Too much going on to write a whole post about each one.

Have I mentioned lately HOW URGENT THE SITUATION HAS BECOME?

Post-Carbon Cities reminds us that it’s at the local level that we need to transform sustainability thinking into planning and action.

Our practice of sustainability, however, has lagged. In the 21 years since the Brundtland Report, cities in the US and Canada have made progress on things like recycling, green building and renewable energy. But we’re significantly behind the achievements of most Western European cities, and neither continent is nowhere near a quality of economic development that could truly be called “sustainable” from a global perspective.

Sustainability thinkers realized early on that, while international action was required on big issues like global warming and global inequity, many green goals were best addressed at the level of communities and local governments (hence initiatives like ICLEI). It’s at this local level that both governmental and academic attention now needs to focus: How do we translate the need to reduce oil consumption into urban development practices that encourage renewable energy? How do we apply the lessons of resource use, connectivity and collapse in complex adaptive ecosystems to those ecological-social-economic systems known as cities and suburbs?

Berkeley CA to finance rooftop solar on residential properties. It doesn’t seem to pay for itself. Do I have the math right? Or is the difference in reducing the local carbon footprint? As posted in the article:

City staff has estimated that the average photovoltaic system in Berkeley costs $28,077 with an average California Solar Initiative rebate of $6,108. A hypothetical financing structure for an average system is set forth below.

Hypothetical Financing for $28,077 Solar System (~3kW)
Project Financing Amount: $22,569
Estimated Financing Rate: 6.75% (to be determined)
Program Costs to be Amortized: $600 Bank and Administration Fees
Term of Repayment: 20 years Paid Through Annual Special Tax
Annual Special Tax Charges: 4.5% of Special Tax County and Program Administration

Projected Annual Special Tax: $2,089/Year - Equates to $182/month

The property tax increase will be offset by the value of the electricity produced by the system. At the outset and based on PG&E’s rates, one could expect the solar systems to result in at least $70/month in lower electric bills.

We bike commuters get a Bailout break!

Oh, darn. I work for myself. Can I give myself a reimbursement? Sure, I can. Here…thanks!

Starting in January, workers who use two-wheelers as their primary transportation mode to get to and from work will be eligible for a $20-a-month, tax-free reimbursement from their employers for bicycle-related expenses. In return, employers will be able to deduct the expense from their federal taxes.

“It significantly legitimizes bicycling and elevates it to a credible commute mode, like riding a bus or train,” said Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

Land rush to the Northwest? Will there be a climate migration?

You must be kidding. Of course there’s gonna be climate migration. And of course a lot of people are going to move from the waterless oven of the Southwest to the lush green coastal Northwest. When? As soon as enough people see the writing on the wall and begin suffering under extreme conditions. But this article tends to downplay such a scenario.

Under the most aggressive growth model, the area could have more than 6 million people by 2060, according to the Metro forecast. The more likely model, however, indicates a population of 3.85 million, plus or minus 300,000.

From a water supply standpoint, at least, the region should be OK.

“We are blessed with water resources,” said Stickel, the Portland Water Bureau planner. “We don’t even tap, or barely tap, the two largest water resources in the region — the Columbia and the Willamette. Even with climate change, we’re blessed.”

The folks at RealClimate provide a report from the meeting of the European Meteorological Society in Amsterdam. In this post, the focus is on a talk by Tim Palmer of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and consistent with that groups title, he addressed “the idea of using one system to predict atmospheric conditions on time scales varying from hours to decades.” This he called “seamless prediction.”

Much of the foot-dragging that holds local governments and communities from committing to adaptive planning comes from the lack of dependable forecasting that’s longer-range than the local weather and more immediate than climate models. If you have confidence that the next decade is going to bring you above-the-historical-average precipitation, you’re more likely to approve infrastructure improvements that will mitigate damage from increased flooding, for example.

You don’t have to understand the more technical discussion at RealClimate in order to take away the importance of this new approach. The following paragraphs I found to be educational without being over my head:

Due to historical and practical reasons, day-to-day weather forecasts tend to be performed on different systems than seasonal forecasts and climate change scenarios. Whereas the former can take the oceanic state to be approximately constant for the next few days, slow changes may have a greater impact for the latter two.

Numerical weather prediction (NWP - i.e. the daily operational weather forecast) and climatology communities have drifted apart for a while, but Palmer argued that there is a need to a convergence of the communities. He also proposed using global climate models (GCMs) the way NWP models are used for weather forecasting to test their quality. By looking at the initial part of their evolution, he reckoned it may be possible to get some idea of how good they are. Thus, he proposed a way to weigh the different GCMs up against each other. Time will show if this strategy will work.

It wasn’t a year ago when I was blogging at Climatefrog - the precursor to pResilience - about sea level rise and how it might affect Marin County where I live. I found it difficult to detect any risk assessment activities relating to the impacts of SLR on this county with its 55-miles of tidal coastline, and that was bothering me, given the scientific evidence available in September 2007.

Now, just a year later, after scientists have reported accelerating melt-off of Greenland’s glacial ice, I’m gratified to find that our city council, right here in little ol’ Mill Valley, is holding a public forum titled “Preparing for Climate Change and Sea Level Rise,” attended by the mayor, our local county supervisor, a senior county planner, and Mill Valley’s Sustainability Director.

I should add here that since last year, most of the predictions of the rate of sea level rise seem to have moderated from the extremely scary projections of 20 feet or more. Yes, such a rise is still eventually possible - under the worst-case scenario that global temperatures will soar (due to the amplifying feedbacks of methane releases from thawing permafrost and warming ocean bottoms), resulting in much faster melting. But responsible scientists tell us that such a worst case would take centuries to become reality. See this RealClimate post for a sanity check on SLR for the coming century.

The latest report, published in Science magazine based upon research about the Greenland ice cap warns that the melting could very well accelerate through the 21st Century, resulting in sea level rise rate of “almost 1 metre per century.”This is considerably higher than the IPCC report projected (10cm at most by 2100).

Of course, the researchers cautiously admit that they’re limited to making educated guesses about this.

Climate scientists are uncertain how susceptible ice sheets are to global warming, largely because they have never witnessed one disappear, so researchers led by Anders Carlson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to look back to the end of the last ice age for clues.

I suspect that our town forum on the subject will reach the conclusion that yes, we are vulnerable, but that things won’t get really serious for a few decades. I’ll be attending, to see how they address the prospect of stronger storm surges combined with even a slight rise in our high tides putting most of our sea level sewage treatment plans out of commission. Not to mention our main highway and probably several hundred residential housing units built, romantically, at just barely above high tide level.

How do you share critical knowledge across a large scale distributed network of organizations? I believe we have a great model in the work of an organization known as ICLEI (”ick-lee”), which was founded almost 20 years ago by the United Nations to develop sustainability practices for local governments. Today its mission has expanded to include adaptation, while the intensity of that mission has risen to meet the growing challenge of climate change.

The American branch of the organization - ICLEI-USA - makes use of the knowledge developed by ICLEI-Global in a program centered around what it calls the Five Milestones. These are the basic building blocks that local governments must commit to achieving to even qualify for membership. Resolutions must be passed by these governments before ICLEI will engage them in the program.

In essence, ICLEI shares and distributes its knowledge about effective local government action by insisting that its clients enroll in its program. Along with the benefits of being guided through the implementation of sustainable and adaptive processes, member governments get to share with their peers the results of their creative efforts. Many of these can be found on the ICLEI-USA web site under Success Stories. An upcoming online community will provide opportunities for more peer-based knowledge exchange.

I tend to think of knowledge sharing as benefitting from informality in conversation, where participants drop pretenses and rely on trust to reveal what they know. Small scale encounters seem to support more open communication. It’s good to know that knowledge sharing can scale to the institutional level where informality is replaced with structure and some prerequisites that demonstrate commitment to learn. If ever we needed to learn as a planet, now is the time.

If you’ve got available dirt in your backyard or have managed to schlep it up to your roof, you can cut down on your shopping trips for fresh veggies. This has long been true as a minority of city dwellers have kept small gardens, but the practice of “city farming” is experiencing a renaissance these days and it has a blog to report about it.

City Farmer News: New Stories from Urban Agriculture is based in Vancouver, B.C., and is provided by the City Farmer group that has been active for 30 years. Its latest article, pointing to a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, describes a new business in San Francisco called MyFarm that installs and maintains gardens for customers. Where the garden is so large that the residents can’t consume all of its harvest, MyFarm sells the surplus to its commercial customers for resale to the public or for serving in restaurants.

How can the social tools of the Internet be used most effectively to advance local community activity to mitigate and adapt to climate change. That’s the question Tracey Todhunter explores in this video and will further exploring at a conference at the Rochelle School in London.

Tracey, co-founder of the Low Carbon Community Network in the UK, is one of the organizers of 2gether08, which is going on right now, including a streaming video feed and an event-centered social networking installation. Tracey’s questions are basic to the need for sharing knowledge and experience among the countless communities of all sizes that are facing the harsh realities of unaffordable transportation and uncertain climate futures. We know that change is coming, but we don’t know in exactly what form.

We know that all of us, down to the household level, need to reduce our carbon footprints and learn to live more sustainably, but we don’t know what the impacts will be on each of our locations as global warming intensifies. Just look at the flooding in the American Midwest and the fires in California. Then think about how you’d prepare for such events if you lived in the affected regions.

This is where more grassroots communication and mutual education is essential. Pamphlets and Web pages from FEMA are fine, but they are general and don’t benefit from the experiences of citizens on the ground who must deal directly with impending disasters.

England has suffered major flooding and unprecedented heat waves over the past two years. Many of its small towns are taking climate change seriously, and many highly motivated local activists are attending 2gether08, building and strengthening the social networks that will help them all provide smarter leadership for their local communities.

One big idea now emerging at 2gether08 is using online networking, and public service media, to help communities reduce their carbon footprints.

Groups in towns and villages are already starting to share experience nationally and internationally about local projects to tackle the challenge of peak oil and climate change, through the Low Carbon Communities Network and Transition Towns Network.

However as Tracey Todhunter, co-founder of LCCN, explains in this interview, they need technical help on how to raise awareness and communicate better online, by using social media and attracting the interest of public service publishers like Channel 4.

Tracey plans to gather a team on the first day of 2gether08 to add more tools to their current set of blogs, wikis and other communication methods, and develop their networking skills. They’ll work to a brief developed by Tracey and others in the network - and on the second day present back a working demonstration.

Although the main focus of the project is climate change, the tools and networking processes could be applied anywhere that communities seek to collaborate on projects for social benefit.

That’s why Tracey hopes Channel 4 might be interested in sharing ideas on how to do this effectively. In a series of interviews on 2gether08.com, Channel 4 executives have explained how they are moving beyond public service broadcasting to develop a range of interactive tools and programmes with partners.

The tools developed by Tracey and the team at 2gether08 will be used to build a network that will meet face-to-face at a conference in October. This will bring together the Low Carbon Community Network and the Transition Towns Network.

Climate Progress did us a service last week by reporting on an analysis of the impacts of rising oil prices by CIBC World Markets.  Think of these in terms of your life in the very near future:

• 7-dollar-a-gallon gas in 2010
• 10 million less vehicles on U.S. roads in 2012
• the continuation of the steep drop in total vehicle miles travelled

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The U.S. Climate Change Science Program - yes, the one that reports to the current Executive Branch of our government - says - according to the Washington Post - that “as greenhouse-gas emissions rise, North America is likely to experience more droughts and excessive heat in some regions even as intense downpours and hurricanes pound others more often.” Extreme weather is just giving us a hint of what’s to come with more extreme droughts and heat waves, more torrential downpours, It doesn’t seem to matter to these scientists that the link between human-caused carbon emissions and the extreme weather can’t be proven.

In a conference call with reporters, Karl and the other co-chair, Gerald A. Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there is no doubt that human-generated heat-trapping gases have helped intensify both the Southwest’s current drought and heavy downpours, which have been increasing at a rate three times that of average precipitation over the past century.

“That’s a certainty,” Karl said. “People aren’t questioning whether there’s been an increase in heavy downpours.”

By the end of the century, he added, models predict that intense bouts of precipitation that might have occurred once every 20 years will take place every five years.

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The state of California’s air board released a report last week calling for local governments to change land-use practices to help reduce the need for driving. In the state’s effort to reduce carbon emissions, it must deal with the fact that a third of those emissions come from vehicles on the road. And with current development and land-use patterns favoring suburban sprawl, it’s important that a reversal in that trend be initiated at the local level.

I continue to hope that ICLEI-Worldwide will lead governments at every level to a higher level of sanity about climate change and I pray that ICLEI-USA will prove to be the local government antidote to stalemate at the federal government level.

The sad truth of it, though, is that most of the money needed to fund the changes we need is bottled up by the impotence of our federal government. Local efforts have a ceiling to what they can afford to accomplish, beyond which they’ll be powerless. Still, there’s so much to do in terms of assessment, preparation, public education and public leadership, that it’s not like the local governments have time to sit around waiting for the money to put them to work.

True to what pResilience is all about, the fast-developing ICLEI-USA site now includes a Learn From Others section where they’re just beginning to post, Model Ordinances, Best Practices and Case Studies along with Success Stories and guidance on local activism. Finally, an adult has arrived in the classroom. This is exactly what needs to happen at the government level and I’m doing my part here to advertise their work, not only to encourage kudos, but to inform more people about their valuable content.

A month ago, ICLEI - in partnership with the Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers - held the first ever Municipal Adaptation Workshop where , in ICLEI’s words, it “provided an outstanding opportunity to learn more about regional climate impacts as well as mechanisms for preparing for those impacts.” The workshop included cool useful stuff like:

• Up-to date forecasted regional climate impacts;
• Training on conducting a community vulnerability assessment;
• Break-out sessions on planning for public health, coastal, freshwater, and ecological impacts;
• Hands-on adaptation action prioritization exercise;
• Assessment of the financial implications of inaction; and
• Exclusive peer networking forum on local climate protection best practices.

Sessions were structured such that attendees were able to begin obtaining the knowledge and skills necessary to begin enhancing resiliency to a changing climate in their respective communities.

Doesn’t it seems like shit is hitting the fan from a lot of different directions? I mean how fucked up is our economy? What’s with the killer tornados hitting in so many new places? Who stopped the rain from moving away from the Midwest, where the corn crop is underwater or just plain stunted, forcing world food prices up even further. Mortgage crisis. Gas prices. Still the wars go on, burning up ungodly amounts of lives, goodwill and money.

I don’t have to focus on climate change as the ultimate fly in the global ointment because it’s all proving to be linked together now - politics, economics, technology, population, the basics of human life - all are inseparable from our need to prevent catastrophic climate change. And yet all of these problems serve to distract us from doing the work that needs to be done to change our lifestyles and priorities at the national (political) level. Congress will debate the prescription for reversing the recession forever, wasting their attention on a by-product rather than focusing on mitigating the greatest risk to our wellbeing.

They used to talk about the Domino Theory in the Sixties, where the loss of one country to communism would lead to the loss of its neighboring countries. Or at least that’s what the fonts of conservative wisdom told us. Maybe today’s dominos will force people to make choices about how they live following disasters and setbacks that will prove to have been smarter than maintaining their status quo. Maybe the high gas prices and natural disasters like wildfires and floods will provide enough of a blank slate that communities will plan appropriately for the future we can now begin to see.

It is too bad, though, that for so many people less fortunate than Americans, letting Nature determine the future may mean death and misery. When you live on the edge, the storm doesn’t have to be perfect to get you.

Local action to mitigate, prepare for and adapt to climate change can arise out of strong social agreement and collaboration, but it really gets a boost when the local political leadership is both wise and vocal about it. I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Ron Simms, the Executive of Kings County, Washington. He leads like the coach of a championship football team, creating a philosophy and a playbook that sets an example for his staff, the entire local government, local businesses and citizen groups alike.

Another exemplary local government leader happens to be Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City. Maybe it’s because he’s a billionaire, not a career politician, and is not beholden to anyone, but he’s proving to be just the kind of climate change leader that our largest city needs to tame its appetite for carbon-emitting fuels.

In a speech he gave at the inaugural World Science Festival in his city, Bloomberg described his belief in the sciences and his determination to follow scientific findings in setting the standards and plans for New York. Andy Revkin was considerate enough to publish the entire speech. Here’ a key excerpt:

I believe strongly in leading by example. That’s why last October, I signed an Executive Order directing City agencies to shrink City government’s carbon footprint by 30 percent by the year 2017 and to start acting now. To do that, we’re committing 10 percent of our annual energy costs – equal to roughly $80 million a year – to reducing City agency production of heat-trapping gases. We’ve taken major steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from autos; the world’s largest yellow cab fleet is slated to go green by converting to hybrid or hybrid-equivalent power by the year 2012. We’ve focused on replacing old and heavily polluting power plants with newer, more efficient generators. We’ve taken steps to put New York in the lead in energy-efficient power co-generation. And we’re on course to more than double production and use of solar power in New York City by this time next year.

That’s not only going to shrink our carbon footprint; it’s also going to take deadly pollutants out of the air we breathe. For New York, as for other great cities, cleaner air and a greener environment go hand in hand. As with tobacco control, this is another area where ‘science and the city’ is going global – and New York City is leading the way.

As we become a more urbanized world, we’ll also certainly become a more science-friendly world. The leaders of the world’s cities are the great pragmatists on the world’s stage. Our concern is protecting the health of our people and increasing the wealth of our economies. So we’re interested, not in ideology, but in results, and that makes us natural allies of science.

It’s also true that ‘science and the city’ is a relationship as old as history itself. Cities have always been science-friendly. That was true in ancient Alexandria and Athens, true in the city-states of Renaissance Italy, and it’s truer than ever in New York City today.