Tag Archives: economy
Win-Win for Wind Energy and Wildlife Conservation
Wind energy offers the potential to reduce carbon emissions while increasing energy independence and bolstering economic development. I am a huge proponent of harnessing wind to power our lives but this form of energy development has a larger land footprint per Gigawatt (GW) than most other forms of energy production, making appropriate siting and mitigation particularly important (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Renewable energy reduces our carbon footprint but human disturbance from poorly placed developments has unintended consequences for birds, bats and other wildlife. Photo credit Joe Kiesecker with The Nature Conservancy.
Wildlife species requiring large and intact habitats and those that avoid tall structures are particularly at risk from wind development. Developing energy on disturbed lands rather than placing new developments within large and intact habitats would reduce cumulative impacts to wildlife, a major tenet of our new book Energy Development and Wildlife Conservation in Western North America.
As outlined by the Administration’s report ‘20% Wind Energy by 2030’, the Department of Energy (DoE) estimates it will take 241 GW of terrestrial based wind development on approximately 5 million hectares (12.3 million acres) to reach 20% electricity production by 2030.
In a paper published this week in the scientific journal PLoS One The Nature Conservancy and I (and 5 others) estimate there are ~7,700 GW of potential wind energy available across the U.S., with ~3,500 GW on disturbed lands; plenty of wind potential within disturbed lands to meet our national goal.
Implementing a disturbance-focused development strategy would avert development of ~2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres) of undisturbed lands while generating the same amount of energy as development based solely on maximizing wind potential.
New wind development has comparatively low wildlife impacts if sited in disturbed areas, and a disturbance-based development strategy is largely compatible with current land uses. Given turbine spacing needs, wind farms typically use only 2-4% of an area, making it compatible with agricultural production on tilled lands where few wildlife values remain.
Moreover, compensation for development increases profitability of disturbed lands that balance agricultural and oil and gas fields with wind development. For example, farmers receive $4-6K per turbine per year on land in corn production that yields an annual profit of <$1K per hectare.
Given the nationwide surplus in wind energy, it is conceivable that states unable to meet goals on disturbed lands could import electricity from states where there is a surplus of disturbance based wind energy (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Available wind-generated Gigawatts (GW) in each state as a percentage of the DoE goal that can be met on disturbed land. Bubbles indicate where goals can (blue) and cannot (red) be met on disturbed lands. Bubble area indicates total GW of wind potential available in the state (Range 0.37 GW in TN to 902 GW in MT). Inset shows potential GW wind production for the entire U.S. and potential on disturbed lands relative to the DoE 20% projection (modified from Kiesecker et al. 2011 PLoS One paper).
A number of states have a significant surplus of wind potential on disturbed lands where additional development would not likely cause significant wildlife losses.
Joe Kiesecker, the primary author on the PLoS One paper and Lead Scientist for The Nature Conservancy notes the importance of mitigating for climate change. “As a climate change mitigation strategy we need to ensure that renewable energies do not result in habitat loss similar to the effects that climate change will likely have. By prioritizing development on disturbed lands we can ensure that we get the benefits of renewable energy while maintaining biodiversity that is critical to human well being”.
Using science to help site wind developments presents a win-win solution for securing our Nation’s energy independence while safeguarding its wildlife heritage.
Readers can learn more about how proper wind siting can conserve wildlife in their state by visiting The Nature Conservancy’s Development by Design website.
David Naugle is a professor in the Wildlife Biology Program at the University of Montana and a leader in wildlife conservation in the West. He is author of Energy Development and Wildlife Conservation in Western North America. Follow Dave’s new book and related work on Facebook.
About David E. Naugle
David Naugle is Associate Professor and Applied Landscape Ecologist in the Wildlife Biology Program, University of Montana, Missoula, where he teaches courses in landscape ecology and wildlife habitat management. Dave's primary applied research interests are in understanding relationships between organisms and their habitats in a landscape context. Using the newest GIS and remote sensing technologies, he and his students quantify the importance of local and landscape attributes influencing habitat use of grassland and wetland birds in prairie and sagebrush ecosystems.
Jerry Yudelson: Top Ten Green Building Trends for 2009
Green building consultant Jerry Yudelson has published his “Top Ten” list of green building trends for 2009. Yudelson says that green building will continue to grow in spite of the global credit crisis and the ongoing economic recession in most countries.”What we’re seeing is that more people are going green each year, and there is nothing on the horizon that will stop this trend. In putting together my Top Ten trends for 2009, I’m taking advantage of conversations I’ve had with green building leaders in the U.S., Canada, Europe and the Middle East over the past year,” said Yudelson.
Yudelson’s Top Ten trends includes the following:
1. Green building will continue to grow more than 60 percent in 2009, on a cumulative basis. “We’ve seen cumulative growth in new LEED projects over 60 percent per year since 2006, in fact 80 percent in 2008, and there’s no sign that the green wave has crested,” he said.
2. Green building will benefit from the new Obama presidency, with a strong focus on green jobs in energy efficiency, new green technologies and renewable energy. This trend will last for at least the next four years.
3. The focus of green building will begin to switch from new buildings to greening existing buildings. “The fastest growing LEED rating system in 2008 was the LEED for Existing Buildings program, and I expect this trend to continue in 2009,” said Yudelson.
4. Awareness of the coming global crisis in fresh water supply will increase, leading building designers and managers to take further steps to reduce water consumption in buildings with more conserving fixtures, rainwater recovery systems and innovative new water technologies.
5. LEED Platinum-rated projects will become more commonplace as building owners, designers and construction teams learn how to design for higher levels of LEED achievement on conventional budgets.
6. Solar power use in buildings will accelerate with the extension of solar energy tax credits for buildings through 2016 and the prospect of increasing utility focus on renewable power goals for 2015 and 2020. As before, third-party financing partnerships will continue to grow and provide capital for large rooftop systems.
7. Local governments will increasingly mandate green buildings from both themselves and the private sector. While concern over economic impacts of green buildings mandates will be present, the desire to reduce carbon emission by going green will lead more government agencies to require green buildings.
8. Zero net energy designs for new buildings will gain increasing acceptance in both public and private buildings. “I’ve shown that you can get building energy use down to low levels with better design,” said Yudelson, “and that makes it easier and more cost-effective to buy green power to displace the remaining energy use.”
9. Green homes will come to dominate new home developments in more sections of the U.S., as builders increasingly see green as a source of competitive advantage. “This trend was foreseen in my 2008 book, Choosing Green (New Society Publishers), which for the first time documented the large number of new green housing developments in the U.S. and Canada.”
10. European green building technologies will become better known and more widely adopted in the U.S. and Canada. “My forthcoming 2009 book, Green Building Trends: Europe (Island Press), will be out in the spring and will help accelerate this trend, along with more European architects and engineers opening offices in the U.S.”
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Jerry Yudelson is the founder of Yudelson Associates, a leading international firm in sustainability planning and green building consulting. Yudelson is widely acknowledged as one of the nation’s leading experts on green building and green development. He is the author of eight green building books, including The Green Building Revolution from Island Press.
Frank Ackerman: Now that you’re unemployed, don’t you feel healthier?
As the economy sinks ever deeper into a rerun of the 1930s depression, it’s worth considering the effects of the crisis on our health. Are stockbrokers jumping out of windows on Wall Street? No – but they typically don’t, even in the worst of times. This enduring urban legend is apparently based on just two people who jumped to their deaths after the crash in 1929; there have been no confirmed cases since then.
Are suicides in general increasing as a result of unemployment? If past trends hold true, the answer is yes: people who are out of work are more likely to take their own lives.
Are any other causes of death likely to increase at the same time? Remarkably, the answer is no: suicides are the exception, not the rule. A substantial body of research in several countries, stretching back to the early twentieth century, finds that on the whole, unemployment is better for our health. With more people out of work, there is less work-related driving, and fewer traffic accidents. On average, unemployed people exercise more, drink less alcohol, take the time to prepare and eat healthier food, see their friends more, and enjoy lower levels of stress. Cardiovascular deaths reflect long-term risk factors, but have short-term triggers: among the working-age population, but not others, heart attacks are most frequent on Mondays. In Israel, heart attacks peak on Sunday, the first day of their work week. In the past, more people died of infectious diseases when they were at work and exposed to sick co-workers; now the death rate from such diseases is very low.
This is not just a happier way to reframe individual misfortune (“Aren’t you glad we finally escaped from that boring office-and-paycheck routine? I’ll see you on the bike path!”). It is also the refutation for one of the anti-environmental claims that became fashionable under the Bush administration. The free-market fundamentalists who came to power in 2001 argued at length that environmental regulations were disastrous for the economy. One of their most overwrought conclusions was that regulations were literally killing people: first they said that regulations were hurting the economy, leading to lower average incomes; then they observed that richer societies are healthier and have longer life expectancies. Put these two ideas together and voila – by making us poorer, environmental protection is a covert form of murder.
Both premises are dead wrong: there is no real evidence that environmental protection harms the economy; and if regulation somehow did slow down economic growth, throwing additional people out of work, it would lead to fewer, not more, deaths. (Maybe environmental protection is killing people by creating all those green jobs and increasing employment – but that’s too much to handle in this week’s comments.) For more on these topics, see my recent book, Poisoned for Pennies - especially Chapter 3, “The Unbearable Lightness of Regulatory Costs,” which includes references to the research on death rates and unemployment, and much more.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Frank Ackerman is an economist who has written extensively about the economics of climate change and other environmental problems. His new book is Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution.
About Frank Ackerman
Frank Ackerman is the Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and the Environment Institute at Tufts University. Ackerman received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Swarthmore College. His current interests include the economics of materials, waste, environmental health, energy and climate change and their relationship with the environment. Ackerman was the co-founder and editor of Dollars & Sense magazine and has also studied the economics of energy and environmental policy at the Tellus Institute in Boston.
Peter Newman: The Crash, Peak Oil and Resilient Cities
How did the crash happen? Over-inflating the economic balloon with debt that was vulnerable to rises in oil price. What do we do about it? Use non-oil-based projects and approaches to generate economic growth or else we are going to make things worse. In detail….
- Peak oil theorists have been squabbling about when the geological peak will happen but in economic terms it happened in 2005 when the production of conventional oil (cheap oil which can be produced under about $65/bbl) peaked. The five mega Major oil companies peaked in their oil production in 2005 and have gone down since.
- The price of oil was then based on the marginal production from unconventional oil (deep water, remote and dirty oil like shale). Oil rapidly increased in price from $40 to $140 between 2005 and July 2008.
- The first financial fall-out was the exposure of debt in sub-prime mortgages based primarily in highly car dependent urban areas. Tripling of fuel prices made it impossible to pay mortgages. Non-recourse financing meant that people in many vulnerable areas walked away from their homes without carrying the debt with them (cant do this in Australia).
- All global debt began to be pulled into the crash as the vulnerability to oil underlies just about everything. As Colin Campbell predicted in 2005:
“…the banks lent more than they have based on confidence that the resulting expansion was sufficient collateral for today’s debt. But unrecognised was that this expansion was not just money it was good old cheap energy… We face this monumental kind of weakness of our entire banking and financial sector.” Peak Oil Newsletter 53, May 2005.
- Imploding debt spread around the world as the debt-based economic balloon began deflating. The assumption of cheap oil now lay in tatters and challenged the ability of any bank to be able to repay its debt.
- How far will this go? US debt alone is over $110 trillion (world annual GDP is $66 trillion)… which represents $386,000 per person. Even 30% of this being vulnerable would suggest that the crash could go a lot further.
- With the economic balloon deflating rapidly the oil price has dropped even more rapidly to less than $40 (in early December, 2008). What kind of price is going to result is now of much debate – see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4846
- The oil price crash means that most higher price oil alternatives are now being dropped or moth-balled. The figure below shows that in production costs alone oil over $40 a barrel is much more likely than oil under $40 a barrel. The deep water and dirty oil (shale) options are all over $100 as are most biofuel projects without their subsidies.
(See the Chairman’s Address of Horizon Oil.)
- The marginal cost of oil production is thus around the $70 to $80/bbl mark so the price could be expected to hover around there until demand pushes it into the more expensive options. As long as oil markets and financial markets return to something like a sane process.
- What is very clear is that no further economic expansion can occur based around oil prices that are less than $40 a barrel which was the assumption of most in the financial community until recently. Projects with debt based around that assumption remain vulnerable. This includes a swathe of suburban and peri urban developments as well as many toll road projects.
- A similar analysis can be made based around climate change. Lack of confidence in any fossil fuel-based growth has seeped into all financial markets since the work of Nicholas Stern and Ross Garnaut demonstrated the importance of early action over climate change. Climate change governance will now progressively push the price of carbon up, making suspect those projects already debt financed using assumptions of cheap carbon.
- The economy of cities everywhere are thus vulnerable to oil. However some cities are much more vulnerable than others as shown in the figure below based on data we collect on global cities.
These data are for city regions in 1995 and include all the gasoline and diesel for private passenger travel. They show:
- US cities dominate in their oil consumption and car use with a significant difference between Atlanta at 103 GJ/person, Houston 75 GJ/person and New York at 44GJ/person. (Note: 1 GJ of fuel equals 28.8 litres of gasoline equivalent or 7.8 gallons).
- Australian, Canadian and New Zealand cities follow this with 30 to 40 GJ/person.
- All European cities use less than 20 GJ/person and reach as low as 12 GJ/person in Helsinki and 8 GJ/person in Barcelona; Eastern European cities are even lower between 5 and 10 GJ/person with Cracow lowest at 2GJ/person.
- Wealthy Asian cities (Sapporo, Taipei, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore) are also extremely low with 5 to 10 GJ/person.
- Cities in developing countries are scattered throughout this array but apart from Riyadh and Tel Aviv are less than 8 GJ/person and mostly are less than a few GJ/person.
- The developing cities to the right of the graph (Jakarta, Beijing, Bogota, Guangzhou, Cairo, Chennai, Shanghai, Mumbai, Dakar and Ho Chi Minh City) are hardly measurable on the same scale as those to the left of the graph.
- Vulnerable cities such as those in North America and Australia need to respond to the crash in much more dramatic ways than those cities where gasoline and diesel are only a small part of their economies.
- All attempts at expansion of their economies based on further use of oil will cause serious impacts on their future ability to adapt. This particularly applies to new high capacity road systems.
- How can oil-vulnerable cities create an economy that reduces their oil use and creates a more resilient future? In our new book Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change (Newman, Beatley and Boyer, Island Press) we set out a range of technological, land use and governance options based on experience of where these are beginning to be demonstrated. Simply put….
- Electrified transit. This means high capacity electric Metros and Suburban Rail (heavy rail) with their associated dense centers or Transit Oriented Developments. It also means plug-in electric buses (already quite common in some cities) and electric light rail with their associated local corridors of denser linear development.
- Electrified vehicles. This means plug-in electric vehicles (and plug-in hybrids) which together with a range of smaller electric vehicles like scooters, gophers and golf carts, are associated with more dispersed land uses. The key value in these plug-in vehicles is that they enable renewable energy to be 100% of a city’s grid through providing a storage mechanism (they are likely therefore to be part of the transport systems in denser parts of the city as well, though supplementary). We call this Renewable Transport. See http://sustainability.curtin.edu.au/research_publications/.
- Electrified rail and the associated denser land uses will be cheaper and more resilient than the road-based dispersed kind of development as we have shown in a number of publications, including a recent assessment of the costs of urban development for Parsons Brinckerhoff (http://sustainability.curtin.edu.au/research_publications/). However most cities have a combination of these land use types and although dispersed land uses will be more vulnerable they cannot be abandoned – some extremely dispersed parts of cities may need to be.
- Ruralising cities based around local food production is unlikely to occur as cities will still need to be cities providing a range of opportunities not available in rural areas. However cities can incorporate greater local food production as in Cuba though they will remain primarily urban and not rural in function. Ruralised land uses in peri urban areas that are highly car dependent are likely to die first.
- Plans to rebuild local economies will need to factor in how to reduce car use and create more walkable and bikeable local areas. Green buildings and green industries will not create green cities unless they are based around electric renewable transport or non motorised transport.
- It is time to refill the economic balloon based around these innovations, not try to reinflate the old oil-based urban development paradigm.
NOTE: Data are from Kenworthy J and Laube F (2001) The Millennium Cities Database for Sustainable Transport., UITP, Brussels, which was a study of 100 cities (16 were incomplete) and 27 parameters using highly controlled processes to ensure comparability of data. See also Kenworthy J., Laube F., Newman P., Barter P., Raad T., Poboon C. and Guia B. (1999). An International Sourcebook of Automobile Dependence in Cities, 1960-1990. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
About Peter Newman
Peter Newman is a renowned Australian academic and planner who invented the term ‘automobile dependence’ to describe how we have created cities where we have to drive everywhere. For 30 years since he attended Stanford University during the first oil crisis, he has been warning cities about preparing for peak oil. Peter’s book with Jeff Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence was launched in the White House in 1999. Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he is best known for his work in reviving and extending the city’s rail system. From 2001-2003, Newman directed the production of WA’s Sustainability Strategy in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. It was the first state sustainability strategy in the world. From 2004-2005, he was a Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney, advising the government on planning issues. From 2006-2007, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville and he returned there in early 2008 as Harry Porter Visiting Professor. His new book with Tim Betaley and Heather Boyer in late 2008 will be Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Frank Ackerman: What the stock market and environmentalists could learn from each other
It’s no surprise that financial disaster has pushed environmental problems out of the news of late. But it’s too bad that they can’t get together somehow; the two areas of crisis, and the needed solutions, have a lot in common. The common thread is that both involve risks of rare, catastrophic events. In both cases, the prudent response is to focus on insurance against worst-case risks, rather than cost-benefit analysis of the most likely outcomes.
The stock market and other financial markets are in the throes of the worst crisis since the 1930s. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recently said, “We are going through a financial crisis more severe and unpredictable than any in our lifetimes… There is no playbook for responding to turmoil we have never faced.” In fact, there used to be a playbook – a system of banking regulations, enacted in the wake of the Depression of the 1930s, which restricted the types and amounts of investments that banks could make. Deregulation of banking, a process that has been accelerating since the 1980s, allows banks to make riskier investments, which boost their profits as long as the good times keep rolling. Every once in a while, the good times stop, as they did this year – and the meaning of “risky” investments suddenly becomes all too clear.
Something similar applies to environmental crisis. It’s not that the worst possible outcomes of climate change are sure to happen any time soon; it’s just that this could happen. Like a financial meltdown, a 
complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet is unlikely but possible (and it becomes more likely as the world warms). The IPCC projects that sea levels are likely to rise by about one meter by the end of this century; the loss of the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea levels by seven meters (23 feet). Should we spend just enough to protect coastal communities from one meter of sea level rise? Or should we act as swiftly as possible to limit global warming and reduce the risk of a catastrophic seven meters of sea level rise?
Preparation for the worst case is why people buy insurance; your house is extremely unlikely to burn down next year. If you cancel your insurance and spend the premium on something more enjoyable, there’s a very good chance you’ll get away with it. But no one does. This insurance approach, sometimes called the precautionary principle, responds to the dangers that are most important. It’s why we should ignore cost-benefit analysis based on the most likely outcomes, and instead adopt environmental policies based on protection against worst cases. And it’s why it was such a bad idea to spend the last 30 years deregulating the banking system in order to boost short-run profits.
In my recent book, Poisoned for Pennies, I discuss the economic theory behind the precautionary principle, as well as its application to many specific issues involving toxic chemicals. With uncertain but ominous risks to our health at stake, why should we accept potentially dangerous chemicals in order to win small economic gains? That’s as dumb an idea as deregulating the banks.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Frank Ackerman is an economist who has written extensively about the economics of climate change and other environmental problems. His new book is Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution.
About Frank Ackerman
Frank Ackerman is the Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and the Environment Institute at Tufts University. Ackerman received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Swarthmore College. His current interests include the economics of materials, waste, environmental health, energy and climate change and their relationship with the environment. Ackerman was the co-founder and editor of Dollars & Sense magazine and has also studied the economics of energy and environmental policy at the Tellus Institute in Boston.
Jon Isham: What comes after *Yes, we can!*
So what next for climate activists swept up in ‘Yes, we can!’ mania? Perhaps we first must acknowledge how hard this is going to be. As a friend wrote to me in reaction to last week’s blog post, “I share your enthusiasm about the long-term, but the near term is going to be very challenging. Obama needs to convince the public that some pain is required immediately in order to clean out the problems in the financial system, mortgage markets, and budget deficit.” My friend is right of course, and so-far-so-good for the new administration: props to Obama for talking about sacrifice in his first – gotta love it! – weekly video address.
One interesting question for the President-elect’s transition team is whether the perceived sacrifice of cap-and-trade legislation makes it difficult to champion such a bill, which must eventually be at the heart of national climate policy. It’s true, as Peter Barnes has been championing for years, that a cap-and-dividend program would be progressive fiscal policy: lower- and middle-income households would receive a dividend that would more than compensate for the higher energy prices of a carbon-capped economy. And as Rob Stavins of Harvard has just noted, cap-and-dividend “can go a long way toward making the legislation palatable to Republicans and Democrats alike who are reticent to take any actions that even resemble a tax increase.”
But the question remains: given these fragile economic times, should the new administration be out front of a cap-and-dividend policy immediately, or should they promote – (in the words of Ignition co-authors Chris Klyza and David Sousa) – another ‘policy pathway’? Michael Northrup and David Sasoon have a compelling new piece which argues that the President-elect can use his executive power under the Clean Air Act to ‘jump start’ climate action – perhaps even to initiate a national carbon trading regime without new legislation. This appealing idea should be vetted – particularly in light of the decision last week by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board that, according to the Sierra Club, “all new and proposed coal plants nationwide must go back and address their carbon dioxide emissions.” As the demands on the new Congress stack up, following a pathway of executive branch policy making has a lot of appeal.
But I confess that I am drawn back to my friend’s point about calling for sacrifice. Even with the prospect of receiving a large dividend to compensate for higher energy prices, most American voters are likely to balk at cap-and-dividend… unless the new President is willing to make the case that short-term pain will produce long-term gain. In fact, the case for a clean-energy strategy is more compelling than ever: think 5,000,000 new jobs, greater energy independence, less reliance on Middle Eastern oil … and the chance that we might yet save the planet from runaway climate change. So if President-elect Obama does begin to detail his call for national sacrifice in the days and weeks ahead, cap-and-dividend should be in the forefront of his call.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Jonathan Isham is Luce Professor of International Environmental Economics at Middlebury College in Vermont and co-editor of Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement. Visit his website.
About Jonathan Isham
Jonathan Isham Jr. is Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, where he teaches classes in environmental economics, environmental policy, introductory microeconomics, social capital, and global climate change. Since early 2005, he has spoken widely throughout the nation about building the new climate movement. Isham serves on advisory boards for Focus the Nation, Climate Counts, and the Vermont Governor’s Commission on Climate Change. He was the co-recipient, representing Middlebury College, of the 2005 Clean Air–Cool Planet Climate Champion Award for advancing campus solutions to global warming. In January of 2006, he was featured on National Public Radio’s Radio Open Source program “Global Warming Is Not an ‘Environmental Problem.’” In January of 2007, he was trained in Nashville, Tennessee, as a member of Al Gore’s Climate Project. He has published articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of African Economies, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Rural Sociology, Social Science Quarterly, Society and Natural Resources, Southern Economic Journal, Vermont Law Review, and World Bank Economic Review. He was the coeditor of Social Capital, Development, and the Environment (Edward Elgar, 2002) and has coauthored chapters in books published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and New England University Press. He holds an AB in social anthropology from Harvard University, an MA in international studies from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland.
Frank Ackerman: 2009 – The end of an error?
My favorite quote from the recent campaign was the statement in Obama’s acceptance speech at the convention in Denver. Speaking about the United States, he said, “We are better than these last eight years.”
Nowhere is this more accurate than in our anti-environmental policies of recent years. (Well, okay, it’s actually a tie between numerous strong contenders, including the shredding of civil liberties, destruction of countries that never harmed us, and too many others to name.) No one, of course, came out and said that they didn’t much care for public health and the natural environment, so they were going to roll back useful protective regulations. But in the guise of supposedly sound economic analysis, the Bush-Cheney administration achieved the same thing: again and again, cost-benefit analysis was used to bolster the claim that we couldn’t afford to, or shouldn’t, maintain sensible, effective regulations.
The results of such bogus economic calculations inspired the title of my recent Island Press book, Poisoned for Pennies. The amounts of money actually at stake in protecting ourselves, our children, and our surroundings are often trivial. Matching the Japanese testing requirements for mad cow disease, the international gold standard in that field, would add six or seven cents per pound 
to the price of beef. Atrazine, a potent herbicide used on most of the U.S. corn crop, is a known carcinogen and a suspected endocrine disrupter, turning frogs into hermaphrodites at incredibly low concentrations. One of the best substitutes, an apparently much safer and equally effective herbicide sold by the same company that makes atrazine, would add perhaps three cents per bushel to the price of corn – which has recently been around $6.00.
Again and again, objective calculations demonstrate why one of the chapters of the book is called “the unbearable lightness of regulatory costs.” REACH, the new chemicals policy adopted by the European Union last year, is far more ambitious than anything under serious consideration in the U.S. It requires all manufacturers and importers of chemicals to carry out a range of toxicity tests in order to continue to sell their products in Europe. In a study for the Swedish government (included in Poisoned for Pennies), I demonstrated that REACH will raise the average cost of chemicals sold in Europe by one-sixteenth of one percent. Numerous estimates of the potential benefits of REACH are much, much larger than that. Why, exactly, isn’t the U.S. considering adopting such a cost-effective, inexpensive measure?
We are better than the last eight years, in environmental policy and in so much else. I look forward to an administration that may at last realize that it’s time to stop poisoning ourselves for pennies, to take a fresh look at the low cost of doing the right thing for health and the environment.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Frank Ackerman is an economist who has written extensively about the economics of climate change and other environmental problems. His new book is Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution.
About Frank Ackerman
Frank Ackerman is the Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and the Environment Institute at Tufts University. Ackerman received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Swarthmore College. His current interests include the economics of materials, waste, environmental health, energy and climate change and their relationship with the environment. Ackerman was the co-founder and editor of Dollars & Sense magazine and has also studied the economics of energy and environmental policy at the Tellus Institute in Boston.
Peter Newman: Resiliant cities and the crash
The financial crash is developing a whole industry of responses that can tell us where we went wrong and what we must do to make our future more resilient, especially in our cities where so much of the crash is hurting. Finance and economics dominate this discussion. We believe that a better understanding of what makes cities work will help in this debate, especially how urban transport and energy are fundamental to how the urban economy works or doesn’t.
What caused the crash?
Toxic loans are the target of most crash analysts. However although they locate the areas where these toxic loans were mostly taken up, they rarely show why these particular locations were so much more vulnerable to mortgage foreclosure. These locations were invariably in peri-urban areas which were often quite distinctly removed from the main metropolitan areas that developers assumed for the jobs and services of those living there. Whilst the post war suburbs are often called urban sprawl these areas could only be called urban scatter. These areas invariably had nothing other than houses, they had no real employment, shops or services, and transit was non existent. These were highly car dependent places where people had to travel long distances for anything.
Such urban areas are highly vulnerable to the multiple problems of car dependence, particularly peak oil. In recent years their financial fragility has been pointed out through a number of studies which have shown that household budgets needed to find 40% of their income to pay for transportation. Large houses with big heating and cooling bills made it worse. Doubling and tripling of the oil price set in motion the end of so many toxic loans but they occurred mostly in areas where the land development was just as toxic.
As the fall out from the toxic loans rolled across the US economy it began to pick up bad debt estimated at over $18 trillion – The Wall Street Journal estimates about 16% of Americans now own homes worth less than they owe. From there the crash spread out into the highly linked global economy, picking up similar kinds of debt in cities around the world and leading inevitably to the September 15th 2008 Wall Street crash.
Peak oil over the next decade will ensure that fuel prices will rise again. The International Energy Agency are estimating oil will go into permanent decline of between 6% and 9% per year soon. Climate change will only exacerbate this trend away from highly fossil fuel-dependent urban and building design. As global governance on climate change sets in there will be increasing costs right through the housing and transport system that will further challenge the development of cities through high capacity roads, peri-urban scatter and large fossil fuel-hungry houses.
Crashes in Urban History
The coming of industrialism can now be seen to have occurred in a series of waves of technological innovation. These waves show the booms and busts of the economy based on technological systems that boom in the adoption phase and then bust as they reach limits. The first waves were based on water power, then coal and steam boilers, then electricity, then oil…. At each stage the city adapted to the new energy and transport system after they went through a crash based on the end of the previous system.
The shift in oil prices has exposed the underlying vulnerability of highly car and oil dependent urban development from the Fourth and Fifth Waves. Once the fuel price increased, the loans which were used to form these suburbs became toxic. At the same time a more global limit was reached with climate change and the cities of the world faced a new limit whereby they must phase out all fossil fuels. Although not yet part of the main market place, the undermining of confidence in the long term future of heavily-fossil fuel dependent industry and land development, was already underway. The crash of September 2008 signals the end to the urban economy based around oil in particular but all heavily fossil fuel-dependent urban development as well.
What is next?
What is next for urban development? The Sixth Wave replaces oil and all fossil fuels with radical resource productivity eg 50 to 80 percent less fossil fuels by 2050 as many countries are now committed and which has been set as the goal by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through the United Nations processes. Critical to this will be fast electric rail with Transit Oriented Development as its focus for development in a poly-centric city and supplemented with electric vehicles. The new wave of industrialism also includes a new series of sustainability technologies related to renewables and distributed, small-scale water, energy, and waste systems (building on clever control systems and Smart Grids) all of which are more local and require far less fuel to distribute. We have called this the Resilient City in our new book from Island Press.
At the transition point between the different waves, the crash was followed by a new boom. But the swing back was based around the new technologies (not based around propping up of the old systems). The 1890s depression was severe as the world’s cities moved away from horses, wood and the first steam-based coal-fired industries into the much more extensive use of electricity, tramways and electric trains. Then the 1930′s saw the transition to oil and motor vehicles with cities spreading out as though these could be used in limitless amounts. The 2008 crash signals that this era is over and the birth pangs of the new Resilient City are emerging in our cities – if we let it.
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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
About Peter Newman
Peter Newman is a renowned Australian academic and planner who invented the term ‘automobile dependence’ to describe how we have created cities where we have to drive everywhere. For 30 years since he attended Stanford University during the first oil crisis, he has been warning cities about preparing for peak oil. Peter’s book with Jeff Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence was launched in the White House in 1999. Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he is best known for his work in reviving and extending the city’s rail system. From 2001-2003, Newman directed the production of WA’s Sustainability Strategy in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. It was the first state sustainability strategy in the world. From 2004-2005, he was a Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney, advising the government on planning issues. From 2006-2007, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville and he returned there in early 2008 as Harry Porter Visiting Professor. His new book with Tim Betaley and Heather Boyer in late 2008 will be Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Elizabeth Grossman: Last minute Bush Administration actions
On November 4, from the White House to state houses and the unsung offices of Soil & Water Conservation and Public Utility Districts, American voters elected what is likely an unprecedented number of pro-environment candidates. By Thursday of last week, the Office of the President-elect had already posted the “Obama-Biden comprehensive New Energy America” plan. Among its goals are putting a million hybrid 150 mpg plug-in cars on the road by 2015, creating five million new “clean energy jobs” in the next ten years, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The new administration also promises to double federal funding for scientific research, increase support for science education, technological research and development, and to “restore scientific integrity to the White House.” What would be a tall order in the best of times has been made even more challenging by the past eight weeks’ events.
Not only will the Obama administration take office amid the greatest economic distress perhaps since the Great Depression, but the Bush administration has also been busy issuing end-of-term regulations that will considerably increase environmental protection challenges.
Among these new rules are:
- A proposal that would make it impossible to use the Endangered Species Act to curtail greenhouse gas emissions and global warming even when they harm a listed species.
- A revision of how power plants measure their emissions that could result in greater overall emissions.
- A Bureau of Land Management plan to sell oil and gas leases on millions of acres in Utah previously off-limits to such resource extraction and approval of new uranium mining just outside Grand Canyon National Park.
- A Surface Mining Rule that could effectively eliminate a 100-foot buffer zone to protect streams from mining waste generated in mountaintop removal coal mining operations in Appalachia.
- Revision of how waste discharges from confined animal feedlot operations (often called “factory farms”) are regulated that would allow farms to decide when such permits are needed.
- An EPA proposal not to regulate perchlorate in drinking water – a contaminant toxic to the thyroid now found in hundreds of water sources in over thirty states.
- Approval of the pesticide methyl iodide to replace ozone-depleting methyl bromide, long favored by the U.S. strawberry industry. Over fifty scientists – including Nobel laureates – have written to the EPA protesting use of this powerful neurotoxin and potential carcinogen.
Environmental advocates have great expectations for what an Obama administration can achieve. But it won’t be easy. Environmental protection at a time of badly strained budgets and economic turmoil will require ingenuity and persistence – and I think, accounting for the full lifecycle costs of everything we use, including all the costs of global warming, pollution, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Elizabeth Grossman is the author of High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health.
About Elizabeth Grossman
Elizabeth Grossman is the author ofHigh Tech Trash, Watershed: The Undamming of America (Counterpoint Press, 2002), and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail (Sierra Club Books, 2003). She is also the co-editor of Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion (Sasquatch Books, 1999). Grossman’s writing has also appeared in a variety of publications, including Amicus Journal, Audubon, California Wild, Cascadia Times, Chicago Tribune, Environmental News Network, Grist, The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Newsday, Oregonian, Orion, the Patagonia catalogue, Salon.com, Seattle Times, Washington Post, and Yes! A native of New York City, she has a BA in literature from Yale University. She now lives a minute’s walk from the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. When not at her desk writing she's out exploring—hiking, camping, paddling, sketching, and watching birds.
Walker Wells: Solar, the benefits are big but the funding is not
In the green world, the “benefits of solar” is bandied about as dogma. But exactly what kind of benefits are we talking about? Economic? Environmental? Social? All of the above?
As part of preparing to moderate the Affordable Housing panel at the recent Solar Power International conference, we tried to answer this question by running a few simple analyses. If the sun powered every affordable housing development in the country, how many kilowatts of energy could we create, what would that energy be worth, what kind of green economy stimulus would result, and what would this do for climate change?
Our calculations show that if all of the 75,000 units of affordable housing built annually were designed to be fully powered by the sun, it would result in a 2 billion dollar annual investment in alternative energy and avoid 66,578 tonnes of carbon emissions each year. These are big numbers with correspondingly large benefits to the housing developers, regional economies, and the global climate. So why don’t we see solar on every development?
In a nutshell, it’s because solar is still relatively expensive and it takes a long time for the economic benefits to flow back to the developers – at least if you are paying full price. The recently extended federal business investment tax credit results in about a 30% reduction in cost, but in most places, and for most affordable housing developers, the need to raise the remaining funds is still a major hurdle.
Both numeric and anecdotal data shows that in places where incentives like rebates and tax credits exist, developers are well on our way to realizing the potential of solar. In California for example, the strong, long-term incentives have made powering a development’s common areas with solar nearly standard practice. Going a step further, some developers are pursuing the aggressive goal of net zero. In other states like Massachusetts, support for solar has come through a one-time catalyst fund distributed to developers willing to pilot solar. Through the affordable housing program of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, 8 development partners were awarded 25 million several years ago to bring a solar component to 60 affordable housing projects. These efforts have been effective in demonstrating to the solar industry that affordable is a viable, and potentially lucrative market.
But there are still more hurdles to cross. Two of the biggest are in the decidedly unglamorous terrain of the large government bureaucracy. First is the utility allowance. Traditionally housing authorities are responsible for determining what portion of the housing burden is the result of utility expenses. These “utility allowances” are deducted from the allowable housing burden to determine what owners can charge tenants for rent. So it follows that if utilities are lower due to use of alternate energy sources, the utility allowance should be reduced and the owner would thus be able to increase the rent by a comparable amount. With more revenue the developer could then pay back the loans used to purchase the photovoltaic (or solar thermal) system. This is a win for everyone: the tenants get more stable energy costs, the developer gets a more stable asset, green jobs are created, and less carbon ends up in the atmosphere. Until recently this approach was been simple in theory but very difficult to apply in practice.
The good news is that the IRS recently expanded the group of organizations that can develop a utility allowance to include the utility companies, thus giving developers options. Setting what may become a national example, the state of California is about to approve a new methodology that includes the ability to account for onsite generation in the utility allowance. It is expected that the state’s utility companies will take the lead in preparing, or at least verifying, this type of analysis. The improved accuracy of this schedule will allow developers with energy strategies to get full credit for their innovative efforts in their pro-forma.
The other issue is metering. Due to either state or local regulation, each individual dwelling unit is usually required to have a separate meter and inverter to account for the electricity generated for, and used by, the unit. Doing this adds cost and complexity in design and construction and precludes aggregating energy use and production across multiple dwelling units during operation. For example if one apartment has a net gain of energy one month it can’t be shared with an apartment that has a net loss. Several years ago, Massachusetts figured out a smart way around this through “neighborhood” or “virtual” net metering. In this situation all the energy generated is accounted for at a single meter and the credits produced are then spread “virtually” to the individual units on their monthly bills. This approach simplifies the PV system design and dramatically reduces the number of inverters. Just last week the California Public Utilities Commission adopted a similar approach, which greatly increased the odds of there being more net zero affordable housing projects in the near future.
By removing these barriers we can expect an accelerated rate of solar adoption in California and other states that put in place similar regulations. However, there still needs to be the base level of support provided by the federal tax credit and state incentives. Only by combining a progressive regulatory environment with predictable and sufficient rebate programs will solar cease to be a novelty and instead become as conventional as windows, lighting, or appliances. When this occurs we can talk about the benefits that solar is providing, instead of thinking wistfully about missed opportunities.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Walker Wells, AICP LEED AP, is Director of the Green Urbanism Program at Global Green USA and the editor and co-author of Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing.
About Walker Wells
Walker Wells, AICP LEED AP, is Director of the Green Urbanism Program at Global Green USA and the editor and co-author of Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing. He is a member of the American Institute of City Planners and is a LEED Accredited Professional.
