One way to keep perspective amid all the Beltway cogitation over how  to keep a climate component in an energy bill is to pay attention to the global coal industry.  Coal is the prime factor determining the pace of growth in emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide as human populations and appetites crest in the next few decades. And regardless of what happens in the United States, the industry’s leaders see nothing but bright prospects ahead. We’re still stuck on the coal rung of  Loren Eiseley’s heat ladder.

Some energy specialists will explain below why the global coal boom renders the legislative debate on climate somewhat moot from the standpoint of the shared global atmosphere, where the source of emissions is irrelevant to their ultimate heating influence.

Here’s the latest signal from the coal industry. Addressing potential investors in Manhattan on Thursday, Gregory Boyce, the chairman and chief executive officer of the world’s biggest coal company,  Peabody Energy, simply gushed as he described how the company is ideally positioned to take advantage of “a long-term supercycle for coal,” driven by rapidly growing demand in Asia. (The company keeps a fast-moving ticker on its Web site tracking coal sales at roughly 8 tons a second or so.) This is how his talk was described in a company news release…

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Keri Facer – Learning to live in interesting times from FutureEverything on Vimeo.

The video I share with you today comes from one of the keynote speakers at Future Everything, a design and technologies conference held in Manchester.  Keri Facer gives a provoking talk on how we think about the future–psychologically, collectively, technologically–and what it means for the lived experience of our cities, as well as the development of complex biological systems.  Folks here at the Institute are particularly interested in this subject because we are also utilizing collaborations between artists, environmental scientists, and learning specialists to help move the discussion of climate change forward.  One of the keys, as Facer illustrates so well, is getting people to think about the future of their everyday lives in ways that are empowering at the same time as they are realistic about the changes that need to be made.

Last Friday, Harry Reid sent a letter to various Senate committee chairmen telling them he wanted to get an energy bill rolling in July. BP’s poisoning of the Gulf has apparently made energy reform look a lot more palatable than it did a few months ago. But Reid’s letter was blurry on the details: He never said whether he wanted legislation that capped carbon emissions. An “energy bill,” after all, could mean anything from the big Kerry-Lieberman climate bill to a scaled-down bill that just cracked down on oil companies and maybe added some funds for alternative energy sources. A more modest approach might give Dems a nice, tidy political win. But it wouldn’t do nearly as much for the planet.

And now it’s starting to look like a smaller bill may, in fact, be in the offing. Earlier today, Chuck Schumer was on MSNBC and said that the legislation Reid was assembling would resemble the (weak) energy-only bill passed by Jeff Bingaman’s committee back in June. In other words, there’d be some renewable-power mandates, some incentives for nuclear, some funds to kick-start new transmission lines, and some new regulations on oil companies. If Kerry and Lieberman want to tack on a cap-and-trade scheme on top of all that, Schumer said, they’ll “get a chance to add it in the form of an amendment.”

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Composting may be the right thing to do for the environment, but it can be hard to get around the smell and the mess—particularly for urbanites without expansive yards. Much like the Daily Dump in India—which, by the way, looks to be thriving since our 2007 coverage—Compost Cab is a new service about to launch in Washington, DC, that can be called upon to handle all the dirty details.

DC-area consumers begin by signing up online. Once it launches, Compost Cab will then provide them with a standardized bin equipped with a sturdy, compostable bag liner. Each day clients will fill the bin with their organic material, and once a week—on a reliable, fuel-efficient schedule—Compost Cab will pick up the bag, leaving behind only a clean bin with a new liner. The cost is simply USD 8 per week per bin; no long-term commitments are required. Compost Cab’s primary composting partner is Engaged Community Offshoots (ECO), a seed-stage urban farm in College Park, Md., that uses finished compost to grow natural, nutritious food for local kids.

At least as interesting is that clients who have been with Compost Cab for nine months or longer can claim some finished soil in return. Specifically, for every 50 pounds of organics the company collects from them, they can receive five pounds of fresh compost and one pound of worm castings in exchange. Those who choose not to claim their share, meanwhile, can ask Compost Cab to donate it on their behalf to ECO. Compost Cab is a production of Agricity LLC, a Washington, DC-based company focused on sustainability.

Image from Streetsblog.org

Streetsblog recently ran a nice piece on walkable development in Portland.  We may face very different challenges here in NYC, but it looks like we’ve got some lessons to learn from smaller sister city in the northwest.  Noah Kazis writes:

In many parts of America, efforts to build transit-oriented, walkable communities are foiled because financing can’t be secured for projects that differ from the templates lenders have become used to since World War II. In Salt Lake City, for example, the local government’s push for transit-oriented development has been stymied because local banks won’t lend to projects without huge parking lots.

Why do lenders balk at development that reduces car dependence? In a word, inertia. “The lending industry appears to be very conservative, if your definition of conservative is doing the same thing this year as you did five years ago,” said David Goldstein, the co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s energy program and an expert on environmental real estate financing. Because banks have no institutional memory of lending to transit-oriented development, they are reluctant to do so going forward.

In Portland, officials and activists have begun to escape this cycle. The policies they’ve pursued to foster walkable development are instructive for many American cities looking to grow without making traffic congestion worse.

Even in transit-rich New York, economic development officials have subsidized developers who import car-oriented standards. They are happy to secure favorable lending terms, underwritten by the U.S. government, for multi-story parking decks. It’s safe to say that goals like enhancing the pedestrian environment or attaining sustainability targets are not motivating these decisions. Portland development officials do things differently. When planners there decided that urbanism and sustainability were good outcomes, they went out and started convincing lenders to change the way they do business.

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Water Supply in Banglore, photo credit J. Gronwall via Stockholm Center

From the Stockholm Resilience Centre:

Following an intense study of agricultural ecosystems near Montreal, a new tool that enables the simultaneous analysis and management of a wide range of ecological services has been developed by Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne of McGill University´s Department of Geography, Elena Bennett of the McGill School of Environment, and centre researcher Garry Peterson.Risk of missing hidden ecosystem services
Environmental management typically focuses on nature´s resources like food, wildlife and timber, but can miss hidden ecosystem services such as water purification, climate moderation and the regulation of nutrient cycling.

The researchers show that ecosystems that maximized agriculture offer fewer hidden ecosystems services than more diverse agricultural landscapes. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science on March 1, 2010.

- Landscapes that provide a lot of one services, such as pig production, can be costly because they have fewer of the hidden services, such as the regulation of nutrient pollution, which are also important to people, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne says.

They also show that in some areas high amounts of agricultural production can go hand in hand with the production of other ecosystem services. The researchers framework can be used to help identify “best-practice areas” and contribute to developing effective resource policies.

Full post here.

Solar Map for San Francisco from sf.solarmap.org

Green reports that there is a comprehensive ‘solar map’ in the works for New York City.  They quote CUNY’s very own Tria Case and explain that a new LIDAR dataset will allow users to calculate potential energy generation capabilities for individual rooftops.  (We have learned from other sources at CUNY that this data is going to be used for much more than a ‘solar map’–as it measures elevation at such a fine scale that even sidewalks and fire-hydrants become visible, the LIDAR data will be invaluable for storm surge models and urban planning.)  Here is an excerpt from the post:

Now New York City, where it is estimated that solar arrays could generate about one-fifth of the electricity consumed by eight million residents, has climbed on the bandwagon. As I wrote in The Times on Monday, an airplane equipped with a laser system known as Lidar, for Light Detection and Ranging, took images of the city’s surface terrain and structures last month. The goal is to collect data that can be used to, among other things, update flood maps and develop a solar map by this fall.

Tria Case, director of sustainability for the City University of New York, which has teamed with the city to develop the solar map, said the images offered highly precise information about the shape, angle and size of rooftops and the shading from trees and structures around them.  Read more…

A record 10,010 megawatts of new wind capacity was installed in the United States last year, accounting for 39 percent of new electrical generation, the American Wind Energy Association said in its annual report.

That raises the nation’s total wind energy capacity to more than 35,000 megawatts, or enough electricity to keep the lights on in 9.7 million homes. “Over the past five years, wind power and other renewable energy technologies, combined with natural gas, have provided over 90 percent of all new generating capacity in the U.S.,” the report’s authors stated.

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Growth in solar power capacity, in comparison, has slowed but still shows some positive trends:

Total capacity installed for all types of solar energy grew by 5.2 percent in 2009, compared with 9.6 percent the previous year. But Rhone Resch, the chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which released the report Thursday, said that the overall number hid tremendous variation within the industry.

For example, he said, the residential market for photovoltaic panels (the type used on rooftops) grew at its fastest pace ever in 2009, and utilities’ demand for these panels also stayed strong. On the other hand, the large commercial market — companies putting solar panels on their rooftops — lagged. As a result, overall growth in capacity for photovoltaic panels stood at 38 percent last year, down significantly from 84 percent growth a year earlier.

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Every year between June and October, the Hackney Marshes in north-east London are covered with sweet, luscious blackberries. Families bring buckets and collect the free harvest, turning the berries into jams, smoothies and many other recipes. They are so abundant that most of the succulent berries are never picked.

Yet larger supermarkets will sell blackberries for as much as £3 for a small handful, and people will buy it. Most Londoners don’t know about this abundance and have never had this close a relationship with their food and local wildlife. The London Orchard Project aims to change all this.

The London Orchard Project was founded by Rowena Ganguli and Carina Dunkerley. In less than a year the team has assessed, prepared and planted orchards on 12 sites in nine boroughs around the capital; and trained 50 orchard leaders in orchard management skills.

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Manhattan Land Values 1923, via Urban Omnibus

Urban Omnibus ran an excellent piece last week on innovation and the development of New York City.  They interviewed key players from the Regional Plan Association (RPA) in order to explore how three long-term plans have shaped the face and composition of the city up through the 20th century.  What strikes me most about this history (with its admittedly drowsy language) is just how central the agency (with its unavoidably modest and unassuming name) has been to shaping the way forward in periods of crisis and stagnation.  From the interview:

In the 1920s, about 25 years after the creation of greater New York City, a group of civic leaders got together to create a single comprehensive metropolitan plan. Today, RPA is still dedicated to pushing those regional ideas that transcend political boundaries and might be too controversial for elected leaders to take on. RPA produces one of these plans each generation and then goes about advocating for its implementation.

The 1929 plan projected that the size of the metropolitan region would double by the 1960s, and it recommended that we build the systems to support that growth: highways, mass-transit, airports, housing, and community development. By the early 1960s, the plan was largely implemented with one glaring exception: the transit connections. The failure to invest in recommended transit projects hastened the region’s suburbanization. By the late 1950s, the RPA was already worried about our land use patterns and was publishing reports with names like “The Race for Open Space.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of reports came out that are collectively considered the Second Regional Plan. These reports argued for re-centering the region in a constellation of centers, such as New Brunswick, White Plains, the Nassau hub, Bridgeport and Stamford, based on transit networks.

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Like the 1929 and 1968 plans, the Third Regional Plan in 1996 advocated creating infrastructure and building big systems to protect landscapes and water supplies, to provide more mass-transit, to plan for the region’s growth. But the Fourth Regional Plan might end up being less about creating new systems and more about getting more efficiency and productivity out of the energy supply, the water supply, community development networks. The bad news is that we’re doing a poor job of managing and operating these 19th and early 20th century systems; the good news is there’s a lot more capacity in them if we start to manage the systems better.

This kind of thinking around innovation connects extremely well to things like IBM’s Smarter Cities program. And it fits well with previous proposals we have made, such as on congestion pricing. The next time we advocate for congestion pricing we will come up with a much “smarter” proposal. It will not just look at tolling East River bridges but will think about how to develop an innovative policy that actually manages traffic and uses, for example, the GPS systems currently in thousands of Manhattan taxis in order to determine how to get the most capacity out of the system.

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