Greening Suburbia

In the SF Bay Area over the past few weeks we’ve seen the FTA take a very tough stance on transit in favor of smart growth with two projects:  1) potentially removing funds from the Oakland Airport Connector; and 2) not allowing AC Transit to backfill operational budgets with money intended for Bus Rapid Transit.  It seems the fed is taking on a proactive land use perspective which leads me to a recent thought-provoking article from the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute.  It frames Obama-Admin policies as being hostile to suburbia and proposes that:

Given these realities, it seems more practical not to work against such aspirations (of greening suburbia) but instead to evolve intelligent policies that would reconcile them with our long-term environmental needs. Suburbanites like their suburbs but would also like to find a way to make them greener as well as more economically and socially viable. Right now neither party has developed such an agenda, and so the suburbs, now clearly leaning right, remain up to grabs. To win suburbanites over, politicians first have to respect the basic preferences while offering a realistic program for improvement. This remains a key to building a sustainable electoral majority, not just for the next election, but for the decades to come.

So what is your opinion?  Are we not working enough to retrofit and green suburban communities?  How we might work with the suburban landscape to make it greener?  Suggestions?