Archive for the ‘solutions’ Category
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Rethinking personal transportation in small towns
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
Mitigating climate warming is going to require a dramatic decrease in carbon emission from the transportation sector, through a combination of driving less, using public transportation, and, eventually, switching to electric cars powered by a renewable grid.
There are many urban centers with outstanding public transportation options, but let’s face it— It’s often more difficult to find alternatives to driving in smaller towns and suburbs.
Brunswick, Maine (home to Bowdoin College) is no different than most small towns (population 25,000). Transportation is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, and the physical dislocation of residential areas, shopping centers, supermarkets, and hospitals makes it difficult to avoid automobile use. And roads around here are definitely not bike friendly!
This is starting to change as a result of collaborations across institutions from the local to federal levels.
The town just added a new program called Brunswick Explorer, with a fleet of hybrid electric buses that are wheelchair and bike accessible. The route takes the buses from major residential areas (especially those serving the elderly) to our local supermarkets, hospitals, and shopping malls.
With the extension of the Amtrak Downeaster from Portland to Brunswick in 2012, folks will also be able to travel to Portland and Boston easily by train, especially during rush hour and winter when travel by roads is either a hassle or dangerous.
The Explorer and Downeaster are certainly no silver bullets, but they accomplish a few important goals:
- The Explorer allows people in much of downtown Brunswick the opportunity to forego driving for simple, routine tasks, especially during winter when walking and biking are treacherous.
- The hybrid fleet and high-occupancy vehicles will help reduce emissions.
- Reliable bus service makes it easier for families (who are able) to downsize from two vehicles to one vehicle, with the added benefit/incentive of saving on gas, repairs, taxes, registration, and inspections.
- At a cost of $1 per ride or $2 for an all-day pass, the Explorer buses provide an important social service to the elderly and other citizens who may not be able to afford cars.
- It builds transportation resilience in the community, especially for low-income citizens who may find it increasingly expensive to get around the next time gas prices spike.
- The Downeaster provides a redundant transportation network, which makes long-distance travel easy when there are unexpected travel delays due to weather, construction, or accidents. It also has the potential to take many cars off the road for the sizable population that commutes daily between Portland and Brunswick.
- The Explorer bus program provides a model of community collaboration that may be exportable to other towns.
- Perhaps most importantly, they help break the mindset and habits of routine personal vehicle use.
These are small steps, indeed, but they have the ingredients to be successful: alternatives to personal vehicle use that are both cheap and convenient, with substantial community buy in.
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Photo courtesy of Bowdoin College
Posted in behavior, campus sustainability, energy, race and class, solutions, sustainability, transportation | 1 Comment »
Obama: Something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
Below are a few excerpts from President Obama’s comments on the Gulf oil spill (courtesy of CBS News—click here for the full transcript).
Do the American government, private industry, and the rest of us have, in his words, the sense of urgency and courage to confront our energy challenges in this country?
For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked – not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.
The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight. Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.
We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny.
This is not some distant vision for America. The transition away from fossil fuels will take some time, but over the last year and a half, we have already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry. As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels. Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient. Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that will someday lead to entire new industries.
Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us. As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of good, middle-class jobs – but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation – workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.
When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill – a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.
Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy – because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.
So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party – as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development – and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.
All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny – our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how to get there. We know we’ll get there.
…The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face. This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again. What sees us through – what has always seen us through – is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/happeningfish/3007746661/
Tags: Gulf oil spill, Obama
Posted in behavior, energy, nature and culture, solutions | No Comments »
Will the Gulf spill be a catalyst for change?
Saturday, June 12th, 2010
In Tom Friedman’s column in the Sunday NY Times, he describes a poignant letter written by a friend in the Pentagon to his hometown South Carolina newspaper:
“I’d like to join in on the blame game that has come to define our national approach to the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word. It’s what we do as individuals that count. For those on the left, government regulation will not solve this problem. Government’s role should be to create an environment of opportunity that taps into the innovation and entrepreneurialism that define us as Americans. For those on the right, if you want less government and taxes, then decide what you’ll give up and what you’ll contribute. Here’s the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t done my part. Now I have to convince my wife to give up her S.U.V.”
Read the rest of the column here.
And the photo above is a bicycle parking garage in Amsterdam. Here’s a cool rendition of a recently proposed bike station in Philadelphia that could replace a 100-car lot with a 690-bike garage. If fully utilized, and assuming single-occupancy commutes, this could generate up to a 7-fold reduction in vehicle use. One good idea in a suite of many that will be needed.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/redjar/113013177/
Tags: Gulf oil spill
Posted in behavior, energy, nature and culture, solutions, sustainability | No Comments »
NY Times Op-Ed: Public opinion on climate warming stronger than expected
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
A new poll by Stanford communication researchers helps dispel recent notions that most Americans don’t believe climate warming is human caused or a serious problem. Indeed, as the title of the article suggests, there seems to be a climate majority in terms of values and policy recommendations.
This is an interesting and important piece that’s worth reading in full. Here are a few snippets:
On Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses.
Passing the resolution might seem to be exactly what Americans want. After all, national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people.
But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.
….Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.
Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.
And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).
Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.
Posted in behavior, energy, environmentalism, nature and culture, solutions | No Comments »
Krugman: Building a Green Economy
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
The title of a feature article by Paul Krugman in the forthcoming NY Times Magazine.
This piece is worth reading for a good general overview and history of climate economics issues.
He clarifies distinctions between cap and trade and Jim Hansen’s advocacy for a tax-based approach to emissions reductions.
Excerpts:
What about the case for an emissions tax rather than cap and trade? There’s no question that a straightforward tax would have many advantages over legislation like Waxman-Markey, which is full of exceptions and special situations. But that’s not really a useful comparison: of course an idealized emissions tax looks better than a cap-and-trade system that has already passed the House with all its attendant compromises. The question is whether the emissions tax that could actually be put in place is better than cap and trade. There is no reason to believe that it would be — indeed, there is no reason to believe that a broad-based emissions tax would make it through Congress.
To be fair, Hansen has made an interesting moral argument against cap and trade, one that’s much more sophisticated than the old view that it’s wrong to let polluters buy the right to pollute. What Hansen draws attention to is the fact that in a cap-and-trade world, acts of individual virtue do not contribute to social goals. If you choose to drive a hybrid car or buy a house with a small carbon footprint, all you are doing is freeing up emissions permits for someone else, which means that you have done nothing to reduce the threat of climate change. He has a point. But altruism cannot effectively deal with climate change. Any serious solution must rely mainly on creating a system that gives everyone a self-interested reason to produce fewer emissions. It’s a shame, but climate altruism must take a back seat to the task of getting such a system in place.
The bottom line, then, is that while climate change may be a vastly bigger problem than acid rain, the logic of how to respond to it is much the same. What we need are market incentives for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions — along with some direct controls over coal use — and cap and trade is a reasonable way to create those incentives.
But can we afford to do that? Equally important, can we afford not to?
Read on to see what he thinks about these questions…
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Photo by Wolfgang Staudt
Tags: Paul Krugman
Posted in climate economics, solutions | No Comments »
More from Shellenberger and Nordhaus on uncoupling energy policy from climate policy
Monday, March 29th, 2010
Their latest piece: Freeing energy policy from the climate change debate.
Excerpts:
Environmental advocates — with help from pollsters, psychologists, and cognitive scientists — have long understood that global warming represented a particularly problematic threat around which to mobilize public opinion. The threat is distant, abstract, and difficult to visualize. Faced with a public that has seemed largely indifferent to the possibility of severe climactic disruptions resulting from global warming, some environmentalists have tried to characterize the threat as more immediate, mostly by suggesting that global warming was already adversely impacting human societies, primarily in the form of increasingly deadly natural disasters.
The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in no small part so that they could characterize all resistance as corrupt, anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment, as suggested recently by sociologist Bill Freudenburg and others that climate science errs in being too conservative rather than too apocalyptic.
Nevertheless, S & N want us to consider the extent to which dramatic energy policy can be rolled out in the absence of incentives like carbon taxes or cap and trade if, as they suggest, we are wasting time using science to pursue the latter:
In the end, there is no avoiding the enormous uncertainties inherent to our understanding of climate change. Whether 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, or 450 or 550, is the right number in terms of atmospheric stabilization, any prudent strategy to minimize future risks associated with catastrophic climate change involves decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible. Stronger evidence of climate change from scientists was never going to drive Americans to demand economically painful limits on carbon emissions or energy use. And uncertainty about climate science will not deter Americans from embracing energy and other policies that they perceive to be in the nation’s economic, national security, and environmental interest. This was the case in 1988 and is still largely the case today.
Now is the time to free energy policy from climate science. In recent years, bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy supply through the expansion of renewables, nuclear power, and natural gas, as well as increased funding of research and development of new energy technologies. Carbon caps may remain as aspirational targets, but the primary role for carbon pricing, whether through auctioning pollution permits or a carbon tax, should be to fund low-carbon energy research, development, and deployment.
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasmic/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Tags: Shellenberger and Nordhaus
Posted in communication and framing, energy, solutions | No Comments »
This week’s good ideas in campus sustainability: 3/29/10
Monday, March 29th, 2010
AASHE is showcasing the new American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) 2009 report, which highlights climate leadership in higher education.
The Report includes highlights from 2009; a list of innovative ways schools are applying their Climate Action Plans to areas such as curriculum, transportation, renewable energy, and partnerships within and outside the campus gates; a description of the impact the Commitment has had on the reduction of carbon emissions; information on the Climate Action Plans that have been submitted; a list of resources available to signatory institutions; and the ACUPCC budget. The ACUPCC, launched in early 2007, is currently comprised of 677 schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia – representing nearly six million students and about one third of the US higher education student population.
Link to the ACUPCC report (pdf)
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More information: AASHE bulletin 3/29/10
Posted in campus sustainability, higher education, solutions, sustainability | No Comments »
Food aid and long-term food security
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
As we saw in a previous post, food aid is a complex issue. On one hand, it’s critical for acute crisis situations where people are starving because of things like war and natural disasters. On the other hand, in more chronic situations of malnutrition, food aid and cheap imports have the capacity to undermine local food production, which, in the long run, harms the prospect of people feeding themselves through local production.
A farmer’s worst enemy is free food and cheap imports.
In recent years, we have seen this play out in Africa, as Oxfam acknowledges. MSNBC is running a story today, “With cheap food imports, Haiti can’t feed itself,” about how the same thing has happened there. Worth reading.
There is also a larger debate at play here about the implications of free trade and industrialized food production.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, race and class, solutions | 2 Comments »
Climate communication: Is fear + collective action a winning strategy?
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
In a previous post from my series on why people don’t engage climate change, I described my interpretations of work by Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling1, which suggested that the use of fear can be a poor way to motivate behavioral changes to deal with climate warming:
Challenge 6: Fear can change perception but not willingness to take action and can lead to counterintuitive behaviors (like the “SUV effect”)
2006 was a watershed year in public opinion on climate change. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Time Magazine’s famous polar bear cover had the world scared to death about climate change. They grabbed people’s attention and raised awareness, but they didn’t do much to galvanize widespread action against climate warming. As we’ll see in the next post, 82% of Americans have not engaged the issue of climate change personally.
Even worse, if people become fearful of climate change, it could encourage counterintuitive behaviors. For example, people might think, if it really does get stormier or icier in my area, I will need the SUV because it has 4-wheel drive. The irony is not lost, given that large vehicles and their greenhouse gas emissions are part of the reason why we have climate warming in the first place.
When I first saw the Time cover, I thought that mainstream media is finally getting climate change and that people would start demanding action. Now I’m not so sure fear is an effective tactic for driving change.
I also noted in that post that when people are fearful but don’t know what to do in the face of complex problems like climate warming, there can be a tendency to do nothing.
New research by Martijn van Zomeren and colleagues in the Journal of Environmental Psychology2 is beginning to challenge these views (emphasis added):
An inconvenient truth, the book and documentary by Nobel-prize laureate and former US Vice-President Al Gore, is a real-life example of the presumed power of psychology to increase pro-environmental behavior by telling individuals what they could do, and by telling them what to fear if they fail to do this. Although many applauded Gore’s efforts to raise environmental awareness and action, there was a danger that the fear invoked by his message could be counter-productive. Raising fear about the consequences of smoking and safe sex, for example, is thought to undermine health behavior if individuals do not have a sufficient sense of efficacy to transform their fear into action. Without such a sense of self-efficacy, fear is thought to lead individuals to protect themselves against their fear (rather than to take action to reduce the cause for fear). A key aim of this paper is to challenge this pessimistic conclusion.
Although we believe concern for the counter-productive effects of fear appeals is warranted, we think that self-protective responses are most likely in the context of individual problems such as individual health behavior. When individuals perceive a problem as an individual problem, their individual action should be best predicted by their self-efficacy beliefs. Unlike smoking and safer sex, however, one can perceive the climate crisis as a collective problem that requires collective action. Collective action is aimed at promoting collective interests, even if it is pursued by individuals. When individuals perceive a problem as collective, their collective action should be best predicted by their group efficacy beliefs – the belief that group goals can be achieved through joint effort.
This team is arguing that fear of climate warming impacts needs to be coupled with a clear message that
- climate warming is a collective-action problem;
- people can work together effectively to deal with climate warming.
In a series of experiments with university students in the Netherlands, the researchers manipulated climate fear (fear vs. no fear) and collective action efficacy (group action can be effective vs. no information about group action) through the use of different sets of readings.
After completing the different sets of readings, the students ranked in the following order (highest to lowest) in terms of their intentions to take actions on climate warming:
- fear + group action can be effective
- no fear + group action can be effective
- fear + no information on group action
- no fear + no information on group action
What’s interesting about this is the apparent importance on providing information on how collective action can be important. Their results suggested that even students who were not given fearful messages about climate warming were still willing to take action on warming if shown how to do so.
This brings us back to one of my points in the earlier post.
Challenge 3: Specific warming impacts and solutions are seldom conveyed clearly
Rather than just telling people that warming will be bad and we should all be afraid, warming advocates should state examples of how the impacts will be experienced by people in a specific region and specific steps that people can take to help adapt to or mitigate them. Empower people to become part of the solutions process rather than letting them sit on the sidelines. Climate warming is not a spectator sport.
To paraphrase FDR: The only thing we have to fear is fear (when used by) itself.
It’s an interesting idea, although I’m not yet convinced for several reasons:
- I’d like to see how well this resonates with working-class America rather than students from a country like the Netherlands where people are much more likely to be socially conditioned to take action on climate warming. Put another way, in certain cultural contexts, fear + solutions may work. In others, fear + anything may turn people off.
- As I mentioned above, research suggests that 82% of Americans have not engaged the issue of climate change personally. Is there really a lack of information on what we can do collectively to deal with climate warming, or is there a lack of interest in taking collective action? I think it’s both. So long as climate warming solutions are framed in terms of national or international policy (cap and trade or C taxes) or matters of renewable energy innovation and investment, people will feel like they have little leverage to engage either of these approaches—either individually or collectively.
- One might argue that collective action can be promulgated as political action at local, state, and federal levels. However, the deep cynicism about the efficacy of federal institutions may dissuade people from investing the effort. And when the world continues to struggle with the recession and unemployment, jobs will usually trump collective action on climate.
- It’s a complex story with multiple layers of cultural and economic confounding factors. Just as scientific evidence seldom speaks for itself, clear pathways for collective action may not translate to greater action either.
1Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling (2004) Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and Challenge of Global Climate Change. Environment
2Martijn van Zomeren, Russell Spears, Colin Wayne Leach (2010). Experimental evidence for a dual pathway model analysis of coping with the climate crisis Journal of Environmental Psychology : 10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.02.006
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunadirimmel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, solutions | 3 Comments »
This week’s good ideas in campus sustainability: 3/1/10
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
This week’s showcase features Beloit College, Central College, and Iowa State University. LEED Platinum is not easy to achieve, and it’s even more impressive with projects this large.
1. Beloit College’s Science Center gets LEED Platinum Nod
“The success of our new science center reflects the phenomenal collaboration of creative architects, talented engineers, professional construction firms and the finest faculty and staff who were, and are, committed to the best outcome for our students,” said Beloit College president Scott Bierman. “We are, of course, thrilled to have gotten LEED platinum status; but even more important is that we have a building that works terrifically well—as well as any I have ever seen—as an integrated set of learning spaces.”
2. Central receives platinum LEED rating for new building
“This special recognition from the USGBC brings great joy to the whole Central College community and reflects continuing success of our pursuit of a sustainable future as a long-term goal adopted by Central’s board of trustees,” said Central College President David Roe. “The achievement was made possible through the concerted efforts of the professionals on Central’s staff led by Mike Lubberden and a large team of amazing corporate partners including Weitz Corporation as our general contractor, RDG Planning and Design, MEP and Associates, and Pella Corporation.”
3. ISU’s King Pavilion first education building in Iowa to earn LEED Platinum certification
Located on the north side of the College of Design building, the $6.6 million, 23,735 gross-square-foot King Pavilion features a central, two-story “forum” surrounded by instructional studios used by all freshmen in the college, as well as sophomores in architecture, landscape architecture and interior design. “We are delighted to have the King Pavilion receive LEED Platinum certification,” said ISU President Gregory Geoffroy. “The King Pavilion stands as a testament to the commitment that Iowa State University has made to becoming a model ‘green’ university, in our daily operations as well as in our teaching, research and outreach programs.”
Posted in campus sustainability, energy, higher education, solutions, sustainability | No Comments »
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