Meetings. Goals. Meetings. Many recent meetings and their subsequent goals and action items are telling us that the promises we made to ourselves over the past years are not being kept. It turns out with green building initiatives, effiecieny improvements, etc. many agencies are now backing down from initial claims that locations in the US could reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, 2014 or sooner.
The truth is that it’s too painful right now. The idea that Americans somehow changed their behavior after the release of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth was exaggerated. What is did create was more beairacracy, more urban planning acronyms, jargon and level of government to achieve climate goals – not to mention spawning a new era in the machine of the environmental consulting industry and the production of environmental reports to ‘cover’ development.
The graphs and charts we see now show that maybe this is not working – that democratizing a common good leads to profiteering and divisiveness in how to address the problem. Driving behavior has not changed and significant transport infrastructure projects see environmentalists as adversaries; residential populations continue to resist density in favor of the status quo and on claims of environmentalism; energy efficiecy programs are abundant but power loads are increasing.
People worry about federal dollars and stimulus, like trasit and renewable energy money that was promised in Obama’s first State of the Union address – however to be frank that money will be too much too late and it’s scale of impact to global. We need local leadership; we need people to stand up for more, affordable and environmentally friendly housing and jobs in the regional code.
Clearly to make the kinds of changes we need strong local and regional governmental leadership. Recent estimates from the San Francisco Bay Area indicate that even to achieve modest GHG emission reductions the price driving must rise (to close to $5/gallon); more housing must be produced (more than 200,000 housing units are projected to be needed in downtown San Francisco); more renewable infrastructure projects must be pursued.
If this can’t happen maybe we’re just screwed and we should give up on our both our meetings and our goals. We should all just live gluttonously and wait for the end in our V8 gas guzzlers while eating blue-fin tuna sushi.
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?
Someone forwarded this info on a One Less Car challenge happening at University of Florida. Nice tie to their carpool matching program (powerpoint). Always interesting to see creative ways institutions are dealing with climate and transportation footprint ~ especially along the behavioral front! Check it out at: http://www.sustainability.ufl.edu/onelesscar/
