict peoples' movements.

In order to save fuel and reduce our carbon emissions, it might be useful to restrict travel, limit the use of automobiles, or force travelers to choose certain modes of transport over others. We would do this, however, only at the cost of becoming a quite different, and far less free, society. It is no accident that totalitarian societies restrict mobility as well as speech, requiring exit visas for those who wish to go abroad and proper paperwork even for those who want to go to a different city.

Choices about mobility are also choices about what kind of society we will have. The wrong choices may change us in ways we might be unable to bear.

That, in brief, is part of the ethical case for preserving freedom of movement. Stated generally like this, it does not provide much practical guidance. The practical question is whether we can preserve mobility without destroying the planet, and if so, how. The next article in this series will take up this question, along with other ethical questions it raises.

Recycling the Suburbs—Followup Notes

Alison Arief has now posted a followup note on the suburbs in her By Design blog. Based partly on comments from readers, it is enlightening not only for Arief's analysis and resource recommendations, but for what it reveals about the attitudes of urban dwellers toward suburbanites and vice-versa.

Since the suburbs as they now stand are becoming less viable every day, it is up to all of us to find humane, sustainable ways to retrofit them. Arief's followup note shows how difficult this may be. Teamwork begins with the sense of being on the same side. With respect to making the suburbs more sustainable, there are a lot of good ideas out there. And there are a lot of unhelpful attitudes. Let's hope this can change, and quickly.

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Recycling the Suburbs

The American suburb—fuel-intensive, automobile-based, and without walkable neighborhoods—is coming to the end of its useful life. Rising fuel costs and the collapse of the mortgage market mean that some planned developments will not proceed, some developments that have begun will never be finished, and many suburban residents will have to move to smaller and less expensive houses.

Those who, like James Howard Kunstler. dislike the suburbs, expect and hope that they will collapse of their own weight. Others, including this blog, have tried to find ways to make existing suburbs more sustainable by measures like connecting them with public transit and revising zoning codes.

One of the most interesting recent discussions of the design problems posed by the decline of the suburbs is a recent posting in Alison Arief's By Design blog. Although the article reaches no conclusions—Arief admits that she has no perfect solution—it outlines the difficulty of finding creative approaches to recycling the suburbs even while it hopes they will be found.

Well worth reading.

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Smart Cars, Hybrids, and Our Spaceship

For just over a year now, I have been using a Toyota Prius from PhillyCarShare (see my short description) when only a car would do the job—for hauling items too heavy for a hand cart, a long trip to a place with no public transit, and similar tasks.

The Prius is unquestionably a fine piece of engineering. On a 200-mile trip with city and highway driving, it averaged about 45 miles per gallon of fuel. It provides feedback on all its systems, and most of its controls are digital and easy to use. It rides comfortably, accelerates smoothly, and has a sleep mode for the engine that virtually eliminates idling at traffic lights. If the solution to our transportation problems were merely a change of automotive technology, the Prius would be a good candidate for the assignment.

So, to be fair, would the so-called "smart car," a small vehicle which is becoming popular among sport utility vehicle (SUV) owners and others looking for fuel economy now that gasoline in the U.S. is hovering at $4.00/gallon. Automobile makers, even those in the U.S. who previously didn't get it, are rushing to fill the demand for efficiency even as they struggle to sell thousands of unwanted low-mileage SUVs. General Motors, which has been staggering toward bankruptcy for the last nine months or so, is even advertising alternative fuel cars powered by hydrogen, electricity, and hybrid technology similar to that of the Prius.

All of this sounds good, and it cannot hurt if we begin to drive more efficient vehicles. But the problem goes beyond fuel efficiency. The private car has always been the least efficient way to move people from one place to another. Making our cars smaller and more economical will do little to change this. One city bus, for example, can replace 40-50 cars if each car carries one person. If each car has a passenger and a driver, the bus can still replace 20-25 cars. This saves road space, speeds up commuting, and uses less fuel per passenger-mile than even the most efficient car.

The private car has another and more important inefficiency. A high percentage of an automobile's carbon footprint stems from the resources used to manufacture it. Buses and trains also have a built-in footprint, but because they carry passengers more efficiently than a fleet of cars, their total footprint per passenger-mile is lower than a private car.

There is also the question of parking space. One of the major problems with a car is that you have to put it somewhere. Central Philadelphia has over 500 parking facilities, many of them surface lots that break up the urban fabric, complicate water runoff, and turn some areas of the city into treacherous wastelands—literally: empty, deserted areas like parking lots can encourage crimes against persons.

The earth, which is in effect a kind of spaceship, does not have this kind of room to waste. Shared cars, on the PhillyCarShare model, would, if widely used, take up less space than a fleet of cars that outnumbers licensed drivers (as in the United States). There would be fewer of them—one shared car for every 20-30 drivers instead of more than 1 private car per driver. They would come close to the architect Moshe Safdie's concept of the utility car, which would be available for short trips around a city after a traveler or commuter had arrived in the city by train or bus. The Prius or a smart car would make an excellent utility car. It also makes a good shared vehicle.

What these new car models cannot do is transform the world merely by replacing the current car fleet. Replacing all our SUVs with Priuses would save fuel. It would not save the planet.

The Virtues of Age, Part 2

Older, walkable neighborhoods are, as I argued in another posting, good for the environment and the sense of community. Now a study from the University of Utah, described in Tara Parker-Pope's New York Times "Well" blog,shows that older neighborhoods may also be good for one's health. Walkable neighborhoods encourage residents to walk—to the store, to the library, to a neighbor's house, and to many other neighborhood locations. Newer, suburban-style neighborhoods are designed to keep car traffic moving; they do not encourage walking. In many cases, they effectively discourage it.

Walking is exercise in the outdoor air. Driving is sitting still in a large, moving steel box. A walk to the store uses calories and relieves stress. A drive to the store uses fewer calories and much of the time makes daily stress worse. Which is better for the body? The question almost answers itself. Little wonder that the Utah study found that walkable neighborhoods are better for your health than communities where residents drive everywhere.

One more reason for choosing to live in a city neighborhood.

The Virtues of Age

We live on a block and in a neighborhood full of old houses. Most of the houses on our block have three stories; some, like ours, share a wall with another house. Others stand alone. The houses around the corner are all classic Philadelphia row houses—one of the most efficient house designs ever devised.

On our block, the houses differ in design, in distance from the street, and in other ways, but they have much in common. They are not large by modern standards; our house is about 1,575 square feet, much smaller than a typical McMansion (3,000 square feet). None has a garage, although the house next door has a converted carriage house that can shelter a car. All have entrances that face the street and welcome visitors. All have small front gardens.

It is not an exercise in nostalgia, but the literal truth, to say that no one builds houses like these today. In an exchange of letters on suburban housing in a recent Atlantic Monthly, a builder pointed out that because the market favors large houses, developers must economize on material and methods in order to make a profit. For instance, they use sheetrock instead of lath and plaster, and molded plastic windows and trim, because these save money. For a smaller house, fewer shortcuts might be necessary.

More to the point, during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, no one built neighborhoods like the ones that are common in cities. There is a good vegetable store on the corner of our street. Within easy walking distance one can find two drug stores, a hardware store, two supermarkets, a pizzeria, a library, five schools, several medical and dental offices, and two veterinary offices.

Suburban developments have no corner stores, walkable shopping streets, or local schools within half a mile of where students live. They have distant supermarkets and big box stores, shopping malls, and consolidated schools, none accessible to most residents without a car. Hence the two or three-car garage which dominates many modern houses and inevitably raises every family's carbon footprint when they drive to the mall or to school.

The suburban way of life, so dependent on cheap fuel, is nearing the end of its viability. Architects and planners like the New Urbanists are designing walkable neighborhoods modeled on blocks like mine. One does not have to agree with all of New Urbanism to see that they are on the right track. We must live in smaller, more efficient houses, and we need to be able to walk, not drive, to neighborhood amenities.

This is not a radical change, though in a world full of suburban development it may seem so. We already have neighborhoods like this in our cities. The stereotype of the city—that its people are either very poor or very rich—has just enough of the truth to be credible. But it is not the whole story. Many city neighborhoods, like my block, are affordable, pleasant places to live. In the future, we will need more such places.

Toronto's Greenbelt Leads the World

Urban sprawl—the uncontrolled growth of automobile-driven suburbs—has increasingly been recognized as a form of blight. It destroys vital farmland to create tract house developments miles from work, shopping, and even good walking areas. Suburban shopping districts cling to the edges of the highway, each store with its own parking lot, or close themselves from the outside world in shopping malls surrounded by the inevitable acres of asphalt for parking. Sprawl is an offense to the eye, the aesthetic sense, and the planet.

One proposed solution to the sprawl problem is the creation of greenbelts, areas of land closed to development and protected for agriculture, parks, and wildlife. The largest and most creative of these, according to a study reported in the April 9, 2008, Globe and Mail, is the greenbelt surrounding Toronto.

"Ontario's greenbelt is positioned to be the most successful and most useful greenbelt in the world," concluded the study, compiled by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, a Toronto-based think tank.

Commissioned by the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, the study compared Toronto's greenbelt with similar efforts in Canada, England, and Europe.

According to the report, greenbelts face at least two major problems: pressure for development, and "leapfrogging" of sprawl over the greenbelt.

So far, the province of Ontario has resisted pressure from developers to open the Toronto greenbelt to sprawl.

"My goal and my mantra that drives me is that we're going to be doing nothing but expanding the greenbelt," Municipal Affairs Minister Jim Watson said in an interview [with the Globe and Mail.]

To avoid "leapfrogging," Ontario authorities hope to expand the greenbelt, in effect doing the opposite of opening the protected land to development.

Allison Arieff on Housing and Community

Allison Arieff's latest posting in her blog for the New York Times ("Is Your House Making You Look Fat?") is a sharply-written essay on how to design houses for lower environmental impact, greater sense of community, and better health for those who live in them.

Well worth reading.

California Cuts Back and Grows

One of the standard arguments against cutting greenhouse gas emissions—cited by opponents ranging from right-wing talk show hosts to the Bush Administration—is that making the necessary changes will damage the U.S. economy. Supporters of change often point to the economic opportunity offered by investment in green technologies and refitting our society for the future to argue that the opposite is true, that a sustainable society can also be prosperous.

Now there is evidence that the opponents of change may be wrong and the supporters right. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in an article on November 14 that since 1990, Californians had cut their per-capita greenhouse gas emissions by nearly ten percent, while their per-capita gross domestic product had continued to grow. Which is to say that Californians cut back and continued to prosper. Because California's population grew during this period, their overall emissions did not drop—but the news is encouraging nonetheless.

In the long run, our growth-based model of prosperity will become unworkable. It could not be otherwise in a world where resources are finite and the environment can no longer absorb the waste we put into it. But the California experience at least gives some hope that by moving to sustainability we will not make ourselves poor.

Greening the City

Cities have a bad reputation. It is in the city that crime rates are high and the streets are dark and forbidding. In modern mythology, the city is the place of Metropolis, Batman, the Godfather gangs, shootouts, drug lords, and the nightmare landscape of Escape from New York. It is a terrible, inhuman place, a place to leave for the clean air and safe surroundings of the countryside.

There is a good deal of irony in all of this. The clean and safe surroundings of the countryside have become the sprawling suburbs of big box stores, acres of parking lots, unwalkable streets, and traffic jams. And the cities have begun to take the lead in promoting a sustainable way of life. Here are three recent examples:

• At a recent Climate Protection Summit convened by the National Conference of Mayors, one speaker after another described how his or her city was rethinking neighborhood planning, public transit, and shopping—creating mixed-use, livable neighborhoods that are easy to reach and navigate without a car. The consensus was that cities must take the lead in becoming sustainable, if they are to have a future.
• Many of the most innovative green neighborhood groups are based in cities. A partial listing will be found under "Links—Urban Green Programs" in the right-hand column.
• New York City, whose residents already use public transit more than most Americans, will soon have a fully hybrid taxi fleet, which will lower the city's greenhouse gas emissions and save money and fuel for cab drivers.

The irony is that cities, for all their bad reputation, have always had the potential to be sustainable in ways that standard American suburbs could never be. And as they become sustainable, they will almost certainly become livable in ways that would surprise the people who fled them for suburbs that are becoming less viable with every increase in the price of gasoline.

Simple Changes and Common Sense Ideas

It's surprising how simple changes and common sense ideas can move us—more than we might have imagined—toward sustainability. The best-known example is the compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), which could prevent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions if it came into widespread use. CFLs have other virtues: they last far longer than conventional incandescent bulbs, and they use far less electricity, thereby saving a lot of money for those who use them.

CFLs are one simple idea, but there are many others. Here are three:

White Roofs: The traditional Philadelphia row house, which usually has party walls with its neighbors on the left and right, is an extremely efficient design for cold weather. With windows and doors only on the front and back and a black asphalt roof, it absorbs and retains heat well, thus saving fuel. In summer, however, the row house's advantage becomes a liability. The roof absorbs heat, as it is designed to do, and the house retains it, as it is designed to do. The house becomes a heat sink.

One obvious remedy for this problem is a white roof, which would reflect heat in summer without making the row house significantly less efficient in winter. Until recently no one seems to have thought of making row house roofs white. Now two cities, Chicago and Philadelphia, are experimenting with the concept. In Philadelphia, a local non-profit group, the Energy Coordinating Agency, has created Smart Energy Solutions, which provides a number of services, including installation of white roofs. The new roof lowers the temperature in the house an average of five degrees—which, for some people in row houses, can mean the difference between life and death. White roofs save on cooling costs, which saves fuel, and make the upper floors of traditional row houses more habitable than the traditional black roof. And by reflecting heat instead of absorbing it, they should help to cut down on the "urban heat island" effect and make cities less hot—if only very slightly—in the summer.

Car Sharing: The private car is the least efficient way to move people. Its manufacture uses huge amounts of raw materials, energy, and fossil fuels, and it would be hard to imagine a more efficient way to generate greenhouse gases than a traffic jam with thousands of car engines idling for half an hour or more.

That said, there are some trips, such as a visit to a garden shop and a return with plants for a home garden, where a small vehicle is most efficient. The problem is that car ownership is highly inefficient and expensive: it is actually cheaper to have no car (thus avoiding depreciation and maintenance costs), take a taxi where only a car will do the job, and use public transit the rest of the time. This is also a more sustainable and efficient way to get around than driving everywhere in a car whose manufacture uses resources and whose upkeep can be prohibitively expensive.

Groups like PhillyCarShare have begun to provide the obvious alternative: shared vehicles that group members rent only for the time they need them. Joining is free, and for those who use cars only occasionally there is no monthly fee. Rental rates are lower for more fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles. And many pickup points are at local train stops to help members get to their temporary car by public transit. It is a well-thought-out program.

Shared Tools: On our block, there is only one lawn mower. One neighbor owns it, but others on the block are free to use it, provided they return it with its cord. It is a highly efficient electric model which generates no exhaust pollution and, because most block residents use green electricity sources, a relatively small amount of indirect pollution. In all, a simple but good arrangement. By having only one lawn mower on the block, we also keep down the cost in materials and greenhouse gases of manufacturing separate mowers for each household.

This kind of informal arrangement is easy in a densely-populated city where neighbors talk across garden fences. It is more difficult in the spread-out suburbs, but it can be done. Everybody's lawns are well-mowed in our block, and nobody is seriously inconvenienced because if the mower is in use one day, it will be available the next.

Americans, on the whole, don't like sharing. They want their private space, their private tools, and their private cars. But sharing with neighbors, or with other members of groups like PhillyCarShare, makes life easier and more neighborly, not more difficult. Like white roofs, sharing tools and vehicles is a common sense idea that can help to build a sustainable and quite possibly more civilized future.

Insoluble Problems, Soluble Opportunities

In one episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the British political satire, the Prime Minister tells his cabinet that "every problem is also an opportunity." His Cabinet Secretary, a high-ranking civil servant, then observes that the cabinet must beware of creating "insoluble opportunities."

It is a wonderful exchange, and it tells us a lot about ourselves and the debate over climate change. Mainstream commentators no longer doubt the reality of climate change, but they see only problems in trying to cope with it. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it is argued, would do enormous economic damage, especially cutbacks at the levels recommended by scientists and the United Nations in its latest report. It is fraught with problems, so we cannot do it—or at least not at the recommended levels.

But, as the Prime Minister observed, every problem is an opportunity. Not every problem has a solution, but every problem gives us a chance to think anew about how we work, play, travel, and live our lives. And we may never cut back our emissions as much as we would like, but the effort to do so—to rethink our approaches—can lead us toward a better world even if we are not entirely successful.

Consider the problem of buildings. Buildings are one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. They are also one of the areas where change means opportunity, not privation. Retrofitting old buildings for more sustainability; designing new ones with smaller carbon footprints; even simple actions like installing insulation in old houses—all of these measures involve investment, money, and jobs. They are not insoluble problems, but soluble opportunities.

The central problem with buildings is not the technology. Architects already know how to build more sustainable buildings and refit old ones, and over time they will find better ways to do so. The central problem is with ourselves, and the saga of the Comcast Tower in Philadelphia is a good example.

The Comcast Tower was designed to be the world's tallest green building. Among its features was exclusive use of waterless urinals, a new technology that is known to save tens of thousands of gallons of water over time. The Philadelphia Plumber's Union, which has a great deal of political clout, objected. The objections delayed construction on the building and threatened to undercut its green certification. The problem, according to the plumbers, was that waterless urinals would result in less work for members of the union. They were a problem—not an opportunity.

The plumbers were trapped in old thinking. It is perfectly true that installing waterless urinals takes less time (and is therefore less lucrative) than installing conventional ones. But waterless technology is the future; conventional plumbing is the past. The Plumber's Union failed to see the opportunity to master a new technology which, in the long run, would preserve its members' jobs as new buildings adopted the new urinals and older ones converted to them. If Plumber's Union members would not install the technology of the future, someone else would. Failure to adapt, as in most situations, would mean failure to thrive.

A more sustainable society need not be a society in economic collapse. It could be a better place to live than our current world. But we will not see this, let alone achieve it, if, like the Plumber's Union, we fail to see that every problem is also an opportunity.

Eating for the Planet

In 1971, Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet argued that modern agribusiness practices and the Western meat-centered diet were wasteful and impractical in a world with a growing population. Lappe has since modified some of her dietary theories and begun to emphasize inequities in the food distribution system as a major cause of hunger. But one central assumption of the book still stands—more firmly now than in 1971: Our methods of food production and distribution and our diet preferences have major effects on the environment.

Thirty-five years later, the questions are different. Hunger remains an issue, but we now know that our food production and distribution are major contributors to the increase in greenhouse gases. Livestock—chiefly beef and dairy cattle, but other livestock as well—account for around 18% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative (LEAD). This figure includes the effects of deforestation to raise livestock, transportation, production of feed, and gas created by the animals themselves.

LEAD suggests that better farming methods and better animal feeds could mitigate many of the problems created by livestock. But greenhouse gases from livestock are only part of a larger problem in the developed world: the production and distribution of food itself. In the United States, much of our produce comes from California and Florida, usually by truck, at enormous cost to the environment. Much of it is nourished by artificial fertilizers, produced and transported at enormous cost to the environment.

Some of this would be hard to avoid even in an ideal world. Staple grains will not grow everywhere, for example, and need to be transported somehow from the places where they will grow to the places where they will be eaten. But, even in the era of sprawl, the United States still has a lot of good farmland where livestock could be raised more humanely and less destructively than at present—and where both livestock and produce could be farmed nearer to where consumers live.

Raising livestock and produce more naturally and locally would not only benefit the environment. It would have health and taste benefits as well. Naturally-produced hamburger, for example, is more expensive than the standard McDonald's variety. But it is less likely to give you e coli infection or mad cow disease, and it tastes better than the bland stuff that passes for beef in fast food restaurants. Local produce almost always tastes better than produce from across the country because it is fresher. And it is likely to be more nutritious, again because it is fresher.

It is easy to see that if we ate less meat and more vegetables—as the U.S. government itself has recommended—we and the environment would be healthier. What is not so obvious is that we would also be eating more enjoyably and more traditionally. The great cuisines of the world—French, Chinese, Italian, and hundreds of others—have never centered around 16-ounce servings of beefsteak. They are not vegetarian, but by using fresh ingredients and cooking them with care, they can produce delicious and healthful meals using far less meat than is standard on American tables. Huge servings of meat are not even traditional in the U.S. Many of our classic dishes, like Boston baked beans, were designed to stretch meat when it was a rare and expensive commodity. Some, like macaroni and cheese, contain no meat at all.

Healthy, delicious, and good for the environment—a combination that is hard to beat when talking about food. Those who look for good ingredients and cook them with respect will never miss McDonald's. They may even wonder why they ate there in the first place.

Brief Note: Sustainable South Bronx

To rebuild for the future, we have to start somewhere. An individual can change his or her behavior, and that is all to the good. But individuals by themselves can change little without organizing—to pressure policymakers, to stop ill-considered and harmful developments, and most important, to change our institutions in a positive way.

In cities, the best vehicle for organizing is the neighborhood. People in the neighborhood know each other, they share a common interest in the welfare of the community, and if something is wrong with the environment in their area, they can sometimes literally smell it.

That was the case a few years ago in the South Bronx. It is less so now, thanks to one of the most exciting grassroots environmental efforts in the country: Sustainable South Bronx. Founded by Majora Carter, who grew up in South Bronx when it was, quite literally, New York's dumping ground, this organization has helped reverse the decline of the neighborhood and created hope where before there was the smell of rotting industrial waste. It is a group that more than repays study and a model for similar groups everywhere.

The Economics of Green

A recent report by the leading economic and strategic analysis firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, The World in 2050, argues that, contrary to U.S. government assertions, reducing the world's carbon emissions 60% by 2050 would have little economic impact—and might have substantial economic benefits—if we did it right. The report compares several scenarios, with the emphasis on two of them, and concludes

The projections demonstrate that if countries sit back and adopt a "business as usual" approach, the result could be a more than doubling of global carbon emissions by 2050. Based on current scientific thinking, this could have potentially serious longer term implications in terms of global warming and related climate change.

On the other hand a scenario such as the "Green Growth Plus" strategy outlined in the report could allow for continued healthy growth whilst controlling carbon emissions.The Green Growth Plus strategy

incorporates possible emission reductions due to a greener fuel mix, annual energy efficiency gains over and above the historic trend, and widespread use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Of the scenarios considered in the report, only this ‘Green Growth Plus’ strategy stabilises atmospheric CO2 concentrations by 2050 at what the current scientific consensus suggests would be broadly acceptable levels.

The greener fuel mix considered in the report includes nuclear power, biofuels, and alternative power sources like wind and solar. It is, according to PriceWaterhouse, a strategy for maintaining prosperity without destroying the planet.

In the long run, we will have to develop a new type of prosperity that does not depend on growth. But without change along the lines suggested by PriceWaterhouse, we will not get to the long run. Green Growth Plus is not the ultimate solution to the problem of living with limitations, but it or something like it would be a step in that direction. And it is far more sane and hopeful than business as usual—the old style of growth that is slowly killing us.

An Unforbidden City

Yesterday's posting described Orange County, China, a residential development that replicates an American suburb. In fairness to the Chinese, I should also point out that a team of environmental designers from Berkeley has recently proposed a far more sustainable form of development which, if adopted, bodes well for the future of China and could provide a model for other places. The full story is found in Unforbidden Cities, by Harrison Fraker, Jr.

The proposed community includes

• a stronger emphasis on public transit and non-polluting forms of transport like bicycles;
  
• community development centered around public transit stops; and
  
• most important and exciting, extensive use of renewable energy and recycling to make the community as self-sufficient and carbon-neutral as possible.

The central discovery in this project was the potential of "whole system design":

As the project progressed, the Berkeley team became more and more excited by the potential for the whole system design concept to be a real breakthrough, to be a reproducible model for sustainable development throughout China and the developing world. The buildings are platforms for producing energy from renewable sources such as wind and sun. Sewage is not treated and dumped, but processed into energy, fertilizer, and water for irrigation. The landscape is more than eye pleasing; it is a multi-functional contributor to the systems. There is little or no waste, and all energy is generated on site. Most importantly, the neighborhood becomes essentially a self-sufficient unit, a circular system. It does not require the construction of expensive new power plants, new sewage treatment and water supply outside the system.

This approach to community development, however, had its downside as well.

The new design requires a radical transformation in the development process. In addition to constructing housing units, the developer has to build a comprehensive, on-site utility system of energy production, water supply, and sewage treatment, which is beyond the developer's traditional scope of work. It requires getting approvals through government agencies that are narrowly proscribed and not accustomed to thinking across their jurisdictions. Most importantly, it requires design and construction professionals to share responsibility and to work collaboratively, to which they are unaccustomed. It requires paying 15 to 20 percent of the costs up front. Even though the life cycle costs are significantly less than the cost of constructing new centralized utilities, the question becomes: Who owns, operates, and maintains the system, and how are they compensated for the service? Some models exist for funding and operating on site systems, but none is as comprehensive and integrated as the one proposed.

Despite these potential problems, the Fraker team's approach offers an alternative for community design—not just in China and the developing world, but in the advanced economies. It will be interesting to see whether it is widely adopted in China.