While thinking today about cities, foresight and rugged adaptation to discontinuities, I tweeted a few messages on the subject:

It's a little disturbing how often the answer to why a forecast is modeled a certain way is "that's what we have data for"

What we measure well now is almost certainly not the best way to define the boundaries of the possible, let alone anticipate the unexpected.

When I look ahead I see lots of potentially massive discontinuities. These are poorly built into existing models.

Does anyone know of a city that plans for potential discontinuities, other than short-term emergency planning? Like, in the decades range?

Most city strategic plans I know of take BAU for granted for the next 20-40 years; don't know any that plan meaningfully beyond that.

And, then, having gotten revved up, I finished off that tweet-stream with the thought that

Were I 20, I'd think srsly about 2050 when choosing where to live +look for civic signs of rugged adaptation to discontinuities.

I've already gotten a few dozen really interesting responses through various channels. A couple were from people quite a bit older than me who plan to be around in 2050 and are thinking ahead about what kind of a place they want to be in during their golden years. Most, though, have been from younger folks, and the common theme seems to be that people in their 20s and 30s (or at least the kind who pay attention to what I blather on about) are already thinking seriously about what kind of changes they can expect to live through, and where they might want to live and work in light of those changes.

I find this fascinating. I'd like to hear more. Are you thinking about big, long-term changes when you choose where you want to live? What changes are you thinking about, and what have you been deciding? What makes a good future place, and where would you live if you could live anywhere?

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Imagining the Future at 5:33 PM)

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As you may have gathered, the idea of city-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 has gained a lot of steam here in Worldchanging's home base of Seattle. Our City Council has embraced it as a goal (though it's wrestling with the timeline) and some of our smartest people are wrestling with what carbon neutrality might mean and how it might be accomplished.

Eric de Place offered one set of concerns here last week, exploring the example of Copenhagen -- which at this point has the world's most ambitious urban climate goal of carbon neutrality by 2025 -- and asking some tough questions about Seattle's plans.

Copenhagen, he notes correctly, does not have a plan to achieve zero emissions -- as far as I know, no city has a plan for that. What Copenhagen has a plan for is to achieve zero net emissions, meaning that when you balance everything its people do, you come out with carbon neutrality. To do this, Copenhagen relies on offsetting actions, or offsets, to balance out the greenhouse gasses that Copenhageners will still be emitting in 15 years.

Copenhagen uses offsets, to my understanding, to balance things that fall in one of two categories: the last emissions from big, slow systems they're not sure they can completely change in just 15 years (for example, even in a city which has declared independence from the car, some cars will still be in use, and some of those cars will still be driven by internal combustion engines in 15 years), and emissions over which they have no direct control (for example, offshored emissions coming from consumr goods manufactured in other nations). To balance those emissions, they're adopting best practices in offsetting. This is a sign not of hypocrisy, but honesty: Copenhagen is attempting to take responsibility for all of its emissions, and making up for those that are beyond its control to change in 15 years. The end result is the same.

Eric rightly points out that if Seattle were to slash its emissions in half in the by 2030, we'd still emit something like three times as many greenhouse gasses as Copenhagen will in 2025, and offseting those emissions could come with a high price tag (he estimates $60 million a year for Seattle if we purchased those offsets on the open market for roughly $20/ ton). "That’s a lot of money," he says. "And it’s an open question, at least to my mind, whether achieving 'carbon neutrality' for a specific city for a specific point in time would really the best use of that money."

And here's where Eric and I differ in several ways. I see carbon neutrality as a necessary goal in and of itself. Many people, including Bill Gates, think we need the entire developed world to be carbon neutral by 2050 in order to reach a worldwide reduction in emissions of 80% by that time. I think that 80% reduction is an insufficient goal, but leaving that argument aside, if we want carbon neutrality in the developed world by 2050, then we need leading cities to hit that goal decades earlier to create the innovation paths others can follow.

Just as importantly, however, I see carbon neutrality as a huge opportunity. Urban climate action offers us a fabulous tool chest, presenting solutions to all sorts of other problems we want to solve as well, from a flagging economy to energy vulnerability to mounting health care costs. Overall, I think Eric's missed a few key points:

1. I'm not at all sure that a 50% reduction of our emissions footprint is the best we can do (or frankly, even something we ought to think is "worth shouting from the green rooftops" as Eric says). It is certainly technically possible for us to do much, much better. We already have the technology and design capacity to get 80-90% improvements in many fields, especially in green building. And technology is improving extremely rapidly. Twenty years ago, most of us didn't have the Internet or cell phones (to note a commonplace example of technological change); we ought to anticipate improved ability to solve some problems we don't now know how to address.

2. Because we run our city on hydroelectricity and live in a mild climate, Seattle's biggest problem is cars. Cars and trucks are the largest source of our greenhouse gas emissions. Our city's auto-dependence is often treated as a fact of nature by older commentators, and when they acknowledge the problem of auto emissions at all, they tend to claim electric cars will fix the problem. Unfortunately, electric cars won't solve auto emissions, and (as we've explored on this site scores of times) won't even come close to solving the massive non-tailpipe auto-related emissions that come from road building and other auto infrastructure, air- and water-pollution, increased health care costs and so on.

No, the solution to the problem of cars is to build a better city. We could use the new growth that we know is coming our way, and use it to make all our neighborhoods compact, deeply walkable, and sustainable (for one home-grown vision of sustainability, check out New Energy Hubs) This is entirely within our power. The idea that Seattle can't do this is silly; the idea that Seattleites refuse to do this is 20 years out of date. We can, and should, remake our city to promote urban quality of life, sustainable systems and freedom from the car. Given how rapidly our region is changing, I think two decades, wisely used, could mean a city that's unrecognizably better.

3. This isn't charity. Though of course we want to do the right thing, the reasons for achieving carbon neutrality are as practical as they are ethical:

* Many of the kinds of things we need to do to reduce our carbon footprint will also make us more resilient in the face of the energy shocks and rapid climate change we know are headed our way. Many of the changes we want to see in our urban fabric and infrastructure can also be thought of as insurance against a chaotic future.

* The U.S. will likely see massive economic benefits from a national climate strategy, but whether or not American conservatives agree, climate action isn't really a choice, economically: the world is moving quickly towards a low-carbon economy. As a city heavily linked to international trade and competing in global technology and design markets, if Seattle wants to stay economically strong, we must stay at the forefront of sustainable design, clean technology and green urbanism (no matter what else the rest of the country does). When you add the direct economic development benefits of moving to a bright green economy, climate neutrality is smart economic policy.

* There's a huge brand advantage for our metropolitan region in carbon neutrality. This is completely non-trivial. This region spends millions every year promoting itself as a place to do business, to visit on vacation, to pick for hosting conventions, and so on. Our economic future depends in part on how many bright young people decide to move here and/or stay. In an era of super-liquid capital, our ability to launch successful start-ups, to market export goods, even to secure funding for large projects depends on others seeing us as an innovative place (lest we fall into a branding version of the Ninja Gap). A big portion of our regional economy depends on people thinking highly of us: leadership in carbon neutrality (and all the innovation it will spur) will accelerate a region brand of green, smart and beautiful.

* Many of the things we want to do to go climate neutral, when done right, offer huge benefits in other areas: a climate-neutral Seattle would have cleaner air, longer-lived citizens, healthier kids (who suffer less from obesity and asthma), better diets, lower health-care costs, less isolated seniors, more affordable housing and transportation choices, stronger communities and so on. A whole fleet of studies has been done on the non-environmental benefits of climate action: all of those benefits would apply here, too. If we are carbon neutral, we will be a better place to live.

4. We almost certainly won't be able to eliminate all emissions, and will end up wanting to offset our remaining climate footprint: again, this is not a sign of hypocrisy, but of honest accounting. But here's the thing: only a fool would just buy those offsets on the open market, when so many things we want to do for other reasons (but don't think we can currently afford) present themselves as offset investments in our immediate surroundings.

Take just one category of offsets: securing carbon sinks. There are a whole bunch of things we want to do for other reasons that could help us draw down large amounts of carbon over time, and there's no reason why we shouldn't count these investments as offsets. Think of improving our city's watershed on the Cedar River, and improving the habitat around it; think of securing our city's foodshed and preserving regional agricultural land that not only grows local food but practices climate-friendly farming (including projects that return carbon to farm soils and improve the carbon uptake of rangelands; think of practicing sustainable forestry throughout Western Washington (perhaps even on a community-supported model; think of preparing for climate change and rising sea levels by practicing climate-adaptive wetland restoration now, and increasing the area of estuaries and riparian habitats. The list goes on and on, and these are just offsets dealing with carbon sinks and land use. Using offset money to fund these actions would, of course, yield other benefits as well, from preserving ecosystem services to recreating viable rural economies.

It's not that Eric's cautions are wrong: Eric's one of Seattle's smartest sustainability thinkers; I pay close attention to everything he says, and he makes important points here. Is critical, however, that in thinking of solutions to our problems, we don't fall into the habits of mind that caused those problems. If we try to solve our sustainability problems one at a time, and measure the benefits of the solutions only narrowly and directly, we will fail: if we seek to act boldly, based on the best, most comprehensive understanding of the costs and benefits we can find, then we have a shot at changing the world. Think big, think connected, think ahead and climate action becomes a landscape of opportunity.

(For more background on how Seattle can go carbon-neutral, see the Seattle Talks I gave in November.)
(Photo credit.)

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 11:54 AM)

The backyardigans
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Midnight Poutine (blog)
Art Agenda: March 13-27
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The survey of work starts with techno/military enterprises such as those of Thomas Edison, R. Buckminster Fuller, Canada's NFB, and the US Air Force; ...

(A quick little Friday afternoon note.)

Discussion of planetary boundaries is pretty surreal everywhere these days, but in the United States, the disconnect between reality and rhetoric has reached what I think are pretty stunning proportions. Nowhere can this be better seen than in the discussions about how to "fix" the suburbs.

Many still debate that anything about the American model of sprawl development needs fixing, but most understand that something has gone seriously wrong with the outer-ring suburbs that more than a quarter of American call home. It doesn't take a futurist to look at the conditions on the ground -- long commutes, auto dependence, the expected steep rise in oil prices, environmental problems, the bursting of a massive financial bubble (resulting in millions of abandoned homes and ruined families and a wave of bankrupted suburban local governments) -- to realize that they suburbs are in deep trouble, and that trouble is just going to get worse.

Many have started to realize that the foreclosure crisis isn't a crisis in the sense that it will come and go and everything will be fine again someday. For many places, this is the new normal; a permanent foreclosure. Any plan based on the idea we're going back to some modified form of what we had before is wishful thinking, especially in the sunbelt states where speculative sprawl was at its worst. (In fact, I think that we haven't seen anything like the bottom on this bust, with millions more foreclosures in the pipeline, and little money or political will to make the massive investments it'd take to keep many newer suburbs afloat.)

As people have realized how severe the problems facing outer-ring suburbs are, designs which attempt to solve those problems by turning sprawl into something else have seen a vogue. (Part of the reason I was prompted to fire off this note was that I got yet another call from a journalist working on a suburban solutions piece, and that got me thinking.)

Often, the thinking behind new suburban design provocations seems to go something like this: the problem with the outer ring is that it's too spread out; therefore, let's make that weakness a strength and use all that land between the buildings, say, for farms and wildlife habitat. On the surface, it might appear to make sense, but reality is far less forgiving.

The reality is that because of the way we build suburbs, the land left underneath has limited value either as farmland or as habitat; it has neither the benefits of proximity of truly urban gardening, nor the richness of undisturbed land farther out; while pulling out buldings and roads, mitigating toxics, re-shaping the flow of water over the land and restoring ecosystems essentially from scratch is such an expensive process that it will never make sense as long as really critical prime habitat remains endangered elsewhere (which will likely be the case for the foreseeable future). The "asset" of open land that outer ring suburbs have is not a very valuable one, in ecological terms.

Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less valuable in economic terms, as well. Most suburbs have extremely tough times ahead.

I expect that the wealthiest quarter of the suburbs may well thrive for some time. In many cases, they have strong tax bases and the political power to demand new state and national infrastructure investments. More importantly, what those suburbs sell is exclusion, not bargain living, so rising operational costs may not matter as much to them (the rich can afford high gas prices).

The rest are in for a rough ride. Most of the outer ring is not enclaves of high-status exclusivity. Most of it is strung together from developments marketed as offering big family homes in safe areas at a reasonable price. It's designed to be upper-middle class life, on the cheap.

But it's not cheap anymore (it was never as cheap as it looked, as one glance at the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index will show). Many homes that looked like good investments during the bubble are now underwater, and surrounded by communities that will never be finished or are already in decline. Rising fuel prices are about to make big cars, long commutes and poorly insulated homes even more expensive for middle class people. What's worse (from the perspective of the suburban homeowner) is that the cultural worm has turned, and more Americans now want to live in walkable neighborhoods and increasingly associate sprawl with poverty and crime. I expect much of the outer ring's economic value is gone, never to return.

The conventional answer to the problems moderate-income outer ring suburbs face would be redevelopment: bring in more housing, retail and commercial, and rescue them by making them more like the prosperous walkable neighborhoods that now command a premium on the market. But inner ring suburbs already possess a huge set of strategic advantages in moving to meet the demand for walkable communities: its not that hard to imagine adding lots of infill development and new transportation infrastructure to make livable, fairly walkable, much more sustainable communities. They have good bones, and they have location.

Imagining that kind of retrofit in the outer ring is a stretch. In the absence of an as-yet-unseen, brilliant solution, the outer ring suburbs, especially those recently built with funny loans at the far edges sunbelt cities, are probably just destined to become semi-rural slums. The idea that some solution has to emerge to their problems rejects both evidence and history, it seems to me; worse, it doesn't much help us think through how we might offer better outcomes to the people who've invested everything they have on the suburban fringe.

It may well be that the ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier. I fully expect to see some really interesting experiments cropping up in half-abandoned suburbs in coming decades. But it's worth remembering the decline of the inner city from the 1940s to the 1990s, and thinking about how long it was before new answers and possibilities took hold there, and how much of urban America is still suffering. If we're going to avoid that kind of disaster in the outer ring, we need big, bold thinking -- thinking that transcends farming and other small-scale solutions to reimagine what the macro-level possibilities might be for places the 21st century has left behind.

One of the things I'd like to explore in the next few years is what truly different models for suburban redevelopment might look like. As I find interesting ideas, I'll definitely be reporting back.

Images: Damon Duncan, CC; Frog's Dream: McMansions Turned into Biofilter Water Treatment Plants, by Calvin Chiu

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 2:55 PM)

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Here are three talks I found thought-provoking and inspiring. All three demand some attention (and probably some time after to ponder what was said), but all three are also new ideas from thinkers who are breaking new ground. Very worldchanging.

Futureproofing the City: ZEDfactory; Foster + Partners; R/E/D from The Architecture Foundation on Vimeo.

Dan Hill-Keynote: New Soft City from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Dan Barber on a remarkable food project: the sort of food shed every city should have.

(and, of course, you might find these talks I gave in November interesting as well.)

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Cities at 12:37 AM)

by Warren Karlenzig

Last post I covered some guiding principles for urban resilience planning in the face of climate change and diminishing resources (especially fresh water and oil). Considering these guidelines, what aspect of U.S. metro
development stands out as the most ill-advised and risky? Short answer: exurban sprawl.

If the "Great Recession" taught us anything, it is that allowing the unrestrained sprawl of energy-inefficient communities and infrastructure is a now-bankrupt economic development strategy and constitutes a recipe for continued disaster on every level.

"Shy away from fringe places in the exurbs and places with long car commutes or where getting a quart of milk takes a 15-minute drive," was the warning the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers gave institutional and commercial real estate investors in their Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010 report.

I make the further case that the exurban economic model is an outright anachronism in the Post Carbon Institute's Post Carbon Reader, which comes out this summer from the University of California Press and Watershed Media.

Much of US "economic growth" in the 1990s and early 2000s was based on the roaring engine of exurban investment speculation with gas at historic record low prices. That bubble popped on the spike of $4 a gallon; we now are paying the piper with abandoned tract developments, foreclosed strip malls and countless miles of roads to nowhere. Gas prices are forecast to head over $3 this summer, and likely much higher when a forecast global "oil crunch" hits by 2014 or so.

Besides the economic risks, circa-twentieth-century sprawl has destroyed valuable farmland, sensitive wildlife habitat, and irreplaceable drinking water systems at great environmental, economic, and social cost. We can no longer manage and develop our communities with no regard for the limits of natural resources and ecological systems that provide our most basic needs.

A shining alternative is metropolitan areas that have begun to plan for the future by building their resilience with economic, energy, and environmental uncertainty in mind: top U.S. metro locations include Portland, Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Denver, and suburbs such as Davis, California and Alexandria, Virginia. These communities are employing some of the following key strategies that underpin resilient urbanism:

Build and re-build denser and smarter

Most U.S. suburban and urban population or use densities need to be increased so that energy-efficient transportation choices like public transit, bicycling and walking can flourish. Multi-modal mobility cannot succeed at the densities found in most American suburban communities today. Increasing density doesn't have to mean building massive high-rises: adding just a few stories on existing or new mixed-use buildings can double population density--and well-designed, increased density can also improve community quality of life and economic vitality.

Focus on water use efficiency and conservation

Our freshwater supply is one of our most vulnerable resources in the United States. Drought is no longer just a problem for Southwestern desert cities--communities in places like Texas, Georgia and even New Jersey recently had to contend with water shortages. As precipitation patterns become less reliable and underground aquifers dry up, more communities will need to significantly reduce water demand through efficiency, conservation, restrictions and "tiered pricing," which means a basic amount of water will be available at a lower price; above average use will become increasingly
expensive the more that is used.

Global climate change is already thought to be melting mountain snowpack much earlier than average in the spring, causing summer and fall water shortages. This has serious planning and design implications for many metro areas. For example, Lake Mead, which provides 90% of the water used by Las Vegas (above photo) and is a major water source for Phoenix and other Southwestern cities, has a projected 50% chance of drying up for water storage by 2021.

Focus on food

Urban areas need to think much bigger and plan systemically for significantly increased regional and local food production. Growing and processing more food for local consumption bolsters regional food security and provides jobs while generally reducing the energy, packaging and storage needed to transport food to metro regions. In Asia and Latin America--even in big cities like Shanghai, China; Havana, Cuba; and Seoul, South Korea--there are thriving small farms interspersed within metro areas.

Gardens--whether in backyards, community parks, or in and on top of buildings--can supplement our diets with fresh local produce. Denver's suburbs, for instance, have organized to preserve and cultivate unsold tract home lots for community garden food production.

Think in terms of inter-related systems

If we view our urban areas as living, breathing entities--each with a set of basic and more specialized requirements--we can better understand how to transform our communities from random configurations into dynamic, high-performance systems. The "metabolism" of urban systems depends largely on how energy, water, food and materials are acquired, used and, where possible, reused. From these ingredients and processes (labor, use of knowledge) come products, services, and--if the system is efficient--minimal waste and pollution.

Communities and regions should decide among themselves which initiatives reduce their risks and provide the greatest "bang for the buck." Like the emergence of Wall Street's financial derivatives crisis in 2007, if we are kept in the dark about the potential consequences of our planning, resource and energy use in light of climate change or energy shortages, future conditions will threaten whole regional economies when they emerge.

Imagine if Las Vegas informed its residents and tourists on one 120-degree summer day that they would not be able to use a swimming pool or shower, let alone golf, because there simply wasn't any water left.

Odds are that the days are numbered for having one's own swimming pool and a large, lush ornamental lawn in the desert Southwest, unless new developments and desert cities are planned with water conservation as having the highest design priority.

By thinking of urban areas as inter-related systems economically dependent on water, energy, food and vital material resources, communities can begin to prepare for a more secure future. Merely developing a list of topics that need to be addressed--the "checklist" approach--will not prepare regional economies for the complexity of new dynamics, such as energy or water supply shortages, rising population, extreme energy price volatility and accelerating changes in regional climate influenced by global climate change.

Next Steps? Time to fold the climate action plan into a resilience action plan, so communities can addresses not only global climate change emissions, but also more urgent economic risks posed by climate change adaptation and resource availability.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Cities at 4:43 PM)

A blue-collar business embraces a green stormwater fix.

by Lisa Stiffler

Editor's note 3/9: This profile is now available in PDF format here.

On Seattle’s 8th Avenue South in the Georgetown neighborhood, empty school buses and recycling trucks rumble by. Semis squeeze past each other. Cars are parked on the street’s gravel shoulder amid shoe-soaking pools of muddy rainwater.

Georgetown’s busted streets and heavy-duty manufacturing plants seem like the last place where earth-friendly, sustainable stormwater solutions would take root. But this is the story of blue-collar industry partnering with a green-thinking community group to benefit them both. The trouble is, it was an unnecessarily long and challenging route to get the project done.

The century-old Markey Manufacturing Co. is a neighborhood institution, cranking out marine winches used to tow barges and haul anchors out of the sea.

But Seattle’s heavy rains were threatening to disrupt Markey’s operations by pocking the company’s driveway with gaping potholes, creating a perilous obstacle course for forklift drivers maneuvering their cargo.

“It was becoming a real safety issue,” said Bob LeCoque, Markey’s vice president. “We had a couple of loads drop off.”

The potholes are now gone, replaced with two paved driveways and three long, shallow ditches that catch the rain. The ditches, or swales, are lined with sand, soil, and plants that soak up the water.

When it rains, it puddles

Throughout most of Seattle, when the rain falls on roofs and streets, it’s shunted away by gutters and pipes. This area of Georgetown, however, is something of an anomaly; before the swales were built, there was no infrastructure to handle the stormwater and prevent flooding. When it rained, the water sat in puddles that took days or weeks to evaporate. Or it streamed over the industrial landscape into the nearby Duwamish River, carrying with it toxic pollutants and mud.

LeCoque wanted to pave Markey’s potholes, but city regulators opposed the plan unless something was done to address the potential increase in runoff that the paving could bring. LeCoque could lay hundreds of feet of pipe to connect with the existing King County stormwater system at the end of the street – at the cost of more than $1 million.

While Markey was trying to resolve its stormwater troubles, a community group comprised of nearby businesses, residents, local government employees, and others was working to improve the area through an effort called the Georgetown Riverview Restoration Project.The group teamed up with LeCoque to create a plan that was more environmentally friendly and cheaper than traditional stormwater infrastructure. They proposed what was essentially a large rain garden in the heart of one of Seattle’s grittiest industrial zones.

With help from Seattle’s Department of Transportation, Markey and the community group built three swales along the front of the Markey site, the largest stretching 60 feet long and 14 feet wide. The swales were dug about 2 feet deep, then refilled with 3 inches of soil and sand. The swales were ringed with wood chips and are still being planted with trees, grasses, and shrubs that can tolerate soaking wet soil in the winter and drought conditions in the summer.

“We’re trying to recreate what’s in the forest,” said Cari Simson, project manager with the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition who helped lead the effort.“Obviously, we’re way removed from the forest.”

Innovative -- and slow going

The innovative project – which is being hailed as Seattle’s first “industrial strength” natural drainage – is getting plenty of kudos now. But being the first of its kind, the project was tough to get done.

“It was a huge struggle,” said Shauna Walgren, a planner with Seattle’s Department of Transportation. There were months of meetings and countless questions about how it would work and what sort of precedent would be set.

“When you’re trying to do something different,” Walgren said, “the city doesn’t have experience to draw from."

Walgren helped coordinate between the multiple city departments involved and was key to getting approval for the plan, Simson said. The project, which started in 2007, was nearly derailed over concerns that the dirt to be excavated for the swales was contaminated with toxic chemicals. Fortunately, tests showed it wasn’t too polluted, and the swales were dug in October 2009.

Designing and excavating the swales close to $40,000, paid for by the Department of Transportation. The Georgetown Community Council working with the nonprofit Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition spent an additional $20,000 on soil for the swales, plants, designs, and other support. Markey Machinery paid roughly $35,000 to pave the driveways and add new sidewalks. Total bill? Under $100,000, a bargain compared to the price tag for a traditional stormwater system.

No more need for hip waders

Simson and others want to replicate the project in other industrial centers that also lack stormwater infrastructure, such as parts of Seattle’s South Park and SODO neighborhoods. As the Markey example shows, natural drainage can be a cheaper fix than building traditional pipes and stormwater holding tanks. Plus, it’s better for the environment because it re-greens areas with mostly native plants, and the swales and retention ponds actually clean the stormwater by allowing it to percolate into the ground.

But this kind of project won’t become more widespread unless the city makes it faster and easier to get approval for this sort of effort, said some of those involved. City departments – including Seattle’s Department of Transportation, Public Utilities, and Department of Planning and Development – need to work better together and make clear who is responsible for which decisions and permits, community members said. Even city officials said Seattle should create a standardized protocol for doing industrial projects like this one, and appoint someone to help a business navigate the process. Another way to encourage more industrial strength, low-impact development is through financial incentives -- grants, tax breaks, or a cut to utility bills -- for green stormwater solutions.

Before the swales and driveways were installed, Markey was a muddy mess in the winter and LeCoque was loath to host visitors. “The place looked like hell,” he said. That’s changed.

“I can walk from my car to my office without hip waders on,” LeCoque said. “We’re pretty proud of what we’ve done on the site here.”

Learn more about industrial stormwater fixes

The Duwamish River Clean-up Coalition and EOS Alliance are hosting a panel discussion and meeting about natural drainage projects in the Seattle area. It's free to attend, and here are the details:

• WHEN: Wednesday, March 10, from 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.
• WHERE: EOS Alliance Offices, 650 South Orcas St., Suite 220, Seattle
• RSVP: Email bkantner@eosalliance.org, re: "Green Forum"
  

For more information, go to the Community Natural Drainage Forum website, or email Ben Kantner at EOS Alliance at bkantner@eosalliance.org or call 206-762-2553.

Photos of 8th Avenue South and the Markey Manufacturing Co. swales are used with permission from Laura Treadway.

This piece originally appeared on the Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 4:19 PM)

A climate action lesson from Denmark


There's been a lot of ambitious talk lately about carbon neutrality. It's exciting stuff, but it's worth pausing to consider just how huge that challenge is. And what, precisely, does it mean? Zero emissions, or lots of offsets? 

I thought it was interesting to take a look at the climate action plan(PDF) from the city of Copenhagen. It's certainly a contender for the title of the greenest and most progressive city on earth, and it's a city that has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025. But what you find is that even for the Danes, carbon neutrality is more aspirational than actionable:

By implementing the climate plan’s contributions – and assisted by the expected developments – we expect to reduce Copenhagen’s CO2 emissions from 2,500,000 tonnes CO2 today to about 1,150,000 tonnes in 2025. To become completely neutral we must also remove just as much CO2 as we produce. We will need to compensate for the 1,150,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2025 by for example investing in still more windmills, use new technologies or plant forests which absorb CO2.

In other words, even Copenhagen doesn't have a plan to achieve zero emissions. They'll rely on what amounts to offsets for over a million tons of CO2, roughly half of their current carbon footprint.

Still, their goals are astonishing: Copenhagen has an action plan to cut their already-low emissions in half over the next 15 years. Wow. That will be a signal achievement, and one that will no doubt provide valuable lessons for us in the Northwest, both in terms of strategies to reduce our emissions as well some clearer notion of what it means to be "carbon neutral."

Applying Copenhagen's achievement here in the Northwest makes for an interesting comparison because, as it happens, the city of Copenhagen is roughly the same size as the three big cities in the Northwest. Seattle emitted around 6.7 million tons of CO2 in 2008; Multnomah County, home to Portland, emitted about 8.5 million tons that year; while Vancouver claimed just over 2.5 million tons. (It’s important to keep in mind that these inventories measure different things in different ways, so comparisons between the numbers are not informative. For example, Vancouver’s number refers to a much narrower scope.) If each city followed Copenhagen’s lead and reduced its emissions by half -- a phenomenal achievement -- Seattle would need to offset more than 3 million tons of CO2, Multnomah-Portland more than 4 million tons, and Vancouver well over 1 million tons.

If Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver do as Copenhagen does, and succeed in cutting their emissions in half over the next 20 years, that will be worth shouting from the green rooftops. But even so, to reach carbon neutrality we’d be talking about somewhere in the range of $160 million dollars of investment annually by the cities for various carbon offset projects (assuming a price of $20 a ton for offsets). That’s a lot of money. And it’s an open question, at least to my mind, whether achieving “carbon neutrality” for a specific city for a specific point in time would really the best use of that money.

Now, in fairness, for all the hand-wringing they induce from people like me, offsets are not necessarily a bad idea. At their best, they can foster important advancements for developing countries, low-cost emissions saving in farm country, or ecological restoration. On the other hand, $160 million might be better spent making investments in strategies to further reduce emissions locally, even if those advancements wouldn't result in carbon neutrality. Yet on the third hand, it’s not exactly clear how to achieve those further reductions; even Copenhagen doesn't yet have a plan. I’d say we’re in a pickle.

Now before everyone accuses me of being a giant kill-joy, I should add that there are at least two reasons that a community may want to aim to be “carbon neutral,” even if what that really means is big offset purchases to supplement local carbon reductions.

Reason #1: “80% below 1990 levels by 2050” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So even if we don’t know what “carbon neutral” looks like, it seems somehow easier for people to get their heads around conceptually. People are inspired by the idea of carbon neutrality in a way that they clearly aren’t by “the terms of the Kyoto Protocol” or “80%.”

Reason #2: We need something to push us -- our elected officials, our businesses, and individuals -- to think big. Really big. If, as a planet, we’re going to achieve climate stability, the time for incremental change has passed. As Knute Berger put it yesterday when he proposed removing a major bridge in the Seattle area: “Why, in the 21st Century, aren't we repairing and restoring the environmental damage of the past instead of doubling down on it?”

That could be the kind of question people ask under the “carbon neutral” banner.

Yet I’m wary. The really game-changing climate policies are simply not at a neighborhood or city scale. They’re at the national and global scale – comprehensive and enforceable carbon limits or pricing.

While local areas can incubate ideas and build supportive constituencies, our climate action won’t ultimately add up to much unless it is comprehensive and much, much larger. So city-level aspiration should not be allowed to redirect our attention from national policy -- it should be leveraged to reinforce the big stuff. 

This piece originally appeared on the Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

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(Posted by Eric De Place in Climate Change at 4:08 PM)

There was a time, not long ago, when the idea of a national low-carbon growth strategy for India would have been hard to imagine. "Low carbon" was seen to be at loggerheads with India's ambitious economic development agenda and was too controversial a concept to find voice in domestic politics. Yet in January 2010, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh constituted a 26-member expert group to help develop a low-carbon growth strategy for India. The group, which hosts a formidable array of government, industry, academia, and civil society members, is being chaired by Dr. Kirit Parikh, former member of India's Planning Commission.

Worldwatch Fellow Anna da Costa interviewed Dr. Parikh about the group's plans for the coming year, and how India's efforts at home to address climate change are moving forward.

What led to the Low Carbon Expert Group being constituted?

I think it's quite clear that India realized it is vulnerable. It is in its great interest to have an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions, and from our own energy security point of view, there are many things we should do to move to low carbon growth. [We are interested in] whatever measures we can take that can stimulate and nudge the global community into a global agreement, are also in our interests. This leads us to examine the options, the costs, the alternatives, and the multiple benefits of moving to a low-carbon development pathway.

What types of recommendations can we expect to emerge from the group, and how will this work differ from or connect to India's National Action Plan on Climate Change?

The National Action Plan outlines the long-term measures that we should take. It doesn't have the required specificity in terms of what needs to be done, and we hope the low-carbon strategy will provide more detailed guidelines as to what measures can be taken. India has committed to meet a reduction in national energy intensity of 25 percent by 2020. We need to work out a strategy and the various specific measures that will enable us to meet this.

This seems like a major task. Is all of the analysis being conducted by the Expert Group or are you outsourcing certain elements?

The expert group, which has 26 members, has a very wide-ranging set of expertise. It is a wide group of stakeholders, many of whom have been working on this subject for a long time. We will pool the knowledge that exists [in the group] and put together a menu of what is possible. Time is very short, so we cannot do any further new research as such. We are very open to get any outside help, or contributions. We will put these recommendations out in an open, transparent manner, put them on the website, seek comments, and so on, and might even hold a public consultation on them at some stage.

Do you think the 25-percent energy intensity target you mention, that was announced by India before the Copenhagen climate conference, can be met with the current National Action Plan strategy?

You know, there are many things we are doing already. India's energy intensity has been coming down in any case. Business-as-usual projections should provide a fairly large part of the reduction we want to achieve. A little more effort should bring [energy intensity] down to the 25-percent [target]. I don't think there should be that much of a challenge or difficulty in doing that.

Is the aim of the low-carbon expert group to reduce India's emissions beyond what would likely occur on a business-as-usual trajectory?

It's to make sure we meet the 25-percent reduction in carbon intensity, to see if we can even do more and what kind of support we will need to reach that target. What can we do? What is win-win? What policies do we need? Are there barriers? Do we need finance? These are the kinds of questions that we need to answer.

A few years ago, it seems as though using the words "low-carbon development" as an element of India's political vocabulary would have been politically untenable. What has enabled this change, and does it signify a fundamental shift in thinking on the issue of climate change and development in India?

This is difficult to answer. I think you could give a lot of credit to the Prime Minister, who felt that although the rigid stand we had been taking in the past was morally and ethically correct, we need to get the logjam moving and should take some initiative. That is why at the Gleneagles conference [of the G8 in 2005, which India, China, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa attended], he promised that we are determined to have our per-capita emissions never exceed those of industrialized countries. The Western world didn't think that was any commitment, but if you think about it, that... itself was a major commitment. Why? Because if we want to reach [greenhouse gas concentrations of ] 450 parts per million by 2050, the average of industrialized countries will come to 2.5 to 3 tons per capita, and India will have to restrict itself to 3 tons per capita, which is a huge commitment.... So we are very willing to get the process moving. We are interested in getting a global agreement. That is part of the strategy. Let's get the process moving.

How likely is it that the recommendations of the Low Carbon Expert Group be implemented? What factors will need to be in place to see this happen?

I've chaired enough committees to know that not all recommendations get implemented. There are always political considerations. There are always stakeholders who have vested interests of various kinds. How things play out is a very different thing. So I would not say that I expect all of our recommendations will be implemented. What is important about these expert committees and groups is that they create a consensus and awareness amongst people, so that in due course things change and pick up.

Do you have a sense of how much India's low-carbon strategy is estimated to cost? To what degree is the government self-funding these initiatives, and how much is it hoped that finance will also come from the private sector and international public funds?

My feeling is that there are lots of things we can do that pay for themselves and don't involve any additional costs but have multiple benefits. Energy efficiency, for example, pays for itself. I think there are many [options] like that, but of course finance is required upfront, too. Without such finance we know that many economically attractive actions are not taken up by industry and individuals. But I cannot answer this question until we have done our work.

In your long experience working on India's economic development, you must have seen many kinds of sustainable development solutions. What are some of the most transformative solutions that you believe exist for India?

I think there are three solutions that show [particular] potential for the goal of sustainable development. One is definitely solar technology, and making its cost competitive with coal as soon as possible. That could bring a hugely transformative change. Second would be a major program of rainwater harvesting and watershed development. This could transform the whole water and agricultural scenario and is clearly of importance. Thirdly, if one were to speak in terms of the future, maybe the development of cellulosic ethanol that could make India truly energy independent in a realsense. This is looking [at the question] from the energy sustainability perspective.

But there are many, many things that have contributed to India's inclusive development. Inclusion is critical for sustainability. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which began in Maharashtra and is now across the country. You could say the Gram Swarojgar Yojana [a rural micro enterprise initiative] is also transformative. You might say that if you can get 100-percent literacy and school attendance for all children up to 14 years, that could be transformative. There are many things that we could do that really could make a tremendous difference to the economy. Of course, support for public transport in major metro areas can also be transformative.

Global negotiations tend to focus on what India needs to absorb from other parts of the world, particularly in terms of finance and technology. But do you feel there are areas where India has a lot to share with other countries in terms of global efforts to combat climate change and shift toward sustainability?

It is very clear that India is not just an absorber of technologies; it can really be a generator, inventor, and developer. Again, I support Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's suggestion at Gleneagles that we should set up a network of collaborative institutions at the international level like the Agricultural Research Institutes under the [Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, CGIAR].... If we can have that kind of institutional set-up for low-carbon or renewable technology and have the IPRs [intellectual property rights] shared globally as global public goods, that could be very important.... India can also contribute to the development of the technologies. So in some sense we may have an actual interest in IPR protection, but on the other hand from the global point of view, we think some of these should be made globally available as global public goods.

Anna da Costa is a Worldwatch Institute research fellow based in New Delhi, India.

This article is a product of Eye on Earth, the Worldwatch Institute's online news service.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Climate Change at 3:41 PM)

More than one-third of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumer goods used in developed nations is actually emitted in other nations where the products are made, according to a new study. In the U.S., about 2.5 tons of carbon produced per person annually — or about 11 percent of U.S. per capita emissions — are emitted elsewhere, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science say. In Europe, it’s about four tons of carbon per person. In fact, in smaller European nations like Switzerland, the emissions associated with products manufactured outside the borders exceed the actual emissions produced at home.

Using 2004 trade data from 57 industry sectors and 113 countries and regions, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science constructed a global model of the flow of products and "imported" and "exported" greenhouse gas emissions. They found that more than one-third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumer goods used in developed nations are actually emitted in other nations where the products are made. The biggest "importer" by far is China.

Using 2004 trade data from 113 countries and regions, the authors of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were able to construct a global model of the flow of “imported” and “exported” emissions, most of which are “outsourced” to developing nations. The biggest “importer” by far is China, they said. “Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China,” said lead author Steven Davis.

This article originally appeared on Yale e360

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Climate Change at 3:32 PM)

John Wilbanks, the founder of Science Commons, is in the midst of a big move. His division of Creative Commons, focused on opening scientific research and innovation, is now five years old and is being “airlifted” to California to try to bring some of their ideas into the Creative Commons movement as a whole.

One way to think of the mission of Science Commons, Wilbanks tells us, is to spark generative effects in the scientific world much as we’ve seen them in the online world. He quotes Jonathan Zittrain’s definition of generativity, from “The Future of the Internet… and How to Stop It“: “Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences”. This raises some provocative questions, when applied to the world of science: “What does spam look like in a patent system? What does griefing look like in the world of biological data?”

The truth is that the scientific world is far less generative than the digital space. He proposes three major obstacles to generativity: accessibility, ease of mastery, and tranferability. He points out that, as science has gotten more high tech, it’s far harder to master. The result is hyperspecialization: neuroanatomists don’t talk to neuroinformaticists… “and god help you if you cross species lines.” And so universities are making huge investments to try to encourage collaboration: MIT’s just build a $400 million building – the Cook Center – to force collaboration between cancer researchers… and predictably, researchers are fighting the mandate to move in and work together.

People approach Science Commons based on encountering Wikipedia or free software, and say, We what ‘that’ for science.” Unfortunately, there’s not enough analysis of what makes those projects work. We’d think that science is the perfect space for this sort of peer cooperation, based on Thomas Merton’s observation: “I propose the seeming paradox that in science, private property is established by having its substance freely given to others…” Scientists solve a complex game theoretic problem with new research: they’ve got to disclose to get credit, but as they disclose, they enable competitors in the field. The assumption that science is easier than the cultural space to build a commons in might not be true.

Because John comes from a legal background (and from the Berkman Center and Creative Commons), he tends to think about legal constraints and protections in the field. He asks us to consider three aspects of the world of science: data, tools and texts.

Texts are protected by copyrights, and they’re actually pretty simple. The system is near universal, and as Creative Commons has demonstrated, it’s invertable through legal tools like Creative Commons.

Tools are as broad as ice cores from the Arctic Circle, bones from an archeological dig or stem cells. Contracts between institutions – materials transfer agreements – govern their movement, and patents govern them, especially in the life sciences and the energy field.

Data is protected by secrecy and sui generis protection laws. Fortunately, copyright doesn’t attach to raw data in databases, but there are legal tools we need to unlock other aspects of databases, including structure and compatibility.

While these constraints and protections are relevant, Wilbanks tells us that we also need to deal with “the three I’s”: incentives, infrastructures and institutions. Collectively, they work together to slow down adoption of open policies far more than laws do.

For years, the NIH has had a voluntary public access policy, asking researchers to make their text accessible for free on the web within 12 months. 4% of researchers did. Recently, NIH mandated compliance, and now compliance is over 70% and rising. While this only affects NIH-funded research (hugely important to US biological research, but less relevant in other spaces), institutions like Harvard and MIT are adopting open access publishing policies that mandate this behavior.

“The tools we use to open literature from copyrights don’t work in databases – we need different institutions.” Complicated data that isn’t correctly annotated isn’t helpful. And we need to focus on bottom up resistance, the fact that there’s no incentive or mandate to label or format your data. In the publication and text space, we have university and funder participation. We don’t have any of this in the data space.

The tools space involve “physical objects with physical existence – they are not subject to long tail, everything is free realities” of the digital world. And here the incentives work directly against us: “You don’t get funded by giving away your stem cells – the opposite, you get more funding for writing papers only you can write” because you’re the only guy with access to the tools. And so “the resistance is fractal – it shows up in the same form at high and low levels.” And it represents a huge barrier – he shows us the patent workflow for Telomerase. “Any new field with VC’s involved has a patent explosion underway. It’s not just US – China is outpacing us 8 to 1 in filing patents around clean energy.”

We need to consider the problems that we’ll face with an explosion of data. He quotes Bruce Sterling: “We used to produce data faster than humans could structure it. Now we produce data faster than machines can structure it.” Students are now assigned to develop a microbial portrait of a streetcorner – they swab lampposts and garbage bins and are able to get the organisms sequenced in a weekend. “We need a domain name system for data if web effects come into being.” Until we get to a strong enough web infrastructure, we won’t be able to get these positive effects.

Science Commons works on developing new types of contracts, but Wilbanks tells us that the heart of the work is lobbying people to use them and tracking the extent which they’re used. “Measurements lead to incentives in science – everyone wants to maximize on that metric”. The other major change that’s going to push the field forward is the emergence of new technologies, which may put forward new norms.

“Science is heading (back) towards the garage”. You can buy a gene sequencer on eBay for less than $1000 – which allows you to go from the physical to the digital. And you can get your novel genes sequenced on sites like Mr. Gene for $0.39 per base pair, bringing the digital into the physical. Citizen bioengineers are figuring out how to reprogram E. Coli into novel organisms that can detect arsenic in water. You can download tools from a database at MIT and synthesize your new creations at the site of your choice.

“We’re trying to let the explosion of creativity occur,” much as it did in the online space. “The evil people are going to use these tools anyway. If only the bad guys and the government have access, my money’s on the bad guys.”

“We need to decide whether we’re going to have a PC or Tivo for science,” Wilbanks says in closing. The PC model is uglier, but it’s far more generative and creative and it’s what we want to embrace in the long term.

A partial account of question and answers:

Salil Vadhan wonders how these ideas apply to his field, Computer Science. Wilbanks points out that there’s a spectrum of fields with respect to their openness, roughly spanning from math, physics and computer science (where the fields tend to be extremely open) to chemistry, which tends to be extremely closed. In fields that are highly specialized, the consequence is that it’s much harder to make useful abstractions. In open fields like math, Wilbanks tells us that Hippocratic principles prevent him from getting involved.

Eric Von Hippel wonders about the constraints that the patent system put on generativity. Wilbanks tells us that patents tend to be used like trading cards. Massive, mechanized disclosure is going to change this up. The pharma industry did systematic disclosure as a way to prevent patenting of genomes. “Data as prior art, channeled correctly, makes it harder to get an idiotic patent.”

I asked where Wilbanks would put pressure if he were starting the battle for scientific generativity today, independent on Creative Commons or his legal background. He explains that law is actually a pretty useful place to work from – “we don’t take research money, create text, tools or data,” which means we’re perceived as being fairly neutral. And law is an essential component. But the lever is possibly better placed at the point of funder relationships. Funders can demand that you don’t just release your data – you annotate it. You make sure your tools are accessible. And Creative Commons is a great convener to help funders figure out how to do this, with the legal bits disappearing into the framework.

This turns into a discussion of norms and law – Wilbanks quotes a colleague, who’s got the brilliant observation: “Norms scale far better than the law” –

David Weinberger asks his prefered trick question about the organization of the data we’re talking about releasing. Wilbanks correctly identifies it as “a religious question” and offers “the view of my sect”. That view is that we need standard formats like OWL and RDF, but that we need to let people form their own ontologies and let them fight it out in the marketplace of ideas. He’s suspicious of assertions of people (sometimes people involved with the semantic web) who push forward one particular ontology. This resolution is going to be messy… we need to lower transaction costs to allow people to wire big data sets together.

There are excellent conversations as well about privacy and incentives – check David Weinberger’s blog for what turn out to be very thorough notes, especially on the Q&A.

This piece originally appeared on My Heart's in Accra

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in New Science at 3:07 PM)

Debut novel mixes Buckminster Fuller and teen sensitivity
San Luis Obispo Tribune
Inside the dome, his 80-year-old Nana is raising him according to the precepts of R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom she once worked as an associate. ...

and more »

Debut novel mixes Buckminster Fuller and teen sensitivity
Modesto Bee
Inside the dome, his 80-year-old Nana is raising him according to the precepts of R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom she once worked as an associate. ...

and more »

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there's a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There's as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here's why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect -- warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka "methane hydrates" and "methane clathrates") is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO2-driven scenarios -- perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth's geologic past.

(Here's one piece of mitigating information: it's unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we're lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on "if we're lucky" is not very wise.)

Because of this tipping point/feedback process, a runaway methane melt won't stop on its own. When I've written before about desperation as a driver for the rapid (and risky) implementation of geoengineering, this is precisely the scenario I had in mind. If this news holds up, and if it can be shown that the methane leak is actually increasing, then I believe that we are certain to engage in geoengineering, and probably will do so before we have enough good models and studies to suss out any unwanted consequences. We'd be faced with a choice between guaranteed catastrophe or terrible uncertainty.

We'd probably try every geoengineering option available in the event of a methane runaway, but the one that most people would focus on would be the temperature management strategies: stratospheric sulfate injection, seawater cloud brightening, and (unlikely to happen but certain to get a lot of media attention) orbiting reflectors. But there's one more method we should consider. Understanding its potential requires a bit of science talk.

I noted earlier that methane is a "significantly more powerful" greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. More specifically, it's at least 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2; some reports (such as the first piece I linked to above) cite it as 30x stronger, and I've been seen as much as 72x stronger. The difference comes from how the effect is measured over time -- methane and carbon dioxide leave the atmosphere at very different speeds. Although CO2 takes upwards of a century to cycle out naturally, methane takes only about ten years. Why the difference? Chemical processes in the atmosphere break down CH4 (in combination with oxygen) into CO2+H2O -- carbon dioxide and water. In addition, certain bacteria -- known as methanotrophs -- actually consume methane, with the same chemical results. These processes have their limits, however; an abundance of methane in the atmosphere can overwhelm the oxidation chemistry, making the methane stick around for longer than the typical 8-10 years, and the commonplace methanotrophic bacteria evolved in an environment where methane emerges gradually.

These are pretty much the only two natural methane "sinks." There are a few small-scale human processes that can make use of methane (for the production of methanol for fuel, for example) and function as artificial sinks, but such efforts would be hard-pressed to capture methane released across two million square kilometers. So here's where we start to think big.

Both of the natural processes are, in principle, amenable to human intervention. The oxidation of methane into CO2 and water is a well-understood phenomenon, and relies on the presence of OH (hydroxyl radical); upwards of 90% of lower atmosphere methane is oxidized through this process (PDF). But OH is something of a problem chemical, in that it's also a key oxidation agent for many atmospheric pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and NOx. Although we could produce OH to enhance the natural chemical oxidation process, the side-effects of pumping enough OH into the atmosphere to oxidize all of that methane would be unpredictable, but almost certainly quite bad.

So what about methanotrophic bacteria? Such bacteria have long been recognized in freshwater areas and soil, and have had limited use in bioremediation efforts. Methanotrophic Archaea -- similar to bacteria, but a wholly different kingdom of organism -- were recently identified in the oceans; research suggests that methanotrophic Archaea may be responsible for the oxidation of up to 80% of the methane in the oceans. Methanotrophic microbes can also be temperature extremophiles, as they were among the various species found after the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed.

We recently began to learn much more about how methanotrophic bacteria function, as a team from the Institute for Genomic Research sequenced the genome of the methanotroph Methylococcus capsulatus. The scientists discovered that Methylococcus has the genomic capacity to adapt to a far wider set of environments than it is currently found in. They also looked at the possibility of enhancing the microbe's ability to oxidize methane, although admittedly for purposes other than straight methane consumption.

So here's the proposal: we need to deploy methanotrophic microbes at the East Siberian Ice Shelf. Methanotrophic Archaea appears to be best-suited for this task, but we don't know as much about them as we do about bacteria. If we need to modify the microbes (to consume methane more quickly, for example), we may need to work on Methylococcus bacteria, making them viable in extremely cold seawater. I suspect that working with the Archaea will probably be sufficient, but it's important to think ahead about different pathways. Either way, we should consider just how we could make use of methanotrophs to avoid a methane-melt disaster. Given the size of the region, we'll need lots of them, but that's one advantage of biology over straight chemistry: the methanotrophs would be reproducing themselves.

We need to be aware of possible unintended consequences, but at this point, it's not clear how additional methanotrophs would pose a larger risk; moreover, a mass of methanotrophic organisms would undoubtedly be helpful for reducing overall atmospheric methane beyond the Siberian release. Nonetheless, there are some crucial questions we need to answer before we could consider deploying natural or GMO methanotrophs:

Is it physically possible? Could a sufficient number of methane-eating bacteria even be produced to counter a fast release of methane from the Siberian ice shelf?

Is it biologically possible? Would methanotrophic Archaea survive in the Siberian ocean? Could a species of methanotrophic bacteria be engineered to be able to do so (as well as consume large quantities of methane)?

What are the unrecognized risks? What are we missing in an initial risk analysis? Saying "we don't know the risks" doesn't, in and of itself, mean "we should not attempt this," it means "we need to do more research." Clearly, if the risks from enhancing the methane consumption and environmental adaptation capacities of a methanotroph could lead (through species-hopping genes or simple mutation) to even harder-to-manage problems than gigatons of atmospheric methane, this isn't an option. Boosting OH levels in the region would be the fallback position, as we have more experience with managing CO and NOx pollutants.

If the frozen methane in the Siberian ocean is melting faster, our options are extremely limited. We'd no longer be in a position to stop the melting, even by ceasing all greenhouse gas production today; the temperature increases we're seeing now are the results of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere decades ago. And when methane melts, it appears to do so quickly -- there are signs that past methane clathrate events took less than a human lifetime.

This is why I think that methane melt would inevitably mean geoengineering. But if this is the case, the pathway I suggest here may be the best option. The engineering options are enhancements of common natural processes, as opposed to something that emulates extreme conditions (such as sulfate injection). At least with current understanding, there would be few downsides to a greater-than-expected growth of the methanotroph population -- it might even be helpful in mitigating atmospheric methane coming from other sources, such as cattle.

A further advantage is that this is a process that could begin after we start to see significant methane output and could still have a measurably positive result. Using microbes for bio-"scrubbing" of methane from the atmosphere would work on methane that was a decade old as readily as methane fresh from the permafrost. We'd still see some effect from the methane that makes it to the atmosphere, but eventual removal would help to reduce that effect. This means that we still have time to get more certainty about the methane situation before we would need to use the methanotroph option; we don't necessarily have to rush past our better judgment in response. With a process of this magnitude, it's worth taking the time to get it right.

If we are seeing the beginning of a runaway methane melt, we would be facing a problem of a scale with few precedents in human history. No society on the planet would be unaffected; if left unmitigated, it would continue to affect the lives of our children, and our children's children, and generations beyond that. And remember, this is a fast process -- simply pushing a bit harder to reduce carbon emissions will do nothing to stop it.

Our choices are few, and the risk of not acting is (potentially) immense. We may well be on the brink of a new era in planetary management. Let's hope we're up to the challenge.

(Some of this essay reproduces text from my initial methanotroph proposal on Worldchanging back in 2005. At that point, it was speculation -- now, it's something we need to seriously consider.)

This piece originally appeared on Open the Future

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(Posted by Jamais Cascio in Features at 2:24 PM)