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.

The World's Worst Traffic

The City Fix, an excellent web site on urban issues, reports that the worst automobile traffic in the world is in Bangkok, Thailand. In a world that includes Los Angeles, Houston, Mumbai, and Peking, this comes as somewhat of a surprise. But it probably should not. According to the report, the Bangkok authorities have made the situation even worse by, in effect, subordinating all planning and design to traffic movement—a policy which has backfired in at least one respect. To make room for more roads, the authorities covered the city's canals with concrete. Since the canals served not only as transportation routes, but as reservoirs for rainwater (which Bangkok gets in abundance), the loss of the canals has led to greatly increased flooding. This in turn increases congestion and slows down traffic.

Traffic in Bangkok is so bad that "'hundreds of women over the past few years have been forced to give birth in cars.' Police are now trained in midwifery" as a matter of routine. Productivity has suffered greatly—even more than in car-centric cities like Los Angeles, where traffic delays of more than an hour are routine.

Anyone who wants to see the future without congestion controls, it appears, has only to look at Bangkok. It is not a pretty sight.

No Place for Walkers

There are a lot of things to dislike about the American suburbs. There is no streetscape; the houses all look similar; the houses are too big and cheaply built. Suburban planning and design, which assume abundant cheap fuel and no climate change, are among the more important causes of the outlandish American carbon footprint.

But the most annoying problem with the suburbs is simpler to state and harder to remedy: there is no place to walk. Often there are not even sidewalks, as if walking was actively discouraged. Perhaps it is.

A new web site, walkscore.com, shows just how difficult it is to walk in the suburbs. The walkscore calculations are imperfect in some respects, and the maps are sometimes out of date. But the walkability scores that the site generates ring true. To get a score, the user types in an address. The site then calculates the score based on how close the address is to shopping, libraries, fitness centers, and other services. On a scale of 100, anything above 70 is considered walkable. 50-70 is borderline. A score below 50 means that a car is a practical necessity, and there is nowhere to walk—at least not if you want to use local services.

My own experiment with walking scores, while not systematic, was enlightening. I ran scores on addresses from Philadelphia, some Philadelphia suburbs, and some other suburbs where friends and family live. Here, in descending order of scores, are the results:

Office in Central Philadelphia: 98
Home in a Philadelphia neighborhood: 82
Apartment in an older suburban town: 80
Home near the Philadelphia city limits: 71
Home in a Portland, OR, suburb: 40
Home in a newer Philadelphia suburb: 22
Home in a new Tucson, AZ, suburb: 11
Home in the country in New Jersey: 5

This is all very unscientific and unsystematic, but it is no surprise. Anyone who has lived in or visited the suburbs knows they are not walkable. And anyone who looks at the cost of fuel and the climate change numbers knows that the suburbs are also unsustainable.

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.

Biofuels—A Greater Hazard Than We Thought

Biofuels from corn and other crops, which were supposed to be the silver bullet that would fuel cars without affecting climate change, are actually a worse source of greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, according to a report in the New York Times. Two recent studies published in the journal Science looked at the overall greenhouse gas effect of biofuels—including emissions from the production process, the consequences of land clearance to grow crops for use as fuel, and other factors. They concluded that production and burning of fossil fuels was less harmful to the earth's climate than production and burning of biomass fuels.

These two studies add to the already-strong case against increasing our use of biofuels. In addition to their overall effect on the environment, fuels derived from food crops have raised the price of food and hurt farmers in some developing countries. (See the summary in a recent issue of Sojourners.) And their other environmental and social effects—particularly destruction of forests which are the homes of many plant and animal species, including humans—hardly bear thinking about.

Biofuels have long been promoted as one answer to many problems, not just climate change. But on closer inspection, their virtues turn out to be far less than their supporters claim.

• Supporters claim that biofuels could replace some fossil fuels and lessen the West's strategic dependence on oil from the Middle East and Russia. The problem is that biofuels could not replace enough fossil fuels to make a difference unless we devoted an indefensible (and dangerous) amount of arable land to their production.
• Biofuels could theoretically be less expensive and have more stable prices than fossil fuels. But market forces would operate on biofuels as much as on fossil fuels. As demand for ethanol rises, and more and more land is devoted to its production, either food or fuel prices—and probably both—are bound to rise.
• And, of course, there is the claim that biofuels could help to save the planet. The science is now showing that this claim is unfounded.

In the end, the claims for biofuels seem at least poorly supported. The truth is that we cannot grow enough biomass crops to fuel the world's transportation fleet. An increased emphasis on biofuels, as in recent action by Congress mandating their greater use, is no substitute for finding ways to get from place to place more efficiently. One can't, for example, make a private automobile more efficient than a train simply by changing its fuel. Gallon for gallon, the train will always use fuel more efficiently.

We cannot just slot in biomass fuels and keep driving everywhere. In the long run, the planet will not support it.

The Price of Coal

Coal-fired plants are a primary source of electricity in the United States, China, and many other countries. There are proposals in the U.S., including one in Pennsylvania, to manufacture liquid fuel from coal because there is a lot of coal in the ground, and synthetic fuels would lower U.S. dependence on Middle East oil.

Coal, that is, is central to industrial society as we now know it. But it comes with costs. It is a major source of greenhouse gases, soot, and smoke. Coal mining—the traditional underground sort of mining—is one of the most dangerous professions on earth. These are among the costs of coal.

There is another price we pay for our coal: the destruction of some of our most beautiful and precious mountains and the culture of the people who live in them. The people of Appalachia have long suffered more than their share of poverty. Now they also suffer, even more than in the heyday of "strip mining" (removal of the earth above a coal seam), from environmental ruin. The method of this devastation is called mountaintop removal. It is, according to the mining companies, more efficient and safer than underground mining. What they fail to mention is what it does to the hills, the valleys, the watersheds, and the people who must live next to mountains whose tops have been blown off.

A detailed description of mountaintop removal and its effects is at ilovemountains.org. When a mining company blows off the top of a mountain to get at the coal beneath, the debris from the explosion must go somewhere—and "somewhere" usually means into the valleys below. This disrupts watersheds that have existed since long before there were humans in those valleys. It leads to flooding, destruction of property and roads, and huge economic costs in a region that is already poor. (Little or none of the proceeds from mountaintop removal find their way back to those same valleys.)

To environmental and economic costs, we can add spiritual and aesthetic ones. Mountain people may not have a great deal of money, but because of the beauty of the mountains they are seldom poor in spirit. Mountaintop removal destroys that beauty—a loss which is in some ways more painful than any economic cost.

All this because we have not found a substitute for coal to feed our appetite for power. And because we have assumed that the cost of energy is what we see in our electric bill. It is not. In the long run, the price of coal as we now extract and use it is too high to pay.

Wagering on the Future

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal suggested in his Pensees that believing in God is a better "bet" than not believing. This is Pascal's Wager, which

. . . posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists than not to believe, because the expected value of believing (which Pascal assessed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing. (Wikipedia)

Those who "bet" on God, Pascal argues, lose nothing if they are wrong, but gain boundless life now and in the next world if they are right. Those who "bet" against God lose nothing if they are right, but gain nothing—and may reap eternal punishment in hell for the fact of their unbelief—if they are wrong.

As an argument for religious belief, Pascal's Wager is not persuasive. Philosophers and theologians have presented many criticisms of it since Pascal's time, but the chief difficulty with it is simple: No one commits to religious belief or unbelief because of a bet. People do not manage their spiritual lives that way.

As a rough guide to risk management, however, the Wager (which is actually an example of decision theory) can be useful. It can clarify issues, and in using it we are forced to make at least approximate predictions about the consequences of our wagers.

Consider its application to climate change. The scientific consensus is that the climate is growing warmer, and that human-generated greenhouse gases—mainly from burning fossil fuels—are a major cause of the change. Those who accept this theory argue for policies that will reduce our production of greenhouse gases. A small number of skeptics argue that any observed warming is part of a natural cycle and not subject to change by human action or inaction.

In the original Wager, readers were asked to "bet" by choosing whether to live as if God is real. Applying this reasoning to climate change, we "bet" by choosing either to live as if human actions—our actions—can make a difference or choosing to live as if our actions make little or no difference.

If our actions can make a difference, then we would want to make some changes in our way of life. For example:

• We might invest in public transit to encourage people to drive less, thereby using less oil;
• We might invest in technologies, existing and new ones, not based on fossil fuels, to generate electricity; and
  
• We might invest in technologies that use less energy (e.g., compact fluorescent light bulbs) in order to use less fuel of any kind.

These actions and others we might take have one thing in common: All of them have side benefits quite apart from their effect on climate change. If we burn less fossil fuel, we will be less dependent on oil from unstable parts of the world, and our air will be less polluted. If we improve public transit and drive less, our roads will be less full and travel will become easier even for those who must drive (e.g., ambulances, which will get to hospitals faster). If we invest in sustainable technologies, we can open up new possibilities for economic development and jobs. Thus, even if we have bet wrongly and the skeptics turn out to be right, our world will be a cleaner and better place to live.

If, on the other hand, we bet that the skeptics are right, we need not take any actions to reduce our use of fossil fuels. We might want to for strategic reasons (to protect our economy from disruptions in oil supplies) or because we think reducing pollution is a good thing in itself. But nothing in the skeptics' position compels us to change. We would probably reduce pollution and fossil fuel usage less than if we had bet against the skeptics. Thus, if the skeptics turned out to be right, we would very likely be quite a lot worse off. The planet would still be warming alarmingly, the air would be more polluted, and we would still suffer from traffic jams and oil dependency.

If it turns out that the skeptics are wrong, and we have lived as if they were right, we would face the prospect of greater and faster global warming than if we had bet against the skeptics—and the air would likely be more polluted, the roads more jammed, and our lives far more at risk.

It should be an easy bet to make.