“Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.” - Paul Hawken
I’ll take good news anywhere I can find it these days, and one of the brighter lights now visible on the low-carbon horizon is the electric car. With the looming launches of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt (check out my Volt test-drive report from earlier this year), I’m convinced we’re on the cusp of a transportation and mobility revolution.
To that end, I’d like to draw your attention to a few key events coming to Vancouver in the weeks ahead.
First, on Sunday, September 12, The Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association (VEVA) and Concord Pacific are co-hosting ElectraFest 2010 - A Celebration of Electric Transportation. If you’re curious about how you can boost your mobility beyond your bike without benefiting our friends in the petroleum industry, then make a point of checking out this free public event. Expect a showcase of battery-powered cars, trucks, buses, conversions, plug-in hybrids, bicycles, scooters, off-road vehicles… even skateboards! The organizers are even mooring a few electric boats at the nearby False Creek dock. Located at Concord Place, 88 Pacific Boulevard in Vancouver’s North East False Creek. 10am - 4pm. Free.
The following day marks the start of EV2010 — more properly known as EV 2010 VÉ Electric Vehicles/Véhicules Électriques Conference & Trade Show. This one is “Canada’s premier electric mobility event,” and it’s for transportation planners, elected officials, sustainability consultants, and policy wonks—and those lucky enough to find a career in the budding electric-vehicles industry.
Attendees will hash out the political, technical, and business challenges of the electric revolution and I’ll be there with them, tweeting the opening plenary. On hand: Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, British Columbia Minister of State for Climate Action John Yap, and Green Party of Canada deputy leader Adrianne Carr, and many others who are working to bring this dream to life. If you’re there, too, use the hashtag #EV2010.
Finally, the organizers of EV2010 are throwing open the doors to the public at the Sheraton Wall Centre, on September 15. Catch the premiere of the new short video “The Life Electric,” and say hello to Chelsea Sexton, former GM EV1 Specialist and one of the key players in Who Killed the Electric Car? (Heads-up: The sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, is now in production.) Check out the most advanced electric vehicles, and learn more about home and fast-charging options. 6pm to 9pm.
I don’t live in a city, but from a sustainabiliy perspective, modern cities fascinate me. That’s because I’m a solutions geek; I track a number of feeds devoted to green buildings, transportation centers, streetcar lines, pedestrian bridges, pocket parks, walkable mixed-use developments, and so on— the infrastructure that is gradually displacing the noise, pollution, smog, and dark satanic mills that we historically associate with big cities and helping to create healthier, more active, and richer human experiences.
These qualities and this infrastructure - combined with access to nature - is making urban centers like Vancouver far, far more liveable than they were even a decade ago, and improving the overall well-being of those who live there. And that’s not just a good thing, it’s essential. For the first time, more than half of the world’s population now resides in cities. In terms of carbon footprint, an urban address is indisputably a smaller one.
Urban form—the look and feel of a place, the scale and type of its buildings and streets—directly impacts human health with respect to noise, pollution, exercise, workplaces, housing, health care and mobility. It also shapes the social and spiritual aspects of well-being, such as the sense of home that comes from a neighborhood, the stress level, the need for spiritual refuge, and the opportunities to connect with other people and other living things.
From the perspective of Vancouver, Portland, or Seattle, with the abundance of farmer’s markets and shiny transit lines and groovy public spaces, we’ve clearly come a long way. But looking around the world, we clearly have a lot of work to do to make cities better. How could we retrofit cities to focus on human health and quality of life? Could our cities be “healed?”
I don’t know, but I’ll be listening in as visionaries like HB Lanarc’s Mark Holland ask the questions and debate strategies at The Healing Cities Conference, a part of this year’s edition of the always-interesting Gaining Ground Summit, coming to Vancouver October 4 to 7. The theme of the whole event is “EcoLogical: The Power of Green Cities to Shape the Future.”
My employer, the Tides Canada Foundation, has come on board as a supporter of Healing Cities and Gaining Ground. If you’re an armchair urban planner like me—or, ahem, the real thing—I hope to see you there, and if you are, please come say hello.
I am delighted to let you all know that I have accepted a full-time position with Tides Canada, a national foundation tackling a wide range of social and ecological challenges. To quote our boilerplate, “we pool the best ideas, strategies, people, and capital to achieve the greatest impacts on the key environmental and social issues of our time.”
In my case, the issue in question is climate, and the solution is energy. I’ll be working with the gifted Merran Smith—the former climate director of ForestEthics—on the recently established Tides Canada Energy Initiative. My role in part is to support, advance, and help host productive conversations around low-carbon energy, to diversify Canada’s energy system and advance climate solutions.
About a year ago, a dozen or so friends and I came together and formed a group called TRUE GREEN: Solutions for Bowen. To quote the mission statement, we’re…
…a grassroots community organization that advocates for a range of progressive social, economic, and ecological local-government policies and actions to create a more balanced, inclusive, and resilient community.
Bowen Island is grappling with some serious growth and change issues, against a backdrop of mounting challenges such as peak oil, demographic shifts, housing costs, and climate change. We are particularly vulnerable to these tectonic shifts, and struggling mightily with them. This is a special place, distinct from the city that is getting closer all the time. For many, the only response to unavoidable change is to keep it at bay as long as possible, by restricting growth and by effectively raising the drawbridge to newcomers. There is a deeply-grained sentiment that if we are to preserve and protect this jewel, we must keep the people away.
That philosophy has only created a mounting diversity crisis that is gradually changing our character and demographics. At a workshop a few years back, planner HB Lanarc principal Mark Holland said “I’ve never seen a population cap work. You end up with the uber-rich buying out the ultra-rich.”
Meanwhile, we remain deeply dependent on private vehicles and a ferry that, while acting as an effective pain-in-the-ass buffer from the nearby city, spews tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year. We produce very little of our own food, have very little cycling or walking infrastructure, and export all our waste—even compostable garden trimmings!—to the mainland. While there is a strong sense of community, there is no community center and not much of an island economy. Few on-island amenities or opportunities mean a steady parade of private vehicles to the city for jobs, school, recreation, and shopping. There’s no franchise fast-food outlet here, but our setup still smacks of suburbia.
Many Bowen Islanders feel that, while we could be doing better in some areas, our current arrangement serves us well. We’re close to Costco when we need it, but still offer authentic island character, a tight-knit community, and small-town charm. Density is bad, 10-acre lots are good. I wrote a feature on this schism a couple years back.
But our group TRUE GREEN — now about 90 members — wants us to together start addressing the looming big issues. We want to have frank conversations about these challenges, our role and responsibilities in creating a safer future for our children and a more resilient community for all. The truth is, we are in a deeply vulnerable position.
Meanwhile, over the past year or so, Bowen Island Municipality has been undergoing an Official Community Plan (OCP) Update. The OCP is effectively the civic constitution. Formed through extensive community engagement, it is designed to guide all municipal decision making.
After a year of public meetings, workshops, and submissions, in the middle of June the hard-working volunteer committee—in conjunction with consulting firm CitySpaces—emerged with a first draft. The first draft is critical because it’s the stage of the process where the committee is likely most open to significant changes. Beyond the first draft, the changes are generally understood to be minor, as the process enters a “tweaking” phase.
Unfortunately, because the process is behind schedule, and due to the challenges of fitting in council and volunteer committee time during the summer months, plus a variety of other reasons, the community was given only 18 days to comment and offer feedback on the 165-page draft.
And feedback it needs. The constitution that will guide us for the next decade recommends no meaningful greenhouse-gas reduction strategies, limits housing forms in a way that will continue to make densifying our village a challenge, overlooks the need for active transportation, on-island waste reduction, and many other issues. Such issues need to be properly framed in a document of this importance.
As SFU economist Mark Jaccard points out in his book Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Challenge, Targets are meaningless if they are not attached to policies likely to achieve them.” Unfortunately, this observation applies to the Draft. Instead of recommending land-use and transportation policies that will actually mitigate climate change, the document leans heavily on private citizens, exhorting them to change their behaviors by choosing, for example, more fuel efficient vehicles, and developers, who are encouraged to construct more efficient homes. It also vaguely encourages renewable-energy use. Put simply, these exhortations will not accomplish our provincially mandated carbon-reduction goals.
The most effective strategy to accomplish the stated E.14 objective of reducing the dependence on private vehicle travel is by reducing the need to travel in the first place. We could do this by focusing growth in Snug Cove village, fostering a more complete community with clustered housing, more on-island employment, and a wider range of recreational and educational amenities, and by developing active-transportation infrastructure. The community identified all these strategies as priorities during the consultation process.
In the end, these OCPs are supposed to be about community involvement. We the people effectively write it, and the consultant is supposed to pitch in and advise on sound policy recommendations. But we must do so against a backdrop of the very real challenges, in a way that is honest, integral, and positions us well for what lies ahead. We could have a thriving complete community, with bicycle trails, a humming village populated with a wide spectrum of people from ages and economic backgrounds, a community centre, anything we want. This draft doesn’t help us get there. It has the word “sustainability” on the front, and contains many useful recommendations about how to protect ecosystems, but it basically seeks to maintains the status quo. It attempts to defend a planning model that in my estimation is no longer defensible.
Good thing it’s a still a draft.
We still have work to do here on our little rock, to own up to our responsibilities, role up our sleeves, make good on our commitments, and create a more complete and resilient community through the uncertain times that lie ahead. We need to confront our own culpability in climate change, and prepare ourselves for a future of constrained energy availability. We have an opportunity to lead here. If you live on the island, I hope you will get involved—or stay involved. If you agree with our submission comments, or even if you don’t, please share them with a friend. Thank you.
Last October, Canadian Geographic magazine published an investigative feature of mine on the emerging alliance between the green-building movement and the heritage-conservation community. During the reporting and research I uncovered a really interesting story of two different, but often complementary, groups with a shared passion for the built environment.
Unfortunately, the magazine does not release its content online. After several friends asked after the piece, I’ve created a .PDF of the article and published it here. If you missed it the first time, I hope you get a chance to check it out. Photography in the story is by Marina Dodis. As always, let me know what you think in the comments below. Thanks.
Under One Roof [.PDF, 1.8MB], Canadian Geographic, October 2009.
I finally watched The Age of Stupid last night. Wow, what a wake-up call.
Not because I now know that glaciers are melting, or that Shell is flaring natural gas in Nigeria and poisoning ecosystems and generally doing Very Bad Things, or that Range-Rover-piloting NIMBYs are successfully halting British wind farms, or that India has a new and very popular low-cost airline run by an evidently rather unpleasant CEO.
I already know most of these things. But lots of people, presumably the film’s target audience, don’t. As Age of Stupid pans back into space in its final frames, leaving a dead future planet cluttered with junk satellites — Wall-E’s opening scene, except in reverse–the filmmakers were likely hoping I would be fired up to take political action.
Are you as sick of Earth Day stories as I am? Then I implore you to read The New Grand Tour, a long and masterful piece of reporting in The Walrus.
Chris Turner, author of The Geography of Hope, takes a trip around the clean-energy and green-economy innovations of present-day Europe. It’s an inspiring piece of reporting, with stops in pedestrian and bicycle haven Copenhagen, a ride on Spain’s AVE high-speed rail network, and a visit to a solar generating station. Turner visits with a couple who live in a passivhaus (like the new one in Whistler, btw). They lay out their energy bills on the kitchen table to show how the economics make dollars and Eurocents, given the right enabling policies.
In 2008, Harald Müller and Barbara Braun paid €398.69 (about $560) for their electricity consumption and €332.81 for their heat consumption. The same year, they were paid €3,750.29 for the electricity produced by the solar panels on their roof. Their net revenue totalled €3,018.79. They estimate that they’re still a few years from fully paying off their household power plant, but by 2012 or so they’ll be looking at more than a decade of pure profit.
This is the rub. “Going green” is not about hemp shopping bags and grapefruit-based cleansers, folks. It’s about public infrastructure and liveable cities. It’s about public policies that turn every rooftop into a cash machine.
Scared of subsidies? Then maybe it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that, according to an Ecojustice investigation, Canada’s oil and gas industry enjoys roughly a billion dollars a year in handouts. In 2006, the United States oil and gas industry received USD$3.06 Billion in federal subsidies, while the nation’s coal industry received USD$2.8 Billion.
The Stern Review estimated that the fossil-fuel industries globally receive about USD$150 billion per year. Subsidies for renewables and incentives for energy efficiency together receive about UDS$9 billion.
In other words, we’re already paying subsidies. And we’re not getting much out of them but deep trouble.
For about a year and a half, Vancouver’s regional government has been running a pretty innovative initiative to discourage bottled-water consumption. Here’s a deliciously subversive decal from the tap water campaign that I spied on the back of one of Metro Vancouver’s trucks this morning.
The large type reads “Tap Water. Drink it.” and the secondary copy says “World Class Water: Mountain Fresh and Pure.” Here’s to truth in advertising.
Now, I haven’t yet seen this on a billboard anywhere; Metro would have a hard time coughing up the cash for an outdoor campaign. But how great would that be, if the kind of money that Pepsi and Coke pumped into Dasani and Aquifina, instead sold some of the finest water on earth, the stuff that’s piped straight to your house? Does anyone else out there know of a local government that is actively marketing its water like this?
Last summer, Metro Vancouver also partnered with Pacific Cinematheque’s Summer Visions Film Institute for Youth to produce a series of public service announcements about drinking tap water. They’re all pretty good, but here’s my favorite of the bunch:
Metro has been working on other programs as well. During the Olympics, Metro parked a Kewl Earth Water Wagon outside the Main Library downtown, and offered refills of fresh tap water to visitors and residents. According to corporate communications division manager David Hocking, some 4,700 people took the “tap water pledge” during the two weeks of the games, compared to 3,700 who did so during previous 17 months.
The regional government also developed a program with the new Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel. The property offers co-branded reusable Metro Vancouver water bottles for sale in guest rooms, for visitors who would prefer not to use the one-off bottles in the mini-bar when they head out on daytrips into the city.
This is all classic community-based social marketing. Metro isn’t trying to educate residents or drown them in brochures or make them feel bad—it’s working to build new social norms. How is it going? In 2008, as part of its Zero Waste Challenge, Metro set a goal to reduce the sale of bottled water in the region by 20 percent by the end of this year. Hocking says they’ll do a survey at the end of the year to find out how they did. I’ll let you know when he does.
The Town that Food Saved (Rodale, $25) is among the most engaging, thoughtful, and manure-stained-honest appraisals of local agriculture and edibles since Michael Pollan rocketed to cult fame with a seven-word manifesto about plants.
The town in question is an otherwise unremarkable little dogpath called Hardwick, Vermont, which popped up on the national foodie scope a few years back after author Ben Hewitt wrote a magazine piece about its happy convergence of iconoclastic producers, food-related non-profits, cafes, doers, and dreamers. The New York Times followed suit, as did assorted other buzz-makers.
Why the fuss? It turns out that Hardwick hosts a wide range of innovative agricultural businesses and thinktanks, a semi-cohesive spontaneous community of “agrepreneurs.” The mix includes salt-of-the-earth farmers, publicity-hungry eNGO executive directors, and values-driven business people who are accomplishing a great deal with minimal fuss. While many small-town Americans still get groceries from Buy N’ Large, Hardwick has cooked up an almost-sustainable honest-to-god local food system of CSAs, co-ops, value-added geniuses, and everything in between.
You characterize yourself as “a very mediocre economist.” How does a mediocre economist win the Nobel Peace Prize?
I was just one of hundreds who shared the prize for our collective work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I understand people and policy, and people and delusion, but I’m not a topnotch academic.
You understand delusion—what do you mean?
North America-wide polls reveal that most people think they are green consumers. There are so many books telling you how you can change your life and be green, but really the only way we can get there is by having laws and rules that prevent us from producing or emitting carbon.
Will carbon offsets help?
Quality research consistently shows that subsidies, like offsets, go significantly to “free-riders,” people and firms who get money for doing what they were going to do anyway. We must make things happen that were otherwise not going to happen and that require changes to prices (like a stronger carbon tax) and regulations (like building codes and vehicle standards) so that, for example, all homes get insulated. So when you think about buying an offset, I recommend instead sending your guilt money to organizations that are trying to change laws, like the Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute, and PowerUp Canada.
Last October, 
The Town that Food Saved (Rodale, $25) is among the most engaging, thoughtful, and manure-stained-honest appraisals of local agriculture and edibles since Michael Pollan rocketed to cult fame with a seven-word manifesto about plants.
You characterize yourself as “a very mediocre economist.” How does a mediocre economist win the Nobel Peace Prize?