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It's time to link climate and energy policy to land-use policy. We won't be able to reduce emissions and escape fossil fuels if we keep building communities that require massive amounts of driving.
That's practically a truism among greens, but I'm not sure it's really entered the political bloodstream, so it's nice to see a kick-ass journalist like Ron Brownstein making the point in a prestigious publication like National Journal.
David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.
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The hidden cost of coal
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stopgreenpath Posted 4:39 am
08 Aug 2008
this would also zero out the problem and provide options for those of use who don't want to live in crowded, cramped, noisy spaces, and those of us who want to have large organic gardens, outdoor play areas for kids, and decentralize our lives and make them more independent from Big Energy, Big Transit and Big Developers rather than re-centralize and re-enslave ourselves.
there is definitely something for everyone, but we need good energy policy to make it happen, which means, in addition to cityscapes and mass transit for city dwellers, feed in tariffs and incentives for those of us living farther from city centers to do the right thing.
finally, don't forget that many, many jobs could be performed from a home office, rather than a commute, and encouraging employment policies that allow/encourage people to work mostly from home will make an enormous difference...
the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:08 am
08 Aug 2008
But instead, we can all "decentralize" even further, thereby destroying what's left of the ecosystems in the US...and while we're at it, might as well help the rest of the world pave over what's left of the rainforests.
We've been having quite the discussion of the survivability of the suburbs over here, and it's a big messy subject matter not amenable to simplistic solutions either way (either they will all die or you'll just have to change what's under the hood of the car).
So do you represent Big Suburbia?
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Wolverine Posted 7:26 am
08 Aug 2008
Suburbs are completely ecologically and environmentally destructive, period. People who don't want to live in dense urban environments should live in the country naturally, without roads and private motor vehicles. Remember, global warming is only one of many serious environmental and ecological harms caused by roads and driving.
The root of the problem is, as usual, overpopulation. I actually dislike living like a rat crammed into a small cage with a bunch of other rats and only live is cramped San Francisco because my wife likes it here (I far prefer Berkeley, or at least Oakland where most of my friends are and which, while cities, are much less densely populated). The level of industrial noise is intolerable, when I ride my bike on side streets I am still bothered by far too much auto traffic, and there are always people everywhere.
But the positive side is that you don't need a car to live here, we walk to excellent Thai, Chinese, Sushi, and Indian restaurants, we take public transit to movies, walk or take public transit to live music, and I take public transit with a backpack to farmers markets and ride my bike to do other grocery shopping. None of this is possible in the suburbs, which require massive driving and cause direct destruction of natural areas just by their existence. So if you support protection of natural land, support of suburbs is completely inconsistent with that protection.
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:30 am
08 Aug 2008
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JMG Posted 7:33 am
08 Aug 2008
Will you come over and cut down the tall fir trees a couple houses over? Might want to do it at night, the neighbors are REALLY attached to the trees around here, but my solar guy said that PV would never work because of all the shading, and these are really tall trees, so they're taking a BUNCH of houses out of the zero energy thing.
And don't forget to install additional air conditioning for the loss caused by removing the trees ...
And ...
The 5% Project
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stopgreenpath Posted 9:13 am
08 Aug 2008
i am simply saying that there are already a LOT of people living in these non-city-center areas. what you are proposing is some ridiculous, impossible, forced migration for the vast majority of Americans into crowded cities that cannot be retro-designed to accommodate that level of influx. just the sewers alone would be completely, totally, impossible, not to mention every other single aspect of human life. maybe if we had a blank slate and were designing from scratch, this all-highrise system would have made sense, i don't know. what i do know is that it's completely infeasible at this point.
mine is actually a more practical solution - i don't know the stats, but probably 70% of Americans do NOT live in city centers. the suburban and rural "infrastructure" is already built, those ecosystems are already destroyed. You are kidding yourself if you think it is a sustainable solution to trash all that and start completely over.
i never said that MORE sprawl is the answer, just that if we want to make sense of where we are starting, we should make the most of what we can do, based on the systems we already have. our structures and lifestyles have been built based on waste - wasted space, wasted energy, wasted resources.
it seems to me that it is easier to reduce the waste in existing suburban and rural structures than to level them, try to restore the land to it's pre-suburban state, force everyone into concrete high rises which cannot possibly power themselves, miss an opportunity for people to connect emotionally with the land by growing organic gardens, and miss an opportunity for US to generate and control our own power, rather than staring, glassy eyed at the Big Energy idol.
thus, the phrase "silver lining." yes, sprawl is a dark cloud, and i am not encouraging MORE of it, but the silver lining is that since it already exists, we can have OPTIONS for people, and if they want to have a little garden and solar panels and use incredible insulation and passive solar designs and compost and recycle their water, etc., why can't we have that be one of the alternatives?
as for chopping down pine trees, rooftop generation is only one part of net zero, ideally a very small part. if we spent as much effort as we spent building a Mars Rover or redesigning cellphones on pushing the envelope (get it?) on net zero, it would be a no-brainer. sure, some homes would generate excess to cover for those who run at a deficit, but mine was not a house-by-house analysis, but a suggestion for what to do with existing suburbia to reduce its negative environmental impacts by like 90%.
i hope that makes a little more sense?
the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.
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Jon Rynn Posted 10:43 am
08 Aug 2008
Anyway, now I'm going bonkers because somehow you took either the article referenced in this post or some of the comments to mean that somebody, many people? are advocating essentially a "reverse Pol Pot" -- Pol Pot being the vicious dictator, who with his colleagues in the Khmer Rouge, sat around Paris deciding that the root of all evil were the cities, so a perfect society would have none. When they took over Cambodia, they forced everyone out of the cities, setting up the conditions for the "killing fields".
Now, what did anything that anyone say set up those kind of images? The scary thing is that, according to Paul Krugman in today's NY Times , a Republican Congressman was accusing the Democrats of wanting everyone to move to the "urban core" to live in "tenements", and horror of horrors, take light rail! All anybody said was that we might consider having denser town and city centers (if you're referring to my NYC-only post, that was clearly for the purposes of demonstrating points about land use and energy).
Of course if society can figure out a way to make suburbia possible in a sustainable society, most people would go for it -- we want to solve climate change, peak oil, biosphere destruction.
But please don't diss cities while we try to figure out how to construct survivable suburbs, it's not necessary and it only feeds into the story lines of exactly the people who want to keep power centralized.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 11:55 am
08 Aug 2008
Jon: check out the article in the recent issue: After Sprawl: The Humane Metropolis.
http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/PubDetail.aspx?pubid=1404 ...
Erik
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:25 pm
08 Aug 2008
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stopgreenpath Posted 5:04 pm
08 Aug 2008
just to be clear, i live in a city (plus have a teensy cabin in the wilderness), and i love it - i just appreciate that there are other options that don't have to be demonized if they are handled right. we all agree.
i was also blathering a bit too much, because alls i wanted to say was that while we plan better live/work, mixed-use and other hyphenated communities, we could GREATLY improve those we already have. even the exurbs. sigh. coulda been a lot more concise...
good night all. sorry for the overkill.
the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:20 am
09 Aug 2008
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Wolverine Posted 8:10 am
09 Aug 2008
All the facts you stated re current conditions and what's possible by moving people around are correct, but as I've said ad nauseam, the root of the problem here is overpopulation, which can't be fixed by anything except lowering the population. And when it becomes low enough, it's time to plow up the suburbs and exurbs and restore the native plants and animals as much as physically possible.
If your goal is merely to tinker with the massive ecological destruction that already exists, you'll merely make it so that things aren't quite as bad, but you'll never come close to solving anything.
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