GreenXchange Global Marketplace Conference Panel Compares U.S. City Climate Change Initiatives

Gail Goldberg: We have made a commitment in this city to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 35 percent below the 1990 levels by 2030, as many cities have, and we're working on reducing energy and water consumption by 20 percent. We are doing that with a multi-pronged solution, looking at water, energy, renewable resources, and we are looking at transportation and land use as one of the main objectives to achieve our goals.

We have already accomplished much. We recycle about 62 percent of our solid waste in this city. Our total power from clean energy is up to 20 percent now. We have kept our water use at the same rate that it was more than 25 years ago, despite our population growth. We have mandated that all city public buildings meet LEED building standards, and to date, we have built 50 buildings, and several of them are Platinum and Gold buildings. We have provided incentives for private sector green building. We have invested in our fleet of city vehicles, and we have more than half of vehicles running on alternative fuels. All of our DASH buses are now on alternative fuel.

We also adopted, a few years ago, a new element of our general plan called the Framework Element that lays out a smart growth strategy for how it is that this city is going to grow over the next 20 years, and it talks a lot about congregating growth around our transit stations, our transit corridors, and in our regional centers. We have adopted ordinances over the past few years to reduce parking, although I have to say it's a big struggle in this city. We have also implemented a number of urban storm water mitigation measures and plans, and we are working on that.

But we still have a lot to do. We are raising our goals for both our renewable energy and our water conservation. We are currently working on a private green building program, a set of requirements that we expect to have at our City Council within the first couple of months of 2008. This green building program will establish not only a green building team for the entire city, but will establish a standard of sustainability that will be required on all buildings that are 50,000 square feet or have more than 50 units. We are also establishing a standard of sustainable excellence, and we will be providing expedited processing in the city of Los Angeles. Expediting anything is a really big thing, and that will be one of the incentives that we will be offering.

We still have a lot to do in terms of working with the public to help them better understand the role that all of them can play, both in conserving energy and in conserving water. We are working really hard with our transportation policy to make certain that we can continue to reduce our carbon footprint. We are continuing to increase the number of fuel efficient automobiles that we have in our city's fleet. We are also focusing a lot on mobility of people, as opposed to mobility of cars.

We are working very hard to create new land use plans that will help us implement that Framework Element strategy. We are currently working on 12 of the 35 community plans for this city, so we are currently re-planning one-third of the city of Los Angeles. We are working on a sustainability plan both for our port and for our airport. We are working on recapturing some of the hardscape in this city to unpave the city of Los Angeles, if you will. We are looking to add green space, parks, and we are hopeful to create within the next couple of years 35 new parks, and the mayor has set a goal of planting 1 million trees in the city of Los Angeles.

Finally, I would like to tell you, because I hope it will be of interest to the folks who are here today, that we also want to create a demand and catalyze growth of the green economy in our city. We welcome new green technology, companies that are promoting green technology and green industry, to our city, and it is part of our economic prosperity plan for the city of Los Angeles.

Chris Dearth: Portland was the first city in the country to pass a CO2 reduction strategy in 1993. That was updated in 2001. At that time, we set a goal of reducing our emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2010, a little stronger than the Kyoto requirements.

But to really understand what Portland has done, we have to go back into the 1970s, because much of our success is based on the planning we started in the 1970s. At that time, we started a downtown plan to increase density and mixed use. We introduced light rail, replaced a freeway along our waterfront with a park, and began to increase density and mixed use downtown. These efforts continued into the ‘80s, when Portland did its comprehensive plan, along with all the other cities in the state, as required by the state law at the time. Those comprehensive plans required planning around transportation and many other natural resources. Portland also updated its central city plan to further increase density and mixed use throughout the entire downtown area.

These planning efforts were continued into the 1990s by Metro, the regional government that represents the three counties in the Portland Metro area. The "2040 Plan," so called because it was planning for the population increases to take place by 2040, increased not only density and mixed use downtown but also in town centers throughout the region-increased mixed use, commercial, residential, and higher density along main streets and transportation corridors.

A couple of recent planning efforts have increased this trend. Our Pearl District, on the north end of downtown, is a public-private effort to plan a very under-utilized brownfield railyard area to mixed use commercial and residential. Over 12,000 residents have been added in the last ten years there, and over 21,000 jobs.

Similarly, on the south side of downtown, the south waterfront area, which also sits on a brownfield, a steel and shipbuilding area, has been revived in the last ten years through a public-private planning process. We've extended our river greenway along that area. When that's built out, it is intended to have over a dozen high-density residential towers, including low- and moderate-income housing.

Transportation is an important part of the Portland story, too. We have an extensive light rail network throughout the region, both to the eastern and western suburbs, north to the Expo Center, and most recently, a public-private effort that didn't cost the taxpayers a dime to extend light rail to the airport. We have two new light rail lines planned on the east side to open in the next two to eight years, and we have a new commuter line on the west side between the southern suburbs and the western suburbs.

Portland has reintroduced streetcars after many decades of having lost them. We currently have a streetcar loop on the west side, extending from the south waterfront up through the University District through Downtown to the Pearl District. This streetcar line has been extremely successful at attracting new commercial and residential density around it. We are planning to extend it across the river to the east side, and we hope that that will be equally successful. As the result of the growth in our transit systems, our bus and rail ridership has increased over 100 percent since the late 1980s.

The most recent addition to our transportation mix has been the aerial tram, which was a public-private partnership between Portland, the Oregon Health Science University, and the private developers, on the south waterfront on the river up to the University on the hill. The tram recently took its millionth passenger, saving tens of thousands of vehicle trips up and down the hill every year.

One of the fastest-growing transportation modes in Portland is cycle commuting. Our bicycle network has increased threefold since the early 1990s, and cycle commuters have increased fivefold in that period of time.

So, as a result of all of these transportation choices offered to Portlanders, our vehicle miles traveled per capita has dipped slightly since the mid-1990s. We are generally lower than similarly sized cities throughout the country...

...Portland's green building policy is quite aggressive. All new city construction must be built to LEED Gold standards. All existing buildings and all subsidized development by our development commission must be raised to at least LEED Silver standards. And the city has invested $2.5 million in the last six years to incent the private sector to build green, as well...

As a result of all of these public and private efforts, you can see that the greater Portland area's per capita greenhouse emissions have reduced to 14 percent below 1990 levels. That's contrary to the trend that you see countrywide, which is increasing total emissions. Portland's total emissions began to dip in about 2001, and have generally trended down. We hope to keep that heading down.

But we still have a ways to go to meet our ten percent reduction goal by 2010. We have a long way to go to meet our 80 percent reduction goal by 2050. So, in the coming year, we plan to strengthen our green building plan, update our climate action plan, and we're in the midst of revising and updating our comprehensive plan to include carbon reduction modeling, measuring, and reporting.

Amy Chester: To give you a little bit of background on where we started, 25 years ago, New York was almost unrecognizable. The seedy subway cars, torched housing, and decay of Times Square were all symbols of urban blight. Subway ridership had its lowest levels since 1917. Our population plummeted by nearly one million people, and we have spent the better half of the last three decades focused on quality of life issues, such as crime, poverty, and our education system.

Because of that, we are now the safest big city in America. We have the best bond rating ever, and unemployment is at an all-time low. Our tourism numbers continue to break historic records: last year, 44 million people came to visit the Big Apple. But there's one statistic that sums up everything, and that's population growth. Resurgence has attracted a record number of residents: 8.2 million people. More people are living in New York City than at any time in history, and more and more are coming. New Yorkers have renewed vibrancy and energy like never before.

Our Department of City Planning spent a year developing population projections so we could prepare for the future. They found that New York will grow by almost another million people by 2030. And growth brings enormous benefits-750,000 new jobs, millions more tourists, and billions of dollars of new revenues that we can invest in our city.

But growth unchecked, and growth that isn't smart or guided, can be paralyzing. So we began to take a hard look at how we could accommodate this growth. We studied our entire city: all 188 neighborhoods, the age and efficiency of all our 25 power plants, congestion levels on all 250 miles of subway routes, every park, and every parcel of vacant land. We identified three major challenges that became the foundation for our plan. The first one: we will be getting bigger. The second: our infrastructure is getting older. The third: our environment will be more precarious.

We quickly discovered the scale and interdependency of these challenges. Our aging power plants damage our environment. Population and job growth puts stresses on our strained infrastructure. Our congested streets contribute to our high childhood asthma rates. In short, we determined that we needed to use our resources more efficiently. We needed a long-term plan for sustainability.

What do we mean by sustainability? To us, sustainability is to leave a city to our children and grandchildren that is cleaner, healthier, and more reliable than the one we enjoy today, despite our growth. Creating a sustainability plan is identical to preparing for a growing city-it's all about using what you have better and more efficiently. If we do, we will also have a tremendous impact on climate change.

Last December, Mayor Bloomberg set ten goals to become the first truly sustainable city in America. He wants to create enough housing for a growing population; ensure all New Yorks live within a ten-minute walk from a park; clean up all of our brownfields; develop our water network back-up systems; open 90 percent of our waterways for recreation use; improve travel times by adding transit capacity for millions more New Yorkers; achieve a state of good repair in our transit system, which has actually never happened since it opened; upgrade our energy infrastructure to provide clean energy; achieve the cleanest air of any big city in America. All of those will add up to reduction of global warming emissions by 30 percent in 2030.

We knew we couldn't work alone, so we went straight to New Yorkers to ask their opinion. We set up a website asking New Yorkers about their ideas, and it generated thousands and thousands of comments. We held 11 public town hall meetings, categorizing all of their feedback, and met with more than 150 advocacy organizations and listened to their ideas.

On Earth Day last April, the mayor unveiled the plaNYC, a sweeping and detailed plan to make New York even greener and greater. The plan focuses on five key dimensions of the city's environment: land, air, transportation, water, and energy. This aggressive but achievable plan has 127 separate initiatives to address these ten goals, and all the details of how we will find them and our scheduled implementation is in the plan, too. But these initiatives do more than just meet the goals. They'll put New York on the forefront of fighting global warming and strengthen our economy in an environment that's becoming increasingly more competitive.

I won't go through all 127 initiatives, but I'd like to share with you some of my favorites. Since we're city of islands, our most valuable resource is land. Our plan calls for doubling the amount of land available for possible housing development and focusing on transit-oriented development, decking over railyards and assisting in the clean-up of brownfields by expediting the processes for approval. We will open 290 schoolyards as local playgrounds: these are open spaces that traditionally have been closed on weekends, and for those that need improvement, we will install state-of-the-art facilities. We'll increase the hours in 39 fields by installing lights; reclaim eight large, unfinished parks that had begun to be built in the 1960s but were never finished due to a lack of funds; and we'll invest $40 million to create those spectacular parks. And where there's simply no place to create a new park, we'll create a new public plaza, returning streets to pedestrians.

But having a state-of-the-art recreational facility has more benefits than just recreation. The new parkland will capture storm water. In addition, we will mandate landscaping and parking lots and larger tree pits to absorb water before it reaches our sewer system. We will offer property tax abatements for green roofs and catch basins to absorb rain before it enters our sewer system. For water that reaches our sewer system, we will plant water-cleansing mollusks just outside the treatment facilities to naturally clean the sewage.

And the largest impact of them all, like L.A.: we plan to plant one million trees in the next ten years. We have a very aggressive plan, because there's only a couple of months in New York when you can plant trees. We have to plant 350 trees a day to reach our goal, which we have already begun. That will not only capture water, it will also absorb soot and improve our air quality. Because New York has the second worst air quality in the United States, and in some parts of the city, asthma rates are nearly four times the national average. To tackle that problem, we will require the use of higher grades of fuel oil to heat homes, schools, and places of business, which will not only help our air quality but help our greenhouse gases. We've also begun implementing a pilot biodiesel program in government buildings. The city will launch an unprecedented energy effort, and to track our successes, the Department of Health will mount a campaign of monitoring and pinpointing local air quality across the city.

We will also tackle emissions from another big source of emissions-transportation-by requiring all New York City cabs to go green. Coincidentally, this morning in New York, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission will vote on a rule to require all New York City cabs, whether they be hybrid or CNG, to have better miles per gallon within five years. Our entire fleet will be clean air within that time.

More than a quarter of our local pollution comes from cars, trucks, and other forms of transportation. That's why we have propose charging an $8 fee for all cars that come into the central business district during the hours of 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. The scheme, called congestion pricing, has been successful for London, Stockholm, and Singapore. I know it may be hard for people in L.A. to imagine, but since we have a state-of-the-art transit system and most people have very good mass transit options, they can easily travel to work that way. However, our subways are old, and we have a $30 billion funding gap in order to do the expansion we know we need, which is why every penny of that $8 will go back into the funding system, funding transportation and raising all the money we need within 30 years.

We cannot ignore another essential infrastructure network: energy. To increase supply, we will build clean-burning power plants through guaranteed long contracts to lower our prices and promote upgrades of existing plants. To stabilize demands, we will target our largest energy consumers-older buildings stocks through incentives. The city government will set aside ten percent of our own energy bill to be spent retrofitting city buildings to improve their efficiency. This year alone, that's $80 million.

We have also challenged the universities to meet government goals of reducing our greenhouse gases 30 percent in ten years, and they have all accepted. This will become the largest single energy conservation effort undertaken by any American city.

All the initiatives add up to the most dramatic reduction in greenhouse gases. If we implement all of our initiatives, we will be able to reduce our greenhouse gases 30 percent by 2030, and that's from today's levels, not if we left it to business as usual.

But reducing carbon is simply not enough. New York is a waterfront city. Our waters have already risen one foot in the past 100 years, and that's mostly due to the tectonic plates shifting. We need to be cautious of our rising sea levels. That's why we're going to create an inter-agency task force to complete an inventory of all at-risk sites by expanding our adaptation strategies beyond the protection of our water supply to our wastewater treatment plants to include all essential city infrastructure. We're going to create a community planning process to engage residents in community-specific adaptation strategies, ensure our floodplain maps are up to date, work with insurance companies to secure discounted flood insurance, and amend the building codes to directly address the impacts of climate change.

Long-term investments like those just described don't usually make for great politics, which is why they usually aren't made, but they do make for great cities.

We've already begun implementing this plan. We've hosted the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit. We've begun our Being Green awareness campaign that we call greeNYC, and we've released RFPs for solar and tidal energy. We've released the redesign of our eight regional parks, have been awarded $354 million from the federal government to implement congestion pricing if it's passed by the state legislature, and have already opened 69 schoolyards as playgrounds and begun construction on the next round.

On our six-month anniversary, we released a status report to the public explaining exactly where we were on each of the 127 initiatives. When we tallied it up, we realized we've already begun 83 percent of the initiatives.

If you come to the bullpen at City Hall, which is where the mayor and all the deputy mayors sit, you'll notice an electric countdown clock in the corner. Rather than a countdown for our escape from government servitude, it's a call to action, a reminder that there isn't much time for Mayor Bloomberg to be in office. And just below the clock, there's a sign that says, "Make every day count."

If you study New York City's history, you'll find that, at critical junctions, New York has made critical leaps of the imagination that have set the course for generations. We built subways through farmlands, created a park they called Central Park, a mile from the northern edge of the city, which at that time was 23rd street, and conceived of a street grid for a population ten times greater than it was at that time. We believe that greening our city will be one of those critical leaps to make New York an even better place than it is today.

Joel Kotkin: What the cities are doing in most cases makes a certain amount of sense, but we have to understand that that's not where the action's going to be for the vast majority of Americans. What we're going to is an era in which people will have more and more freedom to locate where they want to locate, and I think you're going to see all sorts of new environments. Downtowns will be part of it, but much of it will be low- and moderate-density, inner ring communities, then suburbs, then reaching further out into the suburban rings.

I think we have to admit that, unless something very dramatic changes, the vast majority of the growth in the United States will continue to go into the periphery. I think there are several reasons for this. One: the country's going to go from about 300 to 400 million people. Urban growth is hard to predict. Both L.A. and New York's population growth, at least in the last two or three years, has tapered off; it's basically fairly flat. I don't know if that will continue or not. But the country's going to keep growing. Whatever growth you're going to see in the urban centers, it's going to be dwarfed by the overall growth. We had 200 million people when President Kennedy was elected, we have 300 million today, and by 2050, we'll have something around 400 million. There's going to be a huge number of new people. So we have to think about-if we want to create a sustainable future-how we're going to deal with that 100 million people.

What's going to shape that? I think one is telecommunications technology. Another thing that's going to really be critical is the issue of preferences, what people actually want. Almost every survey I've looked at, whether its Fannie Mae, Homebuilders, or even Smart Growth America, suggests that the niche for urban living in America is about 10-15 percent of all Americans. So, that's 10-15 million people in urban centers over the next 45 years. That's not chopped liver, but it's not, as we would say in California, the "big enchilada." Most of the growth is going to be taking place in the periphery. We have to start thinking about why that is, and how can we make that more sustainable...

How do we make the suburbs better? How do we make cities like L.A., Houston, and Phoenix more sustainable? I see several things happening. One, I think you're going to see not new Manhattans but very dense centers, many polar centers, that will develop along the cities: areas where there will be homes, townhomes, condos, and they will be connected by roads, bus lanes, fiber optic cables. Most of the growth will go out in the outer ring.

What's going to happen in the outer ring? Some of it's already starting to happen, oddly enough. We study cities, but we don't study suburbs very well. But we're starting to see suburban malls becoming the centers of urbanity in suburban areas. Others are building housing, for instance, near these suburban malls. The construction of civic buildings, the construction of performing arts centers in the suburbs, so that the suburb itself begins to become more of a self-sufficient unit so that the whole idea of the bedroom suburb that came of out World War II really shifts and moves more to the garden city idea.

I think this is a much better idea. When you look at cities or suburbs that have done this, you have much higher percentages of people living and working in the same community. In Irvine, remarkably enough, 40-50 percent of the residents work close to their homes.

The other thing that will be driving this will be telecommunications technology. That's going to allow for a much greater dispersion of work with much less commuting time. Twenty-three percent gains between 1990 and 2000; it increased about 50 percent a year. An interesting statistic: if we take out New York City, there are now more people telecommuting than taking mass transit in the United States.

So I think what we have to look at is the transformation of suburbia, what somebody once called "smart sprawl." I think we can see the development of an archipelago of villages that are much more sustaining. If the green movement really wants to be serious and really wants to get big emissions reductions in greenhouse gases and in the use of energy, it's going to have to go to where the action is, and that's the multi-polar cities, and most importantly, to the suburbs and ex-urbs.