Published on April 22nd, 2009
Atlanta and Miami Among Cities Declaring Green Initiatives
by Lori Brown
The cities of Atlanta and Miami are two of the most recent cities to announce their green initiatives –Atlanta for zero-waste and Miami for energy efficiency. Both Atlanta and Miami hope to serve as model cities for their respective programs, inspiring other cities to expand their green efforts.
Downtown Atlanta announced its plan to become the Southeast’s first Zero Waste Zone in February of this year, with plans to expand the program across the state in the near future. The project’s first stop was the downtown Atlanta convention district, where hundreds of thousands tons of waste are sent to landfills. Here’s an outline of some measures put in place to accomplish a zero waste initiative:
The Hyatt Regency Atlanta, where 423,433 meals were served in 2008, now diverts an estimated 928,000 pounds of residual food product from the landfill to be composted. All plates are wiped clean of food, including meat products and placed in compost containers. The spent grease from frying is even captured and refined into bio-fuel.
The city now has commercially available biodiesel fuel, being sold for $2.29 a gallon, for any vehicle that runs on diesel. The fuel is made from locally collected fryer oils, meaning it doesn’t travel far from the source to the pump.
The food waste is collected and blended with wood and yard waste, creating a high-quality organic compost available for sale to local farmers, landscapers and gardeners.
According to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, Georgians dispose of more than 17 million tons of solid waste per year. Recoverable products, including paper, organics and plastics, make up 82 percent of the recyclable materials disposed of in the landfills. With the Zero Waste Zone project, these reusable products will be recycled.
300 Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles will be added to the Florida Power & Light Company fleet, powered using 50 new charging stations. Photo: Austinenergy.com
A bit further South, the mayor of Miami announced this week an energy initiative to invest in Smart Grid technology and renewable energy over the next two years. The initiative, called “Energy Smart Miami,” is expected to create 800 to 1,000 jobs to implement a wide range of technologies to improve electricity delivery and electricity management.
The initiative will use federal economic stimulus funds to help implement the $200 million energy efficiency investment. Program highlights will include:
The installation of Smart Meters to more than 1 million homes and most businesses in Miami-Dade County. The Smart Meters will allow customers to monitor energy use.
The addition of solar panels to local universities and schools to help meet their energy needs with renewable, non-polluting technologies.
The implementation of a Smart-Grid Automation and Communication system to connect Smart Meters, high-efficiency transformers, digitized substations, power generation and other equipment.
Both Atlanta and Miami are serving as model cities for their respective programs. Carol Browner, who serves as President Obama’s point person on energy and climate change said of Miami’s program, “I commend Mayor Diaz for creating a plan that will put these recovery dollars to work and make Miami a Smart Grid model for cities across our country.”
Its good to see Miami is finally getting with the Green program. I have to give the Mayor credit.
Showing posts with label Green initiatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green initiatives. Show all posts
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
A Green Scorecard
How a Green Scorecard Can Stimulate the Economy
Richard Conniff
Updated: 12/17/2008 12:36:05 PM
Note: Yale Environment 360 is a publication of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Visit them at www.e360.yale.edu.
And so our eight-year interlude from reality draws to a close, and the job of cleaning up begins. The trouble is, we’re not just cleaning up after a failed presidency. We’re cleaning up after a two-century binge.
Barack Obama has won an historic victory, and with it the right to take office under the most difficult circumstances since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maybe more difficult, because while both FDR and Obama had financial meltdowns to deal with, Obama also faces the meltdown meltdown — the rapid disintegration of the planet's climate system that threatens to challenge the very foundations of our civilization.
Do you think that sounds melodramatic? Let me give it to you from the abstract of a scientific paper written earlier this year by one of the people who now work for Mr. Obama, NASA scientist James Hansen. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm." In other words, if we keep increasing carbon any longer, the earth itself will make our efforts moot.
Hansen's calculation is a scientifically grounded way of saying: Everything must change at once. To meet his target, before enough feedback loops kick in to irrevocably warm the planet, Hansen says fossil-fuel combustion, particularly coal, must cease around the planet by about 2030, and that it must happen sooner in the industrialized nations. As the climate observer, and tireless blogger, Joe Romm observed when Hansen's paper was published, it means that "we need to go straight to the government-led WWII-style effort for the whole planet that is sustained for decades." (Well, back to FDR, what do you know.).
Anyway, here are some of the pieces of what Obama must push for:
Massive government investment in green energy. For this to have any hope of being politically viable, it will need to be seen as the single huge stimulus effort that might lift us out of our financial swamp. (That's almost certainly true, by the way — name another emergent technology capable of re-floating the economy for the long run). We have at least some of the technologies we'd need — wind, the newly promising desert solar arrays, and the ever-useful insulation (the installation of which would at least create a lot of jobs — you're not going to send your house to China for a layer of fiberglass). You might also push for nuclear, but it takes a long time and it's probably too expensive to make a rational list. Still, no holds barred.
A stiff cap on carbon, which will help drive the process. Again, to have any chance of passing politically, it will need to come with the feature proposed in recent years by Peter Barnes, and that Obama has semi-endorsed: a "cap and share" approach that would return the revenue raised directly to consumers. That is, Exxon would pay for the permit to pour carbon into the atmosphere, a cost that would rise steadily as the cap was lowered. But instead of the money going into government coffers, every American would get a check each year for their share of the proceeds. They'd be made whole against the rising cost of energy, while the shock that the price signal would send would be preserved. Current versions of cap-and-trade are too weak and too riddled with loopholes — getting a clean, tough bill through Congress needs to be a preoccupation of President Obama.
Once the president has done all that tough stuff at home, he'll need to do it all over again, globally. The world is meeting in Copenhagen in December of 2009 to come up with a successor to the Kyoto treaty, the modest first international effort that George W. Bush walked away from weeks after taking office. If Hansen and others are even close to right, this will represent the last legitimate shot the world has at putting itself on a new carbon regime in time to make any difference.
It will be incredibly difficult, mostly because we begin from such unequal places. China has lots of coal and it would like to burn it, because it's the cheapest way to pull rural Chinese out of dire poverty (something the country's leaders would quite like to do because otherwise they won't be the country's leaders much longer). If we want them to use, say, windmills instead, we're going to need to “share some wealth,” north to south, to make it happen. The Chinese opened the bidding last week, with a suggestion that one percent of the U.S. annual GDP would be a good amount to send their way. That's going to be quite a political ask — it means that Americans would be working roughly one hour every two weeks just to help the global South build up their clean alternatives. What we're talking about is a carbon version of the Marshall Plan, and it would mean Obama needs to be not just FDR but Truman and Ike as well.
What it all boils down to is: The bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years ago when we started worrying about global warming, we thought we'd have a generation to pay those bills off. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we'd realized. The melting Arctic is the call from the repo man.
Any hope of succeeding will require Obama to grasp, deep in his guts, the fact that climate, energy, food, and the economy are now hopelessly intertwined, and that trying to solve any one of these problems without taking on the others simply makes all of them worse. More, he needs to understand, again viscerally, the single stark fact of our time: No matter how many votes, no matter how much lobbying, no matter how much pressure you apply, you can't amend the laws of physics and chemistry. They aren't like the laws that politicians are used to dealing with. They will be obeyed, like it or not. 350 is now the most important number on the planet, the red line that defines reality reality.
It doesn't define political reality, however. The political reality goes like this: George W. Bush was so terrible on this issue that the bar has been set incredibly low — Obama will get all the political points he needs with fairly minimal effort. Doing what actually needs to be done will be politically…unpopular isn't even the word. It might well wreck his political future, because it would involve — directly or indirectly — raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now.
My guess, from the outside, is that all Obama's instincts are centrist. Certainly in energy policy he's offered nothing all that bold or interesting, though his sophistication and engagement have grown during the campaign, which is a good sign. A better sign is simply that, by every testimony, he's one of the smartest men ever to assume high political office in this country. Not just smarter than Bush. Really smart. Smart enough, if he sits down to really understand the scale of the problem he faces, that he might decide to take the gambles that the situation requires. He said, not long ago, "under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" — which is a sign of someone who is aware there may be a reality to come to grips with.
First signs to watch for: Does he go to Poland next month for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and in so doing electrify the international talks over carbon? Are people like green-jobs advocate Van Jones on the short list of those he's listening to on energy policy? Can he see clear to making this — after dealing with the short-term financial emergency — his first legislative priority, even before health care?
Obama, and the rest of us, have a lot more to fear than fear itself. We've got carbon, and right now that's the most frightening stuff on earth.
Richard Conniff is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and a National Magazine Award-winning writer, whose articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. His upcoming book, Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time -- My Life Doing Dumb Things With Animals, is due out from W.W. Norton in May. He is the author of six other books, including The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide and Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World. Conniff has also written for Yale e360 about carbon offsets and the greenhouse gas NF3.
More From Yale E360
Obama Ready To Move On Clean-Energy Economy
A Detroit Bailout Must Include a Green Makeover
Obama's Big Climate Challenge
Richard Conniff
Updated: 12/17/2008 12:36:05 PM
Note: Yale Environment 360 is a publication of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Visit them at www.e360.yale.edu.
And so our eight-year interlude from reality draws to a close, and the job of cleaning up begins. The trouble is, we’re not just cleaning up after a failed presidency. We’re cleaning up after a two-century binge.
Barack Obama has won an historic victory, and with it the right to take office under the most difficult circumstances since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maybe more difficult, because while both FDR and Obama had financial meltdowns to deal with, Obama also faces the meltdown meltdown — the rapid disintegration of the planet's climate system that threatens to challenge the very foundations of our civilization.
Do you think that sounds melodramatic? Let me give it to you from the abstract of a scientific paper written earlier this year by one of the people who now work for Mr. Obama, NASA scientist James Hansen. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm." In other words, if we keep increasing carbon any longer, the earth itself will make our efforts moot.
Hansen's calculation is a scientifically grounded way of saying: Everything must change at once. To meet his target, before enough feedback loops kick in to irrevocably warm the planet, Hansen says fossil-fuel combustion, particularly coal, must cease around the planet by about 2030, and that it must happen sooner in the industrialized nations. As the climate observer, and tireless blogger, Joe Romm observed when Hansen's paper was published, it means that "we need to go straight to the government-led WWII-style effort for the whole planet that is sustained for decades." (Well, back to FDR, what do you know.).
Anyway, here are some of the pieces of what Obama must push for:
Massive government investment in green energy. For this to have any hope of being politically viable, it will need to be seen as the single huge stimulus effort that might lift us out of our financial swamp. (That's almost certainly true, by the way — name another emergent technology capable of re-floating the economy for the long run). We have at least some of the technologies we'd need — wind, the newly promising desert solar arrays, and the ever-useful insulation (the installation of which would at least create a lot of jobs — you're not going to send your house to China for a layer of fiberglass). You might also push for nuclear, but it takes a long time and it's probably too expensive to make a rational list. Still, no holds barred.
A stiff cap on carbon, which will help drive the process. Again, to have any chance of passing politically, it will need to come with the feature proposed in recent years by Peter Barnes, and that Obama has semi-endorsed: a "cap and share" approach that would return the revenue raised directly to consumers. That is, Exxon would pay for the permit to pour carbon into the atmosphere, a cost that would rise steadily as the cap was lowered. But instead of the money going into government coffers, every American would get a check each year for their share of the proceeds. They'd be made whole against the rising cost of energy, while the shock that the price signal would send would be preserved. Current versions of cap-and-trade are too weak and too riddled with loopholes — getting a clean, tough bill through Congress needs to be a preoccupation of President Obama.
Once the president has done all that tough stuff at home, he'll need to do it all over again, globally. The world is meeting in Copenhagen in December of 2009 to come up with a successor to the Kyoto treaty, the modest first international effort that George W. Bush walked away from weeks after taking office. If Hansen and others are even close to right, this will represent the last legitimate shot the world has at putting itself on a new carbon regime in time to make any difference.
It will be incredibly difficult, mostly because we begin from such unequal places. China has lots of coal and it would like to burn it, because it's the cheapest way to pull rural Chinese out of dire poverty (something the country's leaders would quite like to do because otherwise they won't be the country's leaders much longer). If we want them to use, say, windmills instead, we're going to need to “share some wealth,” north to south, to make it happen. The Chinese opened the bidding last week, with a suggestion that one percent of the U.S. annual GDP would be a good amount to send their way. That's going to be quite a political ask — it means that Americans would be working roughly one hour every two weeks just to help the global South build up their clean alternatives. What we're talking about is a carbon version of the Marshall Plan, and it would mean Obama needs to be not just FDR but Truman and Ike as well.
What it all boils down to is: The bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years ago when we started worrying about global warming, we thought we'd have a generation to pay those bills off. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we'd realized. The melting Arctic is the call from the repo man.
Any hope of succeeding will require Obama to grasp, deep in his guts, the fact that climate, energy, food, and the economy are now hopelessly intertwined, and that trying to solve any one of these problems without taking on the others simply makes all of them worse. More, he needs to understand, again viscerally, the single stark fact of our time: No matter how many votes, no matter how much lobbying, no matter how much pressure you apply, you can't amend the laws of physics and chemistry. They aren't like the laws that politicians are used to dealing with. They will be obeyed, like it or not. 350 is now the most important number on the planet, the red line that defines reality reality.
It doesn't define political reality, however. The political reality goes like this: George W. Bush was so terrible on this issue that the bar has been set incredibly low — Obama will get all the political points he needs with fairly minimal effort. Doing what actually needs to be done will be politically…unpopular isn't even the word. It might well wreck his political future, because it would involve — directly or indirectly — raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now.
My guess, from the outside, is that all Obama's instincts are centrist. Certainly in energy policy he's offered nothing all that bold or interesting, though his sophistication and engagement have grown during the campaign, which is a good sign. A better sign is simply that, by every testimony, he's one of the smartest men ever to assume high political office in this country. Not just smarter than Bush. Really smart. Smart enough, if he sits down to really understand the scale of the problem he faces, that he might decide to take the gambles that the situation requires. He said, not long ago, "under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" — which is a sign of someone who is aware there may be a reality to come to grips with.
First signs to watch for: Does he go to Poland next month for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and in so doing electrify the international talks over carbon? Are people like green-jobs advocate Van Jones on the short list of those he's listening to on energy policy? Can he see clear to making this — after dealing with the short-term financial emergency — his first legislative priority, even before health care?
Obama, and the rest of us, have a lot more to fear than fear itself. We've got carbon, and right now that's the most frightening stuff on earth.
Richard Conniff is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and a National Magazine Award-winning writer, whose articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. His upcoming book, Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time -- My Life Doing Dumb Things With Animals, is due out from W.W. Norton in May. He is the author of six other books, including The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide and Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World. Conniff has also written for Yale e360 about carbon offsets and the greenhouse gas NF3.
More From Yale E360
Obama Ready To Move On Clean-Energy Economy
A Detroit Bailout Must Include a Green Makeover
Obama's Big Climate Challenge
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)