Emily Gertz is a regular contributor to WorldChanging.com, and an internet content and strategy consultant for nonprofits. She has written on environmental policy for BushGreenwatch, and on the intersections of environment, culture, art, and activism for The Bear Deluxe and other independent alternative publications.
Wednesday, 9 Feb 2005
NEW YORK CITY, N.Y.
This morning, taking in a stunning view across Columbus Circle to Central Park through a wall of floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows, I thought, "Hmm. This isn't your mother's environmental conference."
No, it's "Verdopolis: The Future Green City," a three-day gathering of designers, architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, policy and business people, academics, and environmentalists -- in other words, a very diverse array of professionals -- to explore "urban environmental sustainability." It's being held in the Steelcase Building, right in the heart of NYC, America's mega-city.
I was gazing out at the park while speaker Dennis Campbell tried to get his "how to make a hydrogen fuel cell" video going on the conference PowerBook. "The Macintoshes are really great for artists, but bad for engineers," he said as he gave up, and the audience laughed. (The climate may change, but Mac/Windows jokes are forever.) Up an open staircase in the atrium above us, there was an urn of excellent strong coffee, trays piled with tasty City Bakery croissants and muffins made with organic flour, sugar, and eggs, organic OJ being served in biodegradable plastic cups made from corn, and more of that park view. If the future green city includes such creature comforts, I'm for it.
Campbell was one of three members of the morning panel on "Energy: The Next Generation," and despite the cross-platform embedded-video glitch, he was a pretty upbeat guy. In fact, everyone on the panel was upbeat: Jim VanderPas of United Technologies Corporation, which is developing power turbines and fuel cells; Carrie Norton of Energy Innovations, a company working on cost-effective solar power systems; Campbell, president and CEO of Ballard Power Systems, focused on practical hydrogen fuel cells for automobiles. Even moderator Ashok Gupta, air and energy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentalist who has every reason to feel pretty down in the current political and ecological realities, was in a good mood.
This good mood is what seems to be different about Verdopolis. It's a gathering where we dispense with arguing the moral imperative of fewer cars and more trees, and instead get on with figuring out how to design the bright green future for our growing cities. It's beyond anger, done with denial, and waist-deep into acceptance. And at this panel, we were accepting that human-caused climate instability has arrived, and making it better is both the right thing to do and a huge business opportunity.
Norton described her company's efforts to innovate solar for short-term thinking. Right now, solar energy pays for itself in about 10 to 12 years, she said, but most companies want to see payback on their investment in three to four. "We're working now toward sub-five years" on returns, said Norton, because businesses just won't accept anything longer.
Campbell's hydrogen fuel cell-powered vision of future automobiles was persuasive. Zero emissions, 50 to 60 percent energy-efficient (compared to about 15 percent for current combustion engines), fewer moving parts and thus more reliable, low noise and vibration, just "more fun to drive." By the time he got to "packaging flexibility," describing how fuel cells will drive the "reinvention of how you design and build a car" by doing away with those heavy piston engines, even I was excited, and I haven't owned a car since 1988.
"The fuel cell will be the auto engine of the 21st century," he said. Driving factors include air pollution, especially in China, where the ongoing rise of a massive personal-car market may lead to an overwhelming public-health crisis, the costs of global climate change, saving a long-term oil supply for vital uses (one word: plastics), and "energy independence." Neocons recently made headlines for their "unusual alliance" with environmentalists on hybrid cars as a vital part of national security policy, but clearly companies like Ballard have been biding their time until public discourse caught up with their pragmatic, long-term strategy.
And that's OK. Some places need fewer cars, no doubt about it -- as moderator Gupta noted, development needs to be "multi-modal," including better high-density community design, better mass transit, and hybrids as a bridge technology to clean fuels. But Antarctica is melting. A few committed souls like me might be willing to get by with bikes, feet, and borrowed cars to keep it covered in ice (it helps to like living in cities with lots of buses and trains, like Portland, Ore., and New York City), but there's no end in sight to humanity's love affair with the personal automobile.
The obvious questions arose quickly in the Q&A with the audience: How will we bring government policy and development subsidies around to supporting alternative energy? And how will we produce that hydrogen without more emissions and energy use than we save with fuel cells? No one had a good answer about policy (Gupta deferring to his guests here) -- they keep lobbying and advocating, and hope the voting public will do the same. "The consumer is the crux," said VanderPas; if there's demand and a willingness to change, the technologies will come that much faster.
The possible answers to making hydrogen won't be comforting to a lot of us -- Campbell described a combination of nuclear and alternative energies as the wave of the future, and no one on the panel seemed to disagree.
But he voiced that optimism again: "Put a lot of bright people on a problem like this, and I think we'll be surprised at the innovations that result." Everyone agreed. The session ended, and I went to get more coffee.
Next and the City
Thursday, 10 Feb 2005
NEW YORK CITY, N.Y.
One fact is being repeated by speaker after speaker at Verdopolis: This year, for the first time in human history, more of the world's people are living in cities than in rural areas. At Thursday morning's panel on "The Green City," the speakers are taking on the challenges of this "new urbanism."
Stephen Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale University, leads off by setting up the "crisis of the urban built environment." We've degraded and depleted our natural systems; we're alienated from nature, and it's making us tired and sick. We now create environments for captive animals full of natural features and diverse stimuli, even as we build urban environments for ourselves that are more like the barren cages of 19th century zoos. People feel better in broad landscapes -- with horizontal views of the area around us -- because we evolved in that kind of environment. But our cities are made up of massively vertical buildings, our views cut off inside and out.
It's fundamentally un-ecological, in Kellert's view, and we won't have sustainable cities until we change it. Not quite the unabashed optimism of yesterday's future-energy panel, but he's got a point.
The first thing I wrote about in yesterday's dispatch was the view of Central Park from the seventh floor of the Steelcase Building, where Verdopolis is in session. It was remarkable because it was an open expanse that I wasn't used to seeing, from that height, on a regular basis. Looking out at that urban forest, I was seeing more than the trees -- I was seeing status.
If you're a New Yorker who regularly gazes down from above at Central Park, rather than eyeballing a flat expanse of wall across the street, or a window into your neighbor's kitchen, you -- or your employer -- are probably pretty darn rich. Most people in most cities around the world are not rich. They don't have views like this, or even trees like this. The impact seems less tangible than green-city factors like energy usage or air pollution, but it's bad for human health, productivity, and happiness. With most of the world's people living in cities, that's bad for the future.
Kellert's ideas for solutions go beyond environmental mitigation, into creating buildings that embody and enhance nature, inside and out: green roofs and even whole floors opened up to create restorative horizontal views, designs that embrace natural forms (he mentions early Gothic architecture later on in the Q&A), and restoring context -- of place, of watershed, of cultural roots -- into urban design.
The next speaker, Peter Fleischer, is in charge of developing a future green city right now, right between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Governor's Island is a 172-acre daub of land in New York Harbor, about 800 yards off the southern tip of Manhattan and maybe half that from the Brooklyn waterfront. A military outpost for over a century, the federal government sold it back to New York City a few years ago for one dollar. Fleischer calls it "the green looking back at the city," and as senior vice president of the Governor's Island Preservation and Education Committee, he's in charge of coming up with a master plan to turn about 150 acres of the island into public open space, an environmental education facility, conference center, arts and culture venue, historic site, and tourist magnet -- all featuring green infrastructure as well as green development.
Fleischer regales us with the island's potential, showing not only the amazing skyline view from the island (that broad horizontal expanse again) but also the less palatable parking lots and 1950s electrical rooms that the military left behind. It's a complex restoration project that Fleischer is convinced can be done well, and clearly he loves both the challenge and the place. When asked later to name his emblematic green city -- Venice, Portland, and Stockholm all come up in the conversation -- he instead tells a story from his own Verdopolis-in-progress: "When we opened Governor's Island to the public last summer, after years and years in the military, I saw a family sitting in a green area next to a fort for a picnic," he says, leaning their backs against the fort's wall. Thanks to being a military base for the past century or so, Governor's Island is public land today, not real estate for the wealthy, and in the vanguard of green urban design. It's Fleischer's idea of a peace dividend.
The final panelist, transportation designer Cesar Vergara, engages the audience with his world-weary but entertaining style. "I'm just a lowly industrial designer," he says. "I've spent the last 20 years of my life trying to make buses and trains look nice."
"Good transportation design fosters a good attitude in people," Vergara says, and then -- as I'm finding is typical at Verdopolis -- presents an idea that once I've heard it, is so smart it's startling. To sell multibillion-dollar mass-transportation projects, start with the last thing: Design the vehicle.
Mass-transit projects are big losers with politicians, Vergara explains; there's no incentive to support the spending when they know they'll probably be long gone by the time the benefits are a reality. So voters have to put heat on the politicians. But these projects are big losers with the voters, too, because they cost so much.
Vergara believes you don't try to sell the project by putting a map on the wall with a little squiggly line going across and a big dollar number at the bottom. Design appealing vehicles that have geographical and cultural relevance to the people and the city.
"We want things that look good. Transportation design has been grossly neglected" compared to architecture, he says.
Here in New York City, I've seen something like this happen. About four years ago, when new subway cars were gradually introduced onto New York's L line, the Metropolitan Transit Authority made it an event. The press eagerly followed the progress of the shakedown runs. My friends and I all hoped we'd get to ride one -- we reported sightings to each other. I went out of my way to ride the L, hoping to catch a new train.
This was a lot more than the abject gratitude New Yorkers typically feel when something improves in the subway system, instead of falling apart.
It was because these cars are wonderfully designed. They have bright, easy-to-read signage, benches with lumbar support, bright lighting, dark flecked tile that hides grime on the car floor, and electronic maps and LED screens showing the stop. The car fronts have these cheery, vaguely anthropomorphic smiling faces intentionally designed to elicit warm feelings in weary commuters. They are great looking, and riding them, you feel like they reflect something great about the city.
Cesar Vergara is not giving any ground on the inevitability of the personal car in his vision of the green city.
"The car of the future is a railroad car," Vergara says, "and there's a bike waiting for you at the other end of the ride."
The Three Marketeers
Friday, 11 Feb 2005
NEW YORK CITY, N.Y.
How do we pay for the energy transitions that constitute a rational response to global climate instability? That's the question addressed at the "Show Me the Money" session, Thursday afternoon at Verdopolis.
The basic background for the discussion is the Kyoto Protocol, the global climate treaty coming into effect on February 16. Kyoto defines the percentage by which each of the industrialized nations that signed it must reduce the greenhouse gases they add to the atmosphere, calculated as a percentage of total emissions based on 1990 levels. Signatories agree to these reductions, or "caps," and set up regulations to mandate them.
Kyoto gives them several options to meet their caps. They can simply clean up domestic emissions. They can work jointly with other nations to arrive at a net reduction; this could include helping a lesser industrial power clean up its energy production, or financing clean energy in a developing nation.
Also, countries and companies can trade "carbon credits" from other nations or companies that go below their own caps, essentially buying from a shared carbon surplus.
So: To set a cap, you regulate. One way to meet the cap is to trade for carbon credits. To trade, you need a market, just like the NASDAQ or AMEX, to assign value to credits and provide a forum for transactions. And according to this Verdopolis panel, while Europe's got the regulations, the U.S. has the markets. What's up in the air is whether Wall Street will choose to use them before it's forced to.
Peter Fusaro, chair of Global Change Associates and an expert on global energy and environmental commodity markets, leads off. His fast delivery and jargon threaten to leave me behind more than once, but I get his setup of the problematic present: Global carbon markets are underdeveloped worldwide, and not moving fast enough to be a significant factor in climate stabilization. In its present state, Kyoto is too weak to make a significant difference (a valid critique that tends to divide adherents into the "yes, but it's a start" and "no, it's an excuse not to do more" camps).
Says Fusaro, laws mandating carbon emissions reductions and trading are all that will force Wall Street to change its investment and operations practices.
Robert Rubinowitz, vice president and economist of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), describes this pilot project in emissions trading. A multinational, multi-sector, self-regulatory market that "creates a price for pollution," CCX members range from companies trying to clean up to clean technology creators, whose work translates into revenue-generating credits on the exchange. Since no one really knows how we're going to implement alternative energy technologies at the scale needed to stabilize the climate, Rubinowitz suggests, let's connect reduction methods via a market, and let the market decide what pollution really costs.
Rubinowitz expresses great faith in the market path to climate stability: Agree (voluntarily) on an emissions cap, then ratchet down the cap. The price of pollution will rise, driving the market to support investment in innovative technologies that reduce emissions. But do the numbers back that up? According to Rubinowitz, 2.5 million tons of greenhouse emissions have been traded on CCX since December 2003 -- not bad for a wholly voluntary program -- but 15 million tons have been traded on the new, regulation-driven European market just since Jan. 1, 2005.
Next, Bruce Kahn, a specialist in green investments and environmental management for Smith Barney Citigroup, gives a brief overview of growth in socially responsible investment funds, suggesting that we have to think of ourselves as investors -- "Do you have a checking or savings account with a bank? Then you're an investor" -- and use that leverage to make Wall Street harness capital markets to address our environmental goals. And it wouldn't hurt to clear up the misconception that socially responsible investing means poor returns.
It feels quite basic as strategies for change go. I sense that Kahn's used to working a more resistant crowd.
In the public mind, environmentalism has been portrayed as people in T-shirts confronting people in suits, thanks to years of the mainstream media looking for easy drama rather than reporting the issues. Let's observe a herd of wild activists in their native habitat -- the city streets -- performing their ritual protest march past an impassive corporate headquarters. Isn't that exotic?
So what strikes me viscerally about "Show Me the Money" is that those three guys in suits are trying to talk me into believing that the financial structures and strategies of such corporations can enable long-term environmental and financial sustainability. Think beyond boycotts and culture hacking, and into emissions trading and risk management. Talk the Fortune 500 talk, and then get them to walk the walk.
Europe's got the regulations mandating cap-and-trade, but is just getting started in setting up markets. The U.S. has the markets -- there's been a successful sulfur dioxide cap-and-trade market in the U.S. for over a decade, for instance -- but no regulations giving Wall Street incentives to get on board.
Whatever their hopes for the power of markets to stabilize the climate, Kahn, Rubinowitz, and Fusaro all seem to agree that the U.S. -- the producer of one-third of total greenhouse gases, which has not only failed to sign Kyoto, but has actively interfered with its implementation -- will have federal regulations capping carbon within five years. Corporate America thinks so, too. Between those impending regulations, the existing patchwork of state and regional efforts, and the burden of dual regulatory systems in the U.S. and Europe, more and more American companies are already planning to reduce emissions -- or at least start buying carbon credits. The suits are joining the fight.
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