Urban dwellers hold key to climate-change goals: report

Consumption habits and energy use in Canada's cities must change dramatically to meet climate-change goals established by the Harper government, says a new report to be released today.

The research, produced by a coalition of stakeholders from industry groups, environmental organizations and the government, noted that nearly half of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are coming from sources in cities, and that these urban communities could play a significant role in building a new economy if the right policies are in place.

The report, drafted by Ken Ogilvie, former executive director of Pollution Probe, also suggests that reducing carbon-dioxide emissions from industrial sectors and energy supplies -- which it describes as "decarbonization" -- will not be enough to meet the government's target of reducing Canada's greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2020.

"Urban areas must be part of the solution," said the draft report that will be discussed at a workshop in Victoria this week by dozens of stakeholders.

"Decarbonizing Canada's energy supplies by 2020 cannot be accomplished in time on the scale required, and cannot by itself meet this (emissions) target."

The research was spearheaded by the Canadian Gas Association, and the participants are hoping to build a consensus across Canada to develop a blueprint for what they are calling Quality Urban

Energy Systems of Tomorrow.

"Most people take (energy) for granted," said former British Columbia premier Mike Harcourt, who is chairman of the group. "You turn on the light switch and on comes your lights, you go for a shower or wash your clothes. People don't realize how scarce energy is in a lot of parts of the world, particularly in the peak oil period that we're entered into."

The Harper government's climate change plan hinges on a regulatory framework that would set caps on the growth of pollution from large industrial emitters to establish a price on emissions and a market for buying and selling permits to pollute. However, the government has not yet introduced the regulations or explained details of how its overall target will affect the lifestyles and cost of living for average Canadians.

The group has suggested there are four possible scenarios for the future. Three of the scenarios suggest the possibility of either failing to meet targets to reduce pollution or failing to build systems to adequately support economic prosperity. Harcourt said urban dwellers in the future are likely to find themselves living and working in more compact green buildings, relying less on cars and shifting from gasoline-powered vehicles to hybrid or plug-in electric cars.

"If I can paraphrase Bill Clinton when he said 'it's the economy, stupid,' I would say it's sustainable cities, stupid because 80 per cent of us ... live in cities," Harcourt said. "I think within 10 years, people are going to realize that you got to be economically nuts not to be living (with more sustainable practices), because you will be saving $1,000 to $1,500 of after-tax income because you don't have to have a car or two cars."

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Smaller, smarter

Buffalo. Pittsburgh. Cincinnati.

The poets will never compare them to Paris -- or, for that matter, to New Orleans, the fountainhead of so much American culture.

Still, those humble burgs are New Orleans' peers these days, in at least two important respects: About 300,000 people now call them home, and their zenith, in terms of population, has passed. And cities like these have something to teach New Orleans: how to cope with getting smaller.

It's not easy. Lost population usually translates into widespread blight, crumbling infrastructure, stretched budgets and the loss of civic confidence and clout. But more than three years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans must confront the reality of a reduced population, as resettlement has slowed to a trickle.

Embracing or even accepting a downsized city can be painful for leaders and residents accustomed to seeing their town as the center of the universe -- with reason. Not only is New Orleans the birthplace of jazz, it also was the nation's third-largest city a century and a half ago, trailing only New York and Baltimore.

Today, New Orleans ranks somewhere between No. 55 and No. 60 in population, depending on the estimate used. And that ranking seems unlikely to change much: ESRI, a leading market research firm, projects New Orleans will gain only 15,000 residents in the next five years.

Put bluntly, Mayor Ray Nagin's declaration that a laissez-faire "market forces" approach would drive New Orleans' population higher than before the flood seems well off the mark. Although some neighborhoods have recovered strongly, in many the population remains down by 50 percent or more. Across the flood zone, ghost homes sit empty by the hundreds on blighted, overgrown blocks.

The reasons for a patchwork comeback aren't surprising. In poorer areas, residents often had less insurance and savings to finance rebuilding. Moreover, the Road Home program's policy of using pre-Katrina home values in awarding grants, as opposed to replacement values, meant that the grants often did not cover rebuilding costs, particularly given the steep spike in construction prices. Progress in those areas may continue to stagnate, absent some new, large-scale intervention.

The gap-toothed recovery poses questions with no easy answers. Where should the city invest in schools, in roads, in sewer repairs? Should it focus more on healthy or struggling areas? Or should it compromise, by goosing progress in flooded areas that have shown some comeback promise?

How, in short, should fairness be balanced with realism?

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Changing Californian climate 'will make wildfires worse'

When the fierce Santa Ana winds blew in last weekend many residents were stunned by the speed at which wildfires rapidly overwhelmed their neighbourhoods in southern California.

The supercharged flames destroyed 842 homes in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara — the highest urban tally since 1961 — and were further stoked by ultra-low humidity, soaring temperatures and tinder dry vegetation.

Compared with a decade ago, fires are often larger and fiercer. As risks increase, state spending on fighting fires has soared 150% to more than $1bn last year.

A report released last week by UC Berkeley researchers David Roland-Holst and Fredrich Kahrl, entitled California Climate Risk and Response, warned that wildfires, extreme weather and rising sea levels associated with climate change threatened some $2.5tr of the state's real estate assets [out of a total of $4tr], plus hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transport, energy, water and other infrastructure. Annual damage could reach $23bn.

"In the case of fire the real problem for California has to do with the changing seasonal water availability," said Roland-Holst.

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Sea surges could uproot millions in Nigeria megacity

Millions of people in Nigeria could be displaced by rising sea levels in the next half century, as ocean surges swamp some of Africa's most expensive real estate and its poorest slums, scientists say.

Africa's most populous nation, stretching from the southern fringe of the Sahara to the Gulf of Guinea, could come under triple attack from climate change as the desert encroaches on its northern pastures, rainfall erodes farmland in its eastern Niger Delta, and the Atlantic Ocean floods its southern coast.

But the greatest concern is the sprawling commercial capital Lagos, one of the fastest growing cities in the world, spread over creeks and lagoons and dangerously close to sea level.

"Lagos is a megacity with 15 million people, half of them at two meters (6 ft) above sea level, and that puts them at risk as hardly any other big city in the world," Stefan Cramer, Nigeria director of Germany's Heinrich Boll Foundation think-tank and an adviser to the Nigerian government on climate change, said.

Speaking at the launch this week of a Nigerian documentary on climate change, Cramer said most scientists predicted sea levels would rise by one meter over the next 50 years or so.

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Happy Birthday, Love Canal

Niagara Falls, N.Y.In the middle of an abandoned suburban neighborhood, a long grassy mound pokes up a few feet higher than the cracked streets surrounding it. A green chain-link fence surrounds the small hill, which is covered with wildflowers in summerlavender chicory and small yellow daisies. The fence has no warning signnot anymorebut this is Love Canal, the toxic waste dump that became synonymous with environmental disaster 30 years ago.

Adeline Levine, a sociologist who wrote a book about Love Canal, described to me the scene she had witnessed exactly 30 years earlier, on August 11, 1978. “It was like a Hitchcock movie,” she said, “where everything looks peaceful and pleasant, but something is slumbering under the ground.”

That “something” was more than 21,000 tons of chemical waste. The mixed brew contained more than 200 different chemicals, many of them toxic. They were dumped into the canal, which was really more of a half-mile-long pond, in the 1940s and 1950s by Hooker Electrochemical Co. In 1953, the canal was covered with soil and sold to the local school board, and an elementary school and playground were built on the site. A working-class neighborhood sprang up around them.

“The neighborhood looked very pleasant,” says Levine, who was a sociology professor at the State University of New York Buffalo in 1978. “There were very nice little homes, nicely kept, with gardens and flowers and fences and kids’ toys, and then there were young people who were rushing out of their homes with bundles and packing up their cars and moving vans.”

Love Canal was in the midst of an all-out panic when Levine arrived; just 9 days earlier, the state health commissioner had declared an emergency and recommended that pregnant women and children under the age of 2 evacuate the neighborhood. A week after that, the state and federal governments agreed to buy out homes next to the canal.

Levine spent all day interviewing people and was soon obsessed with their plight. Residents spoke of miscarriages, cancers, and children born with birth defects. She spent her vacation in New York City the next month knocking on doors and getting turned down for grants by foundations that couldn’t imagine why a sociologist would want to study an environmental problem. By that time, the entire country was watching the drama of the Love Canal neighborhood play out on the TV screen.

I was 4 years old at the time, and I don’t remember a thing. But later, as a teenager in the late 1980s, I lived about 2 miles from Love Canal as the crow flies, on Grand Island, a literal suburban island in the Niagara River. My father remembered Love Canal, and before he took an engineering job in the area, he asked how far away it was. He wasn’t too happy to learn that he would be living nearly within sight of it across the river. Even a decade after the neighborhood’s plight hit the news, the words “Love Canal” seemed to be stamped on our brains in shrieking orange capital lettersjust as Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island would later be.

After the summer of 1978 came the buyout of some 900 homes; years of legal battles and disputed health studies; the formation of the Superfund cleanup program, which for the first time called on businesses to pay for pollution cleanups; and a new awareness of the dangers of living with chemical waste. Levine’s book about Love Canal became a seminal work in a new field, environmental sociology.
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East Baton Rouge highest in industrial pollution

(The Advocate) - East Baton Rouge Parish ranks highest in the state for industrial pollution risk to human health, according to a report from the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Compiled by Wilma Subra, a consultant with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and owner of Subra Co. in New Iberia, the report uses information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Model.

Subra pulled Louisiana-based information from the computer model to provide a more local perspective, she said.

For years, the federal release of Toxic Release Inventory information has given communities an idea of what the industries around them are releasing into the environment, she said.

The new model takes that information and considers additional factors to come up with a number that allows an individual facility to be compared with another in terms of chronic human health risks.

The rankings don’t say how bad a particular area might be for human health, but instead allows a comparison to say one area is riskier or less-risky than another, according to the EPA Web site.

“This is a mechanism to tell the different parishes where they stand on the national level,” Subra said.

The new computer-model tool from EPA is important because it gives additional information to communities near industrial facilities, Subra said. For years, the Toxic Release Inventories helped communities know what was coming out of the industrial facilities near them, she said.

“We were able to get reductions (in emissions) over the years,” she said.

She said the awareness about specific industrial pollution seems to have quieted down, but this new EPA model could help spark interest again.

“It’s mostly asking the facilities to do more emission reductions,” Subra said. “Then if that doesn’t work, then let’s start talking about relocation of communities.”

The Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Model takes the amount of pollution released and adds in factors such as how toxic those chemicals are to human health, how close communities live to those facilities and how people can get exposed to the pollution — through air, water or soil.

Those “weighted” pollution numbers allows parishes and facilities to be ranked and compared to other areas in the country, Subra said.