Climate Change

A sobering post today from the Streetsblog Network on the importance of preparing our transportation system for the effects of climate change. Megan McConville at The City Fix reports on a panel titled "Perspectives on Adaptation to Climate Change," hosted by the Engineers Forum on Sustainability.

To understand why the climate change bill is a top priority for urbanists, it's crucial to understand the emissions allowances that the legislation distributes. The allowances essentially put the "trade" in "cap-and-trade" -- whichever industry or state government holds them can benefit from their monetary value or use them to emit pollution under the "cap."

At one point midway through yesterday's Brookings Institution forum on metropolitan planning, moderator Chris Leinberger quipped that Portland was deliberately not represented. It's not that Portland isn't a model of sustainability, he explained, but that "we all have Portland fatigue" -- that urban policy thinkers are eager to expand the models of local development beyond Oregon.

Urbanists often find themselves falling into a pattern of thinking that boils down to the dictum that what's good for drivers must be bad for walkability, and sustainability, and all the things that they prize about well-designed cities. Drivers seem to believe this too, which is interesting because it often isn't true.

The Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Portland, Oregon, in early November for the annual Project for Transportation Reform, a summit to further define and clarify emerging urban transportation policies that embrace entire networks, rather than interdependent transportation segments, and that seek to balance modal transportation splits and reduce overall vehicular miles traveled (VMT).

This week has brought news of a brewing compromise on the Senate climate change bill, introduced last month amid signals that the upper chamber would give only a bit more to clean transportation than the House's meager 1 percent set-aside of revenue from cap-and-trade carbon regulations.

Flanked by fellow Democrats, members of the military, and a crowd hoisting signs with buzzwords like "clean energy" and "green jobs," Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) today released the first draft of their legislation to curb U.S. emissions and combat climate change.

The Senate's climate change legislation will finally make its debut tomorrow, courtesy of environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and foreign relations committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA). But the Washington Post has already obtained a "close-to-final" version of the bill [PDF], which provides some details but leaves unanswered the key question of how much aid will go towards clean transport.

About two years ago, the Urban Land Institute published Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, which argued that it will be crucial to build cities in a more compact fashion if the country hopes to avoid substantial growth in vehicle miles traveled and carbon emissions over the next few decades.