The Dark Side of the ‘Green’ City

THE struggle to slow global warming will be won or lost in cities, which emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. So “greening” the city is all the rage now. But if policy makers end up focusing only on those who can afford the low-carbon technologies associated with the new environmental conscientiousness, the movement for sustainability may end up exacerbating climate change rather than ameliorating it.
While cities like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco are lauded for sustainability, the challenges faced by Phoenix, a poster child of Sunbelt sprawl, are more typical and more revealing. In 2009, Mayor Phil Gordon announced plans to make Phoenix the “greenest city” in the United States. Eyebrows were raised, and rightly so. According to the state’s leading climatologist, central Arizona is in the “bull’s eye” of climate change, warming up and drying out faster than any other region in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southwest has been on a drought watch 12 years and counting, despite outsized runoff last winter to the upper Colorado River, a major water supply for the subdivisions of the Valley of the Sun.
Across that valley lies 1,000 square miles of low-density tract housing, where few signs of greening are evident. That’s no surprise, given the economic free fall of a region that had been wholly dependent on the homebuilding industry. Property values in parts of metro Phoenix have dropped by 80 percent, and some neighborhoods are close to being declared “beyond recovery.”
In the Arizona Legislature, talk of global warming is verboten and Republican lawmakers can be heard arguing for the positive qualities of greenhouse gases. Most politicians are still praying for another housing boom on the urban fringe; they have no Plan B, least of all a low-carbon one. Mr. Gordon, a Democrat who took office in 2004, has risen to the challenge. But the vast inequalities of the metro area could blunt the impact of his sustainability plans.
Those looking for ecotopia can find pockets of it in the prosperous upland enclaves of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and North Phoenix. Hybrid vehicles, LEED-certified custom homes with solar roofs and xeriscaped yards, which do not require irrigation, are popular here, and voter support for the preservation of open space runs high. By contrast, South Phoenix is home to 40 percent of the city’s hazardous industrial emissions and America’s dirtiest ZIP code, while the inner-ring Phoenix suburbs, as a legacy of cold-war era industries, suffer from some of the worst groundwater contamination in the nation.
Whereas uptown populations are increasingly sequestered in green showpiece zones, residents in low-lying areas who cannot afford the low-carbon lifestyle are struggling to breathe fresh air or are even trapped in cancer clusters. You can find this pattern in many American cities. The problem is that the carbon savings to be gotten out of this upscale demographic — which represents one in five American adults and is known as Lohas, an acronym for “lifestyles of health and sustainability” — can’t outweigh the commercial neglect of the other 80 percent. If we are to moderate climate change, the green wave has to lift all vessels.
Solar chargers and energy-efficient appliances are fine, but unless technological fixes take into account the needs of low-income residents, they will end up as lifestyle add-ons for the affluent. Phoenix’s fledgling light-rail system should be expanded to serve more diverse neighborhoods, and green jobs should be created in the central city, not the sprawling suburbs. Arizona has some of the best solar exposure in the world, but it allows monopolistic utilities to impose a regressive surcharge on all customers to subsidize roof-panel installation by the well-heeled ones. Instead of green modifications to master-planned communities at the urban fringe, there should be concerted “infill” investment in central city areas now dotted with vacant lots.
In a desert metropolis, the choice between hoarding and sharing has consequences for all residents. Their predecessors — the Hohokam people, irrigation farmers who subsisted for over a thousand years around a vast canal network in the Phoenix Basin — faced a similar test, and ultimately failed. The remnants of Hohokam canals and pit houses are a potent reminder of ecological collapse; no other American city sits atop such an eloquent allegory.

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The Tyranny Of The Regulatory Regime

The manner in which environmentalists have exploited the web of regulations surrounding energy production in this country to sandbag and roadblock domestic energy production is nothing short of a travesty. Regulations exist to protect the public and the environment, not as a vehicle for implementing ideological agendas.
Ironically enough, one of the best examples of regulatory excess isn’t some attack on an oil drilling project or pipeline expansion but rather the opposition to a wind power project off the coast of New England. The Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound has been waylaid by opposition from a small, but well-monied and vocal, opponents for years. Not because the project poses any real regulatory of safety issues, but because the opponents don’t want their view of the ocean marred.

The Cape Wind experience also shows that it does not take much to gum up the regulatory gears for new projects of this sort. Opposition to Cape Wind has been driven by a few dozen families willing to invest their time and money to influence the regulatory process — and it’s worked. It does not matter whether a proposed project is popular with local residents, as a relatively small group of naysayers can exploit existing regulatory requirements to slow things down in the hope of eventually killing the project altogether. If other offshore wind projects are to succeed where Cape Wind has (thus far) failed, they will must prepare for similar opposition, and encourage regulatory reforms that will streamline wind project development and approval.

You can pretty much replace Cape Wind with, say, the Keystone Pipeline in this example and see that the problems are similar.
The government’s regulatory regime has become less about protecting citizens and ensuring responsible development and business practices than about pushing political agendas. In fact, this excessive power of regulation is at the heart of much of the corruption in government. It’s like a protection racket. The government’s regulatory regime is so all-powerful that those wanting to find their way through the maze must pay the proper tribute.

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Keystone XL pipeline protesters encircle White House

Thousands of protesters opposed to a controversial pipeline project surrounded the White House on Sunday.
Canadian company TransCanada is seeking permission to build the 1,600-mile (2,700km) Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf coast in Texas.
Environmentalists are opposed to the project because of the method used for extracting petroleum from Alberta's oil sands.
They are also concerned by the risk of pollution on the pipeline route.
The proposed pipeline would pass south from Alberta through the US states of Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma before ending up at refineries in Texas.
Environmental groups say that extracting oil from the sands would generate huge greenhouse gas emissions, and that any accident on the route could be disastrous. Risky decision
The protesters formed a human chain around the White House, with some carrying an inflatable replica of a pipeline on their shoulders.
Bill McKibben, one of the protest organisers, described the scene as either "a big O-shaped hug" or "a symbolic house arrest," according to the AP news agency.
"We have to leave the tar sands oil in the ground. That's the only solution if we are going to save the planet," protester Martin Springhetti told AP.
Canada's northern Alberta contains massive petroleum reserves
TransCanada said the protesters were ignoring the jobs the pipeline would create.
"What these millionaire actors and professional activists do not seem to understand is that saying no to Keystone means saying yes to more conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela filling American gas tanks," said TransCanada spokesman James Millar.
The US State Department is handling public consultations on the project as the pipeline would cross the border with Canada, but the White House has made clear President Obama will influence the final outcome.
The decision as to whether to allow the project is fraught with political risk for Mr Obama, reports the BBC's Zoe Conway in Washington.
If he rejects it, he could be accused of destroying jobs. But allowing it to go ahead could lose him the support of activists who helped propel him to the White House.
Some predict that the decision will be delayed until after next year's presidential election.
Last week the State Department indicated it might not reach a decision on whether to issue a permit for the pipeline by the end of 2011, as was originally planned.

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Second Energy Department-backed company goes bankrupt

A Massachusetts company that received a $43 million Energy Department loan guarantee last year filed for bankruptcy Sunday, a step certain to fuel criticism of federal green energy financing in the wake of the solar company Solyndra’s collapse.

Beacon Power Corp., which develops energy storage systems, filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

Beacon Power had received federal loan guarantee to help build an energy storage plant in Stephentown, New York that began operating in January. The Treasury Department’s Federal Financing Bank provided the loan.

Beacon sought bankruptcy protection two days after the White House ordered an independent 60-day evaluation of the Energy Department's loan programs aimed at ensuring effective management and monitoring.

The review, conducted by a former Treasury Department official, will include examination of how Beacon’s project is performing going forward, and whether there are additional steps that can be taken to protect taxpayers, according to the Obama administration.

The Beacon bankruptcy comes roughly two months after the California solar panel maker Solyndra, which had received a $535 million Energy Department (DOE) loan guarantee in 2009, went belly up and laid off 1,100 workers.

Solyndra’s collapse unleashed a torrent of GOP-led attacks on the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program.

Solyndra and the broader loan guarantee program are under investigation in the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“This latest failure is a sharp reminder that DOE has fallen well short of delivering the stimulus jobs that were promised, and now taxpayers find themselves millions of more dollars in the hole,” said Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), the GOP’s point man on the Solyndra investigation and a senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement to The Hill and other outlets.

“Unfortunately for the American taxpayers, I am deeply concerned that other DOE programs could follow which goes to the heart of the President's flawed economic program,” he said.

Stearns is chairman of the energy panel’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, which is expected to vote Thursday to subpoena internal White House communications about Solyndra.

Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera said there are “many protections for the taxpayer” in the agreement with Beacon Power.

“The Department’s loan guarantee is for the project Stephentown Regulation Services, LLC, not the parent company, and the loan was set up in a way that ensures the Department is not directly exposed to the liabilities of the parent company,” he said in an email Monday.

The department also sought to contrast the Beacon Power project and Solyndra, noting that Solyndra stopped manufacturing operations when it went bankrupt, while Beacon Power intends to continue operating the New York energy storage plant.

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The Tyranny Of The Regulatory Regime

The manner in which environmentalists have exploited the web of regulations surrounding energy production in this country to sandbag and roadblock domestic energy production is nothing short of a travesty. Regulations exist to protect the public and the environment, not as a vehicle for implementing ideological agendas.

Ironically enough, one of the best examples of regulatory excess isn’t some attack on an oil drillingproject or pipeline expansion but rather the opposition to a wind power project off the coast of New England. The Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound has been waylaid by opposition from a small, but well-monied and vocal, opponents for years. Not because the project poses any real regulatory of safety issues, but because the opponents don’t want their view of the ocean marred.

The Cape Wind experience also shows that it does not take much to gum up the regulatory gears for new projects of this sort. Opposition to Cape Wind has been driven by a few dozen families willing to invest their time and money to influence the regulatory process — and it’s worked. It does not matter whether a proposed project is popular with local residents, as a relatively small group of naysayers can exploit existing regulatory requirements to slow things down in the hope of eventually killing the project altogether. If other offshore wind projects are to succeed where Cape Wind has (thus far) failed, they will must prepare for similar opposition, and encourage regulatory reforms that will streamline wind project development and approval.

You can pretty much replace Cape Wind with, say, the Keystone Pipeline in this example and see that the problems are similar.

The government’s regulatory regime has become less about protecting citizens and ensuring responsible development and business practices than about pushing political agendas. In fact, this excessive power of regulation is at the heart of much of the corruption in government. It’s like a protection racket. The government’s regulatory regime is so all-powerful that those wanting to find their way through the maze must pay the proper tribute.

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Oil’s new world order

For more than five decades, the world’s oil map has centered on the Middle East. No matter what new energy resources were discovered and developed elsewhere, virtually all forecasts indicated that U.S. reliance on Mideast oil supplies was destined to grow. This seemingly irreversible reality has shaped not only U.S. energy policy and economic policy, but also geopolitics and the entire global economy.

But today, what appeared irreversible is being reversed. The outline of a new world oil map is emerging, and it is centered not on the Middle East but on the Western Hemisphere. The new energy axis runs from Alberta, Canada, down through North Dakota and South Texas, past a major new discovery off the coast of French Guyana to huge offshore oil deposits found near Brazil.

This shift carries great significance for the supply and the politics of world oil. And, for all the debates and speeches about energy independence throughout the years, the transformation is happening not as part of some grand design or major policy effort, but almost accidentally. This shift was not planned — it is a product of a series of unrelated initiatives and technological breakthroughs that, together, are taking on a decidedly hemispheric cast.

The search for a “hemispheric energy policy” for the United States has been a subject of discussion ever since the oil crises and supply disruptions of the 1970s. Yet it was never easy to pin down exactly what such a policy would mean. Some years ago, an economic adviser to a presidential candidate dropped in to see me, explaining the directive that his boss had given him: “You know that Western hemispheric energy policy that I have been giving speeches about? Could you talk to some people around the country and find out what I actually mean by a Western hemispheric energy policy?”

The notion of “hemispheric energy” in the 1970s and 1980s rested on two pillars. One was Venezuela, which had been a reliable petroleum exporter since World War II. The other was Mexico, caught up in a great oil boom that had transformed the United States’ southern neighbor from an oil importer into a major exporter.

But since Hugo Chavez took power in Venezuela, its petroleum output has fallen — about 25 percent since 2000. Moreover, Venezuela does not seem quite the pillar to rely on when its leader denounces “the U.S. empire” as “the biggest menace on our planet” and aligns his country with Iran. And Mexico, which depends on oil for 35 percent of its government revenue, is struggling with declining output. Without reform to its oil sector and international investment, it could become an importer of oil later this decade.

The new hemispheric outlook is based on resources that were not seriously in play until recent years — all of them made possible by technological breakthroughs and advances. They are “oil sands” in Canada, “pre-salt” deposits in Brazil and “tight oil” in the United States.

In little more than a decade, Canada’s oil sands have gone from being a fringe resource to a major one. Oil sands (sometimes known as “tar sands”) are composed of very heavy oil mixed with clay and sand. The oil is so heavy and molasses-like that, for the most part, it does not flow until it is separated from the sand and clay and treated. To do that on a large scale and on a commercial basis has required substantial advances in engineering over the past 15 years.

Oil sands production in Canada today is 1.5 million barrels per day — more oil than Libya exported before its civil war. Canadian oil sands output could double to 3 million barrels per day by the beginning of the next decade. This increase, along with its other oil output, would make Canada a larger oil producer than Iran — becoming the world’s fifth largest, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United States and China.

The oil sands have become particularly controversial because of environmental groups’ vigorous opposition to the proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Alberta to the Texas coast. The pipeline is waiting for the Obama administration to say “yea” or “nay.” Though large, it would increase the length of the oil pipeline network in the United States by just 1 percent.

The main reason given for the opposition is the carbon dioxide associated with oil sands production, but the impact of this should be considered in the context of the overall release of CO2. When measured all the way from “well to wheels” — that is, from production to what comes out of an auto tailpipe — oil sands average 5 to 15 percent more carbon dioxide than the average barrel of oil used in the United States. And this country uses other streams of oil that generate CO2 in the same range.

Even while the environmental argument rages, oil sands are proving to be a major contributor to energy security. Although it is easy to assume that most U.S. oil imports come from the Middle East, the largest individual share by far — nearly a quarter of the total — comes from Canada, part of a dense network of economic ties that makes Canada the United States’ largest trading partner. More than half of Canada’s oil exports to the United States come from oil sands, and that share will rise steeply in the years ahead.

At the other end of that hemispheric oil axis is Brazil. When Brazil began to develop ethanol from sugar in the 1970s, it did so based on the conviction that the country had no oil. As it turns out, Brazil has lots of oil. Just the increase in Brazilian oil production since 2000 is more than one and a half times greater than the country’s entire ethanol output.

In the middle of the last decade, new breakthroughs in technology made possible the identification and development of huge oil resources off the southern coast of Brazil that until then had been hidden below a belt of salt a mile thick. The salt had rendered unreadable the seismic signals necessary to determine whether oil was there. “The breakthrough was pure mathematics,” said Jose Sergio Gabrielli de Azevedo, the president of Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company. “We developed the algorithms that enabled us to take out the disturbances and look right through the salt layer.” Once discovered, further technical advances were required to cope with the peculiarities of the salt layer, which, sludge-like, keeps shifting.

Developing these “pre-salt” resources, as they’ve become known, is a big technical, political and logistical challenge for Brazil, and will require huge investments. But, if development proceeds at a reasonable pace, Brazil could be producing 5 million barrels of oil per day by around 2020, about twice Venezuela’s current output — and more than half the current output of Saudi Arabia. That would make Brazil, not Venezuela, the powerhouse of Latin American oil, and could make it a major exporter to the United States.

The third major supply development has emerged right here in the United States: the application of shale-gas technology — horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, a process popularly known as “fracking” — to the extraction of oil from dense rock. The rock is so hard that, without those technologies, the oil would not flow. That is why it is called “tight oil.”

Case study No. 1 is in North Dakota, where, just eight years ago, a rock formation known as the Bakken, a couple of miles underground, was producing a measly 10,000 barrels of oil per day. Today, it yields almost half a million barrels per day, turning North Dakota into the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the country, as well as the state with the lowest unemployment rate.

Similar development is taking place in other parts of the country, including South Texas and West Texas. Altogether, tight oil production is growing very fast. The total output in the United States was just 200,000 barrels per day in 2000. Around 2020, it could reach 3 million barrels per day — a third of the total U.S. oil production. (And that is a conservative estimate; others are much higher.)

Together, these three developments will radically alter the global flow of oil. The Western Hemisphere will still require supplies from the rest of the world, but not to the same degree — and certainly nowhere near the growing amounts forecast just a few years ago. The need could fall by as much as half by 2020, which will mean declining imports from the Middle East and West Africa.

Oil that would have gone west from those regions will instead flow in increasing volumes to the east — to the booming emerging markets of Asia. And those markets will be in urgent need of additional supplies. China, which today consumes half as much oil as the United States, could by the beginning of the next decade overtake America as the world’s largest oil consumer. All of this points to a major geopolitical shift, with Asian economies having an increasing stake in the stability of Mideast oil supplies. It also raises a very significant question over the next several years: How will responsibility be shared among the great powers for the stability of the Persian Gulf?

For the United States, these new sources of supply add to energy security in ways that were not anticipated. There is only one world oil market, so the United States — like other countries — will still be vulnerable to disruptions, and the sheer size of the oil resources in the Persian Gulf will continue to make the region strategically important for the world economy. But the new sources closer to home will make our supply system more resilient. For the Western Hemisphere, the shift means that more oil will flow north to south and south to north, rather than east to west. All this demonstrates how innovation is redrawing the map of world oil — and remaking our energy future.

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Maryland Considering Flush Fee Hike

A state task force is considering doubling, and maybe even tripling, the state's flush fee.
The fee for the Bay Restoration Fund is now $30 a year for property owners. The task force is considering recommending a doubling of the fee in 2013, and increasing it to $90 in 2015.
The fund pays for sewage treatment plant and septic system upgrades as well as cover crops that keep pollutants from running off farms into waterways.
The Capital of Annapolis reported Wednesday that the task force also is considering changing how the fund is used, including a proposal to use cover crop funds on programs to reduce storm water runoff. The task force, which met Tuesday in Annapolis, is scheduled to meet twice more before year's end.

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