When it comes to sustainability, Los Angeles has its work cut out for it.

Sure, they are world leaders in recycling … if you count dialogue. Or plot lines.  But it is going to take awhile for the famously car-centric city to develop climate-friendly transit, and the utility is the dirtiest in the state.  So it is welcome news to see the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power continue to work on solar initiatives.

You may remember last spring, when Measure B failed at the polls.  This was widely seen as a referendum on the process, not on solar per se, as many constituents felt they had no say in developing the Measure B program, and did not know what the initiative would cost.

To rectify those issues, LADWP is doing a couple of things.  First, instead of hiring consultants to guestimate the price of solar, LADWP is demonstrating low costs by signing low cost contracts.  Take a look at this one, 55 MW with First Solar [pdf].  It comes in at 12 cents/kWh, with an escalator.  Why, it seems like only yesterday that consultants would reliably cite solar’s costs as 40 cents/kWh. In any event, 12 cents is in the wheelhouse of palatability.  You can do a lot with 12 cents.

Secondly, to combat the appearance of not taking public input, LADWP is conducting a series of public workshops to solicit public input.  Check them out here. If you do go, here’s a list of our recommendations.

It’s not every day that your utility asks you how much solar you want.

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Seattle is the most sustainable big city in the nation, according to a list compiled by Smarter Cities, an NRDC project that looks at the progress American cities are making toward going green. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and Portland are the runners-up.

Using data from the EPA and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as some voluntary survey responses from city governments, the project identified the top 15 large, medium, and small cities according to 10 different environmental criteria, from air quality to recycling to transportation.

Here's a look the top 15 large cities (population of 250,000 or more):

It's hard not to be environmentally minded in a city with views like this.Photo: Simonds1. Seattle
The Emerald City gets props for its brand-new light rail system, reliance on hydroelectricity (and the resulting good air quality), Mayor Greg Nickels' U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Agreement, and two global warming initiatives: Seattle Climate Action Now and Seattle Climate Partnership. Seattleites are described as "highly educated and environmentally minded." Think it's just a coincidence that Grist is headquartered here?

San Francisco is one of the most densely populated cities in the country.Photo: ATIS5472. San Francisco
San Francisco's dense population, walkability, plastic-bag ban, city-created carbon offset fund, solar power program, and booming local food movement propelled it to the No. 2 spot. (Read more about Mayor Gavin Newsom's green efforts.)

Portland has always been a leader in big-city sustainability.Photo: Ben Amstutz3. Portland
Seattle's neighbor to the south got its light rail up and running more than 20 years ago, and the city has always been ahead of the curve on controlling urban sprawl and suppressing greenhouse-gas emissions. Portland's residents also recycle more than half their waste.

Oakland is making a green comeback.Photo: satanslaundromat4. Oakland, Calif.
This once-struggling city has a Green Jobs Corps, a New Urbanist 10K Downtown Housing Initiative, a Zero Waste Plan, and a growing local food movement (as urban farmer Novella Carpenter explains). It also gets 17 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Sounds like there is a there there.

How green was my Silicon Valley?Photo: the_tahoe_guy5. San Jose, Calif.
Always on the cutting edge of the high-tech world, this capital of Silicon Valley is fast on its way to leading the green-jobs revolution. Its Green Vision includes plans for bringing 25,000 new clean-tech jobs to the area.

Austin's new smart grid will light up the night -- sustainably, of course.Photo: Visualist Images6. Austin, Texas
A liberal outpost in red Texas, this city owns its electric utility (meaning voters elect the utility's board) and plans to adopt a smart grid in the near future.

Sacramento aims to be green while it grows.Photo: kla40677. Sacramento, Calif.
The Golden State's capital, while suffering from the side effects of rapid population growth, has a progressive, publicly owned utility that, in addition to offering a 100 percent renewable power option, provides free trees to residents hoping to cool their homes with natural shade.

Boston stands out among less-green East Coast cities.Photo: werkunz18. Boston, Mass.
Boston's push toward wind and solar energy, its efforts to become more bike-friendly, and its LED traffic lights make it a leader on the environmentally lagging East Coast.

Denver conserves water like nobody's business.Photo: kla40679. Denver, Colo.
The Mile High City is already way ahead of its goals for reducing water consumption. Its new bike-sharing and composting programs and extensive system of city parks also helped it make the top 15.

Chicago's city hall has its own green roof.Photo: Smarter Cities10. Chicago
Always famous for its architecture, today Chicago has more LEED-certified buildings than any other U.S. city and boasts 300 green roofs. (Read more about Mayor Richard Daley's green efforts.)

San Diego is growing smart.Photo: Smarter Cities11. San Diego
Parks and open spaces make up almost a quarter of this city's land area, and its smart growth program has led to impressive developments.

The Big (Green) Apple.Photo: mikeleeorg12. New York City
What it lacks in air quality and renewable energy it makes up for in density, walkability, and Mayor Bloomberg's commitment to reducing the city's carbon footprint. (Read more about Bloomberg's green efforts.)

L.A. works to clear a path through the smog.Photo: Storm Crypt13. Los Angeles
Infamous for its smog and clogged freeways, L.A. is making admirable efforts to switch to renewable energy and conserve its water supply.

Big D: Greener than you'd think.Photo: dherrera_9614. Dallas
Dallas gets 40 percent of its electricity from wind, has seen a huge spike in public transit usage in recent years, and cracks down on lengthy truck idling during the "ozone season" from April to October.

Columbus hopes for an urban resurgence.Photo: jpmueller9915. Columbus, Ohio
A perhaps unexpected entry on the list, flat Columbus lends itself to bike-friendliness. The city has also been working hard to revitalize its downtown core and combat sprawl.

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This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web's leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community.

I couldn't resist. I knew it was going to be a madhouse in downtown L.A. for Michael Jackson's memorial service, but I had to go see what it was like -- not because I'm a super fan, but purely for the urban novelty of a huge swath of downtown closed off for thousands of fans and mourners.

But what really struck me as I was wandering around amongst the masses was the huge percentage of them that were neither fans nor mourners. Lined along the sidewalks leading to the memorial's venue were dozens of vendors, selling everything you could think of with Michael Jackson's name or face pasted on. From buttons to t-shirts to hand-painted portraits, the informal economy was booming down at MJ Central.

In this video of the sidewalk leading up to the venue, vendors are selling everything from posters to stickers to tickets into the memorial service itself.

I don't want to blow things out of proportion, but for a lot of people, this event was kind of a big deal. You can read all about the excitement and anticipation for the memorial all over the mainstream press, but one point I think is worth re-stating here is that this was an incredibly unique event for any city. And the city treated it that way. The (not incredibly coherent) map below shows the streets closed or affected by the memorial, and you can see it's no small footprint.

Thousands of people attended, both with tickets and without, jamming streets and sidewalks. Despite the peculiarity, this was a very urban moment for an otherwise underutilized downtown area. And the city's informal economy responded as expected. I saw dozens, but there very well could have been hundreds of people selling memorabilia, food, water, and probably a whole lot of single silver gloves.

It might seem tacky or disrespectful to turn a funeral into a money-making opportunity, but I guess that's how business works. However you want to lay your moral judgment on these vendors, I think they offer an important example of something cities should start to think harder about. Street vending is a vital part of any active urban area, and while it would seem to be a response to vibrant places, I think it also plays a big role in making places vibrant.

People like to interact, people need things, and -- especially right now -- people need jobs. Making it easier for people to legitimately utilize the public-ness of streets and sidewalks for commerce would be an easy way to create those needed jobs, serve the wants and needs of consumers and create some much-needed interaction in areas that are increasingly devoid of people.

So sell on, Michael Jackson t-shirt vendors. Fill that niche and provide all you can. You may not be curing the economy, but you're at least offering a glimpse of how local, informal businesses can contribute in a not-unpositive way to the character and vibrancy of cities.

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South Central Farm activist Kati Lopez with armload of fresh corn leaves.Black Valley FilmsJust how much trouble can one community garden start? For starters, three years of court proceedings, two eviction notices, one assault charge, countless allegations of corruption, and $16 million worth of fundraising. Even with all the legal crap, the gardeners still had to pay for manure.

Scott Hamilton Kennedy's Oscar-nominated documentary, "The Garden," tells the story of a 14-acre plot in Los Angeles that became a community garden in 1992, a community-building effort undertaken in the wake of the Rodney King riots. For 12 years, the South Central Farm operated in relative peace on city-owned property, providing lots for 347 predominantly Latino families, and laying claim to the title of "the largest community garden in the country." Not bad for a city known more for its traffic congestion than its open spaces.

But in late 2003, in a closed-door session, the L.A. City Council sold the property to a real estate developer for $5 million. The buyer promptly posted eviction notices at the garden, effective in February 2004. But instead of packing it all in, the South Central Farmers decided to fight the property sale for their right to grow food in that space.

At this point in the narrative, the film starts to be less about the need for urban community gardens and more about the particular brand of corrupt politics in L.A. that was willing tSouth Central Farm with L.A. skyline in background.Black Valley Filmso sacrifice the garden for money, storage units, and soccer fields (yes, soccer fields, you'll have to watch the film to understand). Kennedy includes many shots of smiling gardeners tending to their plots, but provides little substance about the value that a garden can bring to a community.

And other than a bit of he-said-she-said back-and-forth between the South Central Farmers and the Concerned Citizens of L.A. (proponents of the soccer fields), we don't have any information about how the greater community felt about the garden. Were the South Central Farmers even from that neighborhood? The audience doesn't know.

What we do know is that the South Central Farm became a cause célèbre for the Hollywood crowd. Joan Baez and Willie Nelson visited, and Daryl Hannah lived in a tent at the farm for a little while. And, of course, politicians tried to bask in the limelight; Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich came in for a last-minute fundraiser and photo-op.

What struck me as most fascinating about The Garden, is that if the legal face-off had taken place in 2008 instead of 2004, I imagine the public outcry would have been much more intense. It's hard to imaging that city officials would taking away free access to local food now, when a) Los Angeles is struggling more than ever to feed its citizens, and b) the politics of food has exploded in the public consciousness.

Regardless of The Garden's timeliness, Kennedy's tour de force of the political injustices inflicted on the South Central Farm can be seen as the "Who Killed the Electric Car?" of the community garden set. There simply isn't a better case study for budding community-garden activists. And even if you aren't of the activist persuasion, The Garden is well worth the $10 and 80 minutes it will take to learn the fate of L.A.'s South Central Farm.

Watch It: The Garden is showing at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 30. Check the SIFF schedule for details. For readers outside of Seattle, the film is still being shown around the country; check the Black Valley Films website for details on those screenings.

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Photo: Peter Davis via FlickrIf Seattle were an 8th grader, she'd probably be grounded right now. And considering the poor scores the city received on its air quality report card (an F for ozone pollution and a C for particulates), it might not be a bad idea if we all stay inside for a while.

Issued by the American Lung Association, the "State of the Air" report [PDF] analyzes data from 2005-2007 for the two most common pollutants in cities and counties across the country. They found that six in 10 Americans live in areas where air pollution is high enough to endanger lives -- damaging lungs, exacerbating asthma, and increasing the risk for heart attacks, stroke, and premature death.

The cities receiving the dubious distinction of most polluted were Pittsburgh (short-term particulate pollution), Bakersfield, Calif. (year-round particulate pollution), and Los Angeles (ozone pollution), while Fargo, N.D., was the only city to be named one of the cleanest in all three categories. (Which leads me to wonder which is worse: realizing how bad your air is or that you live in Fargo?)

But not to worry, the poor marks for Seattle and other cities can be partially attributed to a recent change in the EPA's standards, says Janice Nolen of the Lung Association. "[It] does not necessarily mean the air is getting dirtier. It means we've had unhealthy air all along." Brilliant! I feel so much (cough, hack, cough) better!

Here's a rundown of the top bottom most-failingest five in each pollution category:

Short-term particle pollution

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An overhead view of eSolar's Sierra solar array, located in Southern California (Photo courtesy e-Solar)

I'm sitting in the back of a black Lincoln Continental with eSolar CEO Bill Gross on the downward glide into Antelope Valley, a sun-blasted stretch of semi-suburbanized desert northeast of Los Angeles. We're on our way to take a look at an alternative future called Sierra, the Google-backed startup's first solar power plant and the prototype for what might be called Solar 2.0 -- green energy that's as much a product of software and computing firepower as steel and glass.

California has become an epicenter of green tech innovation, and I've written endlessly about the stream of Big Solar deals utilities have signed to carpet the Golden State with solar farms. Most, however, exist only as futuristic artist renderings (and some undoubtedly will remain frozen in PowerPoint). But steel is starting to go to ground and a shakeout is inevitable -- the winners will be those solar technologies that produce the most carbon-free electricity at the cheapest prices.

"Two years ago when we were developing this design we looked at all the resources that go into making a solar plant and the cost of virtually all those commodities -- steel, copper, aluminum -- was going up," says Gross, a laptop balanced on his knees. "The only thing going down was the cost of processing power. So we consciously decided to trade a design that needed much more computational power in return for using less materials."

In an industry populated by engineers and scientists, Gross is a software guy with some serious smarts. Some of the dot-com era companies hatched by his Idealab tech incubator might ring a bell - eToys, CitySearch, GoTo.com. That last one pioneered search advertising, an idea later embraced by a little startup called Google. Yahoo subsequently bought GoTo for $1.6 billion. Gross walked away from the crash of '01 with a lot of cash to play with, and he went on to start a series of alt-energy companies. (The roof of Idealab's Pasadena headquarters is a Mr. Wizard's workshop of solar, with prototypes of various photovoltaic technologies silently working away under the sun.)

Gross' solar dreams began as a teenager during the 1973 oil crisis. "I started making little parabolic dishes out of cardboard and tinfoil and then started making them out of metal in metal shop," he says. The 15-year-old started his first company, Solar Devices, and began selling plans for solar dishes in the back of Popular Science magazine for $4 a pop. Ten thousand sales later he had his tuition to Cal Tech in the bank.

Like his rivals at other solar startups, Gross is determined that the current solar boom won't be a repeat of that '70s show -- when solar farms blossomed in the Mojave Desert but their builders went bankrupt when oil prices dropped and interest in (and tax breaks for) alternative energy became as fashionable as Farah Fawcett.

"The only way you're going to make a big enough impact is if you can compete with fossil fuels with no subsidies, and the only way to do that is at a very large scale," Gross says as the foreclosed subdivisions of the blue-collar exurb of Palmdale give way to open desert pockmarked by abandoned trailer homes and burnt-out pickups.

Two thin white towers appear on the horizon and we pull off the highway, heading to the construction site of the five-megawatt Sierra demonstration plant. The towers, framed by the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains, appear to be surrounded by a shimmering lake, an effect created by 24,000 mirrors turned toward the sun. A standard 46-megawatt eSolar farm will have 176,000(!) mirrors.

There's nothing particularly new about "power tower" solar thermal plants. Arrays of mirrors called heliostats track the sun and focus its rays onto a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The intense heat vaporizes the water and the resulting high-pressure steam drives an electricity-generating turbine like those found in conventional power plants.

eSolar's innovation is to rely on software and imaging technology rather than complex hardware to concentrate the sun's energy. The difference becomes apparent as Gross and I don hard hats and walk along the perimeter of the plant, which is swarming with workers installing a giant turbine in the unfinished power block. In other power tower designs, each heliostat is picture window-sized or larger and slightly curved to create a parabola to focus the sun's rays. That means each mirror must be precisely placed, spaced and calibrated in the field.

These eSolar mirrors, in contrast, are flat and about the size of an LCD television screen, packed tightly together in long rows. They sit seven to a platform that rolls off an assembly line in China with the motors and circuitry built-in. The makes it possible for just two workers to install the "sticks" on concrete ballasts and attach the mirrors. Since the heliostats are small and flat, far less steel is needed to hold them in place.

"The new thing is distributing 176,000 mirrors around a field and pointing them to one spot without requiring a human to calibrate every one of them," says Gross, who happily bops around Sierra like a boy in a very big toy store - at 50 he still seems like the Doogie Howser of solar. "That's our key breakthrough."

It's all about the algorithm. Flat mirrors won't focus the sun, so eSolar's software creates a "dynamic parabola" out of the entire heliostat field to concentrate the sunlight on the power tower. He points to one of the 100-foot cell phone towers that ring the site. Each tower sports several 10 megapixel sensors that constantly scan the solar field, pinpointing the location of each mirror and the sun's reflection. With the precise position of the sunbeam on each mirror known, eSolar's software sends messages to the microprocessor in each seven-mirror stick so that the arrays align themselves to form a long sweeping curve across the solar field. That saves the company from doing extensive and expensive surveys to lay out the solar field; if the rows are crooked the software corrects for it.

Not too ago, it would have cost $1,000 for each of the 25,000 microprocessors used in the solar field; today the price is 50 cents. "We use Moore's law rather than more steel," Gross likes to quip, referring to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's maxim that computing power doubles every two years.

In the middle of Sierra's four solar fields stand two off-the-shelf windmill towers. On the ground sit two massive receivers that look like supersized Winnebagos. When the receivers are hoisted atop the towers, the heliostats concentrate an intense beam of sunlight through openings at each end to super heat water-filled pipes. "The benefit is that even if some light is reflected it can have multiple bounces and still hit the pipes," Gross says. "We can get all the light inside the cavity all because of the software that controls the mirrors."

The bottom line: Gross claims eSolar will produce greenhouse gas-free electricity cheaper than what can be produced by natural gas power plants. By packing so many mirrors close together, an eSolar plant needs less land than competitors and can be built closer to cities and transmission lines. The company, which has spent $30 million buying land in California and New Mexico, last year signed a 245-megawatt deal with Southern California Edison and in the past month has licensed its technology to coal-fired New Jersey utility NRG as well as to an Indian conglomerate that plans to build 1 gigawatt of solar farms over the next decade.

And like other solar power plant developers, eSolar stands to benefit from the recently enacted federal stimulus package that allows renewable energy companies to receive a 30 percent tax credit in cash and apply for guaranteed government loans. Gross says a new 30 percent tax manufacturing tax credit for renewable energy components makes building a heliostat factory in the United States all the more feasible.

Sierra is set to go online in the next couple months. And while it's fun having a hard hat with your name on it, Gross' real aim is to become a solar software and technology supplier, not a power plant builder. "I think eSolar can be the Intel inside of the solar industry."

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In the future, your drinking water is going to be recycled from your toilet -- believe it.

As the population grows and global warming drives desertification and the loss of the inland glaciers (see here), fresh water will become increasingly in short supply. As the AFP reported recently:

Yes, desalination will become much more widely used, but it is very energy intensive, creates its own environmental problems, and can't easily be used everywhere (see "How dry I am: Droughts and desalination, another amplifying feedback" and below)

And that brings us to toilet to tap. Reuters has a good article on the subject I excerpt below:

"The water that we use in the West is generally undervalued," said Tim Barnett, a marine research physicist for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego ...

"This is a new day, and we have conditions which compel us to look to new water resources," said David Nahai, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation's largest municipal utility.

He and other water managers see tremendous potential in stepped-up conservation, from encouraging more waste-conscious personal behavior to installing low-flow showers, toilets, appliances and lawn sprinklers.

Such measures could add more than 1 million acre feet of water -- enough for 8 million people -- to Southern California's regional supply alone, or about 25 percent of current annual use, according to a report by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

Further gains are possible by replenishing groundwater basins with rainfall runoff that normally flows to sea.

THE HOLY GRAIL

Desalination, the process of converting salt water to fresh, has long been viewed as the holy grail in the quest to replace imported drinking supplies, said Jonas Minton of the environmental group Planning Conservation League.

But Minton, who chaired a California state desalination task force earlier this decade, and other experts cite two major drawbacks.

One is a risk to marine life from intake pipes that suck water into the system and from a highly concentrated brine byproduct that gets discharged back into the ocean.

The other is the relatively high cost of removing salt from ocean water, which contains roughly 30 times more dissolved impurities than sewer water and thus takes far more energy to distill. Energy demands become especially vexing in light of efforts to curb carbon emissions tied to global warming.

Desalination is common in parts of the Middle East, where freshwater sources are extremely scarce, oil is plentiful, and environmental laws are less stringent. But U.S. ocean desal plants are rare. The biggest so far is in Tampa, Florida.

Six small-scale plants exist in California, and about 20 more are in various stages of planning or development.

The most ambitious, a $300 million facility to be built by the Connecticut-based company Poseidon Resources in Carlsbad, near San Diego, would produce 50 million gallons (189 million liters) of drinking water daily, enough for about 110,000 households.

The Poseidon plant, twice the size of the Tampa facility, would be the largest in the Western Hemisphere. It has yet to receive final approval for construction.

FROM THE GROUND AND BACK AGAIN

Once considered a less attractive alternative, wastewater recycling technology has proven more economically feasible and gained greater public acceptance.

"We're to a certain extent helping to drought-proof ourselves," said Michael Markus, general manager of the Orange County Water District and the chief engineer behind its Groundwater Replenishment System.

"Within three years, the price of imported water will be $800 per acre foot, and projects like this, even without outside funding, will become viable," he said. An acre foot of water is about a year's supply for two families.

By comparison, Orange County's recycling system currently produces water for $600 an acre foot, not including subsidies it received for the initial capital investment.

The plant takes pre-treated sewer water that otherwise would be discharged to the ocean and runs it through a three-step cleansing process -- essentially the same technology used to purify baby food and bottled water.

Thousands of microfilters, hollow fibers covered in holes one-three-hundredth the width of a human hair, strain out suspended solids, bacteria and other materials.

The water then passes to a reverse osmosis system, where it is forced through semi-permeable membranes that filter out smaller contaminants, including salts, viruses and pesticides. Reverse osmosis also is the main process used in desalination.

Finally, the water is disinfected with a mix of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide.

The resulting product exceeds all U.S. drinking standards but gets additional filtration when it is allowed to percolate back into the ground to replenish the aquifer.

Much of the technology is supplied by private companies, including German-based Siemens AG, which makes the microfilters, and Danaher Corp, headquartered in Washington, D.C., which furnishes the UV lamps.

The Orange County system is serving as a model for a project that Los Angeles plans to resurrect nearly 10 years after it was killed when local politicians disparaged the concept as "toilet-to-tap." San Diego's recycling project met a similar fate and also is back on the drawing board.

A recent study cited by L.A. County Economic Development Corp found more than 30 Southern California recycling projects with the potential of yielding over 450,000 acre feet of water within five years. That's about half the amount the region expects to import this year from the Colorado River.

Water managers say they now realize that an aggressive public education campaign is key to building support.

They want the public to understand that much of what comes from the tap today is recycled sewer water. The Colorado River, for example, contains large amounts of heavily treated waste discharged from cities upstream, including Las Vegas.

As the L.A. County Economic Development Corp study puts it, "What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas."

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Los Angeles citizens voted on a citywide solar energy plan on March 3, but the very narrow results didn't become official until yesterday: It lost (by about 1 percent).

That doesn't mean the city's electric utility won't proceed with rapidly expanding its solar voltaic energy portfolio -- it still has the authority to do so. Nor does it mean citizens don't want solar investment. The lead opponents of "Measure B" said they want to see more solar panels in the city, just not through this plan that gave the utility's employees a monopoly on the installation work.

The defeat does mean a financial setback for reelected Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who spent $145,000 of his campaign cash to support the measure.

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Los Angeles will source one-tenth of its energy from solar power by 2020 under a plan unveiled Monday by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Considering the town's many celebrities, a plan to tap star power is certainly forthcoming.

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Houston has received the dubious honor of becoming the second U.S. city to have a "severe" smog problem, as classified by the U.S. EPA. Los Angeles is its partner in grime. The downgrade from a "moderate" to "severe" smog problem gives Texas' largest city nine extra years to meet federal air-quality standards. Both Houston and L.A. have, however, taken recent steps to combat their unhealthy air quality. Houston Mayor Bill White has unveiled a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 11 percent and smog 16 percent by 2010, through use of the usual suspects: renewable energy, hybrid cars, LED traffic lights, energy-efficient buildings, rooftop solar panels, and expanded transit. Los Angeles, for its part, on Wednesday launched a pollution-control program at its bustling port, banning the entry of diesel trucks built before 1989.

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Transit ridership has jumped across the U.S. as folks get tired of paying at the pump. From January to March, transit ridership jumped 10 percent in Boston, 8 percent in both Los Angeles and Denver, and 7.2 percent in the Twin Cities. In Philadelphia, transit ridership in March 2008 was up 11 percent from March 2007; in April, ridership in south Florida was an impressive 28 percent above the year before. "Nobody believed that people would actually give up their cars to ride public transportation," says Joseph Giulietti of south Florida's transportation authority. "But in the last year, and last several months in particular, we have seen exactly that." In addition, motorcycles and scooters are selling like fuel-efficient hotcakes, and vanpools and bikes are increasingly popular. Says Clark Williams-Derry of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, "It's almost like we hit a point where, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore,' and that point was about $3.50 a gallon."

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