This is a really smart project discussing how cutting-edge climate-friendly business ventures have begun and succeeded or failed. Though it's not casual reading, it'll be fascinating to those wrestling with these questions, because it focuses on the element most often left out of innovative plans: people. "When people talk about reducing carbon emissions," the report's authors say, "they usually talk about technologies or economics. But the five year Lowcarbonworks research project reveals that’s not enough. Unless we understand the wider systemic context of low carbon initiatives and the human relationships required to drive innovation forward, we will not achieve a low carbon future."

To illustrate how the human factor is critical to success, they explore a range of examples -- including an anaerobic digester company, a compressed air utility; an integrated heating and cooling system; a low-carbon factory producing lingerie for Marks and Spencer; a district energy plan using a geothermal combined heat and power system -- showing where each met resistance, how each found allies and adoption, where each ran afoul of the current system, and how each dealt with the problems of entrenched interests, silo-ed knowlege and hostile experts:

You won't be taking this to the beach, but if you're looking for some real case studies in the difficulties of bright green business and how they can be overcome, this report's for you.

Click here to visit the site where you can download a free copy.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 7:16 AM)

More nuggets from the RCA show. This time from Design Products' edgy and inspiring Platform 13, headed by the very talented Onkar Kular and Sebastien Noel.

Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao

Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.

The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.

Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao

The project aims to explore the cooperation process of human & machine. The designer explains: I found some the relationship between human and machine are amazing and could be horrible (like this one that shows how we human invent machines then put human inside to it to manufacture goods), The final object - A machine is a miniature of what I understand through the process of research, and the aim of the machine is to let people have a chance to feel the condensed process of how we generate our self identity from external point of view as from the society, which is a big machine we all in.

P.S. the website of Self-Portrait Machine will be on line soon, it will show more about the background research and the building process of it. I'll update this post as soon as the website is up.

Videos of the machine in action.

Exhibition view. The designer had aligned portraits made by the machines along with portraits made by painters

The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009.

This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 4:27 PM)

By Terry Macalister

Recruits will be needed to help introduce 'smart meters' to help people see exactly how much energy they are using in their homes.

British Gas today promised to create 2,600 green jobs over the next three years by rolling out "smart meters" and installing wind turbines on peoples' homes.

The move should help ministers meet targets of cutting carbon emissions through lower use of power, especially that generated by gas or other fossil fuels.

About 1,700 of the recruits will be new to the industry, while 900 are expected to be brought in from rival metering organisations in time for a government-backed roll-out programme due to start in 2012. Earlier this year the company unveiled plans to take on an additional 1,500 staff to work in the clean technology sector.

"Today's announcement of 2,600 new jobs by 2012 shows we are creating skilled green jobs in Britain and training the experts who will help customers become more energy efficient in the future," said Phil Bentley, managing director of British Gas.

The new workers, to be trained at the company's growing network of energy academies, will install smart meters and help homeowners understand how the devices could reduce energy use, save money and end the practice of estimated monthly bills. Anecdotal evidence suggests savings of up to 25% can be made.

In May energy secretary Ed Miliband launched a consultation process on smart meters that is planned to run to September. The government would like energy suppliers to be responsible for meters with a new third-party body handling the data, but the companies want to do it all themselves.

Britain plans to replace all existing electricity and gas meters – often clunky objects hidden away in cupboards – with easily viewed devices that show consumers exactly how much energy they are using, and even see the energy demands of individual appliances.

It is hoped that people will change their behaviour to save money. The meters will also help homeowners sell electricity from green technologies such as solar panels or rooftop wind turbines back to the grid, while improving energy demand forecasts and network management.

Smart meters are seen as a first step toward creating "smart grids" where consumers can adjust electricity use to benefit from cheaper energy at times of low demand, including charging electric cars, and reduce consumption at peak times.

The British government estimates that smart meters could deliver net benefits of between £2.5bn and £3.6bn over the next 20 years.

In April, the government set a 2020 target to cut Britain's greenhouse gas emissions by 34% compared with 1990 levels but the necessary renewable energy growth and efficiency improvements have so far been small.

• This article was amended on 2 July 2009. The original projected net benefits from smart meters of between £2.5m and £3.6m. This has been corrected.

This piece originally appeared in The Guardian.

Photo credit: Flickr/Dominics Pics, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 3:51 PM)

By Alok Jha

Study from the Carbon Trust warns that potential of renewables sector will only be realised if government invests in research and removes regulatory barriers.

The UK could benefit from 250,000 jobs and up to £70bn in revenue from offshore wind and wave technologies by 2050, according to a study by the Carbon Trust. This potential will only be realised, however, if the government gives clear signals to industry, so that investors know where to put their money, rather than leaving new technologies to face the market alone.

The Carbon Trust, a government-backed agency that studies ways to promote low-carbon technologies, carried out economic analyses in six areas of low-carbon industry including offshore wind, wave, solid-state lighting and micro combined heat and power.

The studies, published today, looked at the current status and costs of the technology, how these would develop and what research and development costs there might be in the coming decades.

The studies for offshore wind and wave power showed these technologies could provide at least 15% of the total carbon savings required to meet the UK's 2050 CO2 reduction targets. "The UK's greenhouse gas targets mean that by 2050 We must reduce our emissions to just one-10th of today's levels, per unit of output," said John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser.

"This is a formidable challenge, requiring step changes in the rate at which we improve our energy efficiency and in low-carbon innovation.The Carbon Trust's proposals recognise the need for us to be smarter in focusing our investments, including to help businesses seize the economic opportunities of the transition."

According to the new analysis, published just a few weeks ahead of the forthcoming government white paper on energy, the UK could attract 45% of the global offshore wind market by 2020, delivering £65bn of net economic value and 225,000 total jobs by 2050.

This would only happen with an investment of up to £600m into research, the removal of regulatory barriers and incentives to increase the deployment of the turbines. In the UK this means installing around 29GW of wind by 2020 and upwards of 40GW by 2050. A large part of the economic benefit would come from exporting technology developed here.

For wave, the outlook is more modest. Around a quarter of the world's wave technologies are being developed in the UK and the Carbon Trust said Britain should be the "natural owner" of the global market in this area. It could generate revenues worth £2bn per year by 2050 and up to 16,000 direct jobs.

"These technologies are not green 'nice to haves' but are critical to the economic recovery of the UK," said Tom Delay, the chief executive of the Carbon Trust. "To reap the significant rewards from their successful development we must prioritise and comprehensively back the technologies that offer the best chance of securing long-term carbon savings, jobs and revenue for Britain. Rather than following in the footsteps of others, this new analysis shows it is an economic no-brainer to be leading from the front."

In addition to the direct jobs in these in industries, there would be further benefits to the economy. "The UK's also very good at the secondary service industries - things like the financing of wind farms, the legal documents, environmental assessments," said Paul Arwas, a consultant who wrote the new Carbon Trust report. "Those jobs would be in addition - for offshore wind, it would be another 70,000 by 2050."

None of this will happen, though, without government support. Arwas said that when encouraging new industries, authorities tended to swing between two poles - either direct state funding or allowing markets to decide. "Either the governments didn't intervene at all or, if they did they did it by market mechanisms which are totally undifferentiated by technology. There you end up with a situation where, to take a footballing analogy, you've got the under 21s playing the under 12s."

Instead the Carbon Trust has proposed a new, semi-interventionist, model where the government chooses a family of technologies to invest in, for example wave power, and tells developers there will be subsidies or long-term help available to develop the sector as a whole but without backing individual technologies.

John Sauven, Greenpeace's executive director, welcomed the Carbon Trust's proposed approach. "Every country now needs a decarbonisation plan to help solve three of our greatest challenges - climate stability, energy security and economic prosperity. The UK has an enormous untapped supply of clean, green renewable energy and a world class engineering industry well placed to develop it."

Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, said the UK had little choice but to develop these new technologies, given the dwindling supplies of fossil fuels: "In the past we have let opportunities to capitalise on our scientific leadership slip through our fingers. The US and others are investing heavily in low carbon technologies; we must not fall behind and waste the scientific expertise that we have in the UK."

This piece originally appeared in The Guardian.

Photo credit: Flickr/phault, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Bright Green Economy at 3:34 PM)

by Polly Ghazi

Robust new mileage standards for US auto industry

Flanked by two unlikely allies – California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson – President Obama has announced groundbreaking vehicle standards that will further cement the greening of the US car industry.
 
By regulating both miles per gallon and exhaust pollution, the new uniform federal standard links curbs on greenhouse gas emissions with fuel economy standards for the first time in US history.

Covering vehicle model years 2012 to 2016, the legislation will require car makers to achieve an average fuel economy for their fleets of 35.5mpg in 2016 (with 39mpg specified for cars and 30mpg for light trucks). It will replace the current CAFE – Corporate Average Fuel Economy – standard of 27.5mpg for cars and 24mpg for light trucks. According to White House calculations, the four-year programme should result in a saving of about 1.8 billion barrels in oil consumption, and a total reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 900 million tonnes – the equivalent to taking 3.7 million cars off the road.

The new single standard will replace existing federal and state laws governing both fuel standards and greenhouse gas emissions. Initiating a national vehicle emissions standard also brings to a close the increasingly bitter battle between California and the US vehicle industry over the state’s efforts to impose its own legally binding greenhouse-gas emissions standard. Seventeen other states had said they would follow California’s lead if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted its request for a waiver enabling the state government to act unilaterally. While the EPA has not yet ruled on the waiver request, Obama’s national approach supersedes their decision.

The new standard may be modest in comparison with Europe, but it represents a huge step forward in the US, where motor manufacturers and their lobbyists have successfully squashed previous efforts at improving mileage requirements.

At the White House announcement, industry leaders were enthusiastic. “It launches a new beginning,” said David McCurdy, President of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. “The President has succeeded in bringing three regulatory bodies, 15 states, a dozen automakers and many environmental groups to the table.”

This piece originally appeared in Green Futures. Green Futures is published by Forum for the Future, one of the leading magazines on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Its aim is to demonstrate that a sustainable future is both practical and desirable – and can be profitable, too.

Photo credit: Flickr/Burning Image, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Green Futures in Transportation at 2:01 PM)

by Roger Valdez

Northwesterners are using less gasoline.

For our latest research report, we looked at gasoline consumption data in the Northwest for 2008 and found some significant drops. In fact, total gasoline consumption saw the biggest drop since 1980. It would be easy to attribute this to high gas prices and the economic downturn we experienced last year, but the fact is that this drop actually marks an acceleration of a trend that's been going on in the Northwest for nearly a decade.

That's right. Per capita gasoline consumption has dropped in 8 of the last 9 years. Northwesterners are leading the way as the nation takes steps to get off the volatile fossil fuel roller coaster. So, while price and economic factors play a role, we can also track a decade of smart trends that reduce consumption: several decades of smart growth policies, increased transit use, and improved fuel efficiency are just a few.

And even now that gas prices are a bit lower, early 2009 data indicates that our healthier new habits are sticking. In early 2009, Vehicle Miles Traveled have dropped as well adding some depth to our picture of how folks in the Northwest are taking steps to get off the volatile fossil fuel roller coaster.

What does it mean for local decision-makers? For one, investments in freeway capacity no longer make as much sense as investments in transit, walkable communities, and efficiency.

The full report is available here. Here are some of the key findings:

•  We’re using less gas. Gasoline consumption is falling in the Northwest states of Idaho, Oregon and Washington. In 2008, per-person consumption dropped to the lowest level since 1965, and total gasoline consumption had its biggest drop since 1980.

• Our travel habits are changing. While gasoline prices have been volatile, declines in gasoline consumption per capita have continued through the fluctuations of the last decade. Last year’s dramatic price swings resulted in record-high transit ridership—and for some northwesterners, these changes are sticking

• Unemployment is up. Recession has hit the Northwest hard, and many are out of jobs. Last year’s combination of high fuel prices and tight family budgets trimmed fuel consumption dramatically.

• Smart policies lead to long term progress. Policy changes—like better transportation alternatives and more-compact urban growth—can sustain momentum toward lower gas consumption.

• Smart investments give us more choices. Declining gas consumption and driving have implications for transportation spending. They suggest prioritizing road maintenance and transit investments over highway building.

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


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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Climate Change at 1:49 PM)

Shawn Frayne, president of Honolulu- and Hong Kong-based Humdinger Wind Energy, is a prolific inventor and innovator whose work has been inspired by the need for resourceful problem-solving in the world's most vulnerable regions.

I spoke with Frayne after watching his presentation at Sustainable Brands 2009.

Adele Peters: You often use the phrase “confluent technology.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

Shawn Frayne: There’s a confluence of the problems and talents in developing countries with the problems and talents in wealthy countries. Problems — particularly in the fields of energy and water — that are being faced now by developing countries are soon to be faced by the entire world. Thirty years ago, when technology created a new low-cost solar panel for Africa, or a low-cost wind tower to be used in Haiti, that might have been isolated to those places. Now those types of technologies can transcend the boundaries between developing countries and wealthy nations, and, at least the theory goes, go on to create new industries in wealthy countries as well.

AP: What’s the difference between now and 30 years ago?

SF: The problems are more acute now. I suppose what allows this to be possible now, what allows designers and inventors around the world to collaborate on creating new products is the high speed of FedEx, Skype, online whiteboard tools, all those things that I think basically over the last five years allowed this idea of the global invention factory to become a reality.

AP: I know you have a new project under development that arranges the Windbelts into a panel-form to generate electricity from the wind. Can you describe how that works?

SF: This new development is called a 'Windcell Panel,' and its functionally a lot like a solar panel that catches the wind instead of the sun. The Panels consist of 20 individual Windbelts in a single frame, adding up to a rating of 100W of power per panel, with an off-the-line cost of around US$100. This translates to uninstalled electricity of around 4 cents per kWh with 6 m/s average winds -- four or five times cheaper than solar PV. We're engineering these systems to be simple, very low cost, modular, and able to catch low speed winds.

The Humdinger team believes this new version of the Windbelt technology will allow cities to finally capture urban air flows over buildings and under bridges on a large scale of 10 kilowatts on up to 100 megawatts of grid-tied per installation (say, under the 30 km bridge recently installed in Shanghai, as shown in the illustration). We're also going after coastal installations and rural power -- basically, anywhere other energy technologies can't go cost-effectively. Or quickly -- we believe we will ramp up to several hundred installations relatively fast (relative to wind turbine farms or solar farms), since the Panels will be as easy to transport and install as a fence.

AP: Why do you think the big clean tech of the future will be born in the developing world?

SF: An engineer sitting in Silicon Valley may look at the solar panels easily available in his or her vicinity and think, “I can redesign these panels to get an additional 1% efficiency.” That’s good, and that incremental innovation is necessary, but in different environments, where there’s a different set of constraints (such as in developing countries) designers and inventors can sometimes be pushed to create more than incremental changes. Silicon-based solar is decreasing in cost, partially due to supply and demand, but it’s also due to incremental efficiency that’s grown over time with that technology. But you can never push that below, say, $2/watt, even over the next ten years of development. A more disruptive technology, that isn’t based on silicon, could push it to a quarter a watt.

Those sorts of technologies typically only get invented when the constraints demand that sort of serious change. Most of the innovations that the modern world rests on today were formed over 100 years ago, and those key foundational inventions were formed to pull the world out of poverty. Now we’re in a weird situation where grand changes — grand inventions and new starting points -- are needed, but most of the designers and inventors that can get funding are in wealthy countries where the pressures and constraints don’t push them to design the fundamental shifts.

The opinion I have, and the opinion of the others that I work with, is that there’s a huge untapped brain resource in developing countries. When designers or inventors have a different set of constraints, and they’re clever, there’s going to be great inventions and innovations that come out of those people. We’re just looking to link the risk that is required to do sort of revolutionary invention and design with some sort of reward. Some people do invent altruistically, but they're not free to do that if their family’s starving. You need some way to link that risk with reward. That’s part of what we’re trying to prove through Humdinger; we’re trying to create a billion-dollar business that will give this whole idea some chops, and then go from there.

AP: So you are interested in investing in other inventors in the developing world in the future?

SF: Yes, that’s the dream. The dream is a global network of small invention incubators. One in Hong Kong, one in New York, one in Haiti, one in Zambia, one in Guatemala. Spread all around, to have different constraints and different brainpower and leverage that to solve clean energy and clean water, that’s the initial focus. That’s the dream that all of us have formed collectively and that we’re working towards. That dream requires money, and we’re trying to make some of that money through the Windbelt, and more. The goal isn’t to build one invention; the goal is to build smart investments to fund invention.

AP: What are some new examples of "reverse leapfrogging" – that is to say, technologies that were created for the developing world, but are now being adapted for the developed world?

SF: There are several countries in Africa where you can text people money on your cell phone. I know that I can’t do that in the U.S. very easily. A lot of financial trading technologies are being developed in developing countries. I’ve mentioned the Tata Nano car before, and the plethora of innovations that had to be developed to enable the development of a $2500 personal vehicle, and a lot of those will likely be incorporated down the road in the next generation of electric and non-electric vehicles because now they’ve been proven in at least one scenario. Another example is the One Laptop Per Child screen, a revolutionary design which has two separate types of pixels, which allows you to read in the dark and read in full sunlight with extremely little power consumption. That’s something that we’ll see incorporated in more laptops soon. There are a whole lot of small things like that that are starting to bubble up. I expect that we’ll see more and more of this over the coming years.

AP: What progress will be critical for a renewable energy future?

SF: I think the biggest step would be that renewable energy technologies dip below the threshold of about $1/watt for solar and wind. That would have a huge influence. We’ve talked to people in the solar industry, and obviously the wind industry, and if there was anything that was truly disruptive, that dropped significantly below that threshold which nothing right now can breach, that would make a huge change on the production side.

Another key thing that has to happen to enable sustainability is the development of fortifiable energy storage systems, but not only for the obvious reason of storing vast amounts of power and being able to ship that around. Also, for enabling things like wireless sensor networks that gather information about energy use — right now those wireless sensors have to be powered by batteries that only last a year or two years. The batteries have to be replaced, creating millions of batteries in waste, and even more significantly, perhaps, it limits the amount of information that can be gathered, because it makes each of those sensors thousands of dollars because of maintenance costs. If there was a battery that lasted 20 years to power those devices, that would be a leap that could happen.

There are things that companies like Better Place are doing — Better Place has a new business model for electric cars, using battery switchout — systems like that which pull transportation off of oil and put it in the territory of electricity, then create a scenario where a huge chunk of the energy usage in the world gets pulled into the terrain where it can be powered directly by renewable energies such as wind and solar. Right now that is not possible to do. With petrol-based vehicles and transportation being the de facto system in the world, we can talk about a lot about electricity generation, like what the Windbelt can do and what solar can do, but ultimately that’s only one piece of the pie. We need to pull another piece of the pie into electricity so it can be addressed by these renewable technologies. I think business models like Better Place are key to that as well.

All images courtesy of Shawn Frayne and Humdinger Wind Energy.

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(Posted by Adele Peters in Features at 8:50 AM)

International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) have chosen Abu Dhabi as the agency's first headquarters and French diplomat Hélène Pelosse as its first director-general.

A coalition of African and Arab nations celebrated locating the agency in the United Arab Emirates, praising the selection as a success for the developing world. Despite widespread political support, the chosen location and director-general faced criticism from within the renewable energy community due to concerns that nominating countries were attracting votes in exchange for nuclear energy deals.

Representatives from 136 countries [PDF] participated in a summit this week in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to decide the clean energy agency's headquarters and leadership. Prior to the vote, Australia, Costa Rica, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom joined the agency.

Major industrialized countries such as the United States and Japan were initially hesitant to join IRENA because of the existence of other organizations that provide advice for renewable energy development, such as the United Nations and the International Energy Agency.

Hermann Scheer, a member of the German parliament who first called for IRENA's formation in 1990, said that neither of those organizations provides sufficient focus on renewable energy.

"The fact that 136 states have signed IRENA's statute will rebut the skeptics. There does not exist another international governmental organization which had so many members at its formation," said Scheer, who chairs the World Council for Renewable Energy, in a statement. "It is now crucial to swiftly set up a powerful organization and to endow it with the necessary resources to support member states in drafting policies to introduce renewable energies nationally."

The headquarters will be located in Abu Dhabi's Masdar City, a new planned city that aims to produce zero net carbon emissions and zero net waste. To raise support for hosting IRENA, the UAE government committed $22 million of annual support through 2015. The Abu Dhabi Fund for Development also offered $50 million in annual loans to finance renewable energy projects in developing countries.

"We in the UAE extend our hands to all countries of the world. The agency is not exclusively for the Emiratis. It is an international asset," UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan told the Emirates News Agency. "All countries of the world have a right in the agency."

Competing cities Bonn, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, withdrew their bids to host the agency at the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting. The countries' leaders forged a deal that will instead divide IRENA among the new headquarters in Abu Dhabi, a center of technology and innovation in Bonn, and an inter-organizational liaison office in Vienna.

The compromise "reflects the spirit of cooperation that is needed for IRENA to grow into a strong and effective organization," an IRENA statement said.

Copenhagen, Denmark, was the fourth city nominated to host the agency, but the Danish government withdrew from the competition prior to this week's meeting in an effort to support a Bonn location.

An Abu Dhabi location received support from the African Union, France, Spain, Italy, and several Arab nations.

Clean energy advocates raised concerns that the UAE and France were attracting votes for one other in an effort to support unrelated interests such as new nuclear energy projects. The advocates supported their complaints in part by pointing to deals that the United States and France finalized earlier this year to develop several nuclear reactors in the UAE.

Pelosse, the newly elected interim director-general, said in an interview with the Worldwatch Institute that these concerns were unfounded.

"The idea that IRENA would be tainted by nuclear interests is simply wrong," said Pelosse, the French Minister of State's deputy head of staff in charge of international affairs. "Firstly, it is not in its statutes. Second, there already is an international organization in charge of nuclear energy. There is no way IRENA is ever going to deal with nuclear energy."

Pelosse led last year's European Union negotiations to form binding targets of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020. She has also helped design France's renewable energy policy and the Mediterranean Solar Plan, an effort to develop 20 gigawatts capacity of new renewable energy resources in the Mediterranean region by 2020.

"Ms. Pelosse has established a long record of outstanding experience and profound knowledge of the renewable sector as well as strong communication and representation skills," an IRENA statement said.

The other director-general candidates were Juan Ormazabal of Spain, Arthouros Zervos of Greece, and Hans Jǿrgen Koch of Denmark.

Abu Dhabi Chosen to Host IRENA

This piece originally appeared in Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org. This article is a product of Eye on Earth, Worldwatch Institute's online news service.

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(Posted by Ben Block in Cities at 2:26 PM)

by Paul Jaffe

The entire family of San Francisco city agencies responsible for maintaining its streets made an unconventional decision to close a portion of a street to cars and convert the new space into a simple, yet elegant, public plaza. The project combines all the important elements of plaza creation that have been successful in New York City and elsewhere: take space from cars, use simple treatments to convert the space into a pedestrian sanctuary, including movable furniture and leftover granite blocks from city salvage yards, and engage commercial interests around the plaza to help maintain and care for the new public realm.

Though some neighborhood constituents voiced skepticism that the plaza would be empty at best, or filled with miscreants and vagabonds at worst, the plaza's success is hard to dispute. In fact, so many people are using the new space and enjoying the tables and chairs, the businesses around the plaza have contemplated leaving the furniture out later than sunset, which was the initial closing time agreed upon between them and the Castro/Upper Market Community Betterment District. This film takes an in-depth look at the construction of the plaza with some of the agencies responsible for it, and includes some entertaining man-on-the-street interviews.

This piece originally appeared in Streetfilms.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 1:22 PM)

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in About Worldchanging at 5:27 PM)

My guest blogger, Glenn Hurowitz, is Washington Director of Avoided Deforestation Partners. This post is excerpted from a piece first published here.

One of the little-known ingredients of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454 is a breakthrough agreement on ending tropical deforestation, which is responsible for about 20 percent of global climate pollution—more than the emissions from all the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.

The Waxman-Markey legislation contains two primary tropical forest provisions that, combined, help meet the bill’s goals for reducing pollution in a way cost effective enough to win the support it needs to pass. First, it sets aside 5 percent of the bill’s pollution allowances to fund tropical forest conservation. Second, it allows emitters to get credit for investing in tropical forest conservation subject to a set of strict requirements.

Set-aside funding. The revenue from the 5 percent set aside can be used for a variety of purposes, including:

• Protecting forests, wetlands, and carbon-rich peatlands that might not be protected through private efforts.
• Preparing countries and communities to participate in international private conservation efforts by helping them develop the resources and expertise to figure out how much forests they have, how much carbon is stored in those forests, the rate of deforestation, and the impact of conservation activities. These efforts would, most importantly, produce a national baseline against which to measure reductions in deforestation and a national plan to help these countries achieve their forest conservation and climate protection goals.
• Pilot projects aimed at reversing deforestation, especially at the state and province levels.
• Improved governance and enhanced enforcement aimed at reducing illegal logging and other forms of deforestation and helping indigenous and other forest-dependent people.

Private investment. The bill also includes powerful incentives for private investment in forest conservation and subject to strict requirements. The bill allows emitters to offset a portion of their pollution by investing in forest conservation. However, they can only get credit after reductions in deforestation have already occurred and, in major emitting countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, only if those reductions come as part of a national plan that ensures a countrywide reduction in deforestation, not just a local one. Conservation projects run through states and provinces will also be eligible—if the state or province would be considered a major emitting country in its own right and if it has a plan for reducing deforestation statewide.

Finally, for the program’s first years, small emitting countries and the least-developed nations will be eligible to participate while they build their national plans for reducing deforestation. This ensures that conservation can start immediately and we can avoid a deforestation race to the bottom. No conservation will receive credit unless biodiversity is protected, and indigenous and forest-dependent people benefit from it.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. recently conducted a greenhouse gas abatement cost curve analysis and found that tropical forest conservation has the potential to reduce carbon pollution at just a fraction of the cost of other essential strategies such as installing clean energy or improving agricultural practices. In the words of a recent New York Times editorial, “the economics make sense.”

The private investment incentives helped win the support of power producers such as American Electric Power and Duke Energy by lowering the costs of the bill. They also helped ensure that the 5 percent set aside would remain as part of the bill, even as other environmental spending was cut—the utilities and other companies had previously agreed through a negotiating process convened by Avoided Deforestation Partners to support these government funding provisions if the private investment provisions were also included.

The Waxman-Markey bill’s forest provisions provide a model for action by other countries. If the bill passes and other industrialized countries adopt similar tropical forest conservation measures, deforestation could be ended or even reversed—a huge global achievement that, until Waxman-Markey, seemed tragically out of reach.

This piece originally appeared in Climate Progress.

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(Posted by Joe Romm in Climate Change at 4:26 PM)

I was at a small meeting on peak oil Friday — Executive Summary:  We’re peaking now!

James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, was there.  He is in the Mad Max/Lovelock/Wall-E school of dystopia, and so I have a number of disagreements with him (see “Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia“).

He did, however, say one thing that really strike a chord.  He said we should stop calling Americans “consumers.”  It pigeonholes all Americans and also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That seems to me a reasonable point, and I will endeavor to make a change.  Indeed, I had previously blogged that the U.S. savings rate was on the rise, it looks like U.S. carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007, President Obama was making a big ush toward making America a nation of creators as opposed to consumers, and I asked “Is the U.S. consumption binge over?”

The figure above is from the NYT business blog, Economix, which has a longer-term, glass-is-half-empty perspective in a post titled, “Savings Rates Rising Toward Mediocrity“:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that personal savings rates rose again in May. Americans saved 6.9 percent of their after-tax income last month, the highest rate in 15 years.

Is that impressive? Not particularly, at least in historical terms. In fact, it’s about equal to the average savings rate of the last 50 years:

Doh!

Well, I’m a glass-is-half-full type of person — or, rather, like my old friend Amory Lovins, I’m a glass-is-twice-as-big-as-it-needs-to-be person.  So rather than focusing on the past, I’ll stick with Obama’s optimism about the future from his big speech on science and R&D last month — “Our future on this planet depends on our willingness to address the challenge posed by carbon pollution,” vows “we will exceed [R&D] level achieved at the height of the space race”:

I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.

I would also note that in Dale Carnegie’s uber-bestseller How to Win Friends and Influnce People, in Section Four “How to be a leader:  How to change people without giving offense or arousing resentment,” he has a chapter titled, “Give a Dog a Good Name.”  Bottom line:  People live up — or down — to expectations, and the naming of things matters.  [Yes, I know, calling ourselves "homo sapiens sapiens" didn't take.]

So, while it may just be a small thing, instead of using the term “American consumers,” I’ll just try to stick with “Americans.”

This piece originally appeared in Climate Progress.

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(Posted by Joe Romm in Stuff at 3:31 PM)

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department is studying whether 670,000 acres of federal lands in six Western states are suitable for the construction of large-scale solar power projects. Salazar, appearing in Las Vegas with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said the Obama administration is doing “everything we can to put the bulls-eye on the development of solar energy on our public lands.” He predicted that by the end of next year, 13 commercial-scale solar power projects could be under construction on U.S. government lands in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy announced new efficiency standards for fluorescent and recessed lighting fixtures, set to take effect in 2012. Energy Department officials said the tighter standards would save as much as $4 billion annually in energy costs and avoid 594 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from 2012 to 2042 — the equivalent of removing 166 million cars from the road for a year.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Abi Skipp.

This article originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Energy at 3:30 PM)

My tent is back in the closet. The great circus tent used for the Tällberg Forum’s plenary sessions is undoubtedly on its way back home to Italy. The Tällberg Companion — the little book with schedules, participant bios, and general wisdom about how to survive the five-day, change-the-world marathon meeting that is the Tällberg Forum — is up on the shelf, next to the Companions of previous years. I notice that it is half the size of the others, a little resource efficiency case study in its own right. (It is also a growing trend to have business cards that are half the usual size.)

View from my campsite, with a neighboring duck

Now that it’s all over, what do I actually think about my experience this year? Many of the people who work with the Tällberg Foundation are, or are in the process of becoming, my friends. This puts an obvious damper on criticism, and biases one toward expressions of (truly well-deserved) gratitude and admiration for the amazing show they put on. They work extremely hard, all year, in cramped offices, to pull off this annual miracle of big thinking, heartfelt community building, and truly soaring artistry.

At least ten of the conversations I had were truly important ones, in which agreements were struck, friendships were deepened, or doors were opened to something new. You can undoubtedly tell from my log — “log” is such a better word than “blog”, don’t you agree? as though we were all ship’s captains sailing the internet — which elements of the Forum’s content struck me as most valuable (e.g., Drew Jones & Co.’s climate game), or which speakers I responded to most (e.g., Nyamko Sabuni).

But what could have made Tällberg more satisfying this year? Because I am always left wanting a little bit, or even a lot, more. Nor am I alone in this; I heard a number of variations on this comment from participants and presenters alike. This is not a criticism of the organizers; I think they created a wonderful conference, rich with content, well-structured, well-presented, a very good mirror of the state of the sustainability movement today. They deserve accolades and laurel wreaths.

Nor, of course, is it a critisicm of the participants. Nearly everyone I met was already working very hard to “address the challenges,” doing whatever it was they do, from creating social enterprises in war-torn countries, to trying to help their company address the realities of the 21st century in a socially responsible way. Some people added to their already-overstretched workloads while in Tällberg, creating new initiatives on climate change or principled philanthropy. Truly, the amount of energy and dedication in evidence, from the 40-year veterans of sustainability work, to the 20- and 30-somethings just emerged from Masters programs and seeking their place of greatest impact, was a joy and a comfort to behold. The “Army of Sustainability” that I write about in The ISIS Agreement has been growing and solidifying quickly in recent years, and Tällberg is one of those spots on the planet where you get a chance to see that, in the flesh.

And yet … this year’s Tällberg Forum left me feeling a bit down, for some reason. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; as my friend Joanna Macy has been teaching for decades, sometimes we have to into the despair of our situation, the feelings of grief and sorrow that are evoked, to find the new energy we need to rise to a great challenge.

First there were the hard facts from science — disappearing fish, acidic oceans, images of drought, the climate challenge, this increasingly clear view of the “long march” humanity must now make, from here to sustainability. Something like this: if all goes *well*, then we and our immediate descendants will be struggling to stop global warming, restore ecoystems, adapt to climate change, and save people from crushing poverty, for the next ninety years.

No one can credibly pretend any more, as some of our movement’s rhetoric tends to convey (at least implicitly), that some magic basket of techno-fixes, stimulus packages, and lifted chins on TV is going to create a revolutionary rescue for planet Earth and its human civilization in the “next ten years.” This is “cathedral-building,” as many have called it, the kind work that takes generations, and where those who started it only live to see the foundations in place, a couple of walls raised. But they end their lives knowing that the project itself is so deeply embedded in the hearts and politics of the people, that what they started is sure to be completed, and will one day stun the world.

Such thoughts were often the talk of Tällberg, both from the stage and around the margins. But I am not sure, still, whether even we have really grasped the urgency of the situation. Here, I use the word “we” carefully (it is usually used very uncarefully in these contexts to mean “the whole of humanity” or maybe just “humanity’s decision-makers) to mean we, the community of people who devote their professional time to sustainability issues and global futures. My own little experiments with camping and low-impact eating during this gathering are hardly more than symbolic, in terms of change; and in fact they were driven more by the pleasures of being in a tent by the lake, and saving a great deal of money, more than by that nagging sense (and nearly all of us in this business have this sense) of ethical duty to the planet and its people. And yet, even my little experiment in lighter conference-going was a piece of exotica in this crowd. We talk, all of us, of the great need for change, and we dedicate our lives to making it happen. But to what extent are we, really, willing to do more than symbolism to reduce the accumulation of destructive demands and behaviors that have (to cite just one statistic) reduced the population of glass eels in the Atlantic marine system to less than one percent of their previous levels, in just one generation’s time? (Source: Silent Sea, Isabella Lövin) We are willing to work extremely hard, clearly. We communicate intensively. We strategize and search for leverage points and buy organic foods. But are we willing to live differently? To create societies and economies that run differently? To manage our wealth (for most of us at Tällberg were wealthy, relative to the whole of the world) differently? Are willing to give anything up, in return for the knowledge that the cathedral of sustainability will be built?

I will be sitting with such thoughts all summer, as I press forward with work on a new book (that last in the three-book series that started with Believing Cassandra and The ISIS Agreement), having to do with how we humans think about the future. I was trolling for help with that book at Tällberg, and got some; I’ll be “blogging for help” as well in the times ahead.

Meanwhile, I have one small complaint worth sharing. I was sorry my friends from the Nile Basin — our workshop attendance was smallish to small — did not get more of the attention I thought they deserved. Their inter-governmental process is both enormous and inspirational, but it was barely noticed in the Tällberg talk-show context (though they did get some Swedish TV and radio time). This relative inattention was a real-world example of that climate game we played, described in an earlier Episode in this series, where the poorer nations — who suffer directly and decisively, right now, the deadliest impacts of global warming — were given very little voice and visibility, while the rest of the climate-change world talked ppm and models and abstract targets. Our workshop conversations on the Nile were high level and meaningful, so I hope my colleagues’ trip from East Africa to central Sweden proves materially useful to them in some way. But I am afraid most people are returning from Tällberg still not knowing much about the reality of sustainable development issues and challenges in this crucial region, the cradle of modern humanity.

And I also have one great hope. There did seem to be some genuine energy gathered around mobilizing the Tällberg community even further, in directions it has been mobilized previously — to push for (and here I come talking ppm as well) 350 as the necessary global target that our best scientific understanding says that we need (see www.350.org), and this new effort to “take the Tällberg tent to Copenhagen” and push all the harder, with all the voices that can be mobilized, for the best possible agreement there.

Not that I think one should pin great hopes on Copenhagen; but I pin great hopes on more and more committed mobilization, in every sector, to address every issue we have before us. This truly is a great rescue operation — people, species, ecosystems — and I hold out hope, relentlessly, that it can be done, because I have seen parts of it done, in my own lifetime. I grew up in the “save the whales!” era; today, compared to that time, and despite the many threats and losses, many whale species are in fact recovering. I grew up in a world where the best experts expected populations to swell to 12 billion or more, of whom a quarter or more would be likely to starve. We already have reduced population growth rates enormously, and avoided much foreseen famine with technological, policy, and economic innovations (some of which have created their own problems, but that is life). We have already capped CFCs and begun to heal the ozone layer. There are many few nuclear weapons in the world than there were a generation ago (still too many, but there is still serious progress there). These things happened, and are happening, because people at all levels of the world’s power hierarchy became seriously engaged and dedicated years of their lives to make them happen.

I saw a lot of that energy at Tällberg, from the youngest to the oldest, from heads of state to school children, and seeing this steadily growing upsurge of human energy and intelligence and love on display is the chief gift of that time.

Note: This is the final installment in a six-part series. You might want to read them in sequence.

This piece originally appeared in AllanAtKisson.com.

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(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Events at 2:50 PM)

A sort of generation gap on global issues is emerging around the pace of change. The older generation, especially the older generation of well-heeled white men, today respond to our calls for rapid change by urging "realism" -- meaning an expectation of delayed action and minimal commitment. We saw this most recently in the U.S. debate about the Waxman-Markey climate bill, which both takes effect too slowly and demands too little, in comparison to what we know we need to do based on climate science.

Those of us with a little clearer grasp on reality know that every moment lost now has real consequences. Ecological crises and development challenges are combining in ways that make solving both issues much more difficult with every passing day. Clear thinking people -- and at this moment, polls show, most of us tend to be on the younger side -- get that we do not have decades to act. We hear the clock ticking.

We're about to hear a lot about "planetary boundaries." Planetary boundaries reflect the idea that the limits of the Earth to support human civilization can be measured across several natural systems. They're a scientific attempt to describe the base conditions for global sustainability. If we've going to thrive, we need to figure out how to do it within these limits.

Last year, a group of scientists led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre took a shot at defining those boundaries. They found three hard targets:

In addition, they defined seven other boundaries for which specific hard targets were more difficult to pin down but which nonetheless demanded attention: freshwater consumption and the global hydrological cycle; deforestation; interference with the global nitrogen cycle; terrestrial biodiversity; chemicals dispersion; marine ecosystems.

We're in the process of straying beyond every single one of these boundaries. Of course, each of these boundaries is a massive issue in its own right, the subject of a global debate involving hosts of experts and advocates; but put them together -- as we must, since they are all tied together and affect one another -- and we begin to see just how massive the ecological crisis at hand is.

But, as useful as the concept of planetary boundaries is, it also leaves out another critical interplay, the one between human aspirations and abilities and the very real generational thresholds we face.

We are headed towards a peak population of at least nine billion people shortly after mid-century. Almost all of those people will aspire to greater prosperity, quite reasonably in most cases (I think that trying to talk the world's poor out of their aspirations is a fool's game). That means we need to expect to see billions more people reaching for what they see as the good life.

At the same time, we can't repeat the path to wealth that made the developed world rich. We've already exceeded the planet's biocapacity; we're already beyond the planetary boundaries, meaning that business as usual has prohibitive environmental costs. We're running out of places to dump and spew waste without dire human cost. We've also used up a tremendous share of the planet's easy bounty -- from old trees to cheap oil to big fish to virgin metals -- meaning that conventional resource and energy use will largely come from more and more difficult (and often more and more ecologically costly) stocks. Peak everything will not only make getting rich the old fashioned way more expensive, it will also make it more destructive. The combination of what are technically known as declining stocks (less good stuff to use) and shrinking sinks (fewer places to safely put the bad stuff) will make development far more difficult for the world's poor this century than last.

Adding to that difficulty is the on-going waste of human potential, and the growing costs of lost opportunities to engage the world's poor in transforming their own situations.

Think in terms of medicine for a moment. We're starting to get our heads around the fact that compared to treating disease, preventing them is far cheaper, more effective and happier for the patient. Prevention, though, to a certain degree demands early commitment. Start a lifelong exercise, nutrition and stress-reduction program in your teens, and your results will be profoundly better than someone who starts one at 60 after a lifetime of smoking, eating junk food and working too hard. For that 60 year-old, it's still worth getting healthier, but there are hard limits on how healthy he will ever get.

What applies to medicine also applies to human development, especially now in countries with very young populations: the degree of sustainable prosperity we are capable of achieving depends to some large extent on how good a start we get, how quickly.

Even another two decades of the status quo will make many of our goals nearly impossible. Needless deaths, injuries, sicknesses and malnutrition today will impose an astronomical cost on us over the coming decades. Missed opportunities to educate children (especially girls) leave lifetimes of limited opportunities. The trauma of conflict and collapse, of natural disasters or of family tragedies, could combine with the strains of living in extreme poverty to leave hundreds of millions with a lifelong difficulties coping. The disillusionment of a generation of young people, who find themselves trapped in corrupt or failing states, or simply shut out of opportunities for dignity and work in the global economy, can turn them away from productive engagement with the problems around them and turn some of them towards extremism and terror. As much as we want to believe in an endless potential for human transformation, the reality is that people's energies, spirits and opportunities for growth are themselves limited resources.

Right now, we're squandering them in mind-boggling volumes, and that waste has costs. With every passing year, the task of raising billions of people out of poverty to become parts of stable, democratic states with functioning economic, legal and health systems becomes more difficult. And all this while climate vulnerabilities, food shortages and rising energy costs begin to undermine even the progress much of the developing world has managed so far. There are generational thresholds for change, and it is possible to fail to act boldly enough to move through them.

The brutal reality is that failure is possible in human societies as well as in ecological systems. There are points beyond which societal problems start to become effectively impossible to solves. And when you combine the two -- an on-going societal meltdown with massive ecological degradation -- the result can be real, catastrophic failure that lasts for generations, perhaps effectively forever.

Both the planetary boundaries we're exceeding and the generational thresholds we're failing to step through ought to be matters of concern for every person on the planet. We know now that in a thousand extremely practical ways we're all tied together through webs of ecological interdependence, global economics, culture, disease and public health, conflict and terror. It may be possible for large failures to happen while much of the rest of the world improves; some large failures may even be inevitable. But widespread failure to spread stability, human welfare and a reasonable degree of prosperity will ultimately doom any level of progress we make in keeping within our planetary ecological boundaries. And ultimately, a planetary collapse will leave no one -- not even the richest and best situated -- unaffected. Our children's hopes are dependent on the futures other children inherit.

This is why bright green solutions are so important. We here in the developed world need to not only redesign our lives to reduce our own impact; we need to reinvent prosperity itself, so that billions of people around the world can take the innovations we create and make their own versions of sustainable prosperity. And the reality is that it must be us; to think otherwise is to willfully ignore the massive disparity in research funding, institutional capacity and education levels that exists between the wealthy and the poor on this planet. (Besides which, we're responsible for causing many of these problems.)

We must also do it quickly. We need to do it yesterday. We can't simply plan to cut our own impacts down to a level that could be shared by everyone over the next four or five decades. Even if we had that long a time to reduce our impacts -- and we don't -- there is no way the rest of the word can get stable and sustainably prosperous in that time frame unless we lead the way right now. Anything less than an all-out effort now is morally inexcusable. Small steps, incremental reductions, slow plans -- unless these are tied to big, systemic and quick solutions, they will not be enough. We need a bright green future, right now.

All that is the bad news.

Here's the good news: We can build that bright green future. We have the technological prowess, the design insight and even many of the working examples we need to transform our systems and reinvent our cities. We have the money. We may even be gaining the most needed components, vision and political will.

Here's the better news: Not only can we build it, but we'll be better off when we live in it. We will be better off in a stable world than a collapsing one, rather obviously. (It is a monumental failure of our public debate that our choices are still understood as an option between "going green" and the status quo; when in fact they are transformation or imminent ruin.) But most of the evidence indicates that we will be better off in a bright green future than we are now in our dark gray present: better off in crass material terms, with more disposable income, more comfortable homes, nicer communities and better food, but also better off in terms of quality of life, health, time demands and stress. What we gain outweighs what we lose, by far. Put simply, I believe that in almost every way a bright green future would be a better choice than the status quo, even if there were no planetary crisis at all.

There are plenty of reasons for despair and cynicism these days. But it's really important not to underestimate the power of the politics of optimism, the power of actually having better ideas and answers. They are especially powerful when the people opposing us have nothing whatever to offer besides a white-knuckled grasp on a broken status quo. Their only weapons are fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's time we counter with optimism, vision and examples. We need to counter with a future that works.

In the months leading up to Copenhagen we need to insist on the fierce urgency of now: on why we cannot wait, why we have no more time, why half measures and stalling tactics are no longer acceptable; why, in short, the day for real change has come. We need to make that point ring in the media, in political debates, in our corporate boardrooms, in our community meetings, in our classrooms, in our churches and at our cultural events. Everywhere people talk about who we are and where we are going, we need to loudly demand actual reality-based realism... and a bright green economy.

This summer is the calm before the clamor. This fall, we need to let the world know what time it is.

Image credit: flickr/cheekybikerboy, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 9:40 AM)