They're all doing it because it makes sense

The WSJ looks at early days in the development of new "green" jobs:

"Declaring that a city is going to replace yesterday's lost jobs with new green ones is a lot easier than actually doing so."

Although the general tone is "this is hyped" the actual story shows some movement (and a well-named official):

Plenty of people in Joliet recall the anticipation for other new industries that took years to develop. Tom Proffitt, an electrician for 37 years, remembers the excitement in the 1980s about laying fiber-optic cables for the expected advancements in information technology. He said many local companies didn't want to invest in equipment, fearing the industry would never become such a major force. "It took a few years" before the work materialized, he said.

Now Mr. Proffitt, the training director for a local electrical union, takes a trailer around to career fairs to show off solar equipment to high school students. His union just ordered new solar panels, at $700 apiece, to give apprentices a new set of skills for work they expect to come. "Solar was hyped and hyped," he said. "Now it's creeping in there."

Cyclists versus buses

The slightly annoying but always interesting Copenhagenise guy has a good follow on story in this endless battle...

"A bus full of Dutch exchange students were stranded in the northern Danish city of Aalborg because an angry cyclist stole the keys to their tourist bus.

The students stopped at a supermarket and their chauffeur parked illegally on the bike lane.

This irritated a local cycling citizen so much that he first scolded the Dutch angrily and then went into the bus and took the key.

'He simply takes the key out of the ignition and then disappears. So we have a bus chauffeur without any keys to a Dutch coach', said Peter Redder fra North Jutland Police.

The Dutch were able to get the bus moved and had to spend an extra night while they waited for reserve keys to be sent from the Netherlands. The Dutch admitted that it wasn't clever not to have extra keys and that they realise they shouldn't have parked in the bike lane, but they weren't too thrilled by the episode."

I guess it is all a gamble...

At a recent East-West Center conference in Honolulu

"Lin Chien-yuan, deputy mayor of Taipei, discussed some creative approaches to energy conservation, including programs in Taipei that qualify energy-savers to enter a cash lottery.

'Every month, we send out a notice of how much you spend for electricity,' Lin said. 'If you have saved more than 10 percent, you have saved money, of course. Not only that, you qualify for the lottery.'"

Its not just the science

An interesting lecture by an NYU Professor visiting Abu Dabi (and reported on by a local blogger) confronts the inconvenient truth that we simply do not have enough information to make easy business decisions on adaptation to climate change. So let's not hang it all on the science (important though that is), but include the vast range of public policy inputs and other business and cultural factors in working out our investment strategies for adaptation.

The blogger then asks:

"In Abu Dhabi's case, should the Government be thinking of moving the emirate's capital inland to its original seat, Al Ain? How should Abu Dhabi's vital coastal power and water desalination plants be protected? And what about the big industrial complexes on the Gulf coast?

In Dubai, what will happen to the huge Jebel Ali container port? Could Dubai's residents be reduced to eking out a living from offering well-heeled travellers tours of 'the Atlantis of the Gulf'?

The point is that science cannot currently provide the answers, although it may be able to do so in future. More data are needed, and we had better get cracking on making the required but difficult observations.

Levels of mandate - voluntary/mandatory continued

The Fresno Bee (can that be a real name?): Two concurrent battles globally - levels of government (in this case, State and local) that are battling over jurisdiction and the voluntary/mandatory battle over emissions targets.

"This month, Fresno County political leaders expect to vote on proposed targets for cutting emissions of those climate-changing gases -- mainly carbon dioxide from burning gasoline and other fossil fuels. In the long term, making those cuts will change how cities grow and how their people move around.

The local effort is intended at least partly to head off more aggressive targets that could be imposed this year by the state Air Resources Board, which oversees California's climate-change program.

'We felt it was prudent for us to provide a recommendation rather than letting the ARB do it on their own,' said David Fey, deputy city planner in Clovis.

Whether that strategy will work is not clear. The state still reserves the right to set more aggressive targets and may need to do so, because it is counting on local land-use and transportation measures to cut large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

An initial plan from December 2008 estimated that 5 million metric tons per year of emissions could be cut that way. That's equivalent to taking 1 million cars and light trucks off the road completely.

Local governments jealously guard their longstanding control of local land use.

The law mandating the greenhouse gas targets -- Senate Bill 375 from 2008 -- doesn't change that. It does, however, call for the ARB to set emissions targets, which the locals will have to meet or risk loss of funding for transportation and other uses."

The Commissioners might be happy to wait, I suspect

Environment Canterbury in New Zealand just gets better and better and Fiji is now introduced as an insult to political discourse!

"The Government has cancelled an October regional council election, depriving 378,512 Kiwis of a vote for the next 3 1/2 years.

Legislation reforming Environment Canterbury was introduced to Parliament last night under urgency, prompting a furious debate and accusations of 'a constitutional outrage'.

'Those people will be lucky to get a vote before the people of Fiji,' Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said.

Environment Minister Nick Smith and Local Government Minister Rodney Hide announced yesterday that the 14 elected ECan councillors would be replaced by up to seven commissioners.

Dame Margaret Bazley will lead the commissioners and her colleagues will be appointed by Mr Hide. The Government expected the commissioners would be ready to take over on May 1.

Elections scheduled for October have been scrapped and will not be held until October 2013, unless the commissioners are happy to finish their work earlier."

Haven't we learned about cutting corners yet?

StreetCorner.com.au reports on another cross government dispute. And who would back the States in implementing "fast-track" approaches? Especially in NSW?

"Waverley and Woollahra Mayors, Sally Betts and Andrew Petrie, have launched a stinging attack on the Premier Kristina Keneally’s ambitions to take even more planning powers from Councils saying it will hurt local residents.

Political opponents, Labor Member for Coogee Paul Pearce and the Liberal’s candidate for Coogee, Randwick Councillor Bruce Notley-Smith, are also united in their opposition to “emergency” fast-track Stimulus Package planning measures being extended to “significant projects”. They argue that the community will be cut out of the decision making process on the developments that impact them most. On the other hand, developers are welcoming the Review and all seem to agree that developers will be the main beneficiaries if even more projects bypass Councils and local community consultation processes."

One false move when you are sharing the road

My friend Mayor  Bob Harvey has done a great job (with some wonderful assistance) over the years in Waitakere in New Zealand but even so - this view from the cycle is a little hair-raising...

Oh dear God: evidence that we need a moratorium on all "sustainable city" awards

The Globe Awards have a nicely designed web-site (though with the requisite typos) but are very lazy on the whole subject. Is there any excuse for having an award for a sustainable city again this decade? And these cities are the finalists, for goodness sakes?

"# Curitiba, Brazil
# Malmö, Sweden
# Murcia, Spain
# Songpa, South Korea
# Stargard Szczecinski, Poland
# Sydney, Australia"

Jeepers, if even Seattle is dragging the chain...

Mayor McGinn - who knocked off the redoubtable Greg Nichols (now at Harvard) as Mayor of Seattle last year - is holding the line on a regional transport plan (and at least the water supply is looking up) but the majority investment strategy is still way askew:

"McGinn, in contrast, said this weekend (in remarks the invite-only Climate Neutral Seattle Unconference...) he decided to go it alone in voting against the plan because “it doesn’t meet our objectives on transit, land use, social equity, or greenhouse gas emissions.” Instead of moving the region boldly forward in promoting transit, density, equitable access to infrastructure, and greenhouse-gas reductions, the plan preserves the region’s “moderate” status quo—relatively modest investments in transit and biking coupled with massive outlays on new highways for cars.

McGinn’s position, incidentally, is shared by groups like the Bicycle Alliance of Washington, the Cascade Bicycle Club, the Transportation Choices Coalition, the Washington Environmental Council—and even those radical lefties at the US Environmental Protection Agency."

And it makes the discipline a lot easier

Andrew Sullivan (Taking Green To The Extreme - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan) has an interesting series going on at the moment showing that we need a dose of humanism (not to mention reality and compassion) in the green movement more than ever...

Lisa Hymas contends that "the single most meaningful contribution I can make to a cleaner, greener world is to not have children."

The average American generates about 66 times more CO2 each year than the average Bangladeshi—20 tons versus 0.3 tons. If you consider not just the carbon impact of your own kids but of your kids' kids and so on, the numbers get even starker. According to a 2009 study in Global Environmental Change [PDF] that took into account the long-term impact of Americans' descendants, each child adds an estimated 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to a parent's carbon legacy—that's about 5.7 times his or her direct lifetime emissions.

Another city on the brink

Other governments face the consequences of population loss and high unemployment...and the State has no funds to offer either.

Report: Detroit bankruptcy looms without drastic change | detnews.com | The Detroit News:

Detroit -- Mayor Dave Bing and the City Council must reduce the size of government and slash the city's budget deficit to stave off bankruptcy or state receivership, according to a report released Monday.

Without draconian cuts and changes aimed at downsizing government, the city could end up with a 'possible' general fund deficit between $446 million and $466 million to its $1.6 billion budget.

What a mess

Villaraigosa Calls For City Agencies To Close 2 Days A Week: "The mayor of Los Angeles says all city departments except police, public safety and those that make money must close two days a week because of a budget crisis."

(From the Huffington Post)

Apparently brought on by a dispute over raised water rates, this is another example of multiple levels of mandates that cross governance systems and become unworkable. And the end result? A shuffling crisis of service delivery tha makes everyone even more cynical about local governments...

Its the layers that are the problem

Disputes over the different mandates of levels of government is a continuing theme - now being played out ruthlessly in New Zealand with the sacking of Environment Canterbury, a regional Council. what was the role of the territorial Mayors?

The Press reports:

Canterbury council chief executives left Environment Canterbury (ECan) meetings "with a cream cake in one hand and a blood-covered knife in the other", ousted ECan deputy chairwoman Jo Kane says.

Her comments come as Canterbury mayors who urged the demise of ECan will soon influence how the regional council is run.

Critics have accused Canterbury's 10 mayors of a "power grab" after legislation rushed through Parliament last week made them advisers to the Government-appointed commissioners who will replace the 14 sacked regional councillors.

Christchurch City councillors said the mayors were sharing the spoils of victory, with Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker already indicating a willingness to take control of the city's buses from ECan.

Creative thinking about adaptation

New York has been the site of some fascinating approaches to climate adaptation - using zones and different teams of architects' imaginations - and the Museum of Modern Art has just displayed some of the results.

MoMA | Rising Currents: Opening of the Exhibition