feelings run high in Portland, Oregon

The most amazing thing about this article on plans to improve Portland's bicycle plan is the vitriolic raving of the dozens of people who have commented on it. After presenting issues on cycling and planning for bikes, including the conflict between cyclists and motorists, the article ends with this paragraph:

Joshua Bass, a Portland State University instructor who commutes daily by bike, thinks everyone on the road will benefit more by slowing down a bit. To pit cars against bikes is “a false dichotomy,” he says. “It’s a problem between good travelers and bad travelers. It’s disrespectful of people of all types."

Which must be like a red flag to a bull, since many of the readers’ comments that follow that statement simply strengthen the polarization. So much for reasoned debate.

future of coal

Efficient system design is one of the keys to addressing the harmful effects of modern life on the environment. Not only energy efficiency, but also making full use of whatever resources are consumed. This requires treating waste from one process as a resource for another. Many industries extract full value from raw materials, but only where it makes financial sense. One of the most important places (from a carbon perspective) where this does not happen is at coal-fired power stations.

Much as we'd like to wish these monsters away, they aren't going anywhere anytime soon. In his new book Lights Out, Jason Makansi quotes from an article by Jeff Goodell observing that the world is planning to build new coal-fired power stations with a total capacity of 1350 GW, by 2030. To put this expansion programme in perspective, it's roughly equivalent to doubling the total currently installed capacity in the US and China combined.

Sir Nicholas Stern has suggested that South Africa should bury its carbon dioxide emissions from coal power stations, but there are risks with this approach, and they are not minor. Sequestration underground is not a proven method, and a major leak would literally suffocate all life around it, since the carbon dioxide would displace oxygen. The challenge with this approach is not unlike that faced with long-term storage of nuclear waste: for all practical purposes, the material must be contained forever.

Schemes have been suggested to make use of CO2 instead of storing it, for example as a way to accelerate plant growth inside greenhouses; but there are other harmful emissions from coal-fired power stations that need to be captured, converted or used elsewhere to reduce the impacts of burning coal.

Makansi suggests treating the power station as a coal refinery, much like a petroleum refinery. Coal can be used to produce ethanol, hydrogen, gasoline - in fact all the energy products that come from a petroleum refinery, and more. With this approach, electricity is just one of a number of energy output streams. Harmful emissions, which in some cases are removed from the exhaust by converting them to benign gases or solids, can be used more productively. The sulfur in coal produces sulfur dioxide, which is valuable to the fertilizer industry as ammonium sulfate, and is used in gypsum in the construction industry. Oxides of nitrogen can also be used in fertilizer as ammonium nitrate. Fly ash, bottom ash and slag are other byproducts of coal-burning that are useful in the construction industry. Using fly ash in the manufacture of concrete in fact reduces the (substantial) energy required to produce it.

The difficulty is that there is little incentive for power stations to be developed in this way, or for other industries to use these potential byproducts; and there is certainly no incentive to switch to renewables on a scale that will make a difference to reliance on coal. Externalities like social and environmental costs need to be factored in so that efficiencies and synergies and low-carbon energy sources make financial and economic sense. Until then, the best we can hope for is environmental laws that require scrubbing the power station exhaust fumes to reduce harmful emissions; but in a low-carbon world, that's not going to cut it.

biofuels climbing

The EU has set a target for biofuels to represent 5.75% of fuel used for transportation by 2010, and has now reached 1.8%. Here are some of the reasons to be cautious about biofuels strategies. And in South Africa, where the biofuels strategy relies on the use of genetically modified crops, GM Watch reports that the acreage of GM crops in South Africa is already at 29% of maize and 59% of soyabeans. It is very likely that this will increase, as the government wants biofuels to contribute up to 75 percent of its renewable energy needs by 2013. Here's another useful benefit and risk analysis of biofuels in South Africa, pointing out that there are alternative routes that could minimize the risks.

improved travel choices

High-speed railways in Western Europe have established a beachead in the battle to win over air travellers. National railways are now banding together to create a bigger market that can compete with air on cost and travel time for international travel. The intriguing possibility is that by transforming the upper echelons of the travel market, they may also influcence how travellers use the cheaper rail services. The redesign of major rail interchanges in Britain, such as at Stratford and Ebbsfleet, demonstrates an intention to improve connections between regional and international rail lines. This is an essential step in getting to and from the high-speed international services, but there should be an additional payoff. By making it easier to move from one type of service to another, an integrated system will change the way the system as a whole is peceived and used.

A similar phenomenon is emerging in South Africa. Not in the competition between air and rail, but between rail and cars - with potentially big benefits for other low-cost public transport modes. Two controversial projects in Gauteng Province demonstrate a brave effort to stop the loss of commuters from public transport to private cars. Brave, because they serve people who have some choice in how they travel. In South Africa, where the majority cannot afford the luxury of a car, there is strong political pressure to deliver projects that improve conditions for this majority. Projects serving the privileged minority run the risk of being snuffed out; but these two projects are attemping the unthinkable, with the backing of government.

The first project is construction of a new rail link between Pretoria and Johannesburg, currently underway. The Gautrain will be too expensive for the majority of commuters, but aims to win over car-driving commuters and business travellers between the two cities. The second project, less ambitious but no less subversive, is the Soweto Business Express that began running between Soweto and the Johannesburg CBD earlier this month. This high-end service offers drinks, newspapers and Internet access on board: a relaxed alternative to car travel. There are plans to roll out similar services in other cities.

Subject to cries of elitism in a country that is trying to make amends for past injustices, both projects may nevertheless be doing more than the obvious. By establishing premium services that are well integrated with the rest of the public transport system (as they must to be successful), they can improve the system as a whole in the same way that Europe's high-speed railways are doing. If they succeed in attracting car drivers to premium rail services, they can improve the financial health of the rest of the public transport system.

The result would be a bigger market share for the buses and taxis that carry passengers to and from the railways, so they would also benefit from a more secure business footing on which to recapitalise their aging fleets. Planners could then more realistically talk of public transport as a viable alternative to car travel, and could wholeheartedly implement supporting policies such as reduced parking and public transport-supportive land use configurations. It would also be possible to improve public transport by devoting more road capacity to public modes. While some of Gautrain's critics argue that the money should have been spent on bus rapid transit (BRT) facilities, these are also going ahead to increase the reach of the mass transit system.

This would establish a virtuous cycle to improve travel conditions and access to opportunities for all. Not by trying to stomp out cars, but by providing meaningful choice at all levels of the travel market. The private automobile would no longer be the only mode of transport to aspire to. Improved sustainability would have been achieved - or at least begun - not only in reduced emissions from transport, but also in broader social and economic terms.

no free lunch

Most of the debate over nuclear power as a replacement for fossil fuels centres on three things:

1. security risks associated with proliferation of raw materials for nuclear weapons;
2. health risks from accidents or sabotage; and
3. unresolved challenges in long-term management of nuclear waste.

The arguments assume that if we could resolve those issues then we would have a free lunch: low-carbon energy for the masses. Actually, carbon wasn't an issue when the pitch for nuclear energy was first made, but now it's presented as the main reason for rejuvenating the flagging industry.

Let's suspend reality for a moment and assume that those three issues are actually resolved. Then we have to ask, "is nuclear really low-carbon?" The answer is being debated. Some claim that if you consider life-cycle emissions, there are quite a lot of carbon emissions in the construction of plants, and in the mining and processing of uranium. Others say that carbon emissions for wind and nuclear fission are on a par. I don't have a hard time buying the argument that its carbon footprint is a better bet than fossil fuels.

But the next question is the clincher: "is it a cost-effective way to address climate change?" If it's going to cost South Africans R400 billion to finance a planned nuclear programme, which won't even touch the country's short-term energy crisis, does the argument that nuclear is the only non-coal way to meet the needs of a growing economy really hold water? Has anyone really looked at how much R400 billion could achieve with a combined strategy to implement distributed renewable generation systems and increase energy efficiencies to reduce demand?

"It's easy to show that building more reactors makes climate change worse than it should have been," says Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank in Snowmass, Colo. "That's because a dollar put into new reactors gives two to 10 times less climate solution for the amount of coal-power displaced than if you had bought cheaper solutions with the same dollars."

The RMI argument is presented in Nuclear power: economics and climate-protection potential [535 KB PDF]. In the US, nuclear power is responsible for 20% of electricity generation, and RMI estimates that cost-effective competitors could produce more than 13 times this - and do it quickly, without the risks I mentioned at the beginning. Keeping nuclear power alive means diverting private and public investment from the cheaper market winners - cogeneration, renewables, and efficiency - and delaying carbon reductions for more than a decade.

it's not going to be easy

Dongtan is not the only planned sustainable urban area planned for China. Another one is the village of Huangbaiyu, but this one is puzzling. The rendering of the original scheme shows an interesting concept, but this photo of built houses makes it look more like a standard subdivision. Some aspects of the design may indeed reduce ecological impact, but it's no model development.

The real question though, is why existing villagers are being asked to abandon their existing houses to move into new "sustainable" ones. The linked article points out that the existing villagers live scattered among their agricultural fields. Conventional wisdom may suggest that such low densities are bad as an urban model, but I would have thought that there is some wisdom in living where you work. Improving efficiencies by corralling the villagers and knocking down functional houses will only alienate them from the land. If this approach is more efficient, it is only because the fields will be consolidated and farmed by a bigger enterprise, and the villagers will have to start travelling to jobs elsewhere.

Maybe the mistakes with this village are just a bad pixel on a widescreen TV - though the villagers may have a different view - as the general approach sounds positive.

Update on 30 July 2007: I've just discovered another plan for a zero-carbon, zero-waste city, this one in Abu Dhabi. There's a curious rendering of a "solar tree" something like the fake trees that double as relay stations for cellular networks in South Africa, but this one has solar panels.

local responses to global change

One of the challenges of climate change is the need to identify local adaptation strategies. Most climate models deal with the global and regional effects, but municipalities and provinces (or states) are going to have to develop their own policy for adapting to conditions such as water shortages, because local changes will vary. Whether you believe it's caused by global warming or not, there has been localised climate variability that has been significant enough to require a policy response in places like Cape Town. A paper on developing a municipal adaptation plan by UCT researchers Mukheibir and Ziervogel in April 2007 noted:

If climate variability is to increase, it is necessary to understand how climate impacts on the different sectors and their resultant vulnerabilities. This will focus attention on where priority intervention might reduce the impacts of climate change, and help cities to adapt rather than react when the damage has already been done. [...]

Recently, the Western Cape has experienced a drought that can be attributed to climate variability. Climate variability is expected to alter the present hydrological resources in Southern Africa and to place added pressure on the adaptability of future water resources.

Get out your rain barrel. Things are gonna get worse.

That's the adaptation side of the climate equation. The issue of localised responses also applies to the more frequently discussed issue of how to minimise climate change. A number of strategies are based on the idea of taking carbon out of the air. There's a lot of debate about whether there is any point at all in planting trees to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, but a recent study financed by the National Science Foundation has shown that there is absolutely no point in planting trees for this purpose in northern latitudes. Tropical rainforests seem to be far more effective as carbon sinks. So if you're feeling uneasy about your carbon-heavy lifestyle and want to pay someone to plant guilt-reducing trees, at least make sure they are going where they'll make a difference.

Anyway, as this grist post about carbon offsets points out, if we're going to do anything with trees it's probably a better idea to focus on "avoided deforestation" projects rather than on planting new forests. Vast swaths of tropical rainforest are cleared by burning, which pumps more carbon into the air, and oftentimes the cleared land is useless for agriculture and is abandoned after a couple of years.

fuel efficiency does not equal new jobs

Green Car Congress reports on a study finding that increasing the average fuel economy of new automobiles to 35 mpg by 2018 would save consumers $61 billion at the gas pump. This money would be spent elsewhere, increasing US employment by 241,000 jobs in the year 2020. [via WorldChanging]

Technological efficiency should be a good thing, but I am not convinced that this particular improvement would result in greater disposable income for the consumer, as the analysis claims. There are at least two other possible scenarios.

One is that the cost of fuel will increase, offsetting the benefit of reduced consumption. This can happen regardless of the type of fuel used. Petroleum is likely to increase in price as oil supplies decline, and there is no guarantee that replacement fuels won't rise along with it. The nascent bioethanol industry in the US is subsidised, but once the industry is established the subsidies could disappear, particularly if a higher oil price makes ethanol more competitive without artificial subsidies.

The other possibility is that people will use travel savings to increase the distance they travel. I haven't seen any evidence that savings in cost per km travelled result in reduced spending on travel. (Anyone?) In fact, over the decades there has been a steady improvement in automobile fuel economy, and a steady increase in commuting distances. This makes intuitive sense: people balance their personal budgets by trading off the cost of housing against the cost of travel. Or we keep spending the same on travel, but the reduced cost per km lets us travel farther to reach a bigger range of products, services or jobs. The point is that even if we are spending less on fossil fuels, we aren't spending less (or more)on transport and housing, so we aren't creating jobs directly. We may be replacing some oil industry jobs with ethanol industry jobs, but the ethanol industry is creating new challenges that threaten to overshadow potential employment benefits.

If you want to get technical about why reduced travel costs per unit distance can have almost no impact on personal travel budgets, Echenique and Ponti have written a very clear 7-page explanation. [234 KB PDF] Which, to keep things interesting, also raises the point that reduced transport costs per unit distance can increase competition between businesses by reducing locational advantages. Their point is that there are potential benefits from reduced transport costs beyond those generally considered by transport planners, and so I have to admit the possibility of economic benefits from improved fuel efficiency. But there would still be a downside: increased travel requires more road capacity, more urban sprawl and associated negative implications for sustainability. Damn, this stuff is complicated.

city vs farm

In the battle to prevent urban development from continuing its relentless consumption of valuable farmland, planners often rely on establishing a legally defined urban edge and hoping like hell that developers don't jump the fence. Knowing that pressure for urban growth will need an outlet, some delve deeper into strategies to increase densities or allow growth to take place in a few discrete locations outside the main town, or along transport routes or in some other well-defined pattern.

Stellenbosch in South Africa and Cambridge in the UK have taken similar approaches to testing alternatives to see what might be the most sustainable approach in their respective circumstances. Their spatial planning studies are a step in the right direction, because they recognise first that there are a range of options for accommodating growth and second that by considering urban development, transportation and other municipal services together, they can explore the overall impact on sustainability of different growth patterns.

But a limitation of most exercises in limiting sprawl is that they treat urban and rural areas as completely separate, unrelated entities. New Ruralism takes the view that there is a functional relationship between the two, and that this relationship is growing stronger, thanks to a number of converging trends. Increasing demands for fresh, seasonal, organically grown food, as well as recognition of the need to reduce energy inputs for growing and transporting agricultural produce, have resulted in new opportunities for farms on the urban fringes.

It used to be that farmers sold all their produce via central wholesale markets, and their only interaction with consumers was at farm stalls catering to city dwellers on Sunday outings or at a few farmers' markets in the city. Now, with growing demand for food from trusted sources, farmers are increasingly selling direct to the public via weekly boxed deliveries or special retail outlets. (In South Africa, check out urban sprout's ubergreen organic eco directory, listing more than 50 organic farmers, growers and producers in the Western Cape.) This means that smaller, labour-intensive farms can remain viable in areas where they might previously have been forced to close shop in the face of development pressure.

The farm is coming to the city, and the opportunity for planners is that the relationship between town and country can be nurtured so that agriculture is supported. The urban boundary shouldn't be ignored, but rather than thinking of it as a dam wall to keep the flood of humanity off productive land, think of it as an interface: a place for economic and social exchange, for sharing knowledge and raising awareness of interdependencies. Cuba learnt some valuable lessons about this relationship when their oil supply dried up, and perhaps our chance is now.

taxi, anyone?

I confess to knowing nothing about the war in the DRC, but I was interested to learn that a source of income for some of the demobilised child soldiers is the toleka, or taxi-bike, a virtually unmodified bicycle. Many of these "tolekiste" are shunned by society, and find it difficult to reintegrate with civilian life, often turning to crime and living as street children. Research by War Child suggests that for those who manage to find legitimate incomes, the toleka is a more widely adopted business than either small-scale farming or animal husbandry [see pages 14 & 15 of PDF file].