Constructing Sustainability

It is now difficult to imagine a future where climate chaos won’t be flooding cities, raising food prices, killing humans, decimating biodiversity, and generally wreaking havoc. We will soon experience the consequences of carbon dioxide levels in excess of 450 parts per million and the much-discussed 2-degree-C increase in temperature.

Why?

1)   80% of the CO2 emissions needed to reach 450 are already locked-in.  Investors cannot afford to re-tool existing power plants, factories, hot water heaters, buildings, and automobiles until these investments have been used long enough to pay for the cost of buying them.  We will have passed 450 by the time we can install green replacements.

2)   Political and economic realities in China, India, and other developing nations necessitate continued, rapid economic growth. Billions of people aspire to middle class lifestyles.  Reducing poverty quickly enough to stave off social instability and maintain government legitimacy will require lots of cheap energy, which is why thousands of proposed coal fire plants will be built.  For those of us who already made it to the middle class, we are on shaky moral ground if we tell billions of our fellow humans they should forego flush toilets, light bulbs, and refrigerators.

3)   The revolution of shale gas and tight oil in the USA will provide abundant and cheap fossil fuels, enough to make the USA a net energy exporter for decades.  In the short term, cheap gas might decrease USA’s CO2 emissions as gas replaces more carbon-dense coal in electricity generation; but in the long term, cheap energy drives down the competiveness of renewables and delays when they will exist in sufficient quantity to impact climate mitigation goals.

The chaos get’s exponentially worse if temperatures increase much above 2 degrees Celsius, so mitigation strategies are still essential.

Bottom line.  We can no longer delay investing in climate resiliency, climate adaptation, and related strategies that blunt the worst impacts of climate chaos.

I admit it: I am a sustainability nerd.  Instead of shopping during my one free afternoon in Shanghai, I instead toured its Urban Planning Exhibition Center. Chinese celebrate urbanization—how refreshing—so most Chinese cities have similar exhibits. This one teemed with elementary school age children, studious college students, aspiring Chinese planners, and few curious westerners—many of us were taking notes!

Humanity’s battle for sustainable development will be won or lost in our cities.  More than 70% of us will be urban by 2050, because that is where wealth, health, and opportunity are found.  We will double our urban infrastructure between now and then, creating a tremendous opportunity for sustainable development.

Shanghai “gets it.”  They understand the latest and greatest urban planning theory, green-building techniques, smart-growth, transit-oriented-development, green-infrastructure, and low-impact-development.  They have clearly stated, top-down authority to pursue these practices as evidenced in the following statement at an exhibit on the third floor titled “Ecological City”

“Shanghai …will put into practice the Scientific Outlook on Development, focus on innovation driven transformation and development, and firmly embrace the concept of development led by ecological civilization and optimized by environmental protection. Through implementing the pollution reduction missions of the 3-year environmental action plans, with the highlights of total pollution load reduction, quality improvement, risk prevention, and development optimization, Shanghai will continuously strengthen environmental protection and ecological conservation, accelerate the creation of resource conservative and environmentally friendly city, and promote the green growth and low-carbon development for the harmony between human and nature. … By 2020, a clean, safe, and healthy ecological environment will be basically realized in the city. A low carbon development path suitable for a mega-city will be created. The environment foundation favorable for building the well-off society in an all-around way will be established.”

Even more impressive (to me) was an exhibit on the fourth floor that humanized and personalized the goals and motivations of ecological urbanization for sustainable development. It contained silhouettes of a family, each figure with text describing the family member’s dreams of living in an ecologically-oriented urban future. I took a picture of the girl, below.

The text reads:

“I want to have a ‘dream home.’  I will sleep under the sky with stars, wake up with bird twitter and fragrance of flowers. I will tell stories to small dogs in the garden and play with many children under the sunshine”

This strategic appeal to family values paints an attractive image for people currently living in a smog-filled, light-polluted, crowd-filled, city of 25 million people with scarce habitat for birds or dogs.

What made me cry?

China clearly gets it. They understand that urbanization is the secret sauce of sustainable development and are relocating an eye-popping 30 million people a year from farms to cities.  They have the political power and technocratic chops to do it right. They are not hamstrung by the political polarization and petty bickering that block smart growth in most US communities. They have the money, the knowhow, and the motivation.  And they have cool museums celebrating this possible future.

But can they do it?  If they can’t, it probably can’t be done—anywhere, which means we’re in trouble (at best it means our future will be considerably less wealthy, healthy, and happy).

The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels
There’s no question that burning fossil fuels is leading to a warmer climate and that addressing this problem is important. But doing so is a question of timing and priority. For many parts of the world, fossil fuels are still vital and will be for the next few decades, because they are the only means to lift people out of the smoke and darkness of energy poverty…. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/opinion/the-poor-need-cheap-fossil-fuels.html

Current Warming Target “Disastrous”
On other side of the coin is a new study by James Hansen and Jeffry Sachs, arguing that the target of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) as the maximum acceptable global warming above preindustrial levels would still result in “disastrous consequences,” from rampant sea level rise to widespread extinction….and that we are already well on pace to go beyond 2 degrees….  http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/12/scientists-current-warming-threshold-would-be-disastrous