Wednesday, May 14, 2008

PAT Brown Kids.

Is it possible to have green kids? No. AT (Affluence x Technology), the emissions in PAT, P for population, causes a problem.

Two examples-

We live by transit, two blocks from El Camino and four blocks from Ralston. We own two cars. My wife drives one to work- she can take transit to Cupertino, her work has a shuttle from the MountainView train station, but needs the hours to finish her work past when the shuttle runs. The other is a backup for emergency- a dubious proposition since Merit Taxi runs an efficient service here in Belmont. We don’t sell it because we can afford to keep it. But the kids know we have the car. They will refuse to go places on their bus passes and want to get driven or picked up.

And we are not talking miles here. Carlmont is 1.2 miles away. Ralston is 2.2 miles. I can bike there and pick them up on our tandem if they gave me adequate notice or hung out with their friends. But they will say they have homework or something and must be picked up in five minutes and my wife will agree.

By affording to compromise and let the technology into our lives we have turned them into brown instead of green kids. And the city accommodates us with wide streets, free curb parking, unrestricted connections across El Camino and Caltrans and over Hallmark at 50 mph, and a mandated requirement for a two car garage- the infrastructure we build without regard for emissions.

We have three showers because we can afford to have three showers. The result is that the kids expect privacy and will get into a screaming fight over who is in “their” bathroom. They don’t clean or pick up in “their” bathroom- privacy doesn’t extend that far. They also will not conserve water or paper- not their green problem either. But a space, heated and cooled and cleaned with chemicals, just themselves behind a closed door is an essential expectation. OK its solar hot water heated and on a northern wall with a window for cooling and we use vinegar to clean, but still, can't you see the infrastructure for emissions and the expectations that are bred into browning the kids?

One of the principle characters in the Poisonwood Bible, a teacher, is talking to an American child, in a village in the Congo, and is disbelieving when he hears, that their family owns two cars in America. Why he asks, one is sufficient for a whole village and can go pick up supplies for everyone once a week?

AT leads to emissions. Indirectly it threatens the kids since they could be called on to fight another pocketbook war for another Cheney that transfers another $2T to another set of Exxons. But try and make them see that. Once A brings T into our lives there are no rules on usage that can apply even if grandma gets run over by a thirteen year old.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

population x affluence x technology

We know the problem- the resource limited carrying capacity of the earth is caused by population x affluence x technology which attenuates toward a point of no return.
The evidence is everywhere- reduced snow packs, water shortages, overfished resources, spreading ocean dead zones, bee die offs, pesticide pollution, air pollution, oil wars over scarce resources, depleted soils, struggling infrastructure, polluted air and water.

Removing affluence and technology has a big impact. Africa, 57 countries, 12% worlds population, has less than 3% contribution to world Green House Gases. But if you look at where the GHG originate, Nigeria, Angola, and South Africa, and how, from the production and shipment of resources like oil and gold to the developed world, Africa's contribution to world GHGs is less than 1%. Taking into account deforestation and the mechanics of poverty creation from displacement of indigenous populations still leaves a negligible GHG number. We in the developed not only have a disproportional share of GHG production we are responsible for the third world's footprint in providing resources to us.

Making people work only one day a week would solve the affluence technology disease. But are there other solutions?

Consider another example: ONLY 8M people own cars in India. 350 M can’t afford a bicycle. Yet the demand for fuel for the 8M drivers (and the transfer of critical local resources for roads and infrastructure) added to already fuel tight markets between the US, China, and Europe cause prices to rise four fold. Additional perturbations in the food markets with biofuels cause food riots. Its increasingly likely that the 350M will never partake of the industrial revolution.

Our lifestyle sets a wrong and unfair example on how to install infrastructure worldwide. We need to know how we’ve paid to allow ourselves to produce so much GHG. Adding roads brings cars and unsustainable infrastructure needs to unmanageable slopes while taxing runoff at the sewer plant. Belmont is struggling with these infrastructure issues. On 4/18/08 Thomas Fil supplied council with a model on charging for infrastructure through a Community Facilities District plan.

How do we change it around? Do we use the easement law? What goals, indicators, and measures do we develop that are different from business as usual? Can we use brown fees and green credits to guide affluences uses of technology?

Al Gore condensed the infrastructure problem down to Coal Cars and Buildings. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the May 9, 2005 issue of The New Yorker that the longer we wait – and the more infrastructure we build without regard to its affect on emissions – the more daunting the task of keeping CO2 levels from increasing beyond dangerous levels. And McKibben sets the goal post with Project350 where we need to get back to 350 ppb of CO2.

Bill Howard writes in FIDIC 2005 CONFERENCE, WORKSHOP 7: Sustainable Municipal Infrastructure Workshop Introductory Remarks: New approaches to restoring and managing urban environments and infrastructure are appearing everywhere. Concepts like “livable cities,” “urban sustainability,” “green buildings,” and “smart growth” all focus on balancing urban infrastructure, environmental values, quality of life, and economic opportunities.

Sustainability means balancing needs with environmental protection to improve the quality of life for us and for future generations. sustainable development provides a framework under which communities can find the efficient use of resources and infrastructure to protect and enhance the quality of life and strengthen the economy.

Models like STELLA can be used to generate information and promote more informed and balanced decisions via rapid comparison of the performance of alternatives using physical, environmental, and economic metrics.

An opportunity to reinvent community

We need to say NOW where our infrastructure dollars will go. The problem is that business as usual will continue to drag us off to Iran and Kazakhstan from Iraq to control the next scarce resource. Like Al Capone we will go in search of other peoples property to satiate our out of control appetite.

On the one hand, the painful lesson of resource shortages, salmon, or gasoline, take your pick, should be obvious today. Shouldn’t these lessons apply to other areas of shortages like water and fire, an unlikely yin yang twin hovering like death angels over Belmont today, sewer and roads maintenance, parks and open space, trails, etc.?

On the other hand, we know that Cheney and Bush are morally crippled by their petrol interests and transferring $2T to their pocketbooks in oil profits is completely normal. But we are unable to intervene and change the infrastructure that allows these tax subsidies to flow uphill. And while McKibben and Hansen tear off their cloth and cry on the mountain the California Climate Action contingency plan has quietly proceeded and will be found lacking because of the lack of citizen participation.

There is considerable reluctance to see a new future, like the new mobility paradigm, beyond the entrenched interests of business as usual.

The good news is that in three year we could convert parking to housing, put pocket parks in intersections and convert streets for playgrounds and housing; removing the infrastructure that accounts for more than 50% of Green House Gases in Belmont today, in the form of free curb side parking and easy pedestrian killing access across El Camino, Caltrans, and over Hallmark at 50mph. Walkable transit friendly cities will benefit all other sustainable indicators by helping people reduce their cost of housing, healthcare transportation and DALY- disease adjusted life years. While the paragons of business as usual, like McCain/Clinton/Obama are worrying how to keep auto companies in business who brought us the Cheney pocketbook war in Iraq, and the New War Times is worrying about how to keep housing unaffordable, we continue to face an opportunity to reinvent our community.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Infrastructure for efficient use of community resources

What kind of infrastructure should we be building? Modern life involves the taking of the public commons without recourse. We can kill the oceans and pollute the air and overfish salmon. An article on sustainability consulting to cities says instead Sustainability is planning for the most efficient use of community resources.

The author Ed Brock goes on to write: America's Climate Security Act, proposed by Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent of the 2005 level by 2050, could feed the market for buying and selling carbon reduction credits by setting the rules and standards for carbon trading, Murphy says. “It will create a whole new market in carbon trading, and it will require calculations that [most local officials are not] going to be able to do,” he says. “So, you're going to need lots of consultants to help.”

Instead, sustainability consultants need to take a completely different approach to engineering, Wallace says. Consultants in different disciplines should find a way to work together to achieve maximum effect, he says, but an even more difficult challenge will be replacing the nation's current infrastructure. “To be sustainable in the truest sense, you need to change the way infrastructure is designed,” he says. “[Local government planners must] step back and revisit the entire infrastructure and [ask], ‘What do I have to have to reduce the use of resources and energy and really try to achieve super conservation?’”

Earlier he notes:
While many cities want to take steps to protect the environment — evidenced by the more than 800 that have signed the Washington-based U.S. Conference of Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement — most officials lack the technical know-how to make the changes necessary to achieve sustainability goals.

The article raises important questions about the type of high CO2 infrastructure that was installed and financed and how local decision makers don’t know how to go about correcting it, while at the same time creating unacceptable problems with mobility, water, sewer, food, air quality, recreation, and ultimately the ability to distribute scare resources fairly to reduce tension. Our carbon footprint infrastructure from transportation is easy to understand: free curb side parking, two or three or more car garage requirements, non existant bus shelters or sidewalks, every street accessible to automobiles, pavement improved for automobiles on streets with deteriorating sidewalks immediately alongside, no incentives for small vehicles like the small compact parking in the 70s, or electric vehicles, or 20 mph streets for hybrids and Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, easy access across El Camino and Caltrans and 50mph access over Hallmark, children driven to schools and playgrounds less than a mile away, etc. etc. The infrastructure subsidies in water sewer etc. can be similarly ascertained.

Confronting the amount of change that is needed, is necessary, if we're going to redefine our pattern of living into something that is sustainable. Writing in the LA Times Bill McKibben says we don't have much time- maybe four years if we want to get 350PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere. The problem was one of stuffing the biosphere with the effluence of our resource consumption. The solution must entail a convergence to a stable state so that efficient use of resources preserves the planet for future generations.

Belmont needs to ask that Warner-Liebermann start by providing a path to convergence to 350 and allowing cities to make decisions to reduce their footprint; not giving control over the air and water to the same corporations that brought us the infrastructure that we are trying to change. Carbon Credits for cities (Supervisor Hill said it was a necessary tool for CARB) would be a first step, so Belmont could do more, after its leading effort on diesel traps under the Carl Moyer program. I talked to Thomas Fil and he said he would look into it when he had time.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Fund infrastructure sustainably

The Peninsula has been living on borrowed time. We haven’t put money away for Hetch Hetchy and now we have billions, $4.3B to be exact, due to upgrade the water supply. And rate payers bills which has policy makers concerned everywhere. The Examiner writes: San Francisco and San Mateo counties have both been hit by this cycle more than once. Most famously, The City’s decades of diverting funds for more visible purposes, instead of spending on necessary upkeep of the aging Hetch Hetchy regional water system, has resulted in a $4.3 billion renovation program being largely paid by client water districts throughout the Bay Area.

We haven’t put money away on sewage either and now thirty years later we have a huge $40M bill to upgrade the sewer system. Other areas of deffered maintenance include our parks and roads ($30M in Belmont). And these will have to go into the rates increases, and the people who were stuck with handing out the bill, the current council, is likely to get voted out, in 2009.

And as usual we will try to cheat and deffer the true cost by "keeping rate increases gradual." This means that the next heavy rain storm can overload the system and require a higher bill. Add in the possibilities of floods, where the treatment plants are located (and require energy to pump the treated water up), and we really aren't ready for a rainy day! With the sewer cost the council wants to defer a portion and raise other rates equally thus subsidizing large users but keeping the cry down from them as well.

We need a sustainable infrastructure that reduces waste and reduces subsidies for consumption. We need to plan now and put in financial structures that can see us through the days ahead. We can't continue to expect to balance our books on the backs of our children. They will have problems of their own in the days ahead.