Al Gore on Letterman: "I'd Vote for An Asteroid"(Video)

Here is the video that I promised in my earlier post on Al Gore's appearance on Letterman. (Thanks MrPiratte) It get's interesting around minute 4.

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Oil and Ice Tour: Are we giving up ice for oil?

[Just got word of this speaking tour that will be travelling Canada from Coast to Coast this month.]

Join two of Canada's leading authors for a discussion about the choices that will determine the future of Canada's Arctic, and what we can learn from the tar sands.

WWF-Canada is proud to host the cross-Canada speaking tour of award-winning authors Andrew Nikiforuk (Tar Sands) and Ed Struzik (The Big Thaw). Join them this fall as they discuss how the melting of Arctic sea ice and the exploitation of the Alberta tar sands are connected, and how they are shaping Canada's future. WWF aims to stimulate debate among Canadians about the choices and consequences – political, cultural, economic and environmental – involved in how we develop the tar sands and respond to a changing Arctic.

Join us in a city near you between November 4-20, 2009. See here for more information about dates and locations. Read more...

Changing A City: Inside Portland's 80% by 2050 target

[Worldchanging.com is running an interview that I did with the Deputy Director of Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. See the full post at worldchanging or reposted below.]

Last week the City of Portland and Multnomah County jointly passed one of North America's most ambitious Climate Change Action Plan (CAP), which commits the city and county to reducing their overall emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Portland has been a leading city on climate change policy since 1993, when it became the first city adopt a strategy to reduce carbon emissions. It is also the only North American city that has managed to reduce its emissions below 1990 levels (despite an 18 percent growth in population). Nonetheless, the plan opens with the sobering point that “perhaps the most important lesson learned from local climate protection work to date is the frank recognition that our good work...is not nearly enough.” (A familiar mia culpa, well in line with how serious things have gotten.)

What follows in the rest of the 70 page plan (pdf) is an example of what it might look like if cities truly take sustainability seriously. The plan is packed with useful information and strategy. You can find more complete review here.

The standout element is the way the city has positioned itself to facilitate a broad shift that extends well past what it controls directly. This is much more than leading by example. Through a combination of educational programs, public consultations, economic development planning and the coordination of financial incentives, the municipality is leading change across the city as a whole. To find out more, I caught up with Deputy Director of Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability Micheal Armstrong via e-mail.

Alex Aylett: Early municipal climate action plans, both in North America and in Europe, tended to focus on things that the municipal government controlled directly: street lighting, municipal buildings, landfill sites, etc. Portland's new CAP, on the other hand, really is an action plan for the whole city. Tell me a bit about that more ambitious approach to municipal sustainability.

Micheal Armstrong: Since 1993 Portland’s climate-protection work has consistently included both its own operations and community-wide emissions. Our operations represent about one percent of total local emissions, so there’s a modest but real opportunity to achieve meaningful reductions. We clearly need to be making the same prudent investments in efficiency and renewables that others are making.

But our ability to set policy and to invest in infrastructure is a much more powerful lever in influencing local carbon emissions. We have an important role in shaping the overall form of the community -- which is perhaps the single most significant factor in emissions, as well as in integrating transportation systems, enforcing the building code, and regulating garbage and recycling collection, among many other thing.

AA: All true. But this goes beyond good land-use planning. Renewable energy and efficiency gains in private homes and commercial buildings, for example, make up 29 percent of the city's planned GHG reductions. "Food choice" (something significant that never makes it into municipal policy) accounts for another 10 percent.

Often cities avoid things that they can't directly regulate. You've gone a very different route. How has the city approached targets that can't be met solely through regulation?

MA: In the Climate Action Plan we prioritized actions the City of Portland or Multnomah County could either take ourselves or strongly influence, while at the same time trying to identify the full range of potential options for reducing emissions. If we do not put issues like food choice or how much stuff we consume on the list, it makes it that much more difficult — and expensive — to reduce emissions, since we’re limiting our options for where we can make reductions.

Food is a good example, too, where historically local governments have not had much of a direct role. We see that changing. Last year, for example, we provided gardening and food-related classes to more than 700 local residents, and we expect even more participants this year.

We’re also actively reviewing our code to address ways in which it makes it more difficult to grow, sell, or distribute locally produced foods. And we continue to identify parcels of land owned by the city that may be suited to urban gardening. We’re looking at options for expanding the number of community garden plots, and we now have several larger parcels of land that are being gardened by residents. We need to enable a much more active urban agriculture.

AA: Funding is also a big issue here. High up front costs are often cited by homeowners and property managers as a barrier for efficiency retrofits. What's Portland's approach to that part of the puzzle?

MA: With the help of federal stimulus funding, Portland has put together a program, “Clean Energy Works Portland,” that deals with this issue head on. The program pays for the cost of installing efficiency improvements, and the homeowner then repays the cost on his or her utility bill over time. The program puts contractors to work today, provides homeowners a more comfortable, more valuable home, and delivers energy savings and carbon reduction for decades to come.

We’ve also worked hard to ensure that the program provides quality jobs. We developed a “community workforce benefits agreement” that brought together contractors, unions, social equity organizations, and environmentalists to ensure that the jobs created through the program reach historically disadvantaged parts of the community.

This program is still in a pilot phase that will retrofit 500 homes by June 2010, but we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to scale it up from there.

AA: How important are the links between these projects and other local benefits like creating jobs or improving health?

MA: Connections to other benefits are essential. But we view it more as choosing carbon-reduction actions that help create a future community that people want to live in.

In the Climate Action Plan we describe a “vision for 2050” that we hope is appealing, attractive, and desirable – not so much because it doesn’t depend on carbon emissions to succeed – but because it’s simply a place people want to be.

One of the things that gives me hope that we can achieve very large carbon reductions is that many people enjoy the exact things that make a low-carbon community possible: walking to the neighborhood business district; eating fresh, seasonal food; enjoying a cozy, well insulated home; and having affordable, convenient choices about how to get around town. Read more...

Al Gore on Letterman: "I'd Vote for An Asteroid"

Chalk it up to me being a skeptical Canadian usually unimpressed by American TV, but I was really surprised by the quality of Al Gore's appearance on Letterman last night.

Over what must have been close to 15 minutes Gore and Letterman talked about everything from how extremely vulnerable human society is to shifts in climate and the importance of a significant agreement in Copenhagen, to the links of women's education and population stabilization, and the fact that we are currently living through the 6th great extinction in the history of the planet.

(On that Letterman quipped "I'd vote for an Asteroid [like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs] at least that would be exciting.")

[I'll post some video once something decent comes up on Youtube. For now there is this.]
[UDPATE: Here's that Video]

The one message that Late Show viewers went to bed with was that the benefits of good climate change policy go way beyond the environmental. Besides protecting the only planet that we've got, they also reduce vulnerability to foreign owned sources of energy and can help anchor a true rebuilding of the American (and global) economies:

Gore: "We should be relying on American renewable energy that's available right here at home. And we can create millions of green jobs retrofitting houses, installing solar and geothermal energy... and those are jobs that can't be outsourced somewhere else."

Not all of Gore's points made it to their most important punchlines though, so here are a few elaborations:

-- He talked about coral bleaching and ocean acidification, but the clincher (for humans at least) is the impact that that is going to have on fisheries and ocean food supplies.

-- Flooding of lowland communities in Egypt and Asia are a concern, but most especially so when you start to think about the impacts that that will have on migration patterns (i.e. so what is being called "climate refugees".

-- The millions of people who could be displaced within the USA itself also could have used a mention. (It's not just other parts of the world that are vulnerable).

-- Ditto for the impact of water shortages on agricultural production in places like the Middle East. North America also faces a potentially drastic reduction in its agricultural production if we warm by over 4c (which doesn't seem so unlikely any more).

--He also talked about the fact that with women's education and empowerment population growth rates are declining. But beyond that, it needs to be mentioned that population itself is not the problem. It's the fact that a very small percentage of the world gobbles up an incredibly large percentage of its resources.

Gore's new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (which I have yet to read) came out yesterday.

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Portland: Bold Steps on Climate Action

Portland's been at the front of the pack for a while: In 1993 it was the first U.S. city to adopt a strategy to reduce its carbon emissions. It's also the only city in North America to have reduced its emissions below 1990 levels.

Last week, the City Council committed to reduce the city's emissions by 80% by 2050. That ambitious target is the part of an exceptional municipal climate change action plan that sharpens the city's position on the leading edge of municipal environmental policy.

Overall, the plan is a wealth of information and strategy. It is well worth a look whether or not you happen to live in Portland.[plan in pdf]

The plan covers eight different sectors that range from “buildings and energy” to “urban forestry and natural systems.” The main thrust though is on the way that climate related action can also be a driver for a robust local economy.

A Green Local Economy
Alternative energy sources, green buildings and efficient infrastructure can also pay economic dividends – we've heard that before. But Portland shapes the theory into a convincing strategy that includes:

-- Thousands of jobs created through a drive to retrofit all existing buildings and reduce their overall energy use by 25% by 2030 [an interesting piece on Portland's expanding commercial retrofit market ].

-- A demanding goal of generating 10% of energy from local renewables, starting with ten mega-watts of on-site renewable energy by 2012, that will encourage the continued development of Portland's alternative energy sector.

--And two linked initiatives to build nothing but energy positive buildings by 2030 and push the State of Oregon to further "green" its building codes. Together these will help to support the continued growth of Portland's already well developed green engineering and architecture firms.

All with the added benefit that money that isn't spent on energy stays within the local economy. You can see some of this already in action under the banner of the city's Clean Energy Works program.

Beyond Municipal Boundaries
Portland's plan stands out not only because of the high goals that it sets, but for the boundary pushing approach that it is proposing to meet those goals. It is the only action plan that I have seen that takes seriously, for example, addressing the emissions created outside the municipality during the production and transportation of goods that city-dwellers consume.

It's a subject often discussed, but rarely included in policy. This focus gives local agriculture and food consumption choices an important place in the plan (which links up well with recent discussions of the impacts of our food choices). A full 10% of the plan's projected reductions are projected to come from changes in local food choice habits, and at least some of those edibles are to come from a community based local food system.

“The 20 minute neighbourhood” is another stand-out from the Portland plan. The idea is simple: you should be able to comfortably get your daily needs (education, recreation, shopping, transportation etc.) met within a 20 minute walk of your house. It's also got a nice ring to it that people understand intuitively much better than talking about “dense, multi-use, transit oriented development” (which underneath it are the land use and mobility principles to which the city has committed).

On Not Going It Alone
I was in Portland last year during some of the initial consultations that contributed to the action plan. (20 minute neighbourhoods was one of the concepts that come out of those conversations.) But engaging with community members is something that Portland has been doing for much longer than the preparation period for this particular plan.

Community visioning projects like VisionPDX and ReCode Portland, as well as a history of working with communities, has made it possible for the city to come out with such an ambitious document. It is built on a foundation of extensive discussions with communities and local businesses on the many links between environmental goals and increased overall quality of life, economic success, and security. That process, it seems to me, is as important as the end product itself.

"Our good work to date is not nearly enough."
My only disappointment is that there are less near-term hard targets than I would have liked to see. Why no specific 2012 target for the number of residential retrofits or energy positive buildings, for example?

One thing is certain, with such ambitious goals eyes are now on Portland to see if it can continue to deliver on its commitments and whether its approach is something that can be adapted to suit other North American cities.

The plan opens with the sobering point that “perhaps the most important lesson learned from local climate protection work to date is the frank recognition that our good work to date is not
nearly enough.”(a familiar mia culpa). What comes after is a good indication of the direction that we need to go in if we are really going to take urban sustainability seriously.


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