Some hope that record margins (known as "crack spread," heh heh) will lead refineries to crank up gas production, but in any case, there's dangerously little slack in America's dangerously-tight gasoline supply chain. Blogger Robert Rapier points out that gasoline supplies right now are lower than they've ever been (at least since current records began, in 1991), besides a few Labor Day weekends when supplies are drawn down after all that summer driving.

I never quite understood the concept of a "summer driving season," anyways. Why waste a glorious summer day cooped up inside a car stuck in traffic? This summer, let's all escape gloomy gas prices and have a Summer Walking Season instead.

The vast trade show floor (over 700 exhibitors) testifies to the big business of green building. The show places leviathan bridge-builders next door to some guy selling composting toilets. An entire aisle is lined with suppliers of modular green roofs.

What I find interesting, though, is less the breadth of exhibitors than the depth.

Carpet companies rule the roost, commanding expansive multimedia pavilions right by the front door. Office furniture manufacturers have scattered $1,000, 100% recycled-content task chairs around the building. A few software companies catering to architects' workflows speak to the lack of progress toward the paperless office. The Vinyl Institute has a stand, which amazingly has not yet been ransacked. And alone among all the world's nations, the government of Canada has rented out good chunks of floor space to hawk Canadian wares.

These industries hardly have such outsized presence because they're the construction industry's biggest contributors to waste and environmental degradation. Hardly: by that measure, surely heating/cooling systems manufacturers (the biggest energy users in buildings) and cement makers (among the most carbon intensive industries in the world) should have their names on the lanyards encircling attendees' necks.

Rather, the industries talking loudest about their sustainability are those in which certain companies (like Interface for carpeting and Herman Miller for office furniture) have staked their claim to fame on sustainability. Interface chairman Ray Anderson's famed 1994 epiphany led to his company's groundbreaking pledge to literally "leave no trace" -- eliminate its ecological footprint. A few years later, other major carpet manufacturers were stumbling over one another at GreenBuild, in the pages of Metropolis magazine, and elsewhere, to out-do one another's eco credentials.

Tellingly, Interface's business is principally in "contract" work (i.e., for commercial buildings). Since home carpet manufacturers haven't had to compete against Interface, ecological claims hardly merit a mention in their marketing. In fact, Interface's own marketing for its recent entry into the home market (FLOR tiles) makes only passing reference to its considerable ecological merits.

Interestingly, many products and services tailored to the specific structure of USGBC's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system also show up on the trade floor. LEED-NC 2.2, the newest version of LEED for new buildings, gives credits for buildings that incorporate daylighting, treat their own wastewater, use certified-sustainable wood, and use recycled materials. Accordingly, vendors hawk skylights, water filtration systems, FSC-certified plywood, and recycled steel beams.

Other ways to reduce a building's environmental impact aren't specifically mentioned in LEED -- say, composting facilities, or vegetable gardens, or habitats for endangered species on-site, or contributing to off-site transportation improvements -- and therefore don't find a ready market at GreenBuild. (To its credit, LEED allows a few "innovation credit" points, which the above examples could potentially be filed under.)

(I'd love to share my results, especially since this week's theme is transportation, but it's not yet working for me. Anyone else?)

So far, he's posted eight building profiles, including two single-family houses (both in my neighborhood -- must be my aura), high-rise offices, and the rehab of a YMCA into subsidized housing. For each, he notes the level of green-ness, unusual green techniques used, and perhaps a little back story about quirky geothermal wells or an underappreciated project manager who pushed the green angle. ]]> Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:07:50 PDT http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/31/12236/0077 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/31/12236/0077 Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek spent the last year on "an energy safari," working backwards from the customers and night-shift clerks at a single Marathon gas station in exurban Chicago (and the downstate refinery that supplies it) to the exact fields where the oil first left the ground. Last September, for instance, 71% of its gas came from the U.S., 20% from Africa, and 10% from Saudi Arabia.

The eight stories and related multimedia (photos from Iraq, Louisiana, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and a 12-part video documentary) neatly tie together the disparate lives on both ends of the petroleum pipe: an angry gang recruit in Itak Abasi, Nigeria, an oilfield manager in Basra living under what amounts to solitary confinement, fiercely Chavista village elders in Venezuela, the gas station manager who spends a third of her pay on gas, and a "concerned" Hummer-driving realtor in St. Charles, Illinois. The Tribune calls our "globe-spanning energy network" "so fragile, so beholden to hostile powers and so clearly unsustainable, that our car-centered lifestyle seems more at risk than ever" -- a bit out of character for a Republican newspaper with a suburban circulation base. ]]> Mon, 31 Jul 2006 13:33:39 PDT http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/24/124044/241 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/24/124044/241 Dreaming of getting away in August? How about getting away from your car? Xtracycle, a maker of "cargo bike" kits, offers up "car-free vacation tips" so you can fill your vacation with "clean, affordable, soulful transportation," whether in town or exploring the wilderness. Among the hints: plan ahead, choose your destination wisely, combine modes, and travel light.

Xtracycle also gives you a chance to fulfill your dreams: one lucky winner in its "What I Would do on My Car-free Vacation" Contest will receive two cargo bike kits. And yes, you can get really far away on a bike: Xtracycle-equipped mountain bikes were used for the trans-Siberia segment of last year's Expedition 360 human-powered circumnavigation. ]]> Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:51:52 PDT http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/20/163635/227 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/20/163635/227 Pew Center poll done just as An Inconvenient Truth was opening nationally finds, not surprisingly, that Americans don't care about global warming. Or do they?

41 percent say global warming is a very serious problem, 33 percent see it as somewhat serious, and roughly a quarter (24 percent) think it is either not too serious or not a problem at all.

But across party lines, those who say human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels has driven global warming rate the issue as far more serious. Fully 71 percent of Democrats who say human activity has caused temperatures to rise rate it as a very serious problem, along with 54 percent of Republicans who hold the same belief ... [Overall], fully two-thirds of those who say human activity has made the earth hotter rate it as a very serious problem, compared with just 31 percent who see the earth warming but attribute it to natural patterns in the earth's environment.

Fully 80 percent of those who attribute climate change to human activity say the effects can be reduced, compared with just 48 percent of those who say rising temperatures are a natural pattern in the earth's environment.

So, a certain slice of Americans knows about and cares about global warming. The key is to expand that slice to at least an electoral majority, if not to (nearly) everyone. ]]> Thu, 20 Jul 2006 16:36:35 PDT http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/9/233033/0277 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/9/233033/0277 Following up on an earlier post on commercial aviation and global warming: the European Parliament voted 439 yes / 74 no / 102 abstain last week to tax jet fuel used on cross-border, intra-European flights, to allow member states to impose VAT (sales tax) on jet fuel, and to apply a cap-and-trade system to carbon dioxide emissions from aviation. (Currently, international flights, including those within the EU, pay no tax on their jet fuel.)

Airlines predictably condemned the maneuver, calling on the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization to issue a proposal that would apply globally.

According to Crain's Chicago Business, ICAO favors a trading system that would allow airlines to buy carbon credits from other industries, something the European Parliament proposal would not allow. Analysts in the UK report that ticket prices could go up a mere $3 if airlines could buy credits from other industries, but up to $35 if buying from other airlines.

Although new, lighter aircraft promise 20% increases in fuel efficiency, there is little that airlines can do to dramatically cut carbon emissions. This suits Caroline Lucas, a Green Party representative from the UK and author of the proposal, just fine: "the [legislation's] implication for the aviation industry as a whole would be to slow its growth."

Under the arcane rules of Brussels, the parliament's vote is merely advisory; the European Commission and member states ultimately would draft and enact any legislation.

According to the World Resources Institute, the EU accounts for 20.3% of global carbon emissions from aviation, compared with 39.6% for North America. Overall, aviation accounts for 2% of global emissions, but is growing faster than any other sector.

As rapacious national banks swallow smaller, local competitors by the dozen, these lending decisions have increasingly fallen to bankers blindly applying generic guidelines. The result: a paint-by-numbers landscape of interchangeable (but financially safe) subdivisions, strip malls, and office parks. Any developer who dared to innovate would have to do so on his own dime -- and sure enough, many pioneering examples of New Urbanism have been backed by "nontraditional" investors like old-money families, large corporations (like Microsoft, Disney, EDS, and Ebsco), and even charitable foundations. Despite growing interest in socially responsible investing, few investors have thought of how to clean up the picture in the building industry -- source of, say some, half of America's greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, Philip Langdon of New Urban News reports on a new generation of private-equity investment funds that have started up to match socially responsible real estate investors and leading-edge developers. Green developer extraordinaire Jonathan Rose of New York sees his new $100 million fund as an investor alternative to "buying stocks in REITs [Real Estate Investment Trusts, publicly traded corporations whose primary business is real estate] which are based on sprawl." Perhaps the most promising is the $100 million Green Living Fund, based in Santa Cruz and launched by Kacey Fitzpatrick:

Fitzpatrick, cofounder and vice president of sustainability at the Green Living Fund, said her pool is the result of a desire "to promote the right kind of development." She observes: "Our goal is to promote the creation of vibrant, pedestrian-oriented, walkable communities with a mix of uses and a mix of housing types and incomes. Transit is a key piece of what we are doing." The fund will use "the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] standards for Neighborhood Development as the criteria for our initial assessment of a location," she says. Buildings will have to qualify for at least a LEED-Silver designation.

Whereas Rose hopes to raise funds from private and nonprofit investors, Fitzpatrick (an architect by training who hopes to make a bigger impact) hopes to gain substantial funding from public pension funds. If these funds successfully quantify the financial benefits of investing in green development, they could attract more investment, thereby mainstreaming now-unconventional forms of development.

I often liken the process of changing the way America builds cities to turning around a giant ship; many will be frustrated with the slow pace, but taking a trillion-dollar industry optimized to efficiently turn forests and fields into sprawl at the rate of five acres a minute means a lot of change. If investors -- the ones paying for the bulldozers -- catch on, we can count on those bulldozers being used far more gently in the future.

Hearteningly for this Second City resident, Keith Schneider's banner headline -- To Revitalize a City, Try Spreading Some Mulch -- spotlights Mayor Richard M. Daley's efforts to improve the city's quality of life through greening initiatives. While many local wags have ridiculed the Daley as a mere gardener, the article calls new street trees and spiffy parks an "economic development strategy" central to the city's general economic resurgence:

[M]ulch is an organic metaphor, tying together the various pieces of Chicago's novel development strategy, praised by the Sierra Club and the Chamber of Commerce alike. By wrapping its arms and famous big shoulders around its Latin motto -- Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) -- Chicago has become a global model for how a metropolis can pursue environmental goals to achieve economic success.

Having moved here shortly after the 1996 Democratic National Committee convention that landscape entrepreneur Christy Webber says Daley's greening strategy dates back to, I can't really speak to how big of a sea change these policies have proven. And as much as the article over-sells Chicago's strengths (e.g., tying population growth caused by Latino immigration to downtown flowerbeds, ignoring the transit improvements that were canceled to pay down park bonds), it's always nice to have our humble Midwestern achievements noticed east of the Hudson River.

Speaking of the Hudson, Robin Pogrebin reports on efforts by New York's Battery Park City Authority to complete its decades-long, 92-acre waterfront development to exacting environmental standards. One new apartment tower will even use heat+power cogeneration -- a remarkable step forward in efficient, distributed energy generation:

The Verdesian runs on a natural-gas microturbine that creates electricity, which helps power the building. The heat given off in this process is used to create the hot water. Mr. Albanese said this amounted to overall efficiency of 80 to 85 percent for the building. A typical power plant -- which burns fossil fuels like oil, gas or coal -- is about 30 percent efficient.

The story's accompanying video shows Pogrebin drinking from the in-house sewage treatment plant in the Solaire, a LEED-NC Gold rated apartment tower that opened in 2003.

Other articles in the package report on large corporations voluntarily profiting from the green bandwagon, sometimes with help from enviro critics; emissions trading in the U.S. and Europe; a sort-of UL Labs for foodservice equipment efficiency (one restauranteur reports a one-week payback time for new dishwashing faucet nozzles); potential downsides to new technological fixes; eco-advertising and counteracting greenwashing with certification; organic pork; wind energy; reducing and recycling toxic e-waste; and greening government purchasing.

... flying a fully laden A380 [super-jumbo jet] is, in terms of energy, like a 14km (nine-mile) queue of traffic on the road below ... Aviation is a relatively small source of the emissions blamed for global warming, but its share is growing the fastest. The evidence is strong that emissions from jet engines, including the streaks of cloud (called contrails) they leave behind in the sky, could be especially damaging ... You can buy a hybrid car, switch to low-energy light bulbs in your house and eat locally grown organic food. But the dozen daily decisions on which you base your husbandry are trivial compared with the handful of yearly choices about that holiday or this business trip.

Even worse, air travel demand has grown by 75% since 1980 (my brief lifetime) and shows no sign of abating: Airbus projects that in 2020, just the increase in miles flown will equal all air travel worldwide in 1969.

Measuring the "true" fuel (and thus carbon) efficiency of aviation depends on many assumptions, including load factors aboard planes and the distance of trips. (As with car trips, longer trips are more efficient.) Measuring on a per-mile basis ignores the fact that few people drive 10,000 miles a day; measuring per trip ignores the fact that most people fly infrequently. However, the best-case scenarios show that flying is no more carbon efficient than driving; the worst-case scenarios show emissions three times higher than driving.

The obvious solution to these externalized costs would be a carbon tax of some sort, and naturally the European Union would be the first the propose one: the European Parliament will vote in July on whether to add flights at European airports to its "emissions trading scheme" (ETS), a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Yet this would constitute a first-ever tax on jet fuel: currently, tolls (landing charges and passenger fees) pay for airports, quite unlike how the gas tax pays for roads.

Furthermore, the financially teetering airline industry can't agree on anything. American carriers say they'd be exempt, as the U.S. is no longer party to Kyoto; European "legacy" and low-fare carriers disagree about how to allocate the initial carbon cap.

Worse yet, few alternatives exist to Jet A kerosene. New aircraft offer incremental efficiency improvements, but few breakthroughs are on the horizon. Alternative fuels and fuel cells are too heavy for use aboard planes, and alternative travel modes are far slower. (One exception is high-speed rail over short and medium hops, but even the best such services worldwide face stiff competition from low-fare bus and air routes, and besides, trips under 1,500 km account for only 20% of aviation carbon emissions.) Operational efficiencies, like reducing congestion at busy airports, could reduce emissions, but not by a whole lot.

I'll admit I feel vastly more guilty about the carbon emissions of the taxicab ride to the airport than the plane ride from the airport. I've often chosen cheap short-hop flights instead of overnight Amtrak trips, and the notion of offsetting that choice by buying carbon credits doesn't really cross my mind when the flight attendant hands over those pretzels. But perhaps higher prices might be the ticket: "fuel surcharges" of $100 atop already pricey transoceanic trips did partially dissuade me from a recent long-distance getaway. ]]> Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:14:21 PDT http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/3/27/134725/091 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/3/27/134725/091 Photos available from Newsday. ]]> Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:47:25 PST http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/7/112747/5158 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/7/112747/5158 Live Green, Go Yellow PR campaign to greenwash its ethanol efforts is off to a roaring start -- namely, "overwhelming demand" quickly exhausted its supply of free T-shirts. But never fear: "Please try again later -- they'll be back soon!"

The campaign tries to spin some good news out of GM's monumental financial woes. GM has already sold 1.5 million "flexible-fuel vehicles" -- principally those that burn an 85% ethanol mix -- largely thanks to a loophole in CAFE fuel-economy regulations that grants FFVs "extra credit." GM's truck-heavy vehicle mix has needed all the extra CAFE credit it could get in recent years, so it's on track to sell 400,000 FFVs in 2006, and all but two of the 11 FFV models are trucks. GM and Ford spent recent years riding high on booming truck sales, using loopholes to barely stay inside CAFE regulations without having to actually improve fuel economy.

Today, GM's entire worldwide car-making operation is bleeding cash; all of its earnings come from GMAC financial services, an operation that GM is looking to sell to raise cash. Meanwhile, the autobuying public looks set to crown hybrid leader Toyota as the world's largest automaker, possibly within the next two years. And GM's "Go Yellow" trumpeting aside, E85 has yet to make even a small dent: Only 550 filling stations nationwide sell it, one for every 400,000 cars on America's roads. (Even here at the edge of the Corn Belt, I've yet to see a single station that sells it.)

To add insult to injury for GM "flexfuel" truck owners, a switch to ethanol will make their gas guzzlers guzzle more: Ethanol contains one-third less energy (in BTUs) per gallon than conventional gasoline, which means many more trips to one of those lucky 550 filling stations. ]]> Tue, 7 Feb 2006 12:01:46 PST http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/12/22/192634/48 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/12/22/192634/48 On December 5, U.S. District Court judge Louis Guirolla sentenced developer Robert Lucas Jr., real estate agent (and Lucas' daughter) Robbie Lucas Wrigley, and engineer M.E. Thompson Jr. to 7-8 years in prison apiece and $1.4 million in restitution. Their affiliated companies will pay another $5.3 million in fines. EPA agent David McLeod said, "Today's historical sentencing demonstrates our resolve to vigorously prosecute those who despoil our nation's precious wetlands."

[Found at Jackson, Miss. Clarion-Ledger, via Smart Growth News] ]]> Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:26:34 PST http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/12/6/195539/172 http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/12/6/195539/172 COP11 summit: a pro-urban, "red-green" political party has surfaced in City Hall.

The new Projet Montr&;eacuteal party secured a city council seat in the dense, diverse Plateau neighborhood, winning 12% of all votes cast citywide in a three-way election against two established parties. Its platform brings the spirit of the red-green (social-democrat and environmentalist) urban coalition -- the governing majority in major European cities like London, Paris, and Berlin -- to North America.

Unlike most stateside Green political parties, which take a skeptical stance towards urban growth, Projet Montr&;eacuteal embraces population and housing growth as a way to curb car use and suburban sprawl. Its leader, Richard Bergeron, is a transit-agency technocrat whose political heroes (link in French) include mayors Ken Livingstone in London and Bertrand Delanoë in Paris. In London, a wildly successful downtown toll has cut traffic by nearly 20% even while a crop of new, environmentally friendly high-rise office towers rises. In Paris, city officials heckle SUV drivers, close roads to cars for weekly "Paris Breathes" days, and will soon convert a riverfront highway into a beach. The "red" in the coalition comes from a strong appeal to working-class voters with new public-works projects and affordable housing.

Projet Montr&;eacuteal's ambitious platform promises "Montrealers a unique opportunity to gather around a sustainable urban development project," with planks that call for a 2.5% annual reduction in traffic, doubling transit ridership, converting 250 km of bus routes to light rail, narrowing streets to calm traffic, and developing housing on parking lots.

Its call for setting a performance standard to actually reduce traffic has few peers: Slowing traffic growth, much less reducing existing travel, seems well-nigh impossible at times. Politicians understandably prefer laundry-list prescriptive solutions to performance measures, which introduce a higher standard of accountability but won't necessarily move votes. Yet with enough shove, cutting traffic is possible: Cambridge, Mass. requires that new developments use "Transportation Demand Management" (TDM) to keep parking and traffic demand at existing levels. Even in Montr&;eacuteal, which boasts per-capita transit ridership 57% higher than New York City, driving has increased by 35% over the past ten years. Reversing that trend will require every trick in the book, plus many more -- but at least someone's willing to try.

Similar platforms focused on housing and transit, albeit often with more vague proposals, hve elected Democratic mayors like Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, Jerry Brown in Oakland, Will Wynn in Austin, and Dave Cieslewicz in Madison, Wis. In 2003, San Francisco mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez campaigned for better transit and infill housing on the Green ticket; he lost 53-47 to Gavin Newsom, who has moved forward with initiatives like busways and high-rise housing downtown. One challenge facing American cities is that higher car ownership rates make it hard to explicitly attack overdependence on cars; Projet Montr&;eacuteal received its highest margins in high-density, working-class neighborhoods (like the Plateau and Park Extension) with very few car owners and voters hungry for a renewed commitment to transit.

Another challenge comes from Americans' greater skepticism of planning and stronger notions of property rights -- sentiments that manifest themselves in local NIMBY movements that can undermine fragile local political coalitions. On the other hand, Canada's habit of consolidating cities into grand regional councils, and electing council seats disproportionately, probably hurts local minor parties by diluting their support amidst a sea of suburban votes.

(via SpacingWire) ]]> Wed, 7 Dec 2005 06:04:46 PST