Why in the world should Congress be considering a “Green Taxis Act”?
It’s because New York — plus Seattle, Boston, San Francisco and several other cities — want to switch their taxi fleets over to all-hybrid vehicles. But they’ve run into a big legal snag, and Congress may have to come to their rescue.
Switching cabs to hybrids promises some potentially stunning gains.
Take carbon emissions. In New York City, taxis alone account for 1 percent of total carbon emissions; switching them to hybrids would be the equivalent of taking 35,000 cars off the road.
Second, there’s gas consumption. A standard taxicab such as V-8 powered Ford Crown Victoria gets about 14 miles to a gallon of gas. But some hybrids, running on a combination of gasoline and electricity, get as much as 36. The hybrid advantage is especially high among taxis because they so often find themselves idling or creeping along in traffic, generating pollutants all the time. Hybrids just don’t need internal combustion energy in that situation.
In New York City, where the typical cab is driven 80,000 miles a year, the Crown Victoria consumes 5,700 gallons a year, the leading hybrids 2,200 gallons. If we want to curb American oil consumption, what better starting point?
Finally — and arguably most significantly — there is the health issue. Most vehicles are worrisome smog generators. Their tailpipes emit not just carbon dioxide but also nitrogen oxides, benzene and particulates. The public pays the price in heightened levels of asthma, other respiratory diseases, and increased susceptibility to cardiac incidents — triggering sometimes deep personal tragedies and drains on public health budgets.
So what’s the hang-up slowing down hybrid conversions across the country?
Taxi fleet owners, who lease out their cabs to individual drivers, flinch at the original hybrid purchase price (often several thousands dollars higher). The hybrids’ big savings end up not in the pockets of the fleet owners but the drivers, who buy their own fuel.
So in 2008, when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg set fuel standards designed to convert all of the city’s 13,237 taxis (its legendary “yellow cabs”) to hybrids by 2012, he was immediately challenged.
The city’s Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents the fleet owners, went to court arguing that only the federal government has the power to regulate emissions and fuel efficiency. The Federal Clean Air Act and a companion environmental law of the 1970s, they argued, preempted states or local governments from regulating in the field.
A federal judge in New York ruled in favor of the fleet owners. Bloomberg was not pleased, declaring:
“The decision is not a ruling against hybrid cars, rather a ruling that archaic Washington regulations are applicable and therefore New York City and other cities are prevented from choosing to create cleaner air or a healthier place to live.”
Then the city passed an incentive program to encourage yellow taxi owners to convert to hybrids, and was again slapped down by the court.
Now the case is before the U.S. Court of Appeals and there’s a new player — the Obama administration. It’s entered the fray with a “friend of the court” brief vigorously defending the right of New York — and Boston in a parallel case — to set rules for its own taxicab fleets. The move is significant because it’s rare that the federal Justice Department would make a major point of defending states’ and localities’ rights.
And there’s another new player: Congress. The Green Taxis Act, permitting cities to move forward without preemption roadblocks, has been introduced by two New Yorkers — Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand and Rep. Jerrold Nadler.
The legislation, Nadler argues, would “finally empower New York City and other cities to make their fleets greener and more accessible.”
Gillibrand adds: “As a mother of an asthmatic child, I believe this bill is a win-win for our children and our efforts to combat climate change.”
There’s even a “Buy in USA” angle — the still-dominant Crown Victory is manufactured in Canada, but the leading hybrid alternative — the Ford Escape — is produced in the Kansas City area.
The big question, of course, is whether the Green Taxis Act will attract enough attention to achieve passage in a busy and distracted Congress.
Narrow parochialism might stymie it. Rohit Aggarwala, Bloomberg’s Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, says word has filtered back from some Capitol Hill circles that “it’s a joke because no one outside of New York thinks taxis are important.”
That would be sad: Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C. all have all expressed definite interest in the clean taxi program. Big fleets await clean-up in Houston, Miami, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Denver, Phoenix and St. Louis as well. Cumulatively, smaller cities’ fleets add up to big numbers.
If we Americans can’t give our cities a green light on this straightforward reform, then our health and climate futures are indeed dim.
Source : Neal Peirce / Mar 07 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Citizens’ Emergency Training: Fukuoka’s Global Model
Do you know the best survival strategies when an earthquake hits? Would you know how to prepare for a tornado, lean into hurricane-force winds, escape from a smoke-filled room? If fire hit your home, would you know how to use that fire extinguisher you bought years ago?
The earthquake in Haiti, followed in close order by major seismic eruptions in Chile, Okinawa and Taiwan, should be a wake up call for a re-examination of readiness across the globe. We Americans should learn to be a little less obsessed with terrorism, much more about preparedness. The reality is that an earthquake or monster storm or wildfire epidemic could spell disaster for many more of us.
There’s a lot cities can do about this. And I got my first clue sitting on a plane to Fukuoka, Japan, as part of my work organizing the annual international city study missions of the Trade Alliance and Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. The city, I discovered in my reading
materials, listed a disaster training center as a tourist attraction.
What could that be about? So on arrival in Fukuoka, I made a Sunday afternoon stroll to see what the center was all about. To my amazement, there was a line of families in the parking lot waiting to enter. I toured the facility and complimented one of the workers on parents bringing their children for training. She said, “That is not correct, sir. The children are bringing their parents. All school children must annually visit the center. They like it so much, that they bring their parents on the weekend.” The facility is run by the Fukuoka fire department.
Every major city in Japan, I learned, has an experienced-based disaster training center run by the city government. There is nothing like this in the United States. My discussions with local Red Cross and other officials suggest the American system is simply not effective. But the professionals I talked with were genuinely excited by the Japanese approach.
We brought our Seattle delegation to the Fukuoka center as part of the study mission. A sample of what they saw:
In one room there’s an interactive screen the size of a wall in one’s home. In the corner of the screen is a waste paper basket. Against the wall are four red fire extinguishers. Paper in the waste basket catches fire. The fire begins to spread. Four children run to get the extinguishers and spray them on the fire. If done properly, the fire goes out. If not, the room burns up!
It turned out that none of the over 74 Seattle delegates had ever used a fire extinguisher before, although all of them had one in their home.
Another room is set up as a kitchen, with a table, four chairs and a gas stove. Four of our delegates sat at the table. The room began to rock and shake to simulate either a 5.0 or a 7.0 earthquake. One turned off the stove while the others dove under the table and held onto the table legs. Afterwards, one of our business delegates said he would bolt his home to the foundation on his return to Seattle.
The center allows one to escape a smoke-filled room, learn about floods, experience typhoon-level winds, examine a medivac helicopter, and practice CPR. We discussed home safety precautions, smoke detectors use, and other day-to-day safety tips.
A U.S. Navy base in Japan uses a center near Fukuoka for the certification of baby sitters. Training for care givers from retirement homes and hospitals, school teachers and day care provider staff is possible. Every new Toyota employee in Fukuoka must go through the center.
Back home, prompted by what we’d seen and experienced in Fukuoka, the Seattle City Council appropriated $75,000 to hire a firm to do a feasibility study, visiting other Japan centers to flesh out its possible recommendations. We concluded the best metro site for the center would be at Seattle Center, which receives 12 million visitors annually. The facility could also be connected to the Pacific Science Center to add the science of fire, earthquakes or floods. We received contributions from insurance companies, hospitals and others to complete a phase two study. We also concluded that the Japanese approach was a perfect national demonstration for Homeland Security.
We asked Fukuoka to invite the Secretary of Homeland Security to visit its facility. It’s said in the Orient that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Perhaps President Obama, on his next trip to the Far East, should take along his Homeland Security advisers — and just as important, a delegation of mayors from across America — to visit the Fukuoka facility. The next step could be a series of demonstration projects in interested cities nationwide. The cost would likely be a fraction of what we spend checking bags and padding down passengers in airports every day — and in the long run, infinitely more important.
Source : William Stafford / Mar 07 2010
The earthquake in Haiti, followed in close order by major seismic eruptions in Chile, Okinawa and Taiwan, should be a wake up call for a re-examination of readiness across the globe. We Americans should learn to be a little less obsessed with terrorism, much more about preparedness. The reality is that an earthquake or monster storm or wildfire epidemic could spell disaster for many more of us.
There’s a lot cities can do about this. And I got my first clue sitting on a plane to Fukuoka, Japan, as part of my work organizing the annual international city study missions of the Trade Alliance and Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. The city, I discovered in my reading
materials, listed a disaster training center as a tourist attraction.
What could that be about? So on arrival in Fukuoka, I made a Sunday afternoon stroll to see what the center was all about. To my amazement, there was a line of families in the parking lot waiting to enter. I toured the facility and complimented one of the workers on parents bringing their children for training. She said, “That is not correct, sir. The children are bringing their parents. All school children must annually visit the center. They like it so much, that they bring their parents on the weekend.” The facility is run by the Fukuoka fire department.
Every major city in Japan, I learned, has an experienced-based disaster training center run by the city government. There is nothing like this in the United States. My discussions with local Red Cross and other officials suggest the American system is simply not effective. But the professionals I talked with were genuinely excited by the Japanese approach.
We brought our Seattle delegation to the Fukuoka center as part of the study mission. A sample of what they saw:
In one room there’s an interactive screen the size of a wall in one’s home. In the corner of the screen is a waste paper basket. Against the wall are four red fire extinguishers. Paper in the waste basket catches fire. The fire begins to spread. Four children run to get the extinguishers and spray them on the fire. If done properly, the fire goes out. If not, the room burns up!
It turned out that none of the over 74 Seattle delegates had ever used a fire extinguisher before, although all of them had one in their home.
Another room is set up as a kitchen, with a table, four chairs and a gas stove. Four of our delegates sat at the table. The room began to rock and shake to simulate either a 5.0 or a 7.0 earthquake. One turned off the stove while the others dove under the table and held onto the table legs. Afterwards, one of our business delegates said he would bolt his home to the foundation on his return to Seattle.
The center allows one to escape a smoke-filled room, learn about floods, experience typhoon-level winds, examine a medivac helicopter, and practice CPR. We discussed home safety precautions, smoke detectors use, and other day-to-day safety tips.
A U.S. Navy base in Japan uses a center near Fukuoka for the certification of baby sitters. Training for care givers from retirement homes and hospitals, school teachers and day care provider staff is possible. Every new Toyota employee in Fukuoka must go through the center.
Back home, prompted by what we’d seen and experienced in Fukuoka, the Seattle City Council appropriated $75,000 to hire a firm to do a feasibility study, visiting other Japan centers to flesh out its possible recommendations. We concluded the best metro site for the center would be at Seattle Center, which receives 12 million visitors annually. The facility could also be connected to the Pacific Science Center to add the science of fire, earthquakes or floods. We received contributions from insurance companies, hospitals and others to complete a phase two study. We also concluded that the Japanese approach was a perfect national demonstration for Homeland Security.
We asked Fukuoka to invite the Secretary of Homeland Security to visit its facility. It’s said in the Orient that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Perhaps President Obama, on his next trip to the Far East, should take along his Homeland Security advisers — and just as important, a delegation of mayors from across America — to visit the Fukuoka facility. The next step could be a series of demonstration projects in interested cities nationwide. The cost would likely be a fraction of what we spend checking bags and padding down passengers in airports every day — and in the long run, infinitely more important.
Source : William Stafford / Mar 07 2010
Sustaining Sustainability: It Ain’t Always Easy
A little more than a dozen years ago, a collection of three adjacent suburban towns in the sprawling Sun Belt region of Charlotte did something extraordinary. After months of public workshops, lectures and community discussions, months of looking at slide shows to choose what kinds of streets, stores, houses and apartments they wanted for their towns, they revamped their town codes. They aimed to discourage conventional suburbia and encourage traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented projects and farmland preservation.
It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.”
But as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys sang decades before, “Time changes everything.”
“It faded away in Cornelius first,” says David Walters, an urban design professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has worked as a consultant for all three towns starting in the mid-1990s.
“The torch didn’t get well passed,” says Bill Coxe, transportation planner in Huntersville, a one-time mill-town and railroad hamlet that has grown from less than 3,000 people in 1988 to an estimated 39,000 in 2006. In both Huntersville and the next-door town of Cornelius, early enthusiasm for concentrating development into higher density nodes and for pushing more growth into the towns’ tiny, historic downtowns has faltered, victim of elections and the departures of some key planners, mayors and town managers. It hasn’t helped that a long-wished-for commuter rail line remains in funding limbo.
Today, Huntersville town commissioners are thinking of using a city-owned former cotton mill site–purchased years ago with an eye to a mixed-use development clustered at a planned commuter rail stop–to build a new police station. After all, the reasoning goes, it would save money to use land the town already owns. And anyway, conservatives on the town board had successfully scuttled a deal with a willing local developer. That happened back in the pre-recession days when developers could still get financing.
By 2010, only Davidson–an affluent college town of about 9,000, home to Davidson College–was hewing religiously to its strategy: channel most growth into already developed areas, protect the village feel of its historic downtown by requiring new development to fit in with the old and try to protect open land in its fast-disappearing rural surroundings.
In Huntersville, by contrast, “The cadre who believed in it moved on,” Coxe says. “Now you just have a bunch of suburbanites. And they just don’t get it.”
How, he wonders, do you embed into a town’s culture the precepts of smart planning, of building walkable town centers and channeling the growth into the areas where it makes sense to grow? After so much work by so many townspeople and elected leaders, how do you maintain that level of interest, engagement and understanding of the underlying principles? After all, most Americans still equate “density” with poverty.
With so many newcomers, and the generally transient nature of much of America, how many Huntersville and Cornelius residents were even aware of all those hours townspeople devoted 15 years ago? Walters worked with Cornelius, population about 13,000, on an area plan in 2003 and with Huntersville on a 2005 downtown plan. Public participation, he says, was “pretty disappointing.” And, he says, “More worryingly, there was not a whole lot of interest from public officials.”
In addition to the turnover and the influx of newcomers unaware of the past work, I suspect a piece of what has happened relates to starker political partisanship and more liberal-versus-conservative tensions in the past decade. Much about traditional neighborhood design might be considered conservative–such as its aim to hold down municipal services costs and its association with small-town values. But once “smart growth” came to be associated with environmentalism, it became a target for many conservatives suspicious of anything favored by liberals.
Yet the northernmost town of the three, Davidson, has held to its course. Walters credits many things, including its long-time mayor, Randy Kincaid, who only left office two years ago. “He got it,” Walters says. “He really didn’t need any convincing.” The town board, also, has seen little turnover and is generally well-educated about the complexities of growth and planning. And while the town’s top planners have changed, they’ve all been, in Walters’ words, “activist planners.”
And, as if happens, Davidson is a place enamored of itself. “Davidson’s own dynamics, its sense of specialness,” has, over the years, helped it work through difficulties and keep its eye on its goals, Walters says.
Coxe, the Huntersville planner, told me recently that he considers it a personal failure that Huntersville hasn’t held to its much-praised vision of a decade ago. I think he’s too hard on himself. Like a large number of Americans, many of Huntersville’s new townspeople have never lived anywhere but suburbia. That’s the way of life they know and love.
Walters, who has worked as a consultant on planning projects around the country, thinks the inability to stick to community plans is likely a continual problem, especially rapidly growing suburban areas such as Huntersville. He’s right. People move away. They forget. They elect new politicians. Time changes everything.
Even if 15 years ago hundreds of people devoted hundreds of hours to learn a better way to grow, Walters reminds us, you need “constant vigilance, constant education, constant programming of public events to keep the issues alive.”
Source : Mary Newsom / Feb 28 2010
It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.”
But as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys sang decades before, “Time changes everything.”
“It faded away in Cornelius first,” says David Walters, an urban design professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has worked as a consultant for all three towns starting in the mid-1990s.
“The torch didn’t get well passed,” says Bill Coxe, transportation planner in Huntersville, a one-time mill-town and railroad hamlet that has grown from less than 3,000 people in 1988 to an estimated 39,000 in 2006. In both Huntersville and the next-door town of Cornelius, early enthusiasm for concentrating development into higher density nodes and for pushing more growth into the towns’ tiny, historic downtowns has faltered, victim of elections and the departures of some key planners, mayors and town managers. It hasn’t helped that a long-wished-for commuter rail line remains in funding limbo.
Today, Huntersville town commissioners are thinking of using a city-owned former cotton mill site–purchased years ago with an eye to a mixed-use development clustered at a planned commuter rail stop–to build a new police station. After all, the reasoning goes, it would save money to use land the town already owns. And anyway, conservatives on the town board had successfully scuttled a deal with a willing local developer. That happened back in the pre-recession days when developers could still get financing.
By 2010, only Davidson–an affluent college town of about 9,000, home to Davidson College–was hewing religiously to its strategy: channel most growth into already developed areas, protect the village feel of its historic downtown by requiring new development to fit in with the old and try to protect open land in its fast-disappearing rural surroundings.
In Huntersville, by contrast, “The cadre who believed in it moved on,” Coxe says. “Now you just have a bunch of suburbanites. And they just don’t get it.”
How, he wonders, do you embed into a town’s culture the precepts of smart planning, of building walkable town centers and channeling the growth into the areas where it makes sense to grow? After so much work by so many townspeople and elected leaders, how do you maintain that level of interest, engagement and understanding of the underlying principles? After all, most Americans still equate “density” with poverty.
With so many newcomers, and the generally transient nature of much of America, how many Huntersville and Cornelius residents were even aware of all those hours townspeople devoted 15 years ago? Walters worked with Cornelius, population about 13,000, on an area plan in 2003 and with Huntersville on a 2005 downtown plan. Public participation, he says, was “pretty disappointing.” And, he says, “More worryingly, there was not a whole lot of interest from public officials.”
In addition to the turnover and the influx of newcomers unaware of the past work, I suspect a piece of what has happened relates to starker political partisanship and more liberal-versus-conservative tensions in the past decade. Much about traditional neighborhood design might be considered conservative–such as its aim to hold down municipal services costs and its association with small-town values. But once “smart growth” came to be associated with environmentalism, it became a target for many conservatives suspicious of anything favored by liberals.
Yet the northernmost town of the three, Davidson, has held to its course. Walters credits many things, including its long-time mayor, Randy Kincaid, who only left office two years ago. “He got it,” Walters says. “He really didn’t need any convincing.” The town board, also, has seen little turnover and is generally well-educated about the complexities of growth and planning. And while the town’s top planners have changed, they’ve all been, in Walters’ words, “activist planners.”
And, as if happens, Davidson is a place enamored of itself. “Davidson’s own dynamics, its sense of specialness,” has, over the years, helped it work through difficulties and keep its eye on its goals, Walters says.
Coxe, the Huntersville planner, told me recently that he considers it a personal failure that Huntersville hasn’t held to its much-praised vision of a decade ago. I think he’s too hard on himself. Like a large number of Americans, many of Huntersville’s new townspeople have never lived anywhere but suburbia. That’s the way of life they know and love.
Walters, who has worked as a consultant on planning projects around the country, thinks the inability to stick to community plans is likely a continual problem, especially rapidly growing suburban areas such as Huntersville. He’s right. People move away. They forget. They elect new politicians. Time changes everything.
Even if 15 years ago hundreds of people devoted hundreds of hours to learn a better way to grow, Walters reminds us, you need “constant vigilance, constant education, constant programming of public events to keep the issues alive.”
Source : Mary Newsom / Feb 28 2010
Political Will and Love of Place: The West’s Climate Change Secret?
“Drought, extreme weather events, catastrophic wildfires, disruption of natural systems” –combined with “longer periods when streams are dry, with serious consequences for wildlife, natural habitats, and water supplies.” That’s the scenario for my region of America in a provocative recent Lincoln Institute of Land Policy report, “Planning for Climate Change in the West.”
And political will to address these challenges? The report notes that the Mountain West “has lagged behind other regions in pursuing aggressive planning strategies to reduce [greenhouse gases],” largely because of a conservative political culture and insufficient political will.
It is true that the region has tended to be politically conservative, and there may well be an above-average level of climate change denial among westerners. But there are also significant historical vectors at work here that could supply the political will this historic challenge demands.
It’s true that with climate change, western landscapes, historically hard to inhabit, will now become even more of a challenge. But let’s not miss the hopeful side. This hard country has always attracted and retained a hardy, resourceful set of people. From native tribes through homesteaders to western city-builders, a capacity to adapt to challenging conditions has been a baseline requirement for survival in these majestic but forbidding landscapes.
That adaptive capacity has been strengthened recently by a rise of cross-ideological, collaborative problem solving, especially around natural resource issues. No region of the country has produced more examples of loggers and environmentalists, farmers and fishermen sitting down together and hammering out mutually beneficial plans for managing particular watersheds or ecosystems. As climate change creates new challenges, that collaborative experience, now shared by thousands of westerners, will be a major political resource.
Another hopeful trend is the political realignment that has swept across the region over the past decade. The Lincoln report notes, “With views on the need for national climate action basically split along party lines, garnering political support for local efforts can be difficult in the largely conservative and traditionally Republican states.”
It’s true that by 2000 the interior West had become the nation’s most Republican region, with no Democratic governors, only three Democratic U.S. Senators, and only New Mexico voting for Al Gore in that election. By 2008, however, five of the region’s eight governors were Democrats, as were seven of 16 U.S. Senators. And Obama carried three mountain states.
This realignment has reflected a growing restlessness with an ideological brand of politics that bore little relevance to the region’s real challenges. Centrist Democrats like Colorado’s Salazar brothers, Wyoming’s Dave Freudenthal, and Montana’s Brian Schweitzer have been winning by offering a non-ideological, thoroughly pragmatic approach to the region’s challenges.
Many of those challenges arise from the fact that the Mountain West has been the nation’s fastest growing region since the late ’80’s, its economic center of gravity shifting from resource extraction to the increasingly attractive livability of western communities. Now, this center-staging of livability is contributing to the West’s capacity to address the challenges of climate change.
It’s still true–climate change is not yet something that keeps a majority of westerners up at night. The economic viability of their communities is another matter, though. Significantly expanding ranks of westerners, including business leaders, now understand that prosperity and livability are intimately linked. As the Lincoln Institute report notes: “An array of familiar smart growth strategies for creating healthier communities now double as climate solutions.”
A prime example–Utah, where the citizen- and business-supported Envision Utah process of recent years helped to set new, land- and community-conserving priorities. So it was no surprise when Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becket said in his 2010 State of the City address: “If I were to sum up … our goals for 2010 in one word, it would be ‘livability.’”
True, the words “climate change” don’t appear in Becker’s speech. But I found a long list of accomplishments and aspirations, all aimed at making Salt Lake City more livable. They range from bike lanes, street cars and expanded light rail to downtown revitalization and programs to promote eating locally. All these initiatives contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s not why most Salt Lake City residents welcome and support them. They support them, and provide the political will to make them happen, because they love living in the hard, beautiful, mountain-and-desert landscape they call home, and they are willing to do what it takes to live well there. Most westerners join them in a rugged, pragmatic love of this place we call home. In that rootedness lies the West’s best hope to meet the challenges of climate change.
Source : Daniel Kemmis / Feb 20 2010
And political will to address these challenges? The report notes that the Mountain West “has lagged behind other regions in pursuing aggressive planning strategies to reduce [greenhouse gases],” largely because of a conservative political culture and insufficient political will.
It is true that the region has tended to be politically conservative, and there may well be an above-average level of climate change denial among westerners. But there are also significant historical vectors at work here that could supply the political will this historic challenge demands.
It’s true that with climate change, western landscapes, historically hard to inhabit, will now become even more of a challenge. But let’s not miss the hopeful side. This hard country has always attracted and retained a hardy, resourceful set of people. From native tribes through homesteaders to western city-builders, a capacity to adapt to challenging conditions has been a baseline requirement for survival in these majestic but forbidding landscapes.
That adaptive capacity has been strengthened recently by a rise of cross-ideological, collaborative problem solving, especially around natural resource issues. No region of the country has produced more examples of loggers and environmentalists, farmers and fishermen sitting down together and hammering out mutually beneficial plans for managing particular watersheds or ecosystems. As climate change creates new challenges, that collaborative experience, now shared by thousands of westerners, will be a major political resource.
Another hopeful trend is the political realignment that has swept across the region over the past decade. The Lincoln report notes, “With views on the need for national climate action basically split along party lines, garnering political support for local efforts can be difficult in the largely conservative and traditionally Republican states.”
It’s true that by 2000 the interior West had become the nation’s most Republican region, with no Democratic governors, only three Democratic U.S. Senators, and only New Mexico voting for Al Gore in that election. By 2008, however, five of the region’s eight governors were Democrats, as were seven of 16 U.S. Senators. And Obama carried three mountain states.
This realignment has reflected a growing restlessness with an ideological brand of politics that bore little relevance to the region’s real challenges. Centrist Democrats like Colorado’s Salazar brothers, Wyoming’s Dave Freudenthal, and Montana’s Brian Schweitzer have been winning by offering a non-ideological, thoroughly pragmatic approach to the region’s challenges.
Many of those challenges arise from the fact that the Mountain West has been the nation’s fastest growing region since the late ’80’s, its economic center of gravity shifting from resource extraction to the increasingly attractive livability of western communities. Now, this center-staging of livability is contributing to the West’s capacity to address the challenges of climate change.
It’s still true–climate change is not yet something that keeps a majority of westerners up at night. The economic viability of their communities is another matter, though. Significantly expanding ranks of westerners, including business leaders, now understand that prosperity and livability are intimately linked. As the Lincoln Institute report notes: “An array of familiar smart growth strategies for creating healthier communities now double as climate solutions.”
A prime example–Utah, where the citizen- and business-supported Envision Utah process of recent years helped to set new, land- and community-conserving priorities. So it was no surprise when Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becket said in his 2010 State of the City address: “If I were to sum up … our goals for 2010 in one word, it would be ‘livability.’”
True, the words “climate change” don’t appear in Becker’s speech. But I found a long list of accomplishments and aspirations, all aimed at making Salt Lake City more livable. They range from bike lanes, street cars and expanded light rail to downtown revitalization and programs to promote eating locally. All these initiatives contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s not why most Salt Lake City residents welcome and support them. They support them, and provide the political will to make them happen, because they love living in the hard, beautiful, mountain-and-desert landscape they call home, and they are willing to do what it takes to live well there. Most westerners join them in a rugged, pragmatic love of this place we call home. In that rootedness lies the West’s best hope to meet the challenges of climate change.
Source : Daniel Kemmis / Feb 20 2010
Wishing Green to Succeed–In a Future That’s Red
Members of President Obama’s “green cabinet” were greeted like rock stars by nearly two-thousand believers in a more sustainable future at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference earlier this month.
We know this in part because Washington, D.C. city planner Harriet Tregoning–who introduced Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ray LaHood, secretary of the Department of Transportation, and Lisa Jackson, director of the Environmental Protection Agency–came right out and called them rock stars and everybody cheered in agreement.
This was a particularly friendly audience, to be sure, and predisposed to like the administration’s plans to bring smart growth and planning to the–gasp–federal level. The gathered planners and local government officials were also a technically knowledgeable bunch. Where else would it be an applause line to say that not only municipalities but regional planning entities could now apply for a particular federal grant program? Or that there are plans to put the “UD” back in “HUD”?
“We have been working on these issues for so long, to have this cadre of people as leaders is just amazing,” Tregoning said. “No one will work harder to make sure you are wildly successful.”
By the time the convention hall emptied, however, there remained plenty of reasons for pessimism. The reasons have to do with message, money, and politics.
The coordination of the federal agencies responsible for housing, transportation, and the environment, as well as diplomatic relations with energy and agriculture, is itself a landmark achievement. First–and this may sound trifling, but it’s important–HUD, DOT, and EPA are getting out of each others way. They have identified programs and criteria that work at cross purposes, and moved towards seamless coordination.
As LaHood pointed out, why should DOT fund a transit line in one neighborhood if HUD is investing in housing a mile away? Why not bring them together? Several states have seen the virtue of aligning capital budgets on one page in this way. LaHood also touted inter-city high-speed–or perhaps we should say “higher-speed” rail, and a halt to transport projects that are environmentally damaging.
To implement these coordinated policies, each of the agencies has created sub-units–although inexplicably, given them slightly different names in each case (I guess some federal agency habits are just ingrained). HUD has the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which will mete out $140 million in grants for local smart growth efforts ranging from the redevelopment of vacant lots in cities to home financing that includes energy efficiency upgrades and location-efficient mortgages. DOT has the Office of Livable Communities, and EPA the Office of Sustainable Communities.
It may be a small thing, but any marketing campaign needs a strong, consistent, clear message. That seemed to be lacking in remarks prepared by three different staffs. Just how is the administration going to move a sustainability agenda forward? Emphasize jobs and economic prosperity, the three cabinet members wrote an op-ed essay in the Seattle Times. It’s a similar new-green-economy approach flagged in a recent report on planning for climate change.
At New Partners, though, there was no honest talk about the two things clearly standing in the green cabinet’s way: concern about staggering budget deficits, and a political-cultural shift away from taking action on problems like climate change, made clear by the election in my home state of Massachusetts by Republican Scott Brown. (Brown said he would vote against not only health care reform but cap-and-trade legislation as well).
Plans for inter-city rail were clearly music to the ears of those gathered in Seattle. Is it really going to happen? Will transportation reauthorization truly be transformed? Between legitimate worries about the deficit and national debt, and earmarking ways of Congress, there’s no clear path. Similarly, the money devoted to supporting local smart growth is $140 million more than what was there before. But it’s still not a lot, even when properly leveraged.
It’s obviously hard to move into Washington and change the way of doing business. But there was something about the nature of the presentations–Jackson canceled at the last minute and spoke by video, despite heading the agency that co-sponsors the New Partners conference–that suggested something less than a big-time campaign of change.
“It’s time the federal government spoke with one voice,” said Donovan–to wild applause. Was it epic poetry? No. But it may be the extent of incremental change we can expect in these perilous times.
Source : Anthony Flint / Feb 13 2010
We know this in part because Washington, D.C. city planner Harriet Tregoning–who introduced Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ray LaHood, secretary of the Department of Transportation, and Lisa Jackson, director of the Environmental Protection Agency–came right out and called them rock stars and everybody cheered in agreement.
This was a particularly friendly audience, to be sure, and predisposed to like the administration’s plans to bring smart growth and planning to the–gasp–federal level. The gathered planners and local government officials were also a technically knowledgeable bunch. Where else would it be an applause line to say that not only municipalities but regional planning entities could now apply for a particular federal grant program? Or that there are plans to put the “UD” back in “HUD”?
“We have been working on these issues for so long, to have this cadre of people as leaders is just amazing,” Tregoning said. “No one will work harder to make sure you are wildly successful.”
By the time the convention hall emptied, however, there remained plenty of reasons for pessimism. The reasons have to do with message, money, and politics.
The coordination of the federal agencies responsible for housing, transportation, and the environment, as well as diplomatic relations with energy and agriculture, is itself a landmark achievement. First–and this may sound trifling, but it’s important–HUD, DOT, and EPA are getting out of each others way. They have identified programs and criteria that work at cross purposes, and moved towards seamless coordination.
As LaHood pointed out, why should DOT fund a transit line in one neighborhood if HUD is investing in housing a mile away? Why not bring them together? Several states have seen the virtue of aligning capital budgets on one page in this way. LaHood also touted inter-city high-speed–or perhaps we should say “higher-speed” rail, and a halt to transport projects that are environmentally damaging.
To implement these coordinated policies, each of the agencies has created sub-units–although inexplicably, given them slightly different names in each case (I guess some federal agency habits are just ingrained). HUD has the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which will mete out $140 million in grants for local smart growth efforts ranging from the redevelopment of vacant lots in cities to home financing that includes energy efficiency upgrades and location-efficient mortgages. DOT has the Office of Livable Communities, and EPA the Office of Sustainable Communities.
It may be a small thing, but any marketing campaign needs a strong, consistent, clear message. That seemed to be lacking in remarks prepared by three different staffs. Just how is the administration going to move a sustainability agenda forward? Emphasize jobs and economic prosperity, the three cabinet members wrote an op-ed essay in the Seattle Times. It’s a similar new-green-economy approach flagged in a recent report on planning for climate change.
At New Partners, though, there was no honest talk about the two things clearly standing in the green cabinet’s way: concern about staggering budget deficits, and a political-cultural shift away from taking action on problems like climate change, made clear by the election in my home state of Massachusetts by Republican Scott Brown. (Brown said he would vote against not only health care reform but cap-and-trade legislation as well).
Plans for inter-city rail were clearly music to the ears of those gathered in Seattle. Is it really going to happen? Will transportation reauthorization truly be transformed? Between legitimate worries about the deficit and national debt, and earmarking ways of Congress, there’s no clear path. Similarly, the money devoted to supporting local smart growth is $140 million more than what was there before. But it’s still not a lot, even when properly leveraged.
It’s obviously hard to move into Washington and change the way of doing business. But there was something about the nature of the presentations–Jackson canceled at the last minute and spoke by video, despite heading the agency that co-sponsors the New Partners conference–that suggested something less than a big-time campaign of change.
“It’s time the federal government spoke with one voice,” said Donovan–to wild applause. Was it epic poetry? No. But it may be the extent of incremental change we can expect in these perilous times.
Source : Anthony Flint / Feb 13 2010
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