Streetsblog New York City

Last night’s mayoral forum on sustainability at Cooper Union was the first to attract the full slate of candidates this election season, perhaps a sign that environmental issues now figure prominently in the campaigns’ electoral calculus. Organized by the New York League of Conservation Voters Education Fund and the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design, the event packed all nine registered mayoral candidates onto the stage, where Brian Lehrer of WNYC guided a conversation that touched on topics ranging from climate change to energy efficiency.

All candidates but Republican John Catsimatidis assured the audience that they believed in climate change, thought the next mayor should take measures to reduce the number of cars entering Manhattan below 59th Street, and would like to see an increase in bicycle commuting.

The latter two points came forth due to a cautious approach by Lehrer, who opted to acknowledge the touchy political subjects of congestion pricing and bike lanes while allowing the candidates to avoid an overt stance. While this put all mayoral candidates but Catsimatidis on the record in favor of the outcomes of bike lanes, bike-share, and road pricing, it left the audience without an explanation of how candidates who have stated disdain for bike infrastructure and congestion pricing would achieve these goals.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, former City Council Member Sal Albanese, and former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion did expand on this discussion by positioning multi-modal transit networks at the core of their sustainability platforms. Albanese renewed his call for fair tolling and the expansion of bike lanes and Select Bus Service to “get as many people out of their cars as possible.” Quinn pitched an expansion of Bus Rapid Transit and an expanded network of ferries to bring East River Ferry-style options to other waterfront neighborhoods. Carrion expressed support for more efficient bus, car, and taxi fleets and pushed for “smart growth, building vertically instead of horizontally, and transit oriented development” within a “holistic” transportation network that prioritizes mass transit, bicycling, and walking.

Meanwhile, the current and former comptrollers on stage, John Liu and Bill Thompson, offered only passing mentions of the need for improved transit infrastructure to accommodate impending population growth. Former MTA chief and Republican frontrunner Joe Lhota stepped into the discussion with a jab at the aging infrastructure he once oversaw, though he made no proposal to modernize it. This came not long after Lhota offhandedly endorsed the Bloomberg administration’s proposed rezoning of East Midtown, stating that the redevelopment of the business district would replace mid-century structures with more energy-efficient new towers. Lhota left unresolved the question of how to retrofit the aged and overloaded Lexington Avenue subway line to absorb the increased ridership that would come with the rezoning.

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Expanding NEPA to include climate impacts and adaptability won't necessarily mean a future free from this. Photo: Macomb Politics

Since 1970, the National Environmental Protection Act has required federal agencies to consider the impacts of their projects on air, water, and soil pollution — but not on climate change.

Until recently, carbon dioxide, which causes global warning, wasn’t classified as a pollutant and so couldn’t be regulated under environmental laws. The EPA in 2009 asserted its power to regulate carbon emissions but hasn’t applied it to NEPA analyses for infrastructure – until now.

President Obama hasn’t made the announcement yet, but Bloomberg reported Friday that he “is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects, from pipelines to highways.”

There’s more – projects could also be evaluated according to resiliency in the face of climate change. Would the new infrastructure be destroyed if faced with flooding, drought, or other severe weather? Bloomberg reports that the White House is also “looking at” requiring these climate adaptability and resiliency reports for projects “with 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions or more per year, the equivalent of burning about 100 rail cars of coal.”

Does this mean no more highways?

The conservative National Review’s headline about the changes was, “Did Obama Just Block Keystone?” Columnist Stanley Kurtz speculated that Obama could publicly approve the Keystone XL pipeline and then let the new environmental review process rule it out.

Could the same go for highway projects?

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A study by the government of the Australian state of Victoria highlights the limits of electric cars, in isolation, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Australian government researchers say electric vehicles are no environmental panacea. Photo: The Age

The Victorian government’s ongoing “electric vehicle trial” [PDF] found that electric cars powered by coal may actually produce more carbon emissions than petroleum-fueled cars over the lifetime of the vehicle, from manufacturing to junkyard. This is due in part to the added environmental impacts of the lithium batteries that electric cars require.

This is not to say that EVs won’t improve on internal combustion engines. It all depends on where the electricity comes from. The authors found that, taking into account the full vehicle life-cycle, an electric car powered by 100 percent renewable energy — like wind and solar — can begin outperforming gas-powered cars after two years of use.

In the United States, the cleanest sources of electricity are near the coasts, and EVs in those areas outperform the best hybrids, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists released last spring. But in the Midwest and Mountain West, coal-powered energy generation makes EVs dirtier.

Of course, even setting aside the deaths, injuries, chronic diseases, and traffic jams caused by a car-dependent transportation system, vehicle emissions are far from the only environmental cost of cars. To reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, cutting down on the “embedded energy” that comes with sprawling development is absolutely essential. And while cleaner cars can help curb global warming, the wrong incentives for their use can also dump more carbon into the air. To the extent that policies discourage transit, biking, or walking in order to favor electric vehicles, the net effect can actually backfire. Witness Denmark’s incentives to park electric cars in the center city, which undermines the high mode-share for greener modes of travel.

The Australian government has been providing a better incentive, helping gas stations install electric vehicle charging facilities. The city of Melbourne currently has about 30 such stations in the central business district but 10 more are on the way as part of a government trial, reports Melbourne’s The Age.

Governor Cuomo has the opportunity to build a smarter and more resilient regional transportation network. Photo: Daily News

“Climate change is a reality… for us to sit here today and say this is a once-in-a-generation, and it’s not going to happen again, I think would be short-sighted… I’m hopeful that not only will we rebuild this city and metropolitan area but use this as an opportunity to build it back smarter.”

– Governor Andrew Cuomo

Amen Governor Cuomo. Hurricane Sandy should be the massive bucket of cold water needed to rouse New York’s political class into making the multitude of changes required for New York City to survive the rising ocean, and remain a leading global city.

The inconvenient reality is that the water is rising, and New York is a city built on islands. According to New York City’s Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, New York Harbor has risen about a foot since 1900, and will rise at least another three feet in the next century. If polar ice caps melt — which appears to be happening — harbor waters will rise six feet or more.

There is an enormous amount of work to do. New York needs expansive new flood defenses, including the vast expansion and restoration of storm surge-absorbing wetlands and oyster beds. These “soft edges” will have to be accompanied by some “hard edges,” including sea walls and, possibly, massive surge barriers like London’s Thames Barrier. The debate over the right mix of “soft” and “hard” approaches is now underway, even as some New Yorkers still huddle without power or water in darkened apartments.

Beyond debate is that our vulnerable electrical and transit systems have to be made more resistant to flooding. However, our century-old transit system is creaking along under a huge debt, the next transit capital plan is completely unfunded, and there is no money for flood defenses. Meanwhile, our downstate road network is burdened by a totally backward and unfair toll system that causes costly traffic jams, wastes time and consumes big tax subsidies for bridge and road repairs.

New York can’t have “smart rebuilding” and a dumb, broke transportation system. One of the pillars of Governor Cuomo’s rebuilding plan for the New York City area must be tolling the East River Bridges and access to the Central Business District, and reducing overpriced tolls on outer bridge crossings. New toll revenue from this common sense plan should be dedicated to rebuilding the downstate transit and road system, and toughening it against floods. This “bridge swap” toll plan, first proposed by transportation engineer Sam Schwartz, will also free up hundreds of millions in general tax revenue currently spent on roads for new flood defenses.

Hurricane Sandy was a dire message that New York cannot afford the luxury of political dysfunction and irrational governance. In this crisis, there is a clear opportunity for Governor Cuomo to build a new, smarter, tougher transit and transportation system that can serve as the backbone of his efforts to rebuild the region.

If there’s any good news to come out of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, it’s that political leaders and the press are actually talking about climate change. At the end of a long campaign season with barely a mention of the issue, it’s a relief to hear some sane discussion of the issue based on the premise that global warming is real.

While climate scientists hesitate to attribute any single weather event to global warming, many agree that elevated temperatures and sea levels conspired to make this storm especially damaging. And the frequency of storms like Sandy will only escalate as global temperatures rise.

We’ve collected, below, some of the most notable statements about the connection between Sandy and climate change, and what it means for the future:

• Bloomberg Businessweek made the scene of a flooded NYC street its cover, carrying the news that global insurers are beginning to warn about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. A Germany-based insurer reported that the number of weather-related loss events in North America has nearly quintupled over the past three decades.
• The Center for American Progress reports that the United States experienced a record 14 extreme weather events that caused more than $1 billion in damage and there have been seven so far this year. Only five states were spared damage.
• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wasn’t mincing words on the topic. “Part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality,” he said Wednesday during a helicopter tour of the damage. “Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable. There’s only so long you can say, ‘This is once in a lifetime, and it’s not going to happen again.’”

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The overwhelming sentiment that greeted our story on the gas consumption maps the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club put out last week went something like this: These are almost useful. Just about everyone agreed that looking at total fuel consumption per county wasn’t very informative without weighing that number against population.

There were problems with doing per-capita fuel comparisons, but after hearing from several sources (including Streetsblog) that it was needed, NRDC’s Deron Lovaas has put out a follow-up post with new maps and charts that have, in my opinion, much more useful information.

First, the map of per-capita fuel consumption:

This per-capita map of gas consumption provides more nuance than the previous map, giving totals per country, but it still doesn't answer all the questions. Graphic: NRDC.

As Lovaas mentioned last week, there are problems with this map too. Some of these places are so rural and lightly populated that massive per-capita fuel consumption just isn’t a big enough problem to worry about, since there are few capitas there. Plus, there’s the problem of through-traffic — in many rural states, most traffic neither originates nor ends up there. So, since NRDC and the Sierra Club designed these maps, in part, to help them strategize where to focus their efforts, this per-capita map is of limited value.

This chart is where it starts getting good. It shows the counties with the highest total gasoline usage and ranks them by per-capita gas usage, showing where there are a whole lot of people using a whole lot of gas:

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Traffic congestion, air pollution, and lack of mobility disproportionately harm the poor in the developing world when transportation investments favor automobiles. Photo: Owni

If you think the United States is doing a bad job shifting toward sustainable transportation, take a look at the developing world. The places with the most to lose from auto-oriented development are doubling down on it — to the enormous detriment of their citizens, especially the poorest.

The number of cars in the world is expect to grow as much as 375 percent by 2050. Road fatalities in low- and middle-income countries are expected to rise by 80 percent just over the next eight years, with pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable users making up about half those deaths. Harmful air pollutants that already cause 1.3 million premature deaths each year, mostly in developing and middle-income countries, will rise. And carbon dioxide emissions from transport could grow 300 percent over 2005 levels by 2050 — with most of the growth, again, coming from the developing world.

The energy consumed by the transportation sector globally more than doubled between 1970 and 2005. Source: Worldwatch Institute.

Michael Replogle and Colin Hughes warn of these dire outcomes in their article on sustainable transportation for the 2012 State of the World report, published by the Worldwatch Institute. While international climate change agreements have historically overlooked the transportation sector, the authors note some promising changes afoot as international development banks seek to add transit projects to their portfolios.

Replogle and Hughes frame transportation policy in terms of both sustainability and equity. The urban poor lose out disproportionately when car-oriented infrastructure dominates, they note, since the lack of affordable transportation forces them “to choose between low incomes in informal sector employment close to affordable housing and higher-wage jobs that force them to spend a large share of their income and hours each day commuting.”

Compounding the inequity, fossil fuel subsidies disproportionately allocate public funds to the wealthy, the authors report: “The International Energy Agency estimates that only eight percent of the $409 billion that the world spent in 2010 to subsidize fossil fuel consumption (about half of which is used for transport) went to the poorest 20 percent of the population.”

Unfortunately, say Replogle and Hughes, international agreements on poverty reduction and climate change have largely ignored transportation. Even the Agenda 21 agreement, a bogeyman among far-right cranks, included “no targets, goals, commitments, or other forms of accountability” for sustainable transport.

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Alex Steffen goes by the title “planetary futurist,” which makes me realize I should probably spruce up my title to something that makes me sound like I should be wearing a cape, too. What he does is write about sustainable cities, on WorldChanging.com for seven years and more recently in his book, Carbon Zero.

He just gave a TED talk about how to make cities more sustainable. And while he’s primarily looking at climate impacts, he pretty conclusively dismissed the notion that the problem can be solved with clean fuels.

“We tend to seek simple answers,” he said. And if we assume the problem is fossil fuels, he said, “the answer must be to replace fossil fuels with clean sources of energy. And while we do need clean energy, I would put to you that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we’re setting ourselves up not to solve it.”

With a rapidly urbanizing planet and eight billion people projected to live in or near cities by midcentury, Steffen asserts that it may just not be possible to generate enough energy to power all those cities – if those cities continue to look like the ones in the developed world today, anyway. The solution, he said, is density.

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Judging from the current political discourse in Washington, you would guess we are a nation strongly divided on the issue of climate change. But you’d be wrong, according to a new poll from Yale University.

Americans favor transportation policies that would address climate change, such as increased transit and bike lanes, according to a new poll. Photo: Green Chip Stocks

A random survey of 1,010 adults found that 71 percent think that global warming should be a “very high,” “high” or “medium priority” for the president and Congress. Americans overwhelmingly support policy changes that would help address the issue, the poll found. Participants favored developing clean energy sources by a more than 9-to-1 ratio.

“We find very strong bipartisan support for a variety of climate and energy policies in this country,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “It runs contrary to what you might expect looking at, for instance, the current make up of Congress and the Republican candidates for president.”

Transportation and planning policies to avert global warming also enjoyed wide approval among survey participants: 77 percent said they support adding bike lanes to roads, and 80 percent said they support expanding public transportation service.

This was true even among self-identifying Republicans. Some 74 percent of Republican respondents said they supported bike lanes and 80 percent signaled their support for increased public transit availability.

Majorities also supported expanding mixed-use zoning, reducing sprawl and promoting energy efficient apartments over single-family homes.

Republicans were more evenly split on issues of zoning and sprawl; 59 percent said they opposed zoning for mixed-uses in order to reduce the need for a car. However, Republicans were split 50-50 on using zoning to reduce sprawl and commute times.

While Americans were generally supportive of climate change policy fixes, their commitment did not go as far when their wallets entered the equation.

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Michael Bloomberg at the C40 summit in São Paulo, where he spoke strongly of the environmental need for transportation reform. Photo: nyc.gov.

When it comes to sustainable transportation, Michael Bloomberg is saving his strongest words for an international audience. While the mayor’s rhetoric on transportation now tends to focus on safety, when transportation is on his agenda at all, at a meeting of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group in São Paulo Bloomberg brought back some of his 2007-vintage language.

Said the mayor in his speech:

“The intense burning of fossil fuels in the world’s cities – where 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced – not only contributes to climate change, it also clogs the streets, pollutes the air, and shortens the lives of their millions of residents. How we as mayors respond to these challenges will strongly determine the fate of the entire world, now and for decades to come.”

Bloomberg, the current chair of the C40 project, was there to announce the release of two studies and a new partnership between the coalition of big-city mayors and the World Bank.

The first study created a shared greenhouse gas reporting system for the C40 cities, allowing high-quality comparisons for the first time. The 42 C40 cities that participated were responsible for 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions, it found, roughly equivalent to the emissions of Japan.

Numbers like that fed into what at times seemed to be a bit of urban policy triumphalism on the part of the mayors. “Because of our shared experiences in leading the world’s great cities, and because, more than anyone else, we grasp the urgency of the challenges we now face, no one can do more to produce good outcomes for the world than we, the mayors of great cities, can,” said Bloomberg.

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