John McCain

Sen. John McCain was, of course, one of the earliest congressional supporters of cap-and-trade, cosponsoring the first two pieces of climate legislation to come to the floor of the Senate in 2003 and 2005. During his campaign for president last year, he regularly touted his support for climate action.

But McCain did not explicitly back the climate bill that the Senate debated last year, citing a desire for more support for nuclear power, and he wasn't around when the chamber voted on whether to move forward with the bill.

Now that the guy who beat him in the race for the White House is pushing to get climate legislation passed, McCain is being far less supportive.

At an energy summit in April, McCain railed against Obama's plan to fight greenhouse-gas emissions, calling it "irresponsible, ill-conceived." “What the Obama administration has proposed is not cap-and-trade,” he said. “It’s cap-and-tax.” McCain's main complaint was that Obama wanted to auction off all pollution permits; McCain, in contrast, called for the vast majority of permits to be distributed free of charge to emitters to help them transition to a low-carbon economy.

But while McCain didn't like Obama's preferred approach, the climate bill the House passed in June should be more to his liking -- it would give away the majority of permits.

Track the debate and take action >>>

McCain recently told Roll Call that he is working on climate change legislation with Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) once again. "I have not lost my zeal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions," he said. Yet he doesn't seem to want to work with the Democratic majority. "I don’t think [Democratic leaders] have any Republicans" on board with their climate plans, he added.

Do you know more about this senator's stance on climate legislation? Tell us.

Find out about other senators by clicking on their names in the right column.

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In this economy, every state wants jobs. Green jobs are popular, but frankly, they’ll take them in any color.

A great way to attract renewable energy jobs to a state is to—and this should be obvious—establish a local market.  If a state provides incentives for a local solar market, for example, you get on the order of 14 jobs (a year) per MW installed.  Installers, engineers, sales reps—those are good jobs, and they stay local.  Can't be outsourced.

But what about manufacturing?  That’s a different story.  It's a global market, and every state in the country, and every country in the world, has an economic development department whose sole purpose is to lure manufacturing factilities.  In the case of solar, Germany offered a 50 percent unsecured loan.  Malaysia offered a 10-year tax holiday.  So if you want to bring a plant to your state, you need to realize that any company looking to site a plant will be considering all the offers on the table.  Proximity to market matters (especially for big, hard-to-transport items like wind turbines), but it’s not the only thing that matters.  To get manufacturing jobs too, you need to add a sweetener.

Arizona provides a great example of how to do it.  The Arizona Corporation Commission established the Renewable Energy Standard—with strong solar provisions—and the local solar industry is going gangbusters.  Arizona Public Service reports that request for incentives for commercial (i.e. non-residential) solar projects have already exceeded their 2009 allotment, and residential installs are going through the roof.  And APS has signed two contracts for large parabolic trough solar plants.  Local demand: check.

On the manufacturing side, State Senator Barbara Leff sponsored a bill, SB 1403, to provide tax incentives for new renewable energy manufacturing facilities that bring new, high-paying, high-quality jobs (with health benefits).  With the state facing a budget deficit, any tax incentive faced an uphill slog, but she managed to get it passed and the Governor signed it.

Local market + sweetener = green jobs.  It’s a simple recipe, and Arizona got it right. 

Local leaders are really excited about their prospects, and they should be.  Check out this clip from local PBS station about how they are making the most of the opportunity to build a renewable energy economy:

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The clock was ticking ... till it stopped.Courtesy Osha DavidsonJust ten days ago, Arizona state Senator Barbara Leff (R-Paradise Valley) stood before a House committee, making the case for a bill she had written. "The Quality Jobs Through Renewable Energy Bill," was needed, she said, to make Arizona the leader in solar [power]." Not just in the nation, but potentially throughout the world.

Leff reminded Representatives that we are in a period of transition. Fossil fuels are the past (why do you think they're called fossil fuels?). Solar is the future.

Senate Bill 1403 can help the state move forward, Leff concluded. No good alternative exists, because "we can't turn back the clock."

No? Can we not?

OK. No, we can't. But last week, Leff's colleagues did the next best thing: they made time stand still!

Ha! And some people have said that the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature makes the Texas legislature look like a Mensa gathering. How many other legislative bodies can stop time, huh? Of course, if one were perverse, one might point out that no other similar body has needed to freeze time quite so badly as Arizona.

Speaking of time travel, let's go back just a bit so that you can see how the strange events of the last few days came about.

Blame it on Obama

That's right. The Socialist in Chief forced the Arizona legislature to stop time. He did it by stealing our governor, Democrat Janet Napolitano, and making her the head of Homeland Security. That meant that Arizona's Republican Secretary of State, Jan Brewer, ascended to the Governor's office.

Napolitano had a decent working relationship with the Republicanlegislature. They'd fight now and then, but the people's business got done. Basic things, like, for example, the state budget. Sometimes it got down to the wire, and tempers flared. But by June 30th of every year, the state had a budget in place. Which is a good thing, because no budget = government shutdown.

That may sound great to wealthy libertarians (at least until their homes catch fire and they decide that fire departments are handy institutions to have around). But to schlubs like you and me who work for a living, a government shutdown is no joke. Thousands of state employees are told not to show up. Need to get your driver's license renewed? Sorry, DMV had to shut down. And don't even think about taking the light rail. Sure, it's the city's baby, but it depends on money from the state, too.

And on and on. Not so very much fun.

Republican legislators and Governor Brewer couldn't agree on a whole set of issues, most of them linked to the state's dire financial situation. Arizona is looking at a $3 billion shortfall in the fiscal year that just began. (Which, incidentally, is what prompted Leff's bill. The whole purpose is to attract companies that manufacture equipment for producing renewable energy, especially solar.)

Back in March, Brewer first suggested the state might need to consider raising taxes to avoid cutting off services.

"Nobody likes to say that they support raising taxes," said the Governor. But "there is no other way to resolve the crisis we are facing in Arizona."

The anti-tax movement dominates the Arizona GOP, and they were not happy with the Governor's tax-talk.

That includes the 36-year-old Speaker of the House, Kirk Adam. "This is not the best time to raise taxes at this magnitude [sic]," he said. Adams' answer was to slash-and-burn large portions of the state government, particularly education.

Curiouser & Curiouser

The legislature finally passed a budget. They knew, however, that the "Accidental Governor" (as the Democratic Blog for Arizona often calls Brewer) wouldn't like their plan. So, like a 6th grader sitting on a poor report card, Adams and Senate President Bob Burns refused to send their budget to the Governor. After huffing and puffing for a couple of weeks, Brewer sued the legislature. The state Supreme Court heard the case and ruled that while Brewer was correct, there was no remedy. The legislature could wait until the last minute, 11:59 PM, June 30th, to release the budget.

And that's what happened. Sort of.

There was great flurry of activity in the final days of the session as Republican legislators battled each other over a final budget. This culminated in one last push on June 30th, with both the House and the Senate working into the night to make the deadline. It became clear that they wouldn't make it. There were just too many bills and too little time.

That's when the Republicans knew what they had to do: freeze time. But how? They approached the task logically.

We know what time it is by looking at a clock. In a sense, this theory goes, the clock doesn't tell time, it creates time. (This requires an intellectual leap; not everyone can make it to the other side.) The answer was to stop the clocks from creating time. Dreaming up this theory was the hard part. Implementing it was simple. Republican leaders unplugged the digital clocks that create time in the legislature. It would be 11:59 for as long as they wanted. July 1 could not enter the building until they, the Republicans, were good and ready to plug the clocks back in.

Democrats, a churlish lot in the best of times, made a point of beginning every floor statement by saying, in that snarky voice those people have, "Good morning."

Republicans were having none of it and ignored the Dems.

Republican Senator Russell Pierce explained to a reporter for the Arizona Capitol Times, "Once we start session, it is still June 30. The day doesn't end until you adjourned. So it is still June 30 technically."

At least, technically, you see.

Finally, the legislature sent the budget to the Governor's office. Along with the sure-to-be-vetoed budget was SB 1403 - and a slew of other bills.

After starting time back up by plugging in the digital clocks, Republicans realized something they had been too busy to think of before. The governor might veto the budget immediately and send it back just as quickly. That would obligate the legislators to go back to work, making a new budget. They could unplug the clocks again, but that might just effect time inside the chambers while letting those outside, like the Governor, for example, continue to operate in time. No, they'd have to come up with something even better.

And they did. It was so simple, that they all wondered why they done it before? According to the law, the legislature was only forced to act if they received vetoed bills. They couldn't prevent Brewster from using her veto pen, but they could prevent the delivery. All they had to do was look the doors to the building. And so they did. When Arizona Republic reporter Matt Benson asked why the doors were locked, Republican counsel Greg Jernigan explained, "We prefer not to get veto letters this morning."

And it would have worked, too, if one of Brewers top aides hadn't managed to get in through a back entrance. And if security guards hadn't unlocked the doors in front when the plot was discovered.

Someone in the Governor's office yesterday afternoon confirmed that she had received SB 1403. Will she sign it?

"I have no idea," said the person on the phone. "The bill is on her desk. She has ten days to decide what to do."

I wanted to ask if that was with or without the clocks plugged in, but decided against it. Maybe the Governor didn't know how to freeze time. If not, I sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to tip her off.

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The following post was written by Michael Andersen of the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

When Adam Klawonn quit his job at a shrinking major metropolitan newspaper in 2006, he did what so many other journalists have: launched an online news operation that looked a lot like a newspaper’s web site, only with less stuff.

On The Zonie Report (“A New Kind of News for Arizona”), he set out to cover growth, immigration, the environment. The big issues. “The traditional papers were going local, and they were pulling back their bureaus,” said Klawonn, now 30. “It seemed like it was just wide open.”

And from the start, he seemed to be doing everything right—learning enough PHP to slap together a sharp-looking Web site; shooting videos and producing podcasts; painstakingly tagging articles into a dozen geographic categories; looting his bank account for a freelance budget; hiring a New York Times stringer for what turned out to be award-winning environmental reporting.

After two years, it was clear: The Zonie Report was—have you guessed, dear reader?—a complete commercial failure. Without a single town to target, advertisers shunned the site. And though Klawonn’s scattered readers gave him 20,000 pageviews a month, they passed on his offer of CafePress mugs and T-shirts.

So last year, Klawonn started sketching out the plan that, this week, landed him a $95,000 Knight News Challenge grant: a news service devoted entirely to Phoenix’s six-month-old light rail system. Its working title is Daily Phoenix.

Plan B is narrower. Much narrower. Old idea: regional trend stories about migrant labor. New idea: opt-in text alerts about train delays. Old content: “In Prescott, a water war escalates.” New content: the details of every crime within a five-block radius of each rail stop.

With his business partner, newly minted Arizona State MBA Aleksandra Chojnacka, Klawonn will offer businesses a chance to be included in twice-daily text messages to mobile subscribers. “It might be, ‘Two-for-one sandwiches!’” Klawonn said. “It might be, ‘Extended happy hour over here!’”

A print tabloid, conceived in part for advertisers still focused on physical objects, might include coverage of government actions that relate to rail transit.

Klawonn’s remains in a tight space: he figures his Plan B will cost $220,000 in its first year, far more than The Zonie Report ever has. He figures he has until spring to secure the next round of private grants or investments, and he’s confident that with his new idea, that’s possible. And he still believes in his first big idea, which he still hopes can become a sort of NewWest for the Southwest, or at least for Arizona. After all, believing in regional policy reporting has gotten him this far.

“The Zonie Report was a journalistic success and an economic revenue failure,” Klawonn said. “I just thought if I could hang in there in some way and prove that I’m committed to this field and that I’m interested in trying new things, that something was going to break my way.”

Reprint courtesy Nieman Journalism Lab, a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

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What is the best evidence that concentrated solar thermal power (CSP) aka solar baseload is indeed a core climate solution with big near-term — and very big medium-term — promise?  One of the country’s biggest companies, Lockheed-Martin, with 2008 sales of $42.7 billion, has jumped into the race to build the biggest CSP plant with thermal storage.

The CSP market was already exploding (see “World’s largest solar plant with thermal storage to be built in Arizona — total of 8500 MW of this core climate solution planned for 2014 in U.S. alone“).  Now big players are getting on board, as Phoenix’s East Valley Tribune reports:

Arizona Public Service, Starwood Energy Group Global and Lockheed Martin announced plans Friday to build one of the world’s largest solar plants in the Harquahala Valley about 75 miles west of Phoenix.

The 290-megawatt plant will produce enough electricity to power more than 73,000 homes when it is completed in 2013, the developers said,

Called Starwood Solar I, the plant will be financed and owned by an affiliate of Starwood Energy and built and operated by Lockheed Martin. APS has agreed to take all of the electricity generated at the plant for distribution to its customers.

The plant will include 3,500 parabolic mirrors that will focus the sun’s heat onto tubes containing a heat-transfer fluid. The hot fluid will convert water into steam that will turn the plant’s turbines to generate electricity.

The Starwood plant is the second major solar project spurred by APS. In February 2008 the company signed an agreement with Abengoa Solar of Spain to purchase power from a 280-megawatt plant the Spanish company plans to build by 2011 at Gila Bend. But Abengoa has had trouble lining up financing for that project, and construction has not yet started.

APS is required by the Arizona Corporation Commission to obtain 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025. The utility said it will be ahead of schedule to meet that requirement if Solana and Starwood are built.

First, I hope that the Department of Energy is going to use its loan program to help CSP companies like Abengoa get financing for CSP during this credit crunch (see “First Energy Department loan guarantee goes to … a solar manufacturer“).

But that is precisely why it is such a big deal for a company like Lockheed-Martin to enter this space.  They bring credibility and confidence to potential financiers who might otherwise worry about the long-term viability of some relatively new and relatively small solar company.

And in case you were wondering who this mysterious Starwood Energy Group is, they are “a private equity investment firm based in Greenwich, CT, that specializes in energy infrastructure investments.”  Apparently they have deep pockets:  “Founded in 2005, Starwood Energy has committed to seven transactions representing nearly $4.9 billion in enterprise value.”  Yes, this is the Starwood in Starwood hotels — the Chairman and CEO, Barry Sternlicht was “was Chairman & CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., a company he founded in 1995.”  Gizmag reports that “Principals at Starwood Energy and its affiliates have developed or acquired 37 power generation and transmission projects to date, valued at more than USD$12 billion.”  Be interested to know who those “affiliates” are, since it looks like these folks are going to be serious investors in clean energy.

When big players enter the market, there is the real prospect for lower financing and transaction and engineering costs.

Significantly, this plant will have thermal storage:

Solar I will be designed and built by aeronautics giant Lockheed Martin on about 1,900 acres, using a concentrating solar power system. This use mirrors and tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight into a small beam. Solar I will have 3,500 parabolic mirrors to capture the sun’s rays. Heat captured by the mirrors and transferred will be used to convert water into steam. Just like a traditional power plant, the steam is then used to drive the plant’s turbines to create electricity. By storing energy captured during the day, up to six hours of back-up power will be available in a molten salt solution.

The key point is that the easiest way to deal with the intermittency of the sun is cheap storage — and thermal storage is much cheaper and has a much higher round-trip efficiency than electric storage.  The ability to provide power reliably throughout the day and evening in key locations around the world (including China and India) is why CSP delivers 3 of the 12 - 14 wedges needed for “the full global warming solution.”

Kudos to Lockheed-Martin for getting onboard this fast-moving train.

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Not everyone had a close-up viewdr. coop via FlickrOn Wednesday night, President Barack Obama gave a commencement address to graduates of Arizona State University, the first school in the nation to offer degrees from a dedicated sustainability program. One student from the School of Sustainability graduated last fall, but the first real class of 13 graduated this week.

Here’s what Obama had to say about the nation’s challenges:

And here’s a green shout-out for ASU engineering grads:

Watch it:

ASU has emerged as a leader in sustainability in recent years, ranked high for its greenness by Sierra magazine, Princeton Review, and Kaplan. And in the ultimate manifestation of green cred, ASU teamed up with Grist to produce a special eco-focused email newsletter for its students, sent every other week throughout the '08/'09 academic year.

Read an interview with Charles L. Redman, director of ASU’s sustainability program, by Andy Revkin of The New York Times.

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Climate change is a global problem—but as of yet, there’s no global solution. That’s why mayors across the U.S. are taking action, from building green to organizing bike rides, from redeveloping downtowns to cutting emissions. Here are just a few of the municipal leaders who have worked to take our collective future into their own hands.

Bloomberg unveils his grand Plan.PlanNYC 20301. Michael Bloomberg, New York City.
Pop.: 8.2 million
Call New York the accidental eco-city: cram millions of people onto an island, and you’ve got to figure out how to build up, not out. Throw a big park in the middle, and voila: you’ve got an anti-sprawl city that values open space. During his tenure, Bloomberg has made the most of that happy accident, creating an ambitious 127-point initiative called PlanNYC 2030 that encompasses everything from reclaiming waterfronts to repairing electrical grids to reducing traffic congestion. (OK, that last one hasn’t gone so well.) A year after unveiling the plan in 2007, the city had launched a full 93 percent of its components.

Nickels at a climate rally with King County exec Ron Sims, since tapped to head HUD.Oran Viriyincy 2. Greg Nickels, Seattle.
Pop.: 594,000
In some ways, Greg Nickels became synonymous with the phrase “green mayor” after spearheading the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement in 2005. Since then, more than 900 of Nickels’ fellow mayors have come on board, Republican and Democrat alike, from all 50 states. No stranger to eco-ideas at home, Nickels—who has led the Emerald City since 2002—has also been instrumental in bringing light rail to the area, pushing to increase investments in open space, and launching an ongoing series of “clean and green” community-service events. He’s up for reelection this year, and one challenger says he hasn’t done enough on the environment. Only in Seattle.

Newsom uses a white hanky to demonstrate clean diesel emissions. Seriously!MTC3. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco.
Pop.: 765,000
Another mack daddy of sustainability, Newsom is almost too green to believe. Since he took office in 2004, the city has reduced government emissions to below 1990 levels, launched the nation’s largest solar incentive program, banned plastic bags, and introduced ambitious green building and green jobs programs. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, city leaders hope to increase wind power by the Bay, including underwater turbines at the Golden Gate Bridge. Speaking at a conference of green IT entrepreneurs this spring, Newsom—who also recently confirmed his 2010 gubernatorial ambitions—offered up his city as guinea pig: “If you have an idea, let me know. We are a laboratory for innovation.”

Malloy in a glamorous mayoral moment.Will Merydith/flickr4. Ed Malloy, Fairfield, Iowa.
Pop.: 9,650
In November, the city fathers in this liberal southeastern Iowa outpost unanimously adopted a Green Strategic Plan. Their vote was more than ceremonial: they also secured a state-funded grant to hire a sustainability coordinator, inventory their greenhouse gases, and create educational materials for residents. The new plan envisions everything from conserving energy to supporting local farms. Malloy, who’s been mayor since 2001 and heads up a local oil company, says the environment-economy connection is clear. He hopes Fairfield’s ideas will catch on: “We want to create a model community, a virtual template that other small towns can adopt to create the same results.”

What a difference a Daley makes.www.drugabuse.gov5. Richard Daley, Chicago.
Pop.: 2.8 million
Since announcing his intention to make Chicago the country’s greenest metropolis, Daley has made great strides. Green roofs cover or are planned for 3 million square feet, topping everything from City Hall to a McDonald’s. Redevelopment and landscaping have revitalized gathering places across the city, from prominent landmarks like Grant Park to neighborhood playgrounds. And the Windy City is committed to increasing its use of renewable energy (though a recent revelation showed things lagging in that area). Chicago is even bidding to host the 2016 Olympics—a bid that hinges on the event being the greenest Olympics in history.

Franklin, my dear, she does give a damn.City of Atlanta6. Shirley Franklin, Atlanta.
Pop.: 519,000
Often held up as the poster child for sprawl, Atlanta boasts more green than meets the eye—and Franklin is to thank for much of the recent progress. Mayor since 2002, she has attacked infrastructure and intangibles with the same gusto, from overhauling the city’s sewer systems to creating a Climate Action Plan. The city is building a public-transit BeltLine, is tops in LEED-certified buildings, and has implemented practices in City Hall that led to a 20 percent decrease in energy usage. A comprehensive private-sector group called Sustainable Atlanta is developing recommendations for further actions, and all eyes are on the future. “We are building a green, sustainable city,” Franklin says. “We do this for our children, and we do this because it is the right thing to do.”

Planner, politico, father, grandfather.RalphBecker.com7. Ralph Becker, Salt Lake City.
Pop.: 179,000
Building on the groundbreaking work of predecessor (and official Grist crush) Rocky Anderson, Becker—who took office in 2008—has already made ripples in the eco-community. Upon taking the helm, Becker introduced his Blueprint for a Green City, in which he pledged to improve public transit, expand greenways, create neighborhood centers to promote walkability, and improve air and water quality. And the former urban planner isn’t just talking the talk; among other concrete steps, the city is piloting hybrid police cars and has undertaken an overhaul of its city code to make sustainability easier for all residents to achieve.

Don’t mess with Jerramiah.Byron Smith/Jersey Journal8. Jerramiah Healy, Jersey City.
Pop.: 242,000
He’s a rough and tumble guy running a historically rough and tumble city. But that just goes to show that green can be pursued anywhere, by anyone. Healy was recently given a Green Leadership Award by the state U.S. Green Building Council chapter. During his five-year tenure, he has held polluters accountable, opposed a controversial reservoir development scheme, and redeveloped brownfields. Up for reelection this month, Healy recently introduced ordinances that would require city departments to pursue LEED certification and green purchasing, and is reportedly considering a ban on plastic bags.

Manny being Manny.City of Miami9. Manuel Diaz, Miami.
Pop.: 410,000
Though some critics have dubbed him “Concrete Manny” due to his love of development, Diaz is paving the way for sustainability in Miami. An early signatory to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, he created Miami’s first sustainability department and a community-wide Green Commission. He has pushed green building, led an energy-retrofit of City Hall that included solar-panel installation, and is converting the city’s fleet to more efficient vehicles. Late last year Diaz launched Bike Miami Days, and this spring the city hosted a week of events leading up to Earth Hour. “We’re on the front line of global climate change here,” Diaz told Newsweek in 2007. “The water level doesn’t have to rise too much for us to be riding around Miami in canoes.”

Walker? I’d rather bike.Robert the Noid/flickr10. Elaine Walker, Bowling Green, Ky.
Pop.: 53,000
This TV producer-turned-politician has her hands full, from increasing affordable housing to contending with the crash of Big Auto, but green is on her radar screen. Transportation issues loom large in this western Kentucky city, and Walker has worked with local bike-advocacy groups (even creating a Mayor’s Bike Ride) and launched a Rethinking Transportation Choices task force. A signatory to the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, she is a proponent of green building and downtown redevelopment. “There’s too much of a perception that going green is a little bit out there and idealistic,” she has said. “It’s not idealistic—it’s vital.”

Cicilline envisions a model future.Cicilline.com11. David Cicilline, Providence, R.I.
Pop.: 175,000
In late March, this native son signed an order requiring all new municipal buildings to be LEED-certified, saying such a move would help create jobs and boost the economy. It was the first step in a 30-point plan called Operation Opportunity that seeks to help this mid-sized New England city rise from the doldrums; other steps include doubling the recycling rate, creating a green jobs training corps, and finalizing site plans for wind turbines. Cicilline, at the wheel since 2003, has also named walkability and sustainable leadership among his goals for the city.

Get your Phil.Tom Story/ASU12. Phil Gordon, Phoenix.
Pop.: 1.6 million
The long-time Phoenician made a splash in March when he unveiled a 17-point sustainability plan for the desert megalopolis he’s run since 2004. During his tenure, Gordon has already overseen eco-upgrades ranging from LED traffic lights to LNG buses, as well as bringing light rail to the city. The new plan aims to make Phoenix the first carbon-neutral city in America, through green job training, building retrofits, and a massive investment in solar energy. It’s making Phoenix hot in a whole new way.

Coleman (left) and Rybak do their thing.Lou Michaels13. Christopher Coleman, St. Paul.
Pop.: 274,000
14. R. T. Rybak, Minneapolis.
Pop.: 377,000
The Twin Cities are in the hands of two progressive mayors intent on doubling the metro region’s eco-efforts. Coleman and Rybak, elected in 2005 and 2001 respectively, have both made sustainability a priority—Minneapolis, for instance, doles out climate change grants to neighborhood organizations, while St. Paul created its own hybrid car-sharing program. Together, the two leaders have created an annual sustainability report and a green manufacturing initiative, and they’re bringing bike-sharing to town. It’s all part of an effort, they say, to make theirs the most livable cities in the country.

Dixson, far left, leads the groundbreaking of Greensburg’s first eco-home.Greensburg GreenTown15. Bob Dixson, Greensburg, Kansas.
Pop.: 850
Talk about inheriting someone else’s problem: Bob Dixson became mayor of Greensburg in 2008, exactly a year after it was devastated by a tornado. But Greensburg has rallied, and the former postmaster is now overseeing the town’s much publicized green rebuilding effort (which has also been documented for TV). Learning as he goes, Dixson has become an eco-evangelist of sorts, traveling the nation to talk up renewable energy, green building, community spirit, and the common sense behind green. “In rural America,” he told Smithsonian magazine earlier this year, “we were always taught that if you take care of the land, the land will care of you.”

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Participants in the Western Climate Initiative on Tuesday announced specific plans for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The seven states and four provinces will initiate a cap-and-trade program, establishing a carbon market that applies to industries and utilities by 2012 and transportation, heating, and other fuels by 2015. The proposed program is broader than that of the Northeast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which launches Thursday and only applies to power plants. But some aspects of WCI's plan disappoint environmentalists: 90 percent of pollution permits can be given freely instead of auctioned, and companies can offset up to 49 percent of their emissions instead of actually eliminating them. WCI participants -- Arizona, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec -- represent 20 percent of the U.S. economy and a whopping 73 percent of Canada's, and are home to a total 84.6 million people.

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Thousands of abandoned mines across the U.S. West pose hazards to the public, according to a strongly worded audit from the Interior Department inspector general. The Bureau of Land Management's mine program "has been undermined, neglected, and marginalized," says the report, and many easily accessible mines have "dangerously dilapidated structures, serious environmental hazards, and gaping cavities." With very few fences and warning signs, passersby can stroll right in to areas tainted with dangerous levels of arsenic, lead, and mercury. "Even more disturbing," says the report, "we found that BLM supervisors told staff to ignore these problems, and employees were criticized or received threats of retaliation for identifying contaminated sites." Mining companies have minimal responsibility for post-digging cleanup, and no dedicated funding source exists for mine remediation. A bill to update antiquated U.S. mining law passed the House of Representatives in the fall, but has stalled in the Senate.

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The Western Climate Initiative has unveiled a draft proposal for a regional cap-and-trade program that would kick off in 2012. The 11 states and provinces involved -- Arizona, British Columbia, California, Manitoba, Montana, New Mexico, Ontario, Oregon, Quebec, Utah, and Washington -- would impose an as-yet-determined greenhouse-gas emissions limit on industries and utilities, then allow laggards to purchase carbon credits from those that cleaned up their acts. States and provinces would decide individually whether to freely hand out credits or to auction them. Reactions to the draft proposal were mixed; industries craved more detail, while environmentalists expressed concern that companies would be allowed to offset up to 10 percent of their emissions and that transportation and heating fuels would not be regulated until 2015. After a period of public comment, the final proposal is due in September; state and provincial governments will have to OK the plans before they become official.

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Homeland Security officials can continue to waive environmental laws to speed construction of a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club. The groups had argued that the eco-law-waiving power given to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff in 2005 was unconstitutional. The fence section named specifically in the lawsuit has already been built; it runs through Arizona's San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, which is home to more than 250 species of migratory birds.

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Can Phoenix remake its desert-gobbling ways?In order for Phoenix to truly be a green city, it would have to be brown. Or not brown, exactly, but the sandy shade of the mountains that surround it: the jagged peaks and parched hills that enclose the Valley of the Sun.

These days, though, Phoenix is a less-natural shade of brown; a ring of smoggy pollution known locally as the Brown Cloud shadows the city. And that's not the only affront to the environs here. Anyone flying in can see the patches of fierce green lawns that paint the landscape, along with the swimming pools; the manmade lake in the suburb of Tempe, evaporating 452 million gallons of water each year; the sea of single family homes spilling across the desert; the traffic clogging the ribbons of highways; and the heat snakes squiggling from all that boiling bitumen. The 517-square-mile city -- the fifth-largest and fourth-fastest-growing in America -- just survived its second-driest winter on record and is deep in drought.

So how is it that this poster child for sprawl and environmental ills is being hailed -- albeit by its own government -- as an exemplar of sustainability? City leaders are quick to tell anyone willing to listen that not only are they finally getting hip to environmental matters, they've been attending to some of them for upwards of thirty years. From using cleaner fuels in their fleet of trucks and buses to implementing an environmental purchasing program, from building a new 20-mile light-rail line to signing the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement, officials have taken concrete steps to right past wrongs.

ASU president Michael Crow.

Perhaps more important than these piecemeal sustainability steps is the city's partnership with the local university. What's wrong with the city -- the temperature's rising, for one thing, and development is still skidding out of control -- is what makes it such an attractive candidate for a living laboratory. The city's environmental deficits are educational opportunities for the students and teachers of Arizona State University's four-year-old Global Institute of Sustainability.

"When Phoenix is done growing, it will be bigger than Chicago," says Dr. Michael Crow, president of ASU. "The next massive city of the United States isn't done yet." GIOS, then, has a chance to affect these latter stages of growth. And what GIOS gleans from Phoenix just might change the way other desert cities behave -- that is, if it's not too little, too late.

Much of the impetus to tout Phoenix as a city with a long history of sustainability initiatives can be traced to Mayor Phil Gordon, a long-term Phoenician with thick, slicked-back hair and a politician's gleaming smile. "We didn't just pilot these programs," says Gordon -- who's been in office since 2004 -- about municipal upgrades like switching light bulbs to CFLs and LEDs and shifting buses to liquefied natural gas. "We've been doing it full scale for a decade or more."

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon.

But in 2002, a man as prominent and powerful as the mayor, if not more so, entered the scene. When Crow arrived on the ASU campus, he set about reinventing the school as the epicenter of sustainability studies, one where student and faculty research really gets applied. "We want the actual solutions, not just the theory of the solutions," he says.

Crow's warm demeanor, modified good old boy vibe, and credentials galore -- he's the former executive provost at Columbia and co-founder of the Earth Institute there -- could bring anybody on board the sustainability train, but city leaders were already poised to explore ideas GIOS was proffering. "There is a realization that this place isn't sustainable on its present trajectory," says Crow. "Everything has to be rethought, from the notion of species diversification in the urban setting to water use and energy use."

And who better to rethink it than those whose job is to, well, think? "This is a great region to study because the knowledge we gather is transferable to other rapidly urbanizing parts of the world, which are often in hot, arid climates like Phoenix," says Jay Golden, assistant professor in ASU's School of Sustainability, the degree-granting arm of GIOS.

The school's first order of business: walk the talk by setting up a branch in downtown Phoenix. This is one of the only major cities without a university (51,481 of its 64,394 students study at the Tempe campus, in the suburb next door, and most of the rest study at two other small suburban campuses). The new wing brings not only jobs and bodies to the urban core -- a rather generic-looking area with skyscrapers and some unusable, shade-free public plazas -- but culture as well.

With the help of GIOS, Phoenix has brought other changes to its downtown. The answer to sprawl, of course, is density, and while traditional single-family growth continues to spill out to the very edges of the city limits, high-rise, multi-use buildings have been spiking downtown. The city's infill program and redeveloped planning vision, created and realized with GIOS, saw 4,174 infill housing units grow between 1995 and 2005, many of them structures that provide both density and shade. This growth, in turn, helped pave the way for more changes: a new farmers market, a redesigned inner-city park.

But a desert city needs one thing above all to attract residents and keep them happy: relief from the sun's relentless heat. "Four to five months out of the year it's like walking through hell," says Dean Brennan, principal planner for the city of Phoenix. "We want to provide something that people can sit on without literally burning their butts." The number of egg-frying-on-the-sidewalk days has jumped -- only 6.7 days a year topped 110 degrees in the 1950s; in the 2000s, it's 21.9 days. Concrete and development trap heat and create what's called the "urban heat island effect." So Crow asked GIOS to launch projects that specifically studied potential solutions to the phenomenon.

Professor Golden and other faculty put an army of graduate students on the case. Some 40 percent of the landscape is paved, they found -- parking lots, highways, and 5,271 miles of streets. Phoenix is a city that developed without regard to its climate, with millions resettling from Northeastern or Midwestern regions and expecting to live their same lives, sans winter. Parking lots were built without trees. Homes were built without overhangs to shield the sun.

So Golden and his team are helping Phoenix, now home to almost 1.4 million people, reinvent itself as a desert city, the way it always should have been. "We're looking at everything from new surface coatings for roofs and buildings, to incorporating vegetation and urban forestry, to housing projects with greater insulation," he says. And they're codifying their findings in a database of sustainable materials and technologies for any individual or government that cares to peruse it.

For his part, planner Brennan's pet project is a "connected oasis" of street parks and shade structures both natural (leafy trees) and artificial (buildings and canopies) that will help cool the downtown area and make it pedestrian-friendly. Those streets, too, will be repaved with pervious materials researched and developed by GIOS.

The future's so bright, Phoenix needs shade.

One challenge in Phoenix is the landscaping status quo: the omnipresent, high-maintenance palm trees -- 33,000 in the city's care -- whose smattering of leaves cast so little shade and that contribute to the Anywhere, USA, sensibility here. Pivot the right way, and you can edge out any view of the surrounding desert, conjuring up L.A. or Miami instead. But the Parks Department has implemented a "Right Tree for the Right Place" program, training citizens in the art of selecting appropriate arbors -- the native Palo Verde, for instance, requires much less water and care than the palm. And, assures Brennan, "Additional palm trees will not be planted in the public right of way in downtown."

Even without palm trees, the oasis needs water, and water in the desert, of course, is a complicated issue. Most people, residents and non-residents alike, think Phoenix is using more than its fair share from the Colorado River -- and it's still running out. "Nothing can be further from the truth," says Steve Rossi, principal water resources planner for the city's Water Services Department.

Thirsty for more?

The city may have grown by 28 percent in the last 40 years, Rossi says, but water demand has been virtually flat. "Phoenix is serving 340,000 more residents today than in 1997 -- with the same amount of water," he says. The average Phoenician uses about 120 gallons of water per day, less than the 161-gallon average in other Southwestern cities. And, Rossi says, nobody builds without considering the water supply four or five generations down the line. In 2005, according to Rossi, the city introduced an updated long-range water resource plan that goes well beyond the State of Arizona's 1980 Groundwater Code. Developers must prove an "assured supply" of 100 years' worth of water. Until recently, the code was widely ignored, but Rossi says it's now enforced, and seen as a model by some other desert outposts.

His claims may be difficult to believe, but one trend does seem promising: Fewer folks are interested in the high-maintenance home, the one with the perpetually thirsty lawn. Xeriscaping -- landscaping that requires little or no irrigation -- is in vogue. "It's less altruistic and more self-serving," says Rossi. "People want to use less water because it's affordable, and they want to do less maintenance -- they've had enough of mowing the lawn." New developments, he says, increasingly incorporate drought-tolerant plants.

Even if usage is down, this answer to the water question -- 100 years' worth -- doesn't seem to fit the definition of sustainability. Sure, you know your grandchildren will be able to shower with ease, but in geological terms, 100 years is nothing.

"It's betting that technology will find alternatives," admits City Councilor Greg Stanton, who sits on a sustainability subcommittee created last year. City officials assume, then, that in the next 100 years, someone -- maybe researchers at ASU -- will figure out another way to get water besides pumping it from the Colorado River and sending it down the 336 miles of open canal known as the Central Arizona Project.

That's a pretty hefty bet, exemplifying a wait-and-see attitude that some outside the city-university partnership see as its Achilles heel. "My hope is that the city will become less reactionary and more proactive," says Kimber Lanning, founder of Local First Arizona, a nonprofit consortium of local businesses.

Some of the most innovative ideas seem to be coming not from politicians or ivory tower experts, but the citizens themselves, especially Lanning. She opened a record store 21 years ago called Stinkweeds and later started Modified Arts, a downtown performance and art space widely hailed as fomenting the arts scene there. She founded Local First in 2003; it has 1,300 members now. The group works to educate city leaders about the drawbacks of government subsidies for chain businesses and the benefits of hiring local businesses. It's also created an online directory of local businesses, a map, and an interactive site where residents can find restaurants and shops in their neighborhood.

Lanning is infinitely supportive of Mayor Gordon -- "He gets it," she says -- but knows there's more to a vibrant city than shade and infill. "Our biggest challenge most definitely is our sprawl," she says. "You can drive for close to two hours and not leave a megalopolis."

For her part, Lanning would like to see a law requiring owners of downtown vacant lots to landscape and light them, and hold at least one cultural event there per year -- which means they'd be insured and wouldn't be so cheap to leave vacant. Another idea: convince big downtown employers to offer employees incentives to move closer to work. "Have them give $1,000 to anyone who lives within five miles," she says. "That's what it's really going to take."

No one I talked to in the government seemed willing to say that sprawl is the problem, that the lifestyle on which Phoenix is based is in itself unsustainable and must shift, and that regulation should be part of that shift. "You can call it sprawl or you can call it growth," said planner Brennan. Later, pressed to admit that sprawl does indeed characterize the area, he said, "I don't know that sprawl is necessarily a bad word or a dirty word; more importantly is how we're responding to that growth."

So far, how the city is responding is decidedly not through regulation -- even the municipal recycling program is voluntary. But if the U.S. cities typically held up as models of sustainability are any indication, regulation is a necessary part of the picture. Portland molded itself through growth boundaries, however controversial; San Francisco and New York have passed landmark green building laws. That's a much tougher sell here in Phoenix, land of individualism. A proposal to implement growth boundaries was handily panned in the late 1990s. "It's that Wild West mentality," says Lanning.

Brennan sums up the mentality this way: "This is a pro-property rights town."

So how far can Phoenix's sustainability efforts go without real policy to back them up, and without a willingness to question the very lifestyle on which the city has based its allure?

Clearly, Phoenix has a lot of soul searching to do before answering. The city is not done growing: There's more land to the north and south to annex, and an unending stream of customers eager for their single-family slice of the American dream. The city had the third-largest net migration rate from 2000-2004, and the first-largest the five years before that, importing some 50,000 people each year. The bulk of the city's infill development is aimed at the seasonal luxury market, which sidesteps a key element of sustainability: affordable housing.

Light rail and new technologies can't cure all the problems, when technologies like cars and air conditioning are what permitted Phoenix to become what it is in the first place. They've allowed Phoenicians to retreat inside when the climate becomes unbearable, rather than think of innovative ways to make that climate better.

That, finally, is beginning to change. Leaders here say sustainability is blossoming, though it might be blossoming as slowly as a saguaro. Its citizens, too, seem more interested in living in a desert city marked by cactuses instead of Bermuda grass -- a place where the environment is embraced rather than erased.

"We just move a little bit more cautiously than Portland or Seattle," says Brennan. "We're a very conservative community. We'll get there. We'll just take a little bit longer."

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