Planetary Thinking

Archive for the ‘Bright Green’ Category

The Intergenerational Ponzi Scheme

In Bright Green, Futures on March 30, 2012 at 11:09 am

Our economy today operates like an intergenerational Ponzi scheme. It pays profits today to older generations who’ve invested in it, promising younger generations that (in exchange for their own work and investment) they too will benefit when their turn comes.

But because many of the systems generating those profits run unsustainably, when younger generations’ turns finally arrive, those systems will be worth less than they are today. Some may be extremely expensive to maintain by then (like auto-dependent exurban developments). Others may be all cost and no benefit (like inheriting a barrel of nuclear waste). There’s even a potential danger that the whole system will produce less wealth than it costs to maintain, leading to a spiral of entropy and impoverishment known as “catabolic collapse.” But even without such a crash, it’s not hard to see that a great many economic choices being made today by older generations offer fewer options, not more wealth, to those coming later.

Climate change looms as the epitome of an intergenerational Ponzi scheme: for a limited benefit in this generation, we are burning dirty fuels that will present great difficulties for (if not wreak disasters on) many generations to come. A climate-destabilizing economy is sometimes presented as a net good by certain economists (on the supposition that wealth today is worth more than wealth tomorrow, and that people in the future will have more wealth with which to deal with the problems we create). It takes very little true-cost thinking, though, to see that many of the possible (even predicted) impacts of climate change (which, as externalities, are rarely and poorly accounted for in economic models) can easily outweigh the short-term economic benefits. As Paul Hawken says, we’re stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP.

It’s probably worth noting that even those present profits are highly inequitably distributed. Whatever you think about the Occupy movement, it has succeeded in shining a light on the degree to which the rewards generated by the economy are distributed to a very small number of hyper-wealthy older people. Most of those insanely rich people are insanely rich because they own large chunks of the older industries currently trashing the future. Very often, when we hear of the need to be economically “practical” in thinking about climate action, what is actually meant is that we need to protect their investments.

The corollary is too little noted: many of the kinds of changes we need to see in our economy in order to safe-guard the future have at least the potential for far more equitable distribution. If every home in the world was better designed and insulated, if every city was better served by transit and more walkable, if products were designed to last longer and be less toxic — if we saw a shift towards an economy that treated the real impacts of our systems as something no longer “external” to our economy — most people would be quickly better off. Most of the dirtiest industries are like giant vacuum hoses, sucking money out of people’s lives and local communities. Bright green solutions, on the other hand, can not only create profitable businesses but save people money on energy and circulate more of those savings in the local economy.

The public debate on sustainability and the economy is shifting. We are beginning to see the future put back in the room. In the meantime, it’s not at all inappropriate for young people, when presented with the claim that some future-trashing industry is creating needed wealth, to ask “Yeah? Who for?”

PS: I assume you’re well-educated enough not to need pointers to evidence that the rich are getting richer. If you want some hard evidence that profits from our current, unsustainable system accrue far more to old people than young, I have yet to find a better resource than the Pew study, The Rising Age Gap in Economic Well-Being. It’s a wealth of outrage-provoking data.

Among the findings are that while US households headed by people over 65 have grown wealthier, gained income and now see much less poverty compared to 1984, households headed by people under 35 have actually seen a median drop in the wealth of 68%, now having a median net worth of only $3,662 (37% either have no wealth or owe more than they own); 22% are in poverty. The economy, as currently structured, is a system where older people get wealthier while undermining the future, younger people get poorer and inherit planet in crisis. If that’s not a description of a generational scam, I don’t know what would be.

How Google’s Estimated Driving Costs Misses the Train

In Bright Green, Carbon Zero, Cities, Design, Walksheds on February 23, 2012 at 10:50 am

I am a huge fan of Google maps, using them pretty much every day as a core part of my navigation through life. They’ve done a lot of great things (like offering built-in transit directions and walking maps). I’m a fan.

Google's "estimated driving costs" tool

But, but… Google has added a new tool — “estimated driving costs” — that’s broken, conceptually and factually. I think it may even be actively un-helpful. I want to riff a bit how it’s broken, and why that matters, and what it says about the American debate on transportation and cities.

First, a caveat: I am sure that this tool was provided with the best of intentions. I’d bet money that the developers’ thought process went something like this: more metrics must equal more informed decisions, which is an obvious good, right? I’d also bet that at least part of the intention was to show transit users that for many trips, they’re saving money, thus bolstering the case for taking transit. I’d further bet that the budget for creating this tool was far from vast, and the developers did the best they could with a new idea and limited resources.

But the conceptual map underlying the “estimated driving costs” tool and the calculation chosen to provide its result are both deeply flawed, meaning that the tool doesn’t actually offer good metrics for decision-making, and in some ways undercuts the case for transit by not actually comparing apples and apples when setting cars and transit against each other.

This a blog post, not a research paper, and I don’t have time to fully explore and argue every aspect of the challenge. I hope this can start a discussion and others will debate the issues at greater length. Here, though, are obvious flaws I can see without digging:


A) Flaws in how the number is calculated:

1. “The cost of driving is based on the distance driving between your start and end addresses, multiplied by the standard cost per mile that tax regulations allow businesses to deduct.” Because the mileage deduction is calculated for “average” American drivers across the entire rural – exurban – suburban – urban transect, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) rises as density drops, the IRS deduction is almost certainly not an accurate prediction of the cost of urban car ownership per mile (because if you drive less, but pay the same in car payments, maintenance and insurance, each mile you drive costs you more). The direct costs of car ownership are likely considerably higher per mile for urbanites who drive infrequently.

2a. I strongly suspect the IRS mileage numbers don’t actually include all the direct costs of ownership (for instance, I doubt the cost of owning and paying a mortgage on (or paying a rent premium for) a garage or driveway is ever factored in)… but others can probably address this better than I can.

2b. On an even larger scale, of course, the driving costs engine doesn’t even allow for the possibility of not owning a car at all. Simply owning a car with the attendant costs of purchasing, maintaining, storing and insuring that car, but also the costs of financing all of the above and paying the appropriate taxes, is expensive, even before you ever turn the ignition. Because car-free life means you are saving all those costs, at this point, the driving-vs.-transit cost comparisons for individual trips break down completely for many urban dwellers. (This is also why, when the time spent earning the money to pay for owning a car is factored in, driving is actually seen to be considerably less of a time-saver than it appears.)

3. Google driving costs engine “doesn’t consider” tolls or parking fees. This is sort of crazy, as in many cities the cost of parking alone runs higher than the entire driving costs Google engine cites for some of the short trips I searched out of curiosity.

4. The driving costs engine obviously doesn’t count at all the indirect costs to drivers of driving (like the costs to your health of auto-dependence and its increased risk or obesity and heart disease, or the increased likelihood of death in a car accident [riding transit is dramatically safer than driving], and so on).

5. On an even geekier note, the Google comparison fails to account for the fact that driving and transit are different kinds of trips. People who drive go one place, park, go another, park, and so on, scattering their trips across the landscape based on a variety of factors, of which distance is only one concern (and depending on the person, perhaps a not very important concern, as evidenced by people who will drive two miles to save 10 cents a gallon on the price of gas). People who walk/bike and take transit (the modes are inexorably linked) tend to string their trips, meaning they plan routes that will allow them to accomplish multiple tasks along the route (for instance, grabbing coffee on the way to the transit stop, meeting a friend for lunch nearby the office, picking up the dry cleaning or doing the shopping on the way home) instead of making a number of discrete trips to complete those tasks. The result is that people who use transit take fewer trips overall, and travel shorter distances. This produces my favorite odd urbanism effect, that of “transit leverage.” Transit leverage, simply put, tells us that a person traveling a mile by public transportation does not therefore simply travel a mile less by car: in the U.S., he or she actually drives between 2.9 and 9.0 miles less (depending on the characteristics of the neighborhood and transit system). So, to be a fair comparison, the driving costs engine should in theory figure out how to account for the trips that the transit user isn’t making because she or he didn’t drive in the first place.**

B) Flaws in how the driving costs tool is framed, and in the conceptual map underlying the tool:

1) As far as I can tell, it only shows up when asking for transit directions, not when asking driving directions. Therefore, the obvious implication is that when taking transit, we should consider whether or not we’re saving money; but when driving, we should just worry about the fastest way to get there.

2) In a time when exurban conservative politicians are fiercely attacking public transportation (while lauding the car and promising $2/gallon gas), we need to be more rigorous in looking at the true costs of car ownership both to us as individuals and families and to our neighborhoods, cities and nation. To provide a tool that severely underestimates the cost of using cars by limiting what it counts is to offer a certain amount of momentum to ideological and counter-factual arguments about transit’s costs to society. If we’re going to put a number to these things, let’s make it a true-cost number.

3) There is no mention at all made of externalities. Because, though the costs of driving are inarguably higher for many-to-most people in cities than the costs of taking transit, the costs of cars to society and the planet are huge. From climate change to oil spills, geopolitical instability to highway welfare, sprawling exurbs to broken health care, cars exact a terrible toll on all of us. Choosing not to drive once is a small, perhaps positive choice. Choosing to drive rarely or never is probably the single best lifestyle change a person who cares about the world can make. (And though the societal costs of driving are the subject of great debate, and range from large to inconceivable based on what we choose to count, a cost calculator that in the 21st century completely excludes the externalities of an action is not making the contribution it might.)

I could go on, but you get the point.

What could Google do to fix this? Well, given the incredible access to data and in-house genius that Google has, it could choose to completely remake this tool, creating a completely new measurement that aims at a full-and-complete cost accounting of these individual trips. It could look to find a way to service trip-stringing and compare it to trip-scattering, showing transit users how many trips they’re avoiding by using transit and walking. It could remake the whole service, moving partially towards meeting Walkscore‘s excellent work offering information for people who live in neighborhoods and not at exit ramps: this could mean, for instance, offering an engine that would attempt to calculate the VMTs a person would likely accumulate living in different places with a menu of different destinations and trip choices; or a tool that allowed individual users to aggregate trip data and calculate their actual transportation expenditures over time, whether driving or riding/walking. Again, I could go on and on, and Google could probably find a way to come up a practical version with every idea I reeled off. All it would take is the will to make Google maps as excellent a service as it could be. The result would be an extremely useful set of tools, and perhaps some momentum towards a country that makes smarter choices about where to live and how to get around.

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**This, by the way, is also why many arguments against the utility of transit in lowering climate emissions are so deeply flawed. For, even in cases where it’s true that a mile ride on a train produces no fewer (or even, conceivably, more) direct emissions than a mile of driving, they are not actually comparable on a mile-by-mile basis, and the overall life-system that transit in a walkable neighborhood produces is without doubt a much lower emissions way of life than an auto-dependent one. The more things you include in your transportation emissions calculations, the better and better walkable urbanism served by transit looks.

Future-Ready Cities: Why the capacity and willingness to change trump everything.

In Bright Green, Carbon neutrality, Cities, Innovation on August 18, 2011 at 3:06 pm

Anybody who thinks at all seriously about climate and our other planetary crises has probably thought at least a little about their own choices and prospects.

Many of us wonder whether we live somewhere that will be a good place to be in 10 or 20 or 30 years. People are starting to think about questions like, What will the local climate be like in coming years? Will the local infrastructure prove rugged in the face of natural disasters and economic shocks? How good is the water supply, the energy supply, the food supply? How heavily dependent on fossil fuel is the local economy? What will sea level rise mean to this place? A few people are actively relocating solely for big picture reasons, but right now, I hear it more often as a concern, one piece of the calculus used in making life choices.

So, how do we choose?

There are some places that are dealing with natural attributes and human legacies that will be almost impossible to address (Bangladesh, for instance, will find it very hard to adapt to sea level rise under the best circumstances; many auto-dependent American suburbs will likely experience economic distress as resource and energy costs rise; the US Desert Southwest will be extremely stressed by both anticipated heat waves and fossil-fuel dependent land uses and economies). How temperate the local climate is likely to be, how stable the surrounding ecosystem services are likely to remain, how wise (or lucky) the region has been in growing energy-efficient cities, how rich the local people are, and how much strength and integrity their national governments have — all these will matter, undoubtedly.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that readiness to act matters more than any of these. Places that invest boldly in the next decades in ruggedizing their systems, growing civic resilience and building up the local capacity for innovation, adaptation and rapid cultural change… these are the places that will be most prepared for the storms on the horizon.

Being a city region ready to meet the future (whatever it looks like) is more important than being luckiest in location or wealthiest at the moment. Successful engagement with future turmoil will demand leadership, strong civic cultures, commitment to change, tough choices, aggressive action on big systems. No city out there is moving fast enough, yet, but some are beginning to show signs of understanding the scope, scale and speed of the change demanded of them. Others look great now, but are changing only incrementally and slowly. There comes a point where lack of action means further incremental change can no longer keep up with exponential problems.

Personally, I’d rather live in a city that’s moving fast to meet the future, than one that started father ahead, but is stuck and complacent, or simply unwilling to go beyond mere incremental change. If I became confident that any city was in fact poised to be a real global leader, I’d move in a heartbeat.

I know I’m not alone. In fact, I suspect that a city that really through itself to the forefront of urban innovation (and had a clear commit to further innovation ahead) would find itself a magnet for civic talent, entrepreneurial efforts and global investment.

It may be a city few of us think of a leader now (though I think several well-established metros are positioned to rocket ahead, if they ignite bolder strategies). It may be a city in the developing world, though most of the obvious lead contenders have problems at least as big (and politics at least as stuck) as any of their developed world competitors. I doubt, unfortunately, that it will be an American city, unless an absolutely extraordinary leader comes to the front in one of them: the gridlock is too severe, the legacy of sprawl too large, the civic culture too frayed and poisoned. I would love to be proven totally wrong.

Wherever it may emerge, the edge a leading bright green city gains in the next 20 years could put it in a position of increasing prosperity for a century, even in the midst of hard and turbulent times. The solutions it invents and tests could also benefit the entire world, even help smooth some of the rough waters ahead. The best possible scenario would be one in which several (or many) cities hurl themselves into fierce competition to lead in a bright green urban boom.

The Denial of the Future

In Bright Green on June 13, 2011 at 9:32 am

We live in an age where some of our most powerful institutions actively dismiss the future. A main purpose of corporate action in the environmental policy debate seems, often, to be to muffle the question of limits and time spans. The clear example is Big Oil and their PR on climate, peak oil and the possibilities of energy transition. Leaked internal oil industry documents have for decades shown a difference between what oil companies know and say, but if you’re an oil company, obfuscation of the supply issues and the terrible planetary costs of your product is just (amorally) seen as good strategy, whatever the consequences for humanity.

Big Oil’s not alone: all sorts of companies intervene to depict their business models as less unsustainable than they are. Cars, suburban builders, agrobusiness, chemicals: all are profoundly unsustainable, yet fiercely resist notice of that fact. I’m not just talking about the (wrong, but perhaps understandable) defense of current profits by portraying harmful products as benign. There’s a deeper current here — perhaps based on notions of corporate valuation, but I think more psychological at its depths — of profound denial of the very idea that a given industrial business model has no future, and that large-scale change is not only demanded, but inevitable. And while some companies are grappling much more effectively than others with the future, by and large, this corporate denial of the future is a global phenomenon.

As a result, the very different future towards which we’re barreling is coming almost unremarked, much less usefully envisioned. Denial obstructs the critical act of building practical visions of bright green futures; and we can’t build what we can’t imagine. Without visions, preparation, sensible investments and policies, we are arriving in a very different world with an out-dated way of life. This is a recipe for catastrophe.

I increasingly believe the absence of real engagement w/ the shape of future is the single most pressing problem facing humanity.

Carbon-neutral Seattle, Carbon-neutral Delhi

In Bright Green, Carbon neutrality, Cities on February 21, 2011 at 7:21 pm

Sunrise in New Delhi, by Alex Steffen

Sunrise in New Delhi

Cities and their metro regions are where climate change happens. Counting and assigning responsibility for climate emissions is an arcane art, but if we make consumers responsible for the emissions of the things they use (making urbanites, rather than the farmer, responsible for the emissions from the steak they eat, say), it appears that the large majority of the world’s climate emissions come from less than 200 metropolitan era. The top 1,000 cities’ emissions essentially define the problem of climate change.

Cities, therefore, are a natural leverage point for climate action. Create carbon-neutral cities, and you will have gone a long way to solving the climate crisis. In addition, cities offer a unique leverage point, large enough to make a difference, but small enough for citizens to make a change.

Back in 2009, I gave two talks in Seattle in which I proposed that Seattle claim a North American leadership position by becoming a (net) carbon-neutral city by 2030. The idea proved pretty instantly popular (one Councilmember told me he has never seen meetings as consistently packed as those the City holds on carbon neutrality), and the City Council adopted the goal of carbon neutrality in February 2010… but without a firm commitment to the timeline.

Since then — and I’ll have more to write about this later — the debate within both City Government and civic circles has produced a lot of push-back from the powers that be on the pace of change that would be demanded by a 2030 goal. There are many reasons for that opposition — some legitimate concerns about the realities of changing a major city, some mere turf-guarding, some political maneuvering (like Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, who says he supports rapid climate action, but doesn’t want to support the goal of carbon neutrality lest it give the City Council grounds to avoid hard choices now), some simply reactionary (Seattle has more than its share of NIMBYs and denialists) — but the combined effect has been, it would seem, to vent a lot of the momentum out of the effort. Certainly Seattle is fast losing the initiative that might have been gained by clear, bold and immediate action.

In the meantime, the idea of carbon-neutral cities is spreading quickly (in case it’s not clear, I’m no neutral observer here and I’m glad to have played a role in its spread). Copenhagen plans to be carbon-neutral by 2025. Five cities in the Finnish Carbon Neutral Municipalities project have committed to an 80% direct reduction in emissions by 2030, making net carbon neutrality an easy reach with offsets and other financial instruments. These Finnish projects are already way ahead of schedule, too: Uusikaupunki cut its emissions 14% in 2010, and is committed to 30% by the end of the year, for instance. Vancouver already aims for a 30% reduction by 2020, and friends tell me that momentum for carbon-neutrality by 2030 is building fast.

Nor is business lagging here. Lots of small businesses have already gone carbon-neutral with a mix of efficiency changes, green power purchases and a bit of offsetting. Now bigger companies are moving fast as well. Just recently, for instance, the Co-operative Group (the UK’s fifth largest retailer, employing 120,000 people) pledges net carbon neutrality by the end of 2012. (Another post will examine the benefits and perils of these kinds of pledges.)

All of this, however, pales in significance next to the efforts starting to emerge in the megacities of the Global South. Lagos, Sao Paulo, Dakar and Bogota all have serious discussions afoot about achieving climate neutrality in the next 20-30 years. New Delhi has gone even farther.

In a conference being held now, Delhi officials are plotting out a plan for taking the world’s 4th largest city carbon-neutral by 2030. As Chief Secretary Rakesh Mehta told reporters:

“We have been witnessing economic growth of over 10% in the past few years. …[W]e will have to meet their energy demand but without compromising on our green agenda. This will require energy efficient methods, energy conservation and tapping wealth from waste.”

“Our per capita energy consumption is among the lowest in the world, a third of Beijing’s per capita demand. However, there are all chances that it may rise with increase in our consumption patterns. Hence, it is very important that we have a long-term plan to combat climate change and incorporate it as a matter of principal in policy matters.”

“We want to make Delhi a carbon-neutral city.”

Of course, vast challenges lie ahead of these good people as they work to bring 24 million residents along a bright green development path. Huge questions have only begun to be answered. But if the people of Delhi can answer those questions at such a large scale, their example will inform the world.

It is a commonplace in climate debates in North America (and, unfortunately, increasingly in Europe as well) for conservatives to make the claim that climate action here will simply mean handing a competitive advantage to firms in developing countries with laxer regulations. That argument is a relic. Climate action produces far more economic advantages than costs, helping spawn new industries, reducing materials and energy costs and spurring innovation.

What’s more, it’s not at all clear to me that the other part of the argument — that the Global South will pollute its way to competitive advantage — is at all a given. Indeed, I see more and more signs that at least some nations are moving far more quickly than the U.S. and perhaps as quickly as world leaders like Denmark. In 2030, the most ambitious, creative, transformative carbon-neutral cities may well be found in nations like India, Brazil and China.

Passivhaus in Pictures

In Bright Green, Buildings on January 28, 2011 at 8:00 am

Passivehaus Duplex in Vancouver

Passivhaus design incorporates the latest generation of green building innovations. By combining excellent insulation with passive solar heating, natural cooling and other design strategies, passivhaus buildings can often achieve energy savings of up to 90% of that used in a conventional building.

But how do they do it? Many of the discussions of passivehaus design are somewhat-to-extremely wonky: full of talk of building skins, exhaust systems and insulated foundations. Even when I understand these solutions in principle, I have little grasp of what they actually look like or how they work in practice.

That’s why this slideshow is so cool. It details, step by step, the design and construction of a new passivehaus duplex in Vancouver, showing exactly how the project came together. The architects (VERTdesign) make the construction process extremely real. It’s not necessarily where you’d start to learn about the concepts involved, but it’s a really compelling way to understand what an extremely energy-efficient future feels like on the ground.