President Barack Obama, who initially planned to let First Lady Michelle Obama represent the United States in Copenhagen this week, when the International Olympic Committee chooses a site for the 2016 summer games, plans to travel there too….

“There is no greater expression of the support our bid enjoys, from the highest levels of government and throughout our country, than to have President Obama join us in Copenhagen for the pinnacle moment in our bid,” said Chicago 2016 Chairman and CEO Patrick G. Ryan.

This is the best news I’ve heard in a while.

After all, if the president is going to Copenhagen for something that is relatively inconsequential both substantively and politically — it’s not like Illinois is in great jeopardy for the Dems — then I can now predict with high confidence he will be go to Copenhagen in December for the climate talks, which w

ill be crucial for helping achieve a global deal.

Success in Copenhagen this week gets Obama the Chicago Olympics in the final year of his presidency, a tiny, but fleeting, salute (if he gets a second term).  Success in December — not a final deal, of course, but moving the ball forward to achieve such a deal next year — ensures that Obama is not seen as a failed president historically and that he is not viewed as a failure internationally for however long he is president.

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Arches, now deserted, built for the 2004 Athens Olympics. As healthcare reform shipwrecks and climate legislation lurches toward a similar fate, President Obama is ... preparing to jet to Copenhagen to shill for Chicago as 2016 Olympic site? Really?

What an absurd and ignoble use of time and prestige. When I think of the Olympics, I remember the spookily quiet, deserted "Olympic Village" by the railroad tracks I encountered in Turin while visiting for Slow Food's Terra Madre conference last year. Built just two years before for the 2006 winter games, the edifices already seemed rundown and shabby. They certainly had nothing to do with the otherwise-lively streets of central Turin.

And that city may have gotten off easy. In his Planet of Slums, Mike Davis gives a scathing reading of what the Olympics mean for host cities.

The modern Olympics have an especially dark but little-known history. In preparation for the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis ruthlessly purged homeless people and slum dwellers from the areas of Berlin likely to be seen by international visitors. While subsequent Olympics--including those in Mexico City, Athens, and Barcelona--were accompanied by urban renewal and evictions, the 1988 Seoul games were truly unprecedented in the scale of the official crackdown on poor homeowners, squatters, and tenants: as many as 720,000 people were relocated in Seoul and Injon, leading a Catholic NGO to claim that South Korea vied with South Africa as "the country in which eviction by force is most brutal and inhuman."

I can't figure out why any city would actively lobby to host the games. Once the crowds have cleared out--and the poor have been evicted from the central city--what's left? Already, the City of Chicago's economic-benefits forecasts fro the hoped-for '16 Olympics are looking embarrassingly bloated.

Moreover, a recent study by researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggests that the economic benefits of of hosting Olympic games are mainly spectral. The authors find:

The costs of holding such events seem considerable. Further, any enduring benefits derive mostly from infrastructure investments that the host city could choose to make independently of the games.

Those infrastructure benefits can range from hulking structures that quickly fall into disuse, to real improvements in mass transit. (Rather than rally in Copenhagen for Chicago's Olympic effort, maybe Obama should be rallying his party mates on the Hill for a boost in transit spending?) The authors forge on with a critique of typical Olympic investments:

Much of the spending on the event by local citizens is a substitute from a different leisure activity or consumption good, rather than true additional spending. Moreover, the projects associated with the games typically seem to be white elephants, such as poorly-used sporting facilities associated with idiosyncratic Olympic sports, or hotels and transportation infrastructure built to accommodate a one-time peak demand of just three weeks.

Ouch. The authors did find that countries that host the Olympics get a boost in exports. But they add, devastatingly, that "unsuccessful bids to host the Olympics have a similar positive impact on exports." In other words, by just bidding for the Games, Chicago has already banked any export benefits it will gain from the Olympics. Actually winning the bid won't make much difference.

Thus Obama's journey to boost his hometown's Olympic bid seems at best Quixotic. He should stop tilting at windmills and get down to the hard work of getting lots of them installed on the ground all over the U.S. That means working the halls of power in D.C., not Copenhagen.

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EPA chief Lisa Jackson will be in the Windy City on Friday to deliver the keynote address to the Chicago Summit on Sport and Sustainability. A review of the summit's agenda and list of speakers suggests the event will be narrowly tailored to efforts that city is undertaking in its bid for the 2016 Olympics. With that said, there also will be representatives from the National Football League (Philadelphia Eagles) who may speak to the efforts underway in professional sports on achieving sustainable practices.

As I mentioned in my first article, the professional sports industry is just beginning to embrace sustainable business practices. But they are late to the party, as the Olympic movement has been at the forefront of applying environmentally sustainable practices for some time. In fact, you can trace simple sustainability practices back to efforts applied during the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles.

Green and sustainability are already baked into plans for the next two games. The city of Vancouver's promise to host the first sustainable Olympic games ever almost certainly helped the Canadian city's bid for the 2010 winter games (PDF). Not to be out done, London, the site of the 2012 summer Olympics, unveiled its own sustainability plan back in 2007.

It's clear that if you want the Olympics in your city, you had better commit to environmentally sustainable operations. Wouldn't it be interesting if, here in the United States, the same requirements were placed on both college and professional sports programs by the cities they operate in or represent?

But I digress. In Chicago on Friday, Jackson has an opportunity to not only commend the work that is being done by the sports community but also provide some needed industry motivation. It is also a perfect stage for Jackson to point out how existing regulations touch the sport community, and how sports practices will not be unaffected by new regulatory programs (greenhouse gas emissions) that are likely to come into effect in the not too distant future.

So, as the industry itself moves ahead with sustainability programs, and as government regulators set their sights on sports practices, it should come as no surprise if Jackson's "motivation" eventually comes in the form of a Federal Advisory Committee to help guide the sporting industry as it begins the transformation to a sustainable industry.

I look forward to Jackson's speech and will be writing tomorrow on the highlights.

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Vancouver’s vision for its Olympic village looks dazzling from afar, like the city itself. Up close the details get hairier.Photo: ecstaticistThe city of Vancouver, British Columbia, has a lot to brag about. It's got an enviable location, wedged between the Strait of Georgia and the snow-capped Coast Mountains. It's a perennial winner of "most livable cities" rankings, thanks in part to its parks, arts, and the Canadian social safety net. Its youthful mayor, Gregor Robertson, talks up the city as the greenest in North America and has laid out a plan to make it the most sustainable city in the world.

So you better believe the city will be showing off its environmental credentials when it hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics next February. "Greening" the Olympics has become an expectation, after all (see Turin's recycling programs and Beijing's attempt at air quality improvements). As the largest city ever to host the Winter Games, Vancouver intends to make sustainability central to its Olympic legacy.

The centerpiece of those efforts will be the athletes' village at Southeast False Creek, an 80-acre rehabbed brownfield that lies across a "false creek" from the downtown peninsula. There, a $1 billion city-within-a-city is rising in preparation for next year's Olympic and Paralympic athletes. For years the city eyed the site as a place to try out a new kind of sustainable neighborhood. Winning the Olympic bid in 2003 provided the impetus.

Artist's rendering of the Olympic village. Watch a slide show about the project.The development is distinctively European in its design, an odd influence in a city that can already feel more Asian than North American (See a slide show about the project.) Elsewhere in the city, the "Vancouverist" architectural style highlights slender towers that provide high density while preserving open view corridors (to take in the surrounding water and mountains). But at Southeast False Creek, short, squat buildings push to the edge of narrow streets and courtyards, evoking Amsterdam more than Singapore. Plazas and inner courtyards emphasize shared space, and the streetscape design draws on the Dutch concept of woonerf, a combined sidewalk/street that uses paving and landscaping to encourage walkers, cyclists, slow-moving cars, and children at play to make room for each other.

"You're creating a better community feel because you have more eyes on the street, more people with contact with the street level, and less of that height that keeps people apart from each other," said Robin Petri, the city's project engineering manager.

Southeast False Creek's 16 buildings will include market-rate and affordable housing, a senior housing center, retail shops, a grocery store, a pharmacy, and eventually an elementary school. There are enough clean energy and conservation features to make the head spin—bioswales and wetlands to treat runoff water, rainwater cisterns that irrigate green roofs and flush gray-water toilets, solar-powered trash compactors, heat drawn from sewage pipes, a radiant heating and cooling system.

The development's layout emphasizes communal space, as with this waterfront boardwalk, a nod to one of the site's past uses as a shipyard.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIf it sounds a lot like every other Cool Green Building Project, fair enough. The village is LEED-ey, with expectations that 15 of the buildings will be certified gold and one platinum, under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard. The development is also participating in the pilot LEED neighborhood program. But it's not the highest-rated LEED project—that distinction currently goes to Dockside Green in nearby Victoria, B.C.

Southeast False Creek is notable more for its size—planners predict an eventual population of more than 10,000—and for the international attention it will receive in the Olympic spotlight.

Design manager Roger Bayley summarized the hope that the village's influence in architecture and planning circles will stretch far beyond Vancouver: "I personally believe it could have a very significant influence," he said. "It's being constructed on a scale and in a timeframe that is literally unheard of, except maybe in China. And it's embracing a whole series of innovations that I think many people … will be extraordinarily impressed with."

That's one potential legacy. There's another possibility. Seven months before opening ceremonies, a string of problems nearly as numerous as the clean-tech features threatens to eclipse the project's sustainability goals.

Overshadowing and complicating every other trouble is a financing mess rooted in last fall's credit crisis and mired in the real estate ­­­slump. The project was to be the first Olympic village that was largely funded by private sources and sold as market housing (they are typically built by governments and used afterward as low-income or senior housing). The city, which owns the land, was reportedly glad to avoid the responsibility of supervising construction and financing, while still standing to turn a profit on the project. It ceded much of that work to the developer Millennium Development Corporation. But Millenium's funding mechanism collapsed last October when the New York hedge fund Fortress Investment Group pulled out of the project, leaving the city holding the tab. The city council made arrangements, first in secret and then publicly, to shore up the project with tax money—now figured at $450 million Canadian ($403 million U.S.). City leaders hope they can recover the cost when the units are sold to private buyers for use after the Olympics. Of course, that depends on the real estate market.

A woonerf, or shared-used street, in Matsumoto, Japan. Southeast False Creek will employ similar narrow, winding byways. Photo: Cheryl & RichOther setbacks: Construction lags behind schedule, pressuring workers to meet a Nov. 1 deadline, when the development company hands control of 1,100 units to Olympic organizers. In late June, reports arose of a possible mold problem because of improper pipe installation. A goal that vegetation would cover 50 percent of the project's roof space has been scrapped, reportedly because insurers worried about flooding. [Correction: Petri said the project is on track to meet this target.]

The city also scaled back the amount of low-income and middle-income housing it originally pledged to include. It will now subsidize 252 low-income units, a target that has nearly doubled in cost, from $65 million to $110 million, The Vancouver Sun reports. The city has yet to determine who will qualify and how to select tenants for the subsidized dwellings, Petri said.

British Columbia's anti-Olympic protestors have also focused some of their disapproval on the development, even though Olympic housing will occupy only 50 of Southeast False Creek's 80 acres. Much of the development will be built after the games, and of course the whole village will last far longer than its use for the games. Still, planners have battled the perception that the short-term event influenced the city's long-term plan.

"This isn't really about the Olympics," said Petri. "The Olympics just provided us with a fixed timeline and an opportunity to give it lots of attention. But this was planned way before the Olympics. Whether someone's excited about the Olympics or not is really independent from how they feel about the site."

The project’s blocky buildings achieve the same density as many of the city’s tower housing developments, according to the city's project engineering manager, Robin Petri.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIt will be interesting to see which storylines prevail when the international media trains its eye on Vancouver next winter—the financial mess, the shrinking social-housing target, the clean-energy and water-use technologies, the attempt to build not just green buildings but an entire sustainable neighborhood, or something else altogether. Organizers have begun releasing an elaborate online book on their vision for the site, in monthly segments, to help along those glowing profiles. (To be fair, the publication includes some good information, not just PR.)

Assessing the project's long-term influence will be more difficult. Locally, it may wear down some of the resistance that comes with trying to build things differently. Bayley, the lead designer, spoke this spring about seeking permits to use harvested rainwater to flush toilets.

"You'd think that would be a simple thing to do, but persuading municipal authorities was not as simple as we'd hoped," he said. "We ended up putting signs on the toilet saying 'do not drink this water.' Then they wanted it translated into dog and cat."

Petri added later, "But now they've approved it, and the next attempt at this won't be as new to them." She said the project would help permitters, contractors, engineers, landscape architects, and others who work on it become comfortable with high-efficiency techniques. From there, she hopes, they might spread throughout the building and planning trades. In other words, despite all the attention that comes with being novel, the real goal of Southeast False Creek is to help such projects become normal.

Watch a slide show about Vancouver's Olympic village at Southeast False Creek:

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When Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell asked delegates at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment whether they had flown to the Vancouver event on Monday, hundreds of hands shot up. If any of them saw the irony of reaching an environmental conference through the carbon-intensive method of jet travel, they didn’t let on.

Thomas Kineshanko, a 2008 graduate of Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, spoke up Tuesday about the dilemma at a panel on “Inspiring Youth Through Sport.”

As an 800-meter track runner, he traveled with his college team to places such as Tennessee and Fresno to compete in races that would last less than two minutes. “It finally struck me that this is kind of an absurd pastime,” he said.

He tried to lead the team in becoming carbon neutral, but it didn’t work out. He now manages his grandfather’s firm, Habitat Enterprises, helping it transition into a carbon-trading consultating firm. He’s set a personal goal of overseeing the reduction of 25 million tons of carbon emissions in his lifetime.

His musing on the problem of jet travel was one of a few back-to-earth moments the youth panel provided at the idea-heavy conference.

“I think that if young people were given the opportunity and the tools, they could do so  much,” said Theresa Seymour, 24, a member of Canada’s Sto:lo Nation. “It’s not about spoon-feeding young people with what they need to know. Because this world is becoming their very quickly.”

Seymour spoke about helping teenagers in aboriginal groups connect with their communities through traditional sports, such as dugout-canoe races. She said traditional competitions required fasting, bathing, and prayer beforehand, things that inevitably led to a broader awareness of one’s environment. 

“Because it was about your heart and your mind. It wasn’t just about one aspect of your being,” she said.

Seymour is also an up-and-coming hip-hop artist, as are two lads from Richmond, British Columbia, who won VANOC’s “u-reduce/u-produce” video storytelling contest this month. Check out this offering from 15-year-olds Darrick “D-Pain” Lee and Michael “Phat Mike” Darnel. I’m pretty sure it’s a hybrid SUV they’re using to knock SUVs and plug hybrids, despite the tricky camera work. But the video is solid. Decide for yourself:

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Near the end of the World Conference on Sport and the Environment in Vancouver yesterday, Kim Smither of marketing firm Octagon Worldwide displayed a series of photos of screaming, face-painted sports fans.

“Imagine the power you’d have if you could harness this,” she said.

Talk of “harnessing” the passion of sports showed up everywhere at the two-day conference, but Smither moved past the cliché and made a case that athletes are in a great position to promote environmentally friendly behavior—if they understand the diversity of their fans.

She walked conference delegates, including several Olympic medalists, through Octagon’s “Passion Drivers” market research, which tries to determine exactly why sports fans are moved to scream themselves hoarse, or at least plan their weekends around televised games.

The company found viewers are drawn to spectator sports for different reasons -- team loyalty, for example, or nostalgia, or gloating rights, or admiration of individual athletes, or a sense of tribal belonging.

Fan-tastic.

iStock

Octagon’s Olympic-focused research uncovered national trends. Devotion to the national team is the most important motivator for Chinese viewers. In England, nostalgia and appreciation for history and tradition provide the strongest emotional connection to the games. Canadians are driven by an affinity for their own team, for home-grown athletes, and for the cold-weather sports they consider “theirs.” Americans are exceptionally drawn to individual athletes (hence NBC’s human-interest vignettes).

If environmental groups -- and Olympians who speak on their behalf -- want the attention of viewers, understanding their different motivations is invaluable, Smither said.

“If you know why people are passionate, you can really target your message,” she said. “Sports fans are not a homogenous group. Some people are going to tune it out, but if you can find a way to speak in your audience’s language, you have a much better chance of being heard.”

Most of the self-selected respondents to Octagon’s surveys said Olympic athletes could persuade them to change their environmental athletes. Interestingly, they overwhelmingly said the messages of all athletes -- not just superstars -- mattered to them.

“I believe they hold the key to bringing sustainability to the Olympics,” Smither said of the majority of Olympians who do not win medals.

The research also found that people considered the Olympics an appropriate venue for sustainability messages. So they aren’t necessarily demanding that competitions provide an escape from social and political problems.

Anna van der Kamp, a silver medalist in rowing and project director for Clean Air Champions, a group of Canadian Olympians that promotes environmental health, led a panel responding to Octagon’s research. I asked her whether spectator sports have an escapist nature that limits the amount of social change they can promote.

If you can identify viewers that watch sports for escapist reasons (what Octagon calls “Self indulgence” and “Me time”), you can avoid them and target messages toward other groups, van der Kamp said.

The research was new to her, but she said Clean Air Champions has found its personal-health message much more successful with those already involved in athletics.

“People who are physically active, like amateur athletes, are more likely to take on new actions related to the environment,” she said. “So we seek them out.”

Other than urging athletes to step up and start endorsing environmental stuff, the Octagon presentation was more about inspiration than strategy. But it suggested sports fans might be quicker to engage in social issues than one might assume.

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Vancouverite David Suzuki and his namesake foundation surface in the U.S. news from time to time, typically through climate initiatives and ocean conservation initiatives such as its estimate of the carbon impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

But for our Northern neighbors, the 73-year-old Suzuki is a household name. He’s become the Canada’s preeminent environmental activist -- David Roberts likened him to the Canadian Al Gore. At this weeks’ World Conference on Sport and the Environment, I asked some youngish Canucks about his first claim to fame. They weren’t sure, they said.  He’s sort of always been around. (The often-helpful interwebs mention he was a genetist and longtime host of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s science TV series, "The Nature of Things.")

When the Vancouver Organizing Committee released a plan yesterday to make the 2010 Winter Games carbon neutral, reporters immediately turned to Suzuki and the policy wonks at his foundation for an assessment. The foundation provided the orginal forecast of the carbon impact of the 2010 Olympics –- 300,000 tons. But it hadn’t seen VANOC’s offset purchasing plan before yesterday, so it couldn’t vouch for it.

“I would plead with VANOC to please set the bar high,” said Suzuki.

He held his own news conference to announce the release of On Thin Ice, a report on the threat climate change poses to winter sports in Canada. It found that global warming could all but wipe out ice skating, cross-country skiing, and low-elevation downhill skiing by 2050 if no action is taken.

Suzuki mentioned two “iconic Canadian images” that are already endangered by climate change – polar bears and backyard skating rinks, like the one on which a young Wayne Gretzky learned to skate.

As he’s done before, Suzuki enlisted Canadian athletes to help make his case. Professional snowboarder Justin Lamoureaux, who trains in Whistler, B.C., said he’s already found his training season and availabe space shrunk by melting glaciers.

"Imagine a Canada with no pond hockey, no snow days, no skiing," he said. "No snowmen, snowballs or snow forts and less maple syrup. As much as some people dislike it, winter is Canada."

Suzuki also offered a harsh critique of the Conservative-led federal government and its lack of climate action, and of the national media’s downplaying of the climate issue in last fall’s election.

“Hundreds of thousands of Canadians are already acting at the individual level, but we need leadership at the federal level,” he said.

The foundation’s report concludes with a call for national carbon regulation.

“Canada is a northern country,” Suzuki said. “We are probably as vulnerable to the effects of greenhouse gases and global warming as any country in the world.”

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The big news of day one at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment in Vancouver, British Columbia, was the unveiling of a carbon neutrality plan for the 2010 Olympics. The rest of the day’s events were a lot like the offset plan: solid at their core and short on details.

During a keynote address, socially responsible investment executive Thomas Van Dyck managed to drop the lines, “The green tide must lift all ships,” “Green is the new green,” and “We must put the eco back in economy,” all within 30 seconds, all without a smile or a trace of irony. That’s got to be worth an award or something.

The crowd -- athletes, sports organizers, corporate sponsors, International Olympics Committee (IOC) officials and suitors from 2016 host city-finalists Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, Rio -- seemed like they could handle a bit more than inspirational slogans. Not hating, just saying. But there was some good stuff along with the cheerleading.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson

Introduced as a guy who bicycled to work to work this morning, the boyish, charismatic 43-year-old talked up Vancouver as a cosmopolitan, exercise-loving city, where it’s only natural to unite athletics and care for the earth via a global event such as the Olympics.

Robertson mentioned biking to work, which he said taught him that his city could provide more bike-friendly commuter routes. He offered something of a challenge to his municipal colleagues: “We want to be the greenest city in the world,” he said. “Not that it should always be a competition, because there are things we can learn from each other too. But we figure we’re leading North America, which isn’t all that hard to do in terms of the environment.” Booyah! Take that, Cleveland. Also, he biked to work this morning.

Prince Albert II of Monaco

No newbie to the climate action scene, His Serene Highness Prince Albert II has traveled to both poles to observe the effects of global warming and clamor for carbon regulation. In Vancouver he showed lots of love for the host city, province, and organizing committee, along with the IOC.

"What the IOC has done, what the IOC environmental commission has done and indeed what the Olympic movement has embraced is, for me, a return to the original Olympic spirit," he said. "A philosophy of life with the goal of placing sport at the service of the harmonious development of man."

Overall, it was an everybody-on-board sort of speech: “It is no longer possible to shirk the efforts necessary to save our environment,” he said. “This fight requires absolutely everyone’s attention.”

Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell

The province’s leader since 2001 spoke openly and passionately about his love for wood, saying “If you’re concerned about the climate, wood is the best building material there is.

Campbell said wood conserves carbon even in lumber form, is more resilient than steel, and has 400-times better insulation than steel. He said he’s helped rewrite building codes to allow wooden buildings up to six stories high. “It’s cheaper, it’s environmentally sensible, and we’ve got lots of it,” he said.

Mountain pine beetles have killed 80 percent of inland pine forests in B.C. -- the beetle population has exploded because winters are no longer cold enough to kill most of them. The new 350,000 square-foot Olympic speed skating rink in suburban Richmond has a wooden roof, made from beetle-killed B.C. pines. Campbell considers this the sort of lemons-from-lemonade solution B.C. needs to showcase when the Games begin next February.

“We have to be willing to start with ourselves and be an example,” he said. “If no one’s willing to lead, we won’t make any progress.

“I think one of the most important things we can do is tell stories of success. Too often we just hear about what isn’t working.”

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The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) wants make the 2010 Winter Games carbon neutral, but the plan it released Monday counts on help from the private sector to make it happen.

At the World Conference on Sport and the Environment, VANOC announced a plan to neutralize 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in British Columbia. That's the amount of emissions the February 2010 games will create, according to a preliminary carbon forecast by the David Suzuki Foundation. The forecast expects two thirds of that amount will come from air travel by spectators and participants.

Vancouver isn't the first city to attempt a carbon neutral Olympics -- Salt Lake City and Torino made similar promises. But organizers here say theirs is the broadest attempt yet. The 300,000-tons estimate includes carbon dioxide generated by pre-games construction and the 2010 Paralympic Games, to be held in Vancouver later next spring.

VANOC doesn't plan to pay for the offsets itself, CEO John Furlong said. Instead, it's counting on a corporate sponsor to step up just 10 months before the games, long after most sponsorships have been lined up. At current carbon prices of about $15 a ton, meeting the 2010 target would cost about $3.6 million ($4.5 million Canadian), said Linda Coady, vice-president of sustainability for the organizing committee.

Responsibility for executing the offset plan will be placed in the hands of the Pacific Carbon Trust, a newly created corporation that helps oversee the Province of British Columbia's carbon emissions reduction plan. Organizers said they didn't know exactly what projects those offsets would support just yet. Coady said they would likely include retrofitting buildings to run on geothermal or biomass heating instead of natural gas, for one.

Carbon offsets are frequently knocked for not actually reducing emissions (even Grist's Umbra Fisk has weighed in), and Vancouver games organizers conceded there's a big difference between high- and low-quality offsets. They promised to deliver the good kind. "We think the Pacific Carbon Trust standard is going to be one of the highest standards in the world," Coady told a group of reporters.

But the plan would not necessarily meet the internationally recognized gold standard for voluntary offsets, she said, because VANOC wanted to ensure it was weighted toward B.C. projects.

Organizers were asked if offsets are really about easing in the consciences of polluters, and Furlong responded that the offset program really "causes people to change behavior." For example, VANOC officials are traveling less to international meetings and teleconferencing instead, he said.

He promised the 2010 Games would be a shining example of environmental responsibility. "We only get one chance, one opportunity," he said. "Since we're in a part of the world that cares a lot about this, we're doing what we can."

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For the next two days I'll be reporting from Vancouver, British Columbia, where it's hard to walk two blocks without running into a construction project related to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Eleven months from the opening ceremonies, Olympics buzz is fairly palpable, with games-related ads on the airwaves, heaps of Olympics gear for sale in souvenir shops, and construction cranes dotting the skyline.

The city gets a chance to highlight its preparations this week at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment (you know it's classy because they say sport and not sports), which will explore the roles athletics can play in addressing climate change and creating livable environments. It brings together Olympic medalists, pro and amateur sports organizers, and reps from the Olympics' heavyweight lineup of corporate sponsors. The Prince of Monaco will drop in to speak, as will leaders from the International Olympic Committee and the UN Environment Programme, the two sponsoring organizations.

There should be a good dose of overblown talk about "How Sports will Save the Earth," and I'll keep a running count of the use of the word "harness," as in "harnessing the power of sport for change." But I'm hopeful about hearing some genuinely innovative ideas too.

The conference also serves as a showcase for the environmental credentials of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, which has made sustainability a prominent part of its bid from the get-go. The 1,100-unit Olympic Village project is touted as a model of sustainable urban design, and new venues like the Richmond speed skating rink feature nifty energy and water-use elements.

Olympic preparations also include a high-impact rebuild of the Sea to Sky Highway connecting Vancouver to the ski resort Whistler, the site of many ski and sled competitions. B.C. has a feisty activist community that has already raised hell--and plans to raise more--about the highway, the loss of affordable housing, and other environmental and social impacts of the games.

I'll be looking into as much of this as I navigate this fair city, try to think metrically, and learn to keep loonies straight from my twoonies. (That's what they call money here, seriously) More to come ...

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Final venues have been approved for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Following outcry from environmentalists over the original proposal for a gigantic winter-sports complex adjacent to a national park, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reared his head and suggested changes to mitigate eco-impact. Organizers have relocated some venues, as well as cutting a planned inter-venue light-rail system from two tracks to one and a highway from four lanes to three. As organizers make plans to build 250 facilities, mostly from scratch, Sochi 2014 President Dmitry Chernyshenko gives the ambitious assurance that they're "committed to an environmental policy that will not only protect, but also enhance the overall environment of the region." Sochi, by the by, is just 12 miles from Abkhazia, a former territory of Georgia. Notes Olympic affairs expert Eric Morse, "It is possible that [the Russia-Georgia conflict] will have no effect at all, but it's never good when an Olympics is situated on a geopolitical faultline."

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Obama going to Copenhagen

Beijing enjoyed its best air quality in a decade during the Olympic Games, thanks in part to strict traffic-control measures. Pleased by their success, city officials have unveiled ongoing modified measures in hopes of continuing to ward off the smog. Under rules that go into effect Oct. 11, privately owned vehicles will be banned from driving on one weekday, with the particular day determined by license plate number. A third of government vehicles must stay off the roads each day as well. City authorities are encouraging employers to adopt more flexible working hours or allow telecommuting, and the program will be reassessed after six months. Beijing residents currently buy some 1,000 new cars each day. If one resident's response to the new plan is any indication, the new measures could have unintended consequences. "I need to take my daughter home from boarding school on Friday night," says Zhang Min, whose license plate number disallows him from driving that day. "Probably we need to buy another car."

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Beijing's emergency measures to clear its famously polluted air during the Olympic Games have been largely successful, with the city reportedly experiencing the cleanest summer air it's had for over a decade. But now that the Olympics are over, full-time city residents have been pointing out how pleasant breathable air has been and how nice it would be to have it all the time. In response, Chinese officials, who are still under the international spotlight until the close of this month's Paralympic Games, hinted to the media recently that some clean-air measures may stay in place beyond the games' end. Officials have said that plans to reduce construction-site dust will be sped up, some of the city's most-polluting vehicles could be subject to more regulation, and that heavily polluting companies may be required to address their pollution problems in order to resume post-games operations. However, one of the most successful (and popular) measures to curb the city's pollution will not be continued after the games -- the restriction keeping half of the city's cars from operating each day.

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Wash. Times: “China vows to dramatically slow emissions growth.”

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Wash. Times: “China vows to dramatically slow emissions growth.”

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E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations

Wash. Times: “China vows to dramatically slow emissions growth.”