06 Dec Five-Star for CARBON ZERO, by Alex Steffen

Fellow eco-citizens, have I got a book for you! CARBON ZERO, by Alex Steffen.

Steffen's book is "a brief but deep manual for imagining how our cities can become the solution to our climate woes." (Scott Rosenberg, on grist.org )

This book is very permaculture-spirited in that it takes a whole-systems approach, aimed not just at cutting emissions but at ADDING the good design that will make our cities GREAT PLACES — physically, economically, and socially.

• If you want to believe that the human race can arrest climate change in time to save life on earth as we know it, but you don't really believe it's possible, this book is for you. It will give you a healthy dose of level-headed optimism.

• If you already believe we can indeed save life on earth as we know it, but could use some evidence and talking points to mobilize like-minded people and maybe even persuade a few pessimists to get on board, this book is also for you. 

• If you love cities, this book is for you. (If you love your life in the country, and don't want to be threatened by starving bands of urban marauders when TSHTF, this book is for you also.)

And I'm asking you to read it RIGHT NOW, or sometime very very soon. Which you can do easily, because the author is so committed to getting these ideas out there that's he's made it available free online in its entirety.

CARBON ZERO is both concise and compelling enough to read in a single sitting — say, a long rainy afternoon or extended winter evening. So if you can't start in right this minute, try to get to it later today or sometime in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, here are a few of the points I took away from my first reading:

Chapter 1: Cities in the age of climate consequences

We're losing the climate fight. Climate change is more advanced, and its effects more severe, than we thought. To keep things within the "extremely dangerous" range (as opposed to catastrophic), we have to keep the temperature rise to within 2 degrees C.

"This means that all the expressions of commitment we’ve heard from politicians about reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent off 1990 levels, say, or 80 percent by 2050 or whatever — all of those numbers are meaningless. The meaningful number is simple: zero, as soon as possible."

The good news is that rapid cuts to net-zero emissions may offer us the best opportunity to build prosperous economies. We're becoming an urban planet. The bulk of the solution to climate change lies in cities, and will be good for business. 

"Indeed, as we cease trying to maximize the volume of material growth and start emphasizing sustainable prosperity, I think we’ll find that what we’re able to do with energy and materials becomes more and more brilliant, meaningful, and enriching. Design constraints often deliver better results than a belief in complete freedom. Quite the opposite of imposing hardship, carbon zero targets may very well spur a renaissance in urban creativity. … I find it completely likely that the constraints of climate neutrality and ecological sustainability, boldly met, may produce the most livable, prosperous, and resilient cities the world has ever seen."

Chapter 2: Why clean energy isn’t enough

To win the climate fight, we have to see climate change not only as a problem of energy generation, but also as a problem of energy — USE. Although clean energy development is proceeding rapidly, it won't be nearly enough to meet our needs unless we radically reduce our consumption patterns. It's not so much about increasing efficiency (as in doing the same things better); rather, it's about using design to radically reduce the energy and materials used in cities. 

"…[U]sing less energy means a lot less demand for energy generation. Designing out energy and materials use within a city creates cascading reductions all the way down the supply chains that serve that city. Because these supply chains are full of waste (no industrial process is perfectly efficient and many industrial systems today pay at best passing attention to energy efficiency), reducing the need for the final product in a system often produces incredible savings as that reduced demand echoes out."

One of the best opportunities for reduction lies in how we design our buildings. For example, buildings can be designed or retrofitted to need no airconditioning. Landscaping is another key area.

Instead of cutting emissions by (for example) replacing a dirty coal plant with a wind turbine, we design/retrofit our cities to eliminate the need for that energy at all: "We’ll still need a lot of wind turbines. But supplying clean energy to cities that use a small fraction of the energy they do today is a much cheaper and more achievable goal than trying swap the entire power system with clean alternatives."

Once a city cuts its energy use by 90 percent, covering the remainder with clean renewable sources is quite do-able.

"So, climate change is likely unsolvable as an energy problem, but it looks entirely solvable as a cities problem. What follows is my best educated guess at what a workable set of such urban climate solutions might be."

Chapter 3: Urbanism: Why good walksheds mean lower emissions

The largest share of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions comes from transportation. Besides the actual fuel burned in transportation, there's also the enormous footprint of the transportation infrastructure itself (highways, car dealerships, factories, parking lots, etc.). This is a big part of why just switching to electric cars won't help. Rather, what we need to focus on is accessibility — walkable neighborhoods with necessary services located within easy range. We need compact communities. Since it's not practical to tear down what we've already got, infill development will be key.

Public transit has a highly beneficial multiplier effect: 

"Every mile a transit rider goes on public transit results in between four and nine fewer driving miles (depending on the community). … People usually walk or bike to and from transit stops, which means they tend to plan their trips a bit more carefully than drivers do, and as transit ridership grows on any particular route, more businesses and services locate along the route to serve those riders. This means that a person who, say, walks to the station and commutes by train to the office, may well go to the gym and grab a coffee on the way in, then shop for a gift, hit happy hour with some friends, and buy a few groceries on the way home. What would have taken someone in a car a number of trips, the transit rider achieves on a round-trip ticket."

Walkable, compact neighborhoods are people-focused. Walkable streets create synergistic "network effects." Cities need "deep walkability"; even walkable neighborhoods aren't much good if they're just small islands of walkability bounded by large freeways and other prohibitive separators.

With new investments in transit & walkability, even some suburbs can become real communities.

Density makes for safer streets. And, in people-focused neighborhoods, we will live longer, healthier lives.

Urban areas are poised for rapid growth. And, "The growth these new residents bring can reshape whole neighborhoods, provide the revenue for investments in new infrastructure and systems, and stoke the fires of a bright green American economy. The coming boom can release a revolution in urban innovation."

To reduce our footprint while also addressing the shortage of affordable housing, we need to build more housing, and build it denser, smaller, closer together. Options include subdividing large homes into apartments and condos; creating "granny flats" and mini backyard cottages. Other possibilities include car-free zones and "eco-districts".

The Internet and other technology have shaped our relationship with urban space, creating the "searchable city" where the need for car trips is greatly reduced. Though technology has its risks and downsides, used correctly is has the potential to make our cities more vibrant and nurturing spaces.

In the sidebar to this chapter, Steffen brings up "People-focused places and fairer cities."

Chapter 4: Shelter: Working with nature to drop emissions

"If we build it right, they (emissions) will come (down)."

Buildings consume enormous amounts of energy throughout their lives. Buildings are second only to transportation systems in their climate impacts. The built environment therefore offers huge opportunities to achieve carbon-zero cities. Traditional builders knew how to make best use of energy flows. They sited buildings to let in the sun's warmth in winter and stay cool in summer. They knew how to take best advantage of natural lighting. By reviving this old wisdom, combined with the best new technologies and materials, we can achieve enormous gains.

"If we’re going to build carbon zero cities, we need to rethink not only the shapes of our buildings, but the way in which they connect to the world around them. We’re going to need to imagine a major upheaval in shelter systems."

New construction will be a key part of the mix, since a lot of our buildings won't last much longer than a couple of decades. This is actually good news because it presents a major opportunity to do things better. The ambitious Passivhaus standard offers a good path to carbon reduction. 

"The German word “Passivhaus” translates literally to “passive building.” Passivity in this case means sticking to two simple core principles: work with (not against) natural flows and use airtight insulation to keep warmth (or coolness) where you want it.  … Add to those simple principles the latest design, manufacturing, and materials advances (especially new superefficient window designs) and what you end up with are buildings that work in a different way than most of us would expect."

A building constructed to the highest green standards, but located far from transit and services, is not a true green building. Context is key. We can achieve a major increase in overall density without necessarily taking away existing neighborhoods that are working well. One example of the "tent-pole" model of development: The addition of a 1,000-unit complex significantly increases the overall density in a larger area, without sacrificing the adjacent neighborhoods of houses.

Shared services mean more sustainable neighborhoods. Example: One gym serving 500 residents of a dense walkable neighborhood is more sustainable than 500 big houses each with its own private gym. To keep pace with societal changes, we might see new building trends such as growth in multi housing units for groups of single people who value privacy but also want community.

Dense neighborhoods lend themselves to the efficiencies of "district solutions" — services such as heating and water infrastructure shared among multiple buildings. "A common and successful form of district energy is a local combined heat and power (CHP) system. CHP often involves producing electricity with a steam turbine (commonly by burning relatively eco-friendly biomass like wood pellets) to make electricity while capturing the extra “waste heat” thrown off in the process and using it to warm local buildings as well."

We also need more flexibility in the legal codes: "Create specific, legally defined areas where codes and regulations are stripped to their minimums, and bold thinking is actively encouraged. Projects in these special innovation zones would need only prove that they avoid very basic hazards — public health risks, unsound structural engineering, toxic pollution, fire … Beyond that basic set of strictures, they would have the capacity to challenge constraints, try new things."

Chapter 5: Consumption: Sharing capacities to cut carbon

This chapter focuses on collaborative consumption and other forms of sharing as a means of reducing our need for "stuff". We can go a long way toward Carbon Zero by car-sharing, office-sharing, and rethinking our needs.

As just one example of the huge opportunity for sharing, Steffen gives the example of the power drill. The average power drill is used for only 6 to 20 minutes in its entire lifetime. And of course just about every American household has a power drill, just sitting around gathering dust.

"A well-built power drill can, with proper care and maintenance, deliver thousands of hours of hole-drilling. When I own a drill and use it for 10 minutes total, I am letting all those thousands of hours of surplus drilling capacity go to waste; if I used them fully, each minute of my drilling would take a minuscule fraction of a drill’s worth of impact.

"Of course, I just don’t have thousands of hours of drilling to do. I don’t even own enough stuff to drill that many holes. To drill for thousands of hours, I would need to become a menace to society, surreptitiously drilling other people’s stuff, perhaps working at night and leaving my neighborhood pockmarked with hundreds of thousands of mysterious holes. The idea’s absurd, of course. But the fact is, most cities likely have hundreds or even thousands of years worth of surplus drilling capacity lying around. If every drill already manufactured was used with perfect efficiency, we might not need to make another one until the 22nd century. The same is likely true for all manner of tools, from socket wrenches to lawnmowers, beer-brewing equipment to high-quality scanners. We float in an invisible sea of surplus capacity, and wasting that surplus is a major source of greenhouse gases."

Sharing arrangements of various kinds — possibly facilitated by information technology — save resources in many ways (such as allowing people to live comfortably in smaller spaces). Not only that, sharing — unlike buying stuff — contributes to happiness by building community.

"Smart" technology in a deeply networked city might include things like a city-wide system of networked rainbarrels, which could be used as a buffer to mitigate flooding.

Other concepts in this chapter include "recombinant manufacturing" and "the death of speed": As long-distance high-speed transport becomes less economically viable, cities that develop versatile, distributed, clean manufacturing capacities stand to reap great economic benefit.

Chapter 6: Sustenance: Bringing cities and nature together

"The stories of our urban systems need to include nature. Western culture has drawn a line between nature and the city for 400 years. That line was always an illusion. Now, we can’t afford to be blind to the reality that urban systems and natural systems are completely intertwined."

Although food contributes less to climate change than transportation, building, or consumption, we can achieve major progress toward Carbon Zero by changing our food systems. This is because agriculture, fishing, and forestry, done right, can actually be vehicles for atmospheric restoration.

Some people are unaware that food has any climate impacts at all. Others insist that we can solve everything about our food system with a single "magic bullet" (quit eating meat; focus on local food; focus on organics; turn to smaller farms with fewer fossil inputs and better farming techniques).

"All of these views are right. All of them also suffer from little-discussed limitations. And all of them, to my mind, overlook the most important fact about food: It is the by-product of ecosystems, and an intimate connection between our bodies and the workings of those ecosystems. To talk about food and climate is ultimately to speak of cities and nature, and how to bring them back together."

"I think supporting local food is vital, for reasons that have nothing to do with how much diesel got burned trucking our lettuce to the supermarket, and everything to do with the quality of our “foodsheds” — the network of places from where our food comes."

*******

As you can see, CARBON ZERO offers rich fare for those of us whose aspirations go far beyond the mere "survival" of the human race. We can actually use the climate crisis to muster the political will to remake our cities — and in the process, create the kinds of places where people and other living creatures can be truly happy. Imagine that!

I hope you'll read CARBON ZERO and share its words and concepts widely with your social networks. Tweet it; Facebook it; light up your listserves; bring it up in phone conversations, at the coffee house, at the dinner table. Amplifying good ideas and spreading level-headed optimism is one of the most immediately effective ways to add momentum to social change movements. 

It's also well worth your while to buy the full Kindle ebook edition from Amazon. Keep it on your laptop computer, smartphone, or other e-reading device to take with you to City Hall. Or your neighborhood association meeting, design charrette, book club, or wherever your chosen front for climate action may be.

Steffen is no pie-in-the-sky utopian. He has his eyes wide open to (for example) the potential hazards of a super-digital, hyperconnected world, as he explains in his sidebar "Drawbacks of the digital city." But he finds reason for cautious optimism, and I think he's right. When we humans decide to drop our silliness and channel our energy constructively, we get things done. I've long felt that human creativity is the ultimate renewable resource; our ace in the hole that will persist long after the last drop of cheap oil is gone.

Or, as Steffen so aptly puts it, "If the ultimate limit turns out to be time, the last infinite resource turns out to be creativity."

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

A fellow AustinEcoNetwork blogger, Interfaith Environmental Network, has recently posted a nice write-up of organizations that are "Becoming Carbon Positive."