Clean Energy Springfield

One idea I've been kicking around that I think would be a useful attention-getting tool is to perform a greenhouse gas inventory of Springfield. This basically would be a pretty rudimentary way of figuring out what Springfield's carbon burden is--how much carbon we're putting into the air. (You can get the inventory for the State here.) It would also help us see where our biggest sources are, which gives us a starting point for figuring out where to cut. This is something we'll probably do eventually, but I'm impatient, so I think it would be useful to get started now.

Fortunately, the Rocky Mountain Institute has put together the Community Energy Finder, an online tool for doing something similar. The CEF is geared more toward identifying community-wide opportunities for energy efficiency and renewables. It takes a lot of detailed information, but it looks like they've done a good job of outlining exactly what they need and who we can likely talk to get each part. It's not something that you can do in a day, but with a couple of people breaking the work up, you could probably do it in a week or two. It mostly involves calling various city departments or organizations (like the Chamber of Commerce).

If anyone is interested in doing this, drop me an email.

Whoa! Stopped home for lunch today, and what do I find, but that the Supreme Court has ruled (5-4) against the US EPA's refusal to regulate greenhouse gases. Grist has a quick overview here, and you can read the whole opinion, including two dissents from Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia, here.

This is big, but I think it can go in two general ways. First, the EPA puts up some perfunctory regulations, whose primary result is a lessening in urgency to act. Second, this could give moderate Republicans and Democrats the impetus and/or cover to support stronger regulations formulated by Congress, such as Henry Waxman's Safe Climate Act.

I was going to say that it's wait-and-see time, but that's not really true. I think this ups the case for action. April is chock full of opportunities to get involved--to rally, to discuss, to make commitments. I'll be posting about upcoming events throughout the month--consider coming out to show your support or find out what you can do.

Good op-ed in the SJR today from Eric Grimm, about the perverse attempts to undermine the science of global warming. A lot of advocates of climate change (as opposed to myself, an opponent of climate change ;) ) claim to be speaking in favor of sound science. What I don't really hear, though, is any sense of what an unbiased test would look like (to their eyes). Instead, you get a lot of railing against the use of computer models, which strikes me as completely bizarre and about as anti-scientific as you can get. After all, a model is a tool--shaped by theory, tested against reality, and like anything else in science you get bonus points for being repeatable and consistent.

Anyway, I think at this point this is something of a futile effort. We're at the point where only a committed core of people don't think global warming is human caused* and requires action. Better to spend our time figuring out how to adapt and prevent.

With that in mind, here's a scary little nugget: Russia has long relied on its winters to repel all invaders. Turns out the warming world might be leaving Russia vulnerable, not just to the ghost of Napolean, but to the hantavirus, which survived this year's record setting warm winter, and thus got a boost in prevalence. It's still unclear whether the spread is due to the warm weather or cyclical mouse population dynamics, but it's certainly an example of the kinds of weird and unwanted results we expect to see as the world warms.

* One commenter at the SJR was in a huff over the use of "human caused." For the record, when I say "global warming is human caused," I mean "the unnatural part of global warming is human caused." No one's concerned about natural warming, because it happens on a timescale that's easy to adapt to.

Treehugger has a post about a theoretical idea for "food towers," condominiums for farms, to fit into dense urban landscapes. On the one hand, it's a nifty idea that's worth a try--and I have to confess I get a little Tom Swifty-ish when presented with an outlandish sci-fi concept. On the other hand, I've read my Wendell Berry, and know this kind of thing crops up from time to time, and promises breakthroughs that are never realized because ... it winds up being kind of dumb. A better idea might be Berry's call for more horse-based farming. Even something like the Post-Carbon Institute's Local Energy Farms project. (And, of course, any time innovative agriculture comes up, I have to plug the Land Institute, which is working to create an American prairie-based food polyculture.)

Of course, the big problem with Berry's solution, and even the Local Energy Farms and the Land Institute, is that while they're doing great things to improve agriculture, they don't really have much to say about the food system, and about the crucial connection between cities and their hinterlands. (I'm taking this city/hinterland language from William Cronon's book on the development of Chicago, Nature's Metropolis (Powell's).)

One attempt at making this link is the 100 mile diet, started by a couple in Vancouver. It's a nifty idea, but I worry that it doesn't scale up. That is, why does everyone get a hundred miles? I.e., why are New Yorkers and Springfieldians looking at the same foodscape? I tried to scale it based on population once, and the result that I got was that all of Springfield should be eating from Sangamon County alone. That didn't quite make sense either.

Somehow, you have to be able to account for the population of the city, the quality of the surrounding land, and also to provide for open space and natural habitats. And I don't see anyone working on that.

Diane sent me this article about why carbon trading, like a cap-and-trade system, won't work to lower carbon emissions sufficiently, and that therefore we ought to embrace a carbon tax. I gave her a quick rundown of what I thought of the controversy, and then sort of blew her off with a conclusion along the lines of, "Hey, it's all good for us." I'm going to recapitulate my thoughts on carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade, and then explain why that initial response was off the mark.

The central argument of the link is that the cap-and-trade system in Europe was kind of a disaster, and that extending it worldwide will be extremely problematic. And that's true. When prices on the European carbon market crashed, it was definitely a setback. But that's because it was a poorly designed program. Polluters were able to game the limits, setting them too high; the market was also structured by allowing polluters to own the rights at the start, rather than having to purchase them. This gave polluters little incentive to actually reduce their emissions in the short term.

On the other hand, my understanding is that the economics (that is, the incentives) of a well-designed cap-and-trade program and a well-designed carbon tax are basically equivalent. You can get the same reductions through either one. However, the key there is "well-designed"--both programs require a good design, and both have major pitfalls. A carbon tax, for instance, requires getting the tax right, and there's something of a trade-off between control (i.e., being sure that you hit your reduction goals) and simplicity (cap-and-trade has an enormous administrative overhead that a tax wouldn't have). A badly designed tax, however, will either underperform or be too costly--and the former is likely to lead to an abrupt swing toward the latter. In other words, that control isn't just good for meeting goals, it's also good because it's more predictable for all involved. And if we're talking about reducing risk of climate change, it's a bit silly to then insert a lot of risk over how the carbon market is going to work on a year to year basis. (This assumes, of course, that a cap-and-trade system can leverage sufficient incentives to make reductions go smoothly.)

As I said above, my initial conclusion for Diane was basically "Springfield is in a good place regardless of what the feds choose to do." However, if we get a bad policy, we get a bad policy, and that's that, regardless of whether it's a cap-and-trade or carbon tax. So, I'd amend that to say that when the feds really get down to haggling over different climate change plans, we have to be ready to weigh in in favor of quality programs. Businesses know they can game the system, and someone has to resist that.

So, there was Community Energy Systems (CES). And that was weird, but okay. Now there's the Coalition of Energy Suppiers. Does anyone else want to be a CES?

David Roberts at Gristmill has some carbon tax updates--apparently, it's catching on with everyone who doesn't make the decision! One thing to add is that, since a lot of the aversion to a carbon tax is simply based on an aversion to any tax increase, a grand bargain in the mode of Gore's call to switch all social insurance taxes (FICA, Medicaid) over to a carbon tax might be workable. The downside is that one of the benefits of the tax as a new tax is that you get to spend that money, preferably on stuff that makes the transition easier--subsidies for decarbonized power and public transportation infrastructure, for instance. And one important thing to note is that smartly spent money can have effects far greater than just what you pay for. You can attach strings (to ensure that transit spending is supported by transit-friendly land-use regulations, for example) and you can leverage money (either by requiring matching funds or by funding high quality program or planning design, with implementation paid for by another source).

When he testified before Congress the other day, Al Gore talked, in part, about creating a smart energy infrastructure to really leverage the potential for distributed generation. Don't know what that means? Me neither. So go read about it.

That's right. Earth Day is no more. We have Earth Week now! In fact, there's so much going on that its more like Earth Month for all of April. I'm listing all the events I know about so far. Tell me if you know of any events I missed.

Showing of the movie Power Shift and panel discussion.
Wednesday, April 11, 7:00pm
Lincoln Library, Carnegie Room
This is one of the Step It Up events going on around the country. From the film website: "Circling the globe, POWER SHIFT explores the remarkable ways that energy touches our daily lives. Hosted and narrated by Cameron Diaz, this award-winning program reveals the abundant possibilities of clean, renewable energy."

After the movie there will be a panel discussion related to issues in the film.
Panelists include:
Dr. Tih-Fen Ting, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at UIS
Jim Johnston of Sustainable Springfield Inc.
Greg Claxton from Clean Energy Springfield
Moderated by Catherine O'Connor from the Sierra Club

Edens Lost & Found, Chicago: City of the Big Shoulders
Thursday, April 12, Reception at 6:00pm, Screening at 7:00pm
"This multi-part PBS series highlights practical solutions to improve the environment and quality of life in cities, for ourselves and future generations. The centerpiece of a multimedia program and outreach initiative, this special broadcast will showcase extraordinary community activists as well as forward-thinking professionals who are offering best practice solutions to transform their urban environments." This complimentary screening will feature and Q & A session with series producer Harry Wiland.

Step It Up Rally
Saturday, April 14, Noon-1:00pm
Federal Building, 6th & Monroe, Springfield.
Step It Up is organizing over a thousand rallies across the United States.

"Every group will be saying the same thing: Step it up, Congress! Enact immediate cuts in carbon emissions, and pledge an 80% reduction by 2050. No half measures, no easy compromises-the time has come to take the real actions that can stabilize our climate."

Winona LaDuke
Tuesday, April 17, 7:30-9:00pm
Studio Theater, Public Affairs Center, UIS campus
Winona LaDuke was already well known for her work on environmental and Native-American issues when Ralph Nader asked her to be his Presidential running-mate in 1996 and 2000. The topic of her talk is "Politics, Women, and Environmental Justice."

Election Day
Tuesday, April 17
Remember to Vote!

"The Future of Renewable Energy in Illinois" panel discussion
Thursday, April 19, 7:00-9:00pm
Brookens Auditorium, UIS campus
One nice thing about UIS expanding is the opportunities provided to hear great speakers and new ideas in the community. This should be an exciting panel that will include perspectives from both sides of the ethanol debate. The panel includes:
Rebecca Stanfield, State Director, Environment Illinois
John Caupert, Director, National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center, Edwardsville, Illinois
David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences, Cornell University
Tih-Fen Ting, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, UIS, moderator
Before the panel, SAGE is sponsoring a picnic and concert with the band Patchouli, 5-6:30pm.

CWLP Smart Energy Forum
Thursday, April 19, 6 p.m.
Illinois National Bank Conference Center, 431 S. 4th St., Springfield
This public meeting is your chance to let Springfield's utility know what direction you want them to take with their energy conservation programs and related issues.

Earth To America
Sunday, April 22, 7:00pm
Lincoln Residence Hall, UIS Campus
UIS SAGE is sponsoring a showing of the film Earth To America.

Becki Clayborn presentation at the Sangamon Valley Group Sierra Club Meeting
Tuesday, April 24, 7:00pm
Becki Clayborn, Regional Representative with the Sierra Club’s Midwest Clean Energy Campaign, will be giving an overview of Smart Energy Solutions for Global Warming and how Illinois can help move the US toward a cleaner energy future. The presentation will describe the major sources of global warming emissions in Illinois and how the Sierra Club is working to reduce those emissions. Becki will talk specifically about the five C’s of Illinois Sierra Club’s Clean Energy Campaign: Cars, Cool Cities, Coal Power, Carbon regulation and Clean Energy.

Green Building Seminars with speaker Ron Jones
Thursday, April 26th
I'm especially excited to see the Springfield Area Home Builders Association sponsor an event like this. You'll need to register in advance with the SAHBA. From their website: "Ron Jones of HGTV and Green Building Magazine. Ron was named 2006 Green Advocate of the year (builder) by the NAHB and the National Green Builders Conference. Jones is a co-founder of Green Builder Media, LLC, a leading development, education, consulting and media organization and frequently participates in green-building workshops."

Earth Awareness Fair
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Illinois State Fairgrounds, Expo Building
This is the official Earth Day celebration for Springfield. Besides information from just about every environmental group in town, they'll have programs from the Illinois Raptor Center, free trees, live music, a freecycle garage sale, recycling for various items like printer cartridges and used cell phones, and all kinds of fun stuff.

This was cross-posted from CES Blog.

I was hoping that my absence would give Illinois and Midwest newspapers the opportunity to make the latest news from the IPCC a little more close to home. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times got a scoop on the key news, which is that poor nations are, inexplicably, in for an even worse time in the century to come*. A few other links to general coverage, the impacts to natural wonders, and just on the general bleakness of the report.

Sadly, however, the stories on local impacts haven't really started yet. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch seems to have the only news on Illinois impacts: a longer growing season to start, with less rain and even more heat in the further future. More heavy storms rather than gentle rain. My go-to document on Illinois impacts is the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate Change in Illinois, and that's looking pretty solid: Illinois will get Oklahomazized. (According to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin will get Arkansized.)

All is not bad news, however. For one, the "what do we do?" section of the IPCC report is still yet-to-be-released--expect it in the fall. For another, China has agreed to join negotiations for the follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol, governing what to do after 2012. That is big, important news, and hopefully it'll finally bring the US to an international commitment.

* What Revkin's piece details is disturbing enough, but a little bit of context makes it clear that climate is more than just the weather. Mike Davis's book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (also available in our library!), makes clear the ways that economic and imperial power work opportunistically in times of climate strife to prolong the devastation of droughts and floods. Those opportunities will surely abound in the wake of global warming driven catastrophes.

The SJR editorializes in favor of voting today, upholding the noble journalistic tradition of hectoring citizens to not be so lazy. I'm a structures kind of guy, so I'm always more curious about how people's choices--such as whether to vote or not to vote--are shaped by their circumstances. For example, the State gives the day off for the statewide election--does it for Springfield's election? Are other employers in the city willing to let employees duck out for a little bit of time to go vote? Do employers promote voting?

A couple of years ago, Louis Menand wrote a great article for the New Yorker about all of the things, other than an interest in politics, that drive voter behavior. Button color and weather, for instance. Obviously, there is a lot that political candidates and parties do to promote or depress voter turnout. Maybe, though, there are more things that we can do as a community to promote it as well. What if the SJR told us about that? What if the city clerk started a community campaign for voting? Those, I think, would be more valuable than another hectoring screed about how if you don't vote, you don't get to complain.

ALSO: This is actually my main reason for posting: Missouri City ward election draws ZERO votes. Not even the guy running (unopposed) went out and voted for himself. FRANK EDWARDS: THIS COULD BE YOU: REMEMBER TO VOTE!

I could make up something about how pace of life and community and art are environmental issues, but mostly I want to share this article with you: the Washington Post invited violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to be a busker for one morning at a Metro station in DC, to see what kind of reaction he would get from morning commuters. It's a fascinating, melancholy story.

And, ah, what the heck. Let me just say that you don't get buskers in your car. Go transit!

It's often said that environmentalists only know bad news. So let us take a moment to savor another bit of good news: bald eagles are found in Sangamon County. This is long-time example of the good work that national conservation efforts can do.

Habitat preservation is a tricky business, even in the best of times. It combines concerns with sprawl and agriculture, energy and water use, and general smoke-belching pollution in all its forms. Put in the context of the warming world--which the IPCC's latest report says could drive 30% of the world's species to extinction--and suddenly a tricky task doubles in on itself.

So, it's important to remember: not only can we do this, we have done it.

I was in Ann Arbor this weekend, and came across a new campaign there: Think Local First. It turns out that this is part of a larger campaign from the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies. Local economies are hugely important for connecting sustainability issues to actual quality of life--because local business shapes the local environment, because work shapes a big part of your life, and because the economy is an extension of nature. (Via Richard Layman, I see that BALLE is having their annual conference at the end of May--it would be great if someone from Springfield could go--I don't care who: someone from city planning, Downtown Springfield, Chamber of Commerce, anybody!)

One useful thing about bolstering the local economy is that, over time, you can push them to become more like an ecosystem, growing around the waste streams of other local businesses. (This is one of the themes of Bill McDonough's work, which is featured in Power Shift, showing Wednesday evening at the Lincoln Library, at 7:00.)

Governors Blagojevich and Doyle (Wisconsin) issued a joint statement on the latest IPCC report and the Supreme Court ruling against the EPA. Nothing groundbreaking here: global warming urgent and real, state action viable, wind + biofuels == the future. It does remind me that I've been negligent in linking to Illinois' Climate Change Advisory Group, which is pulling together recommendations for the Gov. (Sadly, still waiting for the materials from their meeting last week.)

Two movies you ought to come see. Tonight is Power Shift, which I've talked about before, followed by a panel discussion with myself, Tih-Fen Teng, associate professor of environmental studies at UIS, and architect Jim Johnston of Sustainable Springfield. It'll be at the Lincoln Library at 7:00, and is the first of two Step It Up events.

Whereas Power Shift is mostly looking at our energy use, tomorrow night's feature, Edens Lost and Found, looks more at improving nature within our cities, and doing so as a tool for improving daily life. Edens is a PBS series, and the showing tomorrow night (at Brookens Auditorium at UIS) is of the Chicago episode. It starts at 6pm with a reception; the movie is at 7pm; and then there's going to be a Q&A with the show's producer afterwards.

Not being able to predict the future, I can't say for sure how these events are going to turn out. But the reason I'm involved or the reason I'm going is that I hope that these two movies provide good opportunities for talking out not what the problems are globally, but what the solutions are locally.

I try not to feed the global warming trolls at the SJR too much, but some people are still swayed by them, so it's important to not ignore them completely. One point that repeatedly comes up is the fact that Mars is warming. (Because, if Mars is warming, and the Earth is warming, clearly they must be warming for the same reasons. These are people who, in other contexts, quite happily trot out the tired warning that correlation is not causation. But whatever.) And, as I mentioned in an earlier post, you also get a lot of kvetching about how climate science is bogus since it's models models models all the way down. Actual Climate Scientist Gavin Schmidt, of Real Climate, has a post up to explain some of the basics of modeling radiative forcing (that is, how solar energy gets trapped by greenhouse gases).

The post itself is interesting, but what really caught my eye was the first comment, which is quibbling with Gavin over the idea of presenting simplified models to the general public, since some simplifications wind up with weird, runaway results.

Now, one of the elements in Gavin's model is that it assumes there's a single layer of atmosphere, topped with the greenhouse gases. He also says that, basically, there are two sources of radiative forcing: increased solar energy and greenhouse gases. (This is where the warming skeptic's Mars stuff comes in--if it's increased solar energy that's causing our warming, then it's no big deal.) The commenter (Spencer Weart) says that it's an important point that the atmosphere isn't a single layer: it stratifies, and each layer acts a little differently to sunlight coming through; in turn, each layer reacts to warming a little differently, and most crucially, these layers react different depending on the source of the warming. If it's warming due to increased solar energy, then you'd see warming at all of these layers of the atmosphere. If it's warming due to greenhouse gases, then you'd see the layers below the greenhouse band warm, and you'd actually see the layers above that band cool off.

So far, so model-ly. But one of the great things about models--which in their feverish contempt for the m-word skeptics never note--is that they give you things that you can empirically test. And guess what the empirical tests show? Yup: lower layers are warming; upper layers are cooling.

Architect and planner Daniel Burnham instructed us to think big, but bigness is a surprisingly tricky business. A single vision, applied across many acres, is usually deadening, and recent attempts to dress up single buildings with multiple facades (and Meijer stores are only the oddest looking of the bunch, and not really atypical) often results in a Disneyfied artificiality that would be quaint if we didn't have to live with it.

Richard Layman has some thoughts. For myself, it's partly a problem of matching developer size to land costs. If land costs too much, development as a whole is squeezed out. If land costs too little, it's easy to build into bigness. Of course, the regulations that control how and where and what we build play a huge role, too.

One useful innovation, to my mind, was what was done in Fall Creek Place, in Indianapolis. FCP won the American Planning Association's Smart Growth award in 2003, and they did it, in part, by being very careful with how people got paid. They split the project's responsibilities up, so that the developer worked with many different architects to create a portfolio of house plans, ranging in size but fit to the historical character of the existing neighborhood. (Which neighborhood, incidentally, was 80% vacant at the start of the project, due to 30 years of aggressive demolition.) The developer connected homebuyers with architects, but was only paid a flat fee based on lots sold. Which means that they didn't have an incentive to upsize the homebuyers.

The neighborhood looks great now--I visited in 2004, and again in 2006, and while you can tell a lot of it is new, it has that hard to articulate balance between being stylistically consistent without deadening conformity that we look for in our great older neighborhoods. The best part, though, is that it's affordable--half of the homes are for low to middle income families. It's also transit accessible and pedestrian friendly. (It would almost have to be--it was built using all of the lot lines from the original platting in the 1940s or so.)

So, while we should make no little plans, maybe sometimes we want to make little buildings.

There's been a lot going on this week, so I'm behind in stuff, but let me put out a call: Drop by the Step It Up! rally today at noon at the corner of 6th and Monroe. Step It Up is a national effort to urge Congress to reduce greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. The rally is for an hour--noon to one--and there'll be a petition there that will get sent on to Congress.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of rallies, and it's cold, and it's a little wet--but I'm going to be there. Half a year ago, NASA climate scientist James Hansen--once a global warming skeptic--said that we have ten years left to start action on global warming before too many systems start to tip. Getting Congress to set the regulations now will make it easier to adapt and to prevent large-scale disaster.

So, come on out. This is how we build a movement for action, locally and nationally.

Charlyn Fargo*, who is, I guess, the SJR's agribusiness editor (according to her bylines on the State Fair and rodeo stories that come up on a google search for her), has a column up today advocating the re-election of Mayor Davlin. I'm trying not wade into the thorny issue of promoting candidates--I only want to talk about the policies. A couple of sentences in her column jumped out at me though, and I just have to question them:

His crowning achievement is the power plant. The only thing Springfield will likely regret about its new power plant is that it decided not to build a bigger one. Also, not long ago, the utility was reeling after losing tens of millions of dollars on a dicey power trading deal gone bad, and CWLP's coffers were still serving as a bottomless piggy bank for the rest of city government. Under Davlin, the utility is back on its fiscal feet and a cap has been placed on CWLP funding of the city budget.

I left the whole paragraph there so you could see where Fargo was heading with those two bolded sentences. I don't dispute that a fiscally healthy CWLP is a good thing. I'm not so sure, however, that in the future our only regret will be that CWLP didn't build a bigger power plant. Perhaps we'll regret not doing more to shift away more quickly from carbon-intensive forms of energy. Perhaps we'll regret not doing more to invest in an infrastructure that uses the energy within Springfield's borders. No, of course not--only silly hippies would think a thing like that. (Silly hippies like ... ConocoPhillips, a major oil company which has joined the ranks of other silly hippies like Alcoa, Duke Energy, Caterpiller, BP, and DuPoint in calling for mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions.)

Sadly, anything I more could say here would be trying to kill a gnat with a Buick--these are two toss off lines, and I doubt Fargo really has any sense of what she means, other than bigger and more are always better. There's no sense of what preparing for the future really means, or the many different ways in which we can meet our energy needs. Nope, we can just keep on keepin' on.

* UPDATE: I checked back a little later to see what comments on the op-ed were like, and found that the SJR removed Fargo's byline and left it as just the SJR's opinion.

One of the issues that's always lurking around the topic of environmentalism is: What does it mean for jobs? At the Step It Up panel discussion the other night, we got some tough questioning from someone currently unemployed, who's living on the streets. (I think he was with Homeless United for Change, though I could be wrong.) He wanted to know how what we were talking about was going to help him get a job.

Sadly, I don't think anyone had a good answer. At this point, CES has a general sense, I think, that relocalizing our energy supply--focusing more on efficiency and using the energy within our borders--is a better long-term strategy for jobs than building huge power plants every couple of decades. (And this doesn't even get into the issue of buying more locally for everything else.)

However, I don't think any of us have spent the time that the issue deserves, which is too bad, because employment is always going to be a predominant driver of political and economic decisions. We have to get better about making the case for green collar jobs--the jobs that span blue and white collar groups and that provide employment by protecting or improving the environment. We also have to get better about reaching out to employment-driven groups--the unions, but also the NAACP, Black Chamber of Commerce, the other Chamber of Commerce, and HUC.

I think we have the potential for a good message here. We just have to nail it, and then bring it out to people.

ALSO: I drifted away from my questioner, which is bad of me, but probably to be expected, since I don't have any good answer for him. The only answers I have are long-term and structural, and he quite rightly said that people have been making promises about the future for forever, and he's still out of work. What's more, at this point, we're not even talking to him. Read the paragraphs above, and it's probably apparent to you that I'm talking to people like myself--educated, upper middle class bureaucrats and technocrats. I'm not going to feel bad about who I am, but I do recognize the limitations this puts on us, having me as our public face.

You know the bad news already--it's been all over the news this morning and last night. There is nothing I can do, except to provide a little bit of good news, in the energy field.

First, the average New York City resident has a carbon footprint one-third the size of the average American's. A lot of people chalk this up to density, but I have a different answer: accessibility, or the number of places a person can get to within short distances. If you're a big city, the only way to be accessible is through density. But if you're not a big city, if you're a small city like Springfield, maybe you can simply get a little denser, and allow for mixed use.

Second, Pittsburgh's Green Building Alliance has been extremely successful in bringing green building to Steel City.

Third, here's some choice excerpts from a Wall Street Journal story on how, for the past 30 years, Denmark has kept its per capita energy use stable while doubling its GDP. Hopefully, this is the end of the idea that rising economic growth requires rising energy use.

Be to good to everybody you meet today.

For everybody who doesn't know, Winona LaDuke is having a talk at UIS tonight, from 7:30 to 9:00: "Politics, Women, and Environmental Justice" in the Public Affairs Center.

And then on Thursday, we have an embarassment of riches. First, CWLP is holding its second Community Energy Meeting at 6:00pm, in the INB conference center (in their new building) at 431 S 4th St. Second, UIS is hosting a panel on the future of renewable energy in Illinois, from 7:00pm to 9:00 in Brookens Auditorium. My spidey sense is telling me that if you're interested biofuels, including ethanol, you won't want to miss this one.

And, of course, the day wouldn't be complete without me remonstrating you to go out and vote. So go do it.

Of course, maybe you're a saint, like me, and you would've voted without my stern order. So go read about why voting isn't enough for a strong civil society, or about problems that plague public participation efforts (such as, I don't know, CWLP's community energy meetings?), even when they strive to be reflective of the community at large.

SustainLane has put together a list of the top 10 cities (sadly, only out of the 50 largest cities in the US) based on the proportion of their electricity coming from renewables. Surprisingly, Oakland, CA, clocks in at the top with 17%, and Chicago comes in at ten (really, eleven, because there's a tie for 2nd) with 2.5%.

If you're familiar with the clean energy plan, then, you'd know that when we get our full complement of wind power, Springfield is going to beat the top performer, with our 20% versus Oakland's 17%. Even if you exclude the state's portion, we tie Portland for third, with 10%.

Of course, none of these cities are going to stop moving forward, and Springfield shouldn't either. We can increase that percentage in two ways: first when CWLP opens up it's green power program (wherein residents and businesses can choose to buy more renewable energy, for a slight increase in cost), and second by reducing our overall energy use--since our wind power commitment is for a set capacity (120MW), any decrease in our overall electricity consumption will get reflected as an increase in the proportion of our electricity coming from wind.

Obviously, we're not doing this so we can top someone's list (especially, when that person restricts the list to the 50 largest cities in the country). But it's always nice when you can ratchet the right thing to do to a little virtuous competition.

I wish I could promise that this will be the most boring post you're ever going to read on this blog. Sadly, however, my capacity to be boring has as-yet unplumbed depths. This post's sole saving grace is that I'm going to talk about $30 million.

At last week's community energy meeting, Jay Bartlett, chief engineer at CWLP, mentioned that within the past few weeks, CWLP went to New York to issue the second round of the municipal bonds that fund the construction of the new power plant. (See! I told you it was going to be boring. But just wait--it gets unboring in a minute.) Apparently, what they do when this happens is they do some sort of presentation to investors and, in particular, the two big bond-rating houses (Moodys and ... someone else? these are the groups that grant A or AA or B status to bonds, which is an indication of how risky they are) about why we're a good place for investors to put their money. Municipal bonds are not flashy performers--they're one of the low-risk, low-performance places that you put your safe money. (NOTE: I am not a financial expert. I keep all of my money in the garden.)

So CWLP talked with the money people for a couple of hours. In Bartlett's words, about half of the time was spent talking about the clean energy plan. At the end, they opened the bond up, and it was instantly oversubscribed by a factor of four. That means four times as many people wanted to buy in as were able to. So, CWLP closed the bond down, and reissued it with a lower interest rate. (This seems like cheating to me, but I'm sure that's because I keep my money in the garden.) Anyway, even at the lower interest rate, the bond was still oversubscribed by a factor of four. Bottom line: People really want to give us money.

No, I'm kidding, that's not the bottom line. The bottom line is that lowering CWLP's interest rate on these bonds works basically the same way as lowering the interest rate on your mortgage: your monthly payment is less, and at the end of your mortgage, you've paid less in interest. Where does that leave CWLP?

Paying $1 million less on the bond per year over its entire 30-year lifetime. Which means that CWLP is saving the city $30 million on the coal plant.

Now, I would love it if I could say that this is entirely due to the clean energy plan. However, investors don't give reason, so there's no way to know for sure. However, if you bear in mind that these investors are looking for a safe place to put their money, and you realize that the financial sector is coming around to seeing climate change, and associated regulations, as essentially one ginormous risk, it's not hard to see how the plan would have appealed to them, as it provides a healthy financial padding for CWLP against the costs of future greenhouse gas regulations.

But, whatever the cause, let's give CWLP a round of applause for getting us a better deal for our mortgage this bond.

Well, not really, of course. But since everyone else is talking about Dave Bakke's column about the city's website, I figured I'd chime in. In particular, I like Marie's comments about the website's failings in terms of web design, content, and structure.

Handily enough, I came across today Politicopia, a wiki of bills before the Utah legislature, started (if I'm remembering correctly) by blogging state rep Steve Urquhart. Seeing some of the bigger ordinances that city council deals with, or even more detail on development issues, would really open up the process.

Similarly, from my experience sitting in on city council sessions, either for the clean energy plan or just out of interest, I think there needs to be a better explanation of the process that council goes through for the interested public. There's no real explanation of the consent agenda, debate agenda, how the committee structure works, how first and second reading works, nor of the actual process of passing an ordinance, including when you have to jump up and down to get someone's attention to let them know you want to talk. Davlin, whatever else you think about him, likes to move stuff through fast, and you've got to know when to jump in if you want to comment.

I think Cecilia Tumulty has a lot of potential in this regard. (At a neighborhood association meeting prior to the election, I had the chance to tell Tumulty some of what I've said above.) She's done some good stuff, content-wise, with the Clerk's webpage (giving it, in fact, it's own site now), although her latest changes haven't yet trickled through to the main site (for instance, the link to the city council agendas from the city's main page gets redirected to her clerk's main page).

Two great recent pieces about the struggle to make a market for local food in our increasingly processed foodscape. First, the always reliable Michael Pollan looks again at the relationship between our food choices and obesity, this time through the lens of what the federal government does. It isn't pretty. However, he concludes by noting that a public health coalition is pulling together to get a better Farm Bill this year -- probably something we ought to start organizing on, here in farm country.

Second, Tom Philpott at Grist looks at some of the struggles of local food markets in a rigged system.

If you have any interest in slow food, local food, being healthy, being sustainable, global warming, or helping the family farm, these are two must-reads. To my mind, we need two things: first, a plan for slowly scaling up our local food markets beyond the farmers' market, and, second, we need to get together and start working for change for a better Farm Bill. The impacts of that bill are tremendous, and are only now starting to be understood--not just its impacts to farmers, or to our food system, or our environment, but also to poverty in third world countries, where subsistence farmers are driven off their land, as their crops are undersold by subsidized American food--this is a crucial cycle of dependency that prevents the Third World from standing on its own (which, incidentally, can create more immigration for the U.S.).

Joel Makower has a good post about concerns with fraud in the carbon offset market. This is a tough, but inevitable issue, and it highlights the importance of supporting verified carbon offset programs, as well as the difficulty in national or international carbon trading. A reminder of the importance of local action.

Another reminder of the importance of local action: Brad Plumer notes a paper by Hoff Stauffer, one of the designers of the US's SO2 cap-and-trade system, arguing that a CO2 cap and trade won't work, and that anyway, the better strategy is to focus on performance standards for new greenhouse emitters--buildings, appliances, energy sources, cars. I've seen arguments on both sides for cap-and-trade, and have to confess that I don't know who to believe.

However, one point of Stauffer's is that we're facing two problems: how to reduce emissions from existing sources and how to reduce emissions from yet-to-be-created sources, and that the solutions for each of those are different. That makes sense to me, so that's going to be my new line. One of the nice things about that is that it's even easier for states and localities to take the lead in performance requirements for new developments--among this is basic stuff that we already regulate, like land use and building design. And since we in Springfield have a wonderful public utility, we can really press forward on continuing to green our energy supply as well.

I decided that today's SJR story on the Arbor Day's reassessment of central Illinois' hardiness zone needed a snappier headline, so I came up with the one above. Chris Young skirts around the edge of climate change, and leads with the pleasant idea that "[p]eople may be able to plant their favorite trees farther north than they could have a mere 15 years ago," without noting, of course, that as species shift into Springfield from the south, that means that species already in Springfield will shift north out of town, as well.

Nonetheless, it's good to start seeing reporting on the concrete effects of climate change in our area.

ALSO: And as always, check out the comments for a good time. My own contribution was the wish for a "Prairie Day" to go along with Arbor Day.

The SJR editorializes against the punditry class that's making a cottage industry out of global warming debunkery, eloquently invoking Carl Sagan's gift for bridging the scientific community and the public at-large.

And it's true: we need more people can better bridge that chasm. But we can also make do with what we have, which is engagement between scientists, activists, businesspeople, government officials, and politicians, working in a variety of spheres with varying degrees of expertise in climate science and other issues. The public at large is convinced of the reality of global warming and the need to act.

So what we also need is mounting pressure to do what we can, with the tools at hand. And there is much that we can do--our tools are as varied as the problem, and there is a long way that we can go before we start hitting a wall where great technological advance is required. Quite simply, what we need most of all is commitment. I hope the SJR's global warming realism extends that far, as well.

Obviously, the first thing to say about the pipeline explosion is: Thank goodness no one got hurt. And further: thank goodness that the many utilities running variously toxic and explosive fuels and chemicals around the country are staffed with engineers good enough to ensure that this happens infrequently.

Nonetheless, this is a necessary reminder of the essentially volatile character of much fossil fuel energy. One provocative social theory of the 1990s characterized much of the world today as a "risk society," where risk management and control are the preeminent virtues. However, the paradoxical effect of minimizing risk in daily life is that the risk essentially gets concentrated, and when something goes wrong, it goes wrong big. (If this sounds familiar, it's because it's partly the motivating idea behind Jurassic Park, a decent read because Crichton doesn't pretend to be able to lecture paleontologists on their craft.)

One of the virtues of most renewable energy is that they minimize risk without centralizing and compounding it. Indeed, one benefit of well-designed, thermally efficient buildings is that they can better withstand power outages.

One more reason why clean energy isn't just about global warming.