Concrete Is Remixed With Environment in Mind

Soaring above the Mississippi River just east of downtown Minneapolis is one remarkable concrete job.

There on Interstate 35W, the St. Anthony Falls Bridge carries 10 lanes of traffic on box girders borne by massive arching piers, which are supported, in turn, by footings and deep pilings.

The bridge, built to replace one that collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people, is constructed almost entirely of concrete embedded with steel reinforcing bars, or rebar. But it is hardly a monolithic structure: the components are made from different concrete mixes, the recipes tweaked, as a chef would, for specific strength and durability requirements and to reduce the impact on the environment. One mix, incorporated in wavy sculptures at both ends of the bridge, is designed to stay gleaming white by scrubbing stain-causing pollutants from the air.

The project, built for more than $230 million and finished in September, three months ahead of schedule, “might have been the most demanding concrete job in the United States in 2008,” said Richard D. Stehly, principal of American Engineering Testing, a Minneapolis firm that was involved in the project. It is a prime example of major changes in concrete production and use — changes that make use of basic research and are grounded, in part, in the need to reduce concrete’s carbon footprint.

Concrete may seem an unlikely material for scientific advances. At its most basic, a block of concrete is something like a fruitcake, but even more leaden and often just as unloved. The fruit in the mix is coarse aggregate, usually crushed rock. Fine aggregate, usually sand, is a major component as well. Add water and something to help bind it all together — eggs in a fruitcake, Portland cement in concrete — mix well, pour into a form and let sit for decades.

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Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time Is Now

The country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning things around will take more than just pouring money into shovel-ready projects, regardless of how they might boost the economy. Windmills won’t do it either. We long for a bold urban vision.

With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.

Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.

Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities.

The changes needed may seem extravagant, but they are not impossible. Many of those who see the current economic crisis as a chance to rebuild the country’s infrastructure have pointed to previous major government public works projects, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration in the 1930s and 1940s and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, as a reminder of what this country was once capable of.

Although the W.P.A. is mostly associated with rural dams and roadways, there’s hardly a city in America where it didn’t leave its mark, from riverfront parks to schools and housing projects.

Eisenhower’s investment in highways was equally audacious, but its effect on cities has not always been positive; in many ways the Highways Act set the stage for decades during which suburban interests trumped urban ones.

Inspired by the German autobahn, which Eisenhower saw firsthand during World War II, the program was an attempt to retool the country’s immense military-industrial complex for a peacetime economy. Creating thousands of miles of intercity highways, the program fueled America’s postwar car culture and suburban sprawl, in addition to changing permanently the way towns and cities have evolved.

Most notably it accelerated certain seismic cultural shifts born of the cold war and the civil rights era by creating the means by which middle-class families would flee perceived urban threats — racial friction, potential Soviet bombs — for the supposed security of the suburbs. In many cities intracity highways became dividing lines between white and black.

In New Orleans, for example, the 10 Freeway bulldozed through one of the city’s most vibrant African-American communities, becoming a psychological barrier between the black middle-class Treme neighborhood and the tourist-infested French Quarter. The Santa Monica Freeway, built around the same time, walled off poor African-American areas like Crenshaw and South Central from the rest of the city to the north.

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Urban heat

In life, as in boxing, the combined effects of a one-two punch are often more devastating than either blow alone. Imagine, then, the devastation from a triple whammy that city dwellers might suffer this century as three unfavorable trends converge to afflict an already warming world.

First, there’s temperature. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Earth’s average global temperature has risen about 0.74 degrees Celsius in the past century (SN: 2/10/07, p. 83), an increase almost certainly linked to the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities have released into Earth’s atmosphere. IPCC scientists suggest this warming trend will continue, and indeed accelerate: In the next 20 years, average global temperature will rise another 0.4 degrees C or so, they estimate.

Then, there’s population growth. Now home to more than 6.6 billion people, Earth will see its population increase by about 25 percent, or 1.65 billion, by the year 2030 (SN: 10/13/07, p. 235). Even with substantial increases in energy efficiency, this dramatically larger population will likely trigger a rise in total energy consumption, further boosting emissions of greenhouse gases.

Third, there’s urbanization. Much of the world’s population growth in coming decades will occur within cities, where residents are exposed to warmer-than-average conditions due to the “urban heat island” effect. People living in large, well-developed areas typically experience temperatures several degrees warmer than do residents of the rural areas nearby.

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Obamas to Plant White House Vegetable Garden

On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.

In an interview in her office, Mrs. Obama said, “My hope is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”

Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot in a spot visible to passers-by on E Street. (It’s just below the Obama girls’ swing set.) Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs.

Almost the entire Obama family, including the president, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said laughing. “Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know.” Her mother, she said, would probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot.”

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Northeast US to suffer most from future sea rise

The northeastern U.S. coast is likely to see the world's biggest sea level rise from man-made global warming, a new study predicts.

However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That's because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

An extra 8 inches — on top of a possible 2 or 3 feet of sea rise globally by 2100 — is a big deal, especially when nor'easters and hurricanes hit, experts said.

"It's not just waterfront homes and wetlands that are at stake here," said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who wasn't part of the study. "Those kind of rises in sea level when placed on top of the storm surges we see today, put in jeopardy lots of infrastructure, including the New York subway system."

For years, scientists have talked about rising sea levels due to global warming — both from warm water expanding and the melt of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. Predictions for the average worldwide sea rise keep changing along with the rate of ice melt. Recently, more scientists are saying the situation has worsened so that a 3-foot rise in sea level by 2100 is becoming a common theme.

But the oceans won't rise at thesame rate everywhere, said study author Jianjun Yin of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University. It will be "greater and faster" for the Northeast, with Boston one of the worst hit among major cities, he said. So, if it's 3 feet, add another 8 inches for that region.

The explanation involves complicated ocean currents. Computer models forecast that as climate change continues, there will be a slowdown of the great ocean conveyor belt. That system moves heat energy in warm currents from the tropics to the North Atlantic and pushes the cooler, saltier water down, moving it farther south around Africa and into the Pacific. As the conveyor belt slows, so will the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic current. Those two fast-running currents have kept the Northeast's sea level unusually low because of a combination of physics and geography, Yin said.

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Weatherizing against emissions

Nothing screams green more than a home with rooftop solar panels and a Toyota Prius in the driveway. But when it comes to saving money and the planet, it turns out the lowly caulk gun has these high tech gadgets beat by a mile. A recent report (by McKinsey and Co.) found that simply plugging leaks and improving efficiency in existing buildings would do more to reduce CO2 emissions than ramping up wind and solar power. And it would also pay for itself. Sam Eaton from the Marketplace Sustainability Desk decided to put this theory to the test on his aging Los Angeles home.

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Harnessing the Sun, With Help From Cities

Rick Clark’s garage is loaded with fast toys for playing in the sun. He has a buggy for racing on sand dunes, two sleek power boats for pulling water skiers, and a new favorite: 48 solar panels that send his energy meter whirring backward.

Bronzed and deeply lined from decades of life in the desert sun, Mr. Clark is not one to worry about global warming. He suspects that if the planet’s climate is getting hotter, it is part of a natural cycle and will probably correct itself. “Experts have been wrong before,” he said.

But late last year, Mr. Clark decided to install a $62,000 solar power system because of a new municipal financing program that lent him the money and allows him to pay it back with interest over 20 years as part of his property taxes. In so doing, he joined the vanguard of a social experiment that is blossoming in California and a dozen other states.

The goal behind municipal financing is to eliminate perhaps the largest disincentive to installing solar power systems: the enormous initial cost. Although private financing is available through solar companies, homeowners often balk because they worry that they will not stay in the house long enough to have the investment — which runs about $48,000 for an average home and tens of thousands of dollars more for a larger home in a hot climate — pay off.

But cities like Palm Desert lobbied to change state laws so that solar power systems could be financed like gas lines or water lines, covered by a loan from the city and secured by property taxes. The advantage of this system over private borrowing is that any local homeowners are eligible (not just those with good credit), and the obligation to pay the loan attaches to the house and would pass to any future buyers.

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California panel urges 'immediate action' to protect against rising sea levels

As California officials see it, global warming is happening so there's no time to waste in figuring out what to do.

California's interagency Climate Action Team on Wednesday issued the first of 40 reports on impacts and adaptation, outlining what the state's residents must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels.

Hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars of Golden State infrastructure and property would be at risk if ocean levels rose 55 inches by the end of the century, as computer models suggest, according to the report.

The group floated several radical proposals: limit coastal development in areas at risk from sea rise; consider phased abandonment of certain areas; halt federally subsidized insurance for property likely to be inundated; and require coastal structures to be built to adapt to climate change.

"Immediate action is needed," said Linda Adams, secretary for environmental protection. "It will cost significantly less to combat climate change than it will to maintain a business-as-usual approach."

Few topics are likely to be more contentious than coastal development. But along the state's 2,000-mile shoreline the effects would be acute, particularly in San Mateo and Orange counties, where more than 100,000 people would be affected, according to the 99-page state-commissioned report by the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.

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Sea rise 'to exceed projections'

The global sea level looks set to rise far higher than forecast because of changes in the polar ice-sheets, a team of researchers has suggested.

Scientists at a climate change summit in Copenhagen said earlier UN estimates were too low and that sea levels could rise by a metre or more by 2100.

The projections did not include the potential impact of polar melting and ice breaking off, they added.

The implications for millions of people would be "severe", they warned.

Ten per cent of the world's population - about 600 million people - live in low-lying areas.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, had said that the maximum rise in sea level would be in the region of 59cm.

Professor Konrad Steffen from the University of Colorado, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, highlighted new studies into ice loss in Greenland, showing it has accelerated over the last decade.

Professor Steffen, who has studied the Arctic ice for the past 35 years, told me: "I would predict sea level rise by 2100 in the order of one metre; it could be 1.2m or 0.9m.

"But it is one metre or more seeing the current change, which is up to three times more than the average predicted by the IPCC."

"It is a major change and it actually calls for action."

Dr John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research added: "The most recent research showed that sea level is rising by 3mm a year since 1993, a rate well above the 20th century average."

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Garbage turns into gold in Bangladesh

Maqsood Sinha and Iftekhar Enayetullah like to talk trash, but that’s be­­cause they’re pioneers in Bang­ladesh’s organic-waste recycling. They are the founders and directors of Waste Concern. Since 1995, this NGO has reduced the amount of urban garbage produced here, created jobs and healthier living environments for poor residents, provided for more-sustainable farming, and cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest and most populous nations. Its 150 million people live in an area the size of Iowa and have an average per capita income of about $600 per year, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Because it lacks space for landfills, trash disposal is a major concern.

Every day 3,500 tons of garbage is produced in Dhaka, says Mr. Sinha, a tall formidable man sitting in a conference room at their offices in Dhaka lined with numerous awards. Almost half of the city’s trash goes uncollected, Sinha adds. Dhaka simply does not have the resources to gather and dispose of all that waste. Most of it is left on the streets or in open trash sites.

But 80 percent of the waste is organic – food waste, such as vegetable and fruit peels, meat scraps, and spoiled fish.

That’s where Sinha, an architect and urban planner, and Mr. Ena­­ye­­tullah, a civil engineer and urban planner, stepped in. After earning degrees abroad, they came back to turn organic trash into a profitable resource: compost.

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Applying Peace Corps Ideas To Hometown In Need

With every disaster comes opportunity: That's what two young men from Wilmington, Ohio, thought when they saw the economic devastation in their hometown, where thousands have lost their jobs.

Mark Rembert and Taylor Stuckert decided to put aside work in the Peace Corps to see what they could do to help fix their own community — and they hatched a plan to start an environmentally friendly project that they hope will put hundreds back to work.

The two are as surprised as anyone to find themselves back in Wilmington, a rural community southeast of Dayton. When they graduated from the local high school in 2003, they couldn't get out fast enough.

"If you asked me six months ago if I would want to live in Wilmington, Ohio, if it meant that I got to work closely with the community, be around my family, you know, earn nothing, when I had a really high-paying job in New York, I would say, no, absolutely not," says Stuckert.

A Hope For Lasting Change

Stuckert, 23, has a still-boyish face and blond, wavy hair. Until last fall, he was in the Peace Corps in Bolivia, but he had to be evacuated because of unrest there. Earlier, he had worked at a law firm in New York. He was trying to figure out what to do next when his good friend urged him to return home.

"I was like, you have to come back. There's so much energy here right now," Rembert says.

Rembert is 24, with dark hair and a beard. He almost bounces with enthusiasm. He also was accepted to the Peace Corps and was set to go to Ecuador. But then, DHL Express, Wilmington's largest employer, announced it was going to shut down its domestic air-freight operations, leaving thousands without jobs.

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Huge Solar Facility Planned For California Desert

Utility company Southern California Edison and solar startup BrightSource Energy announced a deal to build a solar-thermal plant that would generate 1,300 megawatts of power, slightly more than a modern nuclear plant, in the Mojave Desert. BrightSource CEO John Woolard discusses the project.

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We Need a Department of Homegrown Security

By Chip Ward

Now that we've decided to "green" the economy, why not green homeland security, too? I'm not talking about interrogators questioning suspects under the glow of compact fluorescent light bulbs, or cops wearing recycled Kevlar recharging their Tasers via solar panels. What I mean is: Shouldn't we finally start rethinking the very notion of homeland security on a sinking planet?

Now that Dennis Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, claims that global insecurity is more of a danger to us than terrorism, isn't it time to release the idea of "security" from its top-down, business-as-usual, terrorism-oriented shackles? Isn't it, in fact, time for the Obama administration to begin building security we can believe in; that is, a bottom-up movement that will start us down the road to the kind of resilient American communities that could effectively recover from the disasters--manmade or natural (if there's still a difference)--that will surely characterize this emerging age of financial and climate chaos? In the long run, if we don't start pursuing security that actually focuses on the foremost challenges of our moment, that emphasizes recovery rather than what passes for "defense," that builds communities rather than just more SWAT teams, we're in trouble.

Today, "homeland security" and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that unwieldy amalgam of thirteen agencies created by the Bush administration in 2002, continue to express the potent, all-encompassing fears and assumptions of our last president's global "war on terror." Foreign enemies may indeed be plotting to attack us, but, believe it or not (and increasing numbers of people, watching their homes, money, and jobs melt away are coming to believe it), that's probably neither the worst, nor the most dangerous thing in store for us.

Outsized fear of terrorism and what it can accomplish, stoked by the apocalyptic look of the attacks of 9/11, masked the agenda of officials who were all too ready to suppress challenges by shredding our civil liberties. That agenda has been driven by a legion of privateers, selling everything from gas masks to biometric ID systems, who would loot the public treasury in the name of patriotism. Like so many bad trips of the Bush years, homeland security was run down the wrong tracks from the beginning--as the arrival of that distinctly un-American word "homeland" so clearly signaled--and it has, not surprisingly, carried us in the wrong direction ever since.

In that context, it's worth remembering that after 9/11 came Hurricane Katrina, epic droughts and wildfires, biblical-level floods, and then, of course, economic meltdown. Despite widespread fears here, the likelihood that most of us will experience a terrorist attack is slim indeed; on the other hand, it's a sure bet that disruptions to our far-flung supply lines for food, water and energy will affect us all in the decades ahead. Nature, after all, is loaded with disturbances like droughts (growing ever more intense thanks to global climate change) that resonate through the human realm as famines, migrations, civil wars, failed states and eventually warlords and pirates.

Even if these seem to you like nature's version of terrorism, you can't prevent a monster storm or a killer drought by arresting it at the border or caging it before it strikes. That's why a new green version of security should concentrate our energies and resources on recovery from disasters at least as much as defense against them--and not recovery as delivered by distant, fumbling Federal Emergency Management Agency officials either. The fact is that pre-organized, homegrown (rather than homeland) networks of citizens who have planned and prepared together to meet basic needs and to aid one another in times of trouble will be better able to bounce back from the sorts of disasters that might actually hit us than a nation of helpless individuals waiting to be rescued or protected.

Imagine redubbing the DHS the Department of Homegrown Security and at least you have a place to begin.

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