Image: Photograph by Dan Saelinger, Styling by Laurie Raab/Halley Resources
In Brief
- Cities are tackling climate change because they are suffering from floods, rising seas and heat waves. They are innovating ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, conserve water, protect transportation systems and help the public avoid heatstroke.
- City leaders should share best practices to maximize progress and minimize costs.
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Our Flooded Future Looms
For years scientists have urged national leaders to tackle climate change, based on the assumption that prevention efforts would require the coordinated actions of entire nations to be effective. But as anyone who has watched the past 15 years of international climate negotiations can attest, most countries are still reluctant to take meaningful steps to lower their production of greenhouse gases, much less address issues such as how to help developing countries protect themselves from the extreme effects of climate change. Frustrated by the ongoing diplomatic stalemate, a number of urban leaders have decided to take matters into their own hands, adopting solutions that already exist or inventing new ones for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for the effects of ongoing global warming.
Mayors and urban managers are taking over because they have a keener sense about how changing weather patterns will affect their cities’ political and economic future. As Bärbel Dieckmann put it in 2007, when she was mayor of Bonn, Germany, “cities are already experiencing flooding, water shortages, heat waves, coastal erosion and ozone-related deaths.” Since the mid-1990s, according to a 2009 report, the number of intense hurricanes has been increasing in the Atlantic Ocean, and the size of wildfires has been growing in the western U.S. As temperatures continue to rise, such extreme events may become even more frequent and severe. Most of the world’s major metropolises were originally built on rivers or coastlines and are therefore subject to flooding from rising seas and instances of heavier rainfall.
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15 Comments
Add CommentActually, Germany is doing very well with wind energy already. The price of regenerative energies will continue to fall, while the price of conventional energy sources will only rise. Last year, we already attained 17% of our electricity from regenerative sources - a number that is climbing quickly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd while America's infrastructure is slowly crumbling due to its energy efficiency and over-reliance on increasingly expensive oil, Germany is getting ready for the future.
Has anyone done a Cost-Benefit-Analysis on the life-cycle cost of wind farms, i.e., the cost of equipment, land, maintenance, labor, replacement and effects on the environment. Corpus Christi, Texas has one of the largest grouping of wind farms I have seen out side of California, yet they produce less than 15% of the total power requirements for the city.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are numerous such studies there - searching for "life cycle analysis wind turbine" on Google produces 3,950,000 hits.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course, this depends on numerous factors - what kinds of materials were used, where the electricity to build them come from, conditions at the target site, and much more...
I've seen some of those wind farms and I used to live in the area. Texas is lucky to have those costal wind farms since they tend to produce the most energy during heatwaves, helping the grid operator to prevent brownouts when everybody cranks up their air conditioners. Those wind farms are only a few years old and Corpus is the largest city in that region, so 15% is actually pretty good. Give it a few more years (and a few more heat waves) and that number will climb higher.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour question of cost-benefit analysis needs to be done on ALL energy sources. For the oil that Texas is famous for, are the costs for oil spill cleanup, groundwater contamination and air pollution from drilling operations factored in? How about the money required to secure oil supplies in the Middle East? What about the healthcare costs and property damage that vehicle emissions cause every year? Our roads and bridges are crumbling due to vehicle traffic and there is no money to fix them because fuel taxes cannot cover even basic road maintenance across the country. As for coal power, it has similar pollution costs in the Midwest and East Coast where it is used, but we also now have to worry about mercury in seafood and waste pond dam failures as well. And don't even get me started on just the best case scenario cost projections for Climate Change. Dirty energy comes out way more expensive, even in this early stage of clean energy deployment. That cost differential eventually gets paid, but the true costs are not now currently reflected in the market price for dirty energy. That cost differential is actually a subsidy, a market distortion that precludes a proper cost-benefit analysis until it is fully accounted. A true cost benefit analysis of clean energy versus dirty energy will come out on the side of clean energy every time.
Just like always, spouting off nonsense without proof...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGermany has Feed-In Tariffs which guarantee a steady source of revenue for wind turbine operators until the cost of building and operating them becomes low enough that they are profitable without them. Thus, wind turbines _are_ a good investment in Germany.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe subsidies will be reduced in the long run - they are only intended to provide start-up incentives until the infrastructure is sufficiently advanced and the technology is cheap enough. In fact, subsidies have already been reduced for photovoltaic installations because their prices have fallen so quickly, and wind energy subsidies will follow sooner or later.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd despite that there is still no shortage of investors - wind turbines are popping up everywhere where there is sufficient wind in Germany. Many, many companies are betting that regenerative energies are the future in Germany, and I assume that they have done the math.
Most ressources are not evenly distributed around the world. Neither are they consumed evenly around the world. It is clearly the western world that has been responsable for ressource depletion and environmental pollution. It is also clear that it is the western world that must change its way of life, not the 1,000,000,000 people that western democracy has left to starve.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGermany uses its Feed-In Tariffs to pass on the added costs of renewable energies directly to the consumers. After that, electricity prices are determined by market forces.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn contrast, Spain - like the USA - uses the socialist practice of fixing electricity prices, and then added subsidies on top to keep prices artificially low, allowing a major bubble to develop - not to mention burdening the national budget and future generations of taxpayers.
For more on the situation in Spain, and how it is unlike the situation in Germany, read this article:
http://notesfromotherside.blogspot.com/2009/10/spanish-solar-collapse.html
US EIA lists levelized unsubsidized costs of financing, building, and operating different 1 MWH power sources for 30 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSolar Thermal 312
Offshore Wind 243
Solar photovoltaic 211
Coal with CCS 136
Nuclear 114
Biomass 112
Wind 97
Coal 95
Gas with CCS 89
Hydro 86
Gas, combined cycle 63
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity_generation.html
Comparative subsidies are listed at
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2011/08/03/eia-releases-new-subsidy-report-subsidies-for-renewables-increase-186-percent/
In a few years mini-local thorium will cost $40 initially and $0.10 per year.
http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_reactor/thorium_reactor_1.php
US EIA lists levelized unsubsidized costs of financing, building, and operating different 1 MWH power sources for 30 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSolar Thermal 312
Offshore Wind 243
Solar photovoltaic 211
Coal with CCS 136
Nuclear 114
Biomass 112
Wind 97
Coal 95
Gas with CCS 89
Hydro 86
Gas, combined cycle 63
US EIA lists levelized unsubsidized costs of financing, building, and operating different 1 MWH power sources for 30 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSolar Thermal 312
Offshore Wind 243
Solar photovoltaic 211
Coal with CCS 136
Nuclear 114
Biomass 112
Wind 97
Coal 95
Gas with CCS 89
Hydro 86
Gas, combined cycle 63
This site needs some repair work!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHave any of you checked Rosenzweig's references. She is writing a dumb article and she is quoting herself in the biography. You all swallow the premise that climate change is inherently bad. She spouts, "according to a 2009 report, the number of hurricanes has been increasing in the atlantic ocean, etc...." What report? Where is the reference? Most of Scientific American's articles on climate change are bad for one, and damned slanted for two. This author and SciAm have an axe to grind and grind away they do. Every "climate change" she quotes also happened in the 1950's, also during the Medieval Warming, and also during the Roman Warming.....which was far warmer than in today's climate. Heat build-up in cities have far more to do with black asphalt than with the direction of the jet stream. The temperature stations around the USA report an increasing temperature in our cities but those stations are surrounded by asphalt and air conditioning units. Replacing grass with xeroscaping does not reduce carbon dioxide. The grass was using the carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen. Xeroscaping looks ugly, does not use carbon dioxide and lulls people into thinking they are green. The best thing cities could do is to set aside more green space, i.e., parks, water features and lots of trees. The trees use carbon dioxide, reduce noise and sure look better than some environmentalist leaning against a post smoking his cigarette. Remember, Denmark's Willi Dansgaard and Switzerland's Hans Oeschger drilled two ice cores. Each core was one mile apart and one mile deep, representing 250,000 years of the Earth's layered climate history. They were astounded to find a persistant temperature cycle superimposed on the big, ice age, climate swings. That cycle was 2500 years. They wrote a repost linking that cycle, unerringly, to the cycles of the Sun. No Mayor, Governor nor city manager will ever be able to make .00001 degree difference to the earth's climate. It's the sun, stupid!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy wife with her Phd and me with a MSc puzzeled over the graph on the top of page 73 for 20 minutes trying to understand it and what the various symbols were supposed to portray. We finally gave up. This seems to be yet another eye-catching, colorful, trendy but useless attempt to convey information.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArchitect Louis Sullivan said it well in 1896 "Form follows function". That is, things have to work before you worry about how pretty they are. I would rather understand any number of old fashioned bar graphs, than try to decipher one like this.