Green Atlanta

This week’s edition of The Sunday Paper, with its cover “Is Gore Wrong?” is the latest example of a press that is at best overly scrupulous about giving “equal time” to both sides of an issue, at worst hostile to policies that might harm their advertisers and/or owners, or something in between.

Though the story itself can claim some balance (one scientist who agrees that humans are causing the globe to warm is quoted), the bulk is given over to coverage of a rally in Marietta by a group claiming impartiality but which clearly opposes any attempts by government to contribute to a solution.  The cover and the oversized blurbs both emphasize opposition to global-warming science.  There are also quotes from scientists who believe that rising temperatures are due to solar wind, an increased discharge by the sun of charged particles that prevent cosmic rays from reaching the earth’s atmosphere.  Cosmic rays, the theory goes, increase cloud cover, shading and cooling the earth’s surface, so when the solar wind blocks them the earth warms.  See this article for a debunking of this line of thinking.   

Two things this writer would note about The Sunday Paper article:

1.  Though the article definitely gives more attention to the skeptics, at least it does not devote any space to the claim one still hears often in conversation- that the planet is not getting warmer.  Even the 400 scientists the article claims challenge aspects of the prevailing science apparently at least acknowledge that Earth is heating up.  Last week’s projections for the disappearing ice at the North Pole certainly back this up.

What the article does not say is that even most of the well-known climate skeptics who are also climate scientists, such as Patrick Michaels (see his book The Satanic Gases) actually acknowledges that the  science makes sense.  Where skeptics disagree with the mainstream is in their belief that any warming won’t be that bad, or that it might actually be beneficial.

We will never be able to confirm absolutely that either increased concentrations of greenhouse gases or a bigger solar wind are causing particular changes in our climate- how could we?  We will also never be able to predict infallibly how much warmer things will get as a result- how could we? 

But given what could happen- a cascade of feedback loops; extreme weather events; disappearing coasts, agricultural lands, and habitats; extinctions; and all the resulting problems for human civilization- is it worth taking the risk that the skeptics, who are in a distinct minority, are right?  Much is made in the article about the potential outlawing of incandescent light bulbs.  Are we willing to play dice  with our civilization, even with our children’s and possibly with our survival, to preserve our “right” to read by an incandescent bulb instead of a fluorescent one?

2.  The article notes that a member of the group organizing the rally handed out $8 bills bearing Gore’s likeness and which said, “Good for one gallon of gas.”  The bill suggests that Gore is the cause of expensive gas, but the reality, of course, is much different, and it is Gore and others who favor emissions reductions who actually have a plan to keep us away from $8 gas.  They support a set of policies that would promote a world where people would not need to buy gas at all, or very little- cars would largely run on something else entirely. 

What will lead to $8 gas is a continued reliance on gas as our source of vehicle fuel.  Domestic production of oil, whether it is in ANWR or offshore, won’t change that, as the federal government itself attests (see here and here).

This could (and will) be the subject of a long series of posts, but with the horrible news on oil and gas prices over the last month, including the past week, when the price of oil per barrel passed $140 and CIBC World Markets predicted that gas would cost over $7 per gallon in the near future, it seems appropriate to take a quick look at how much we drive in this city (and, therefore, how vulnerable our local economy is to the rise in the price of fuel).

A study from 2005 ranked Atlanta 1st among 39 U.S. metropolitan areas in miles driven daily per capita.  In that year we averaged 31.7 miles driven per person per day.  Orlando and Kansas City were the only other cities where drivers averaged over 30 miles per day.  Most cities averaged between 20 and 30 miles per day, while Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans (undoubtedly because of Hurricane Katrina) all averaged less than 20 miles per day.  (According to a 2008 report by the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, miles driven per person in Atlanta dipped below 30, to 29.6, in 2007.)

Spending as much time on the road and in traffic as we do in this city has a lot of consequences.  It takes time to drive all those miles, time which could be spent doing something else.  The more we drive, the less we tend to walk, meaning we have to get our exercise (if at all) in another way- one study showed that rates of obesity and hypertension are higher in areas that sprawl (though the difference is small).  As someone who made the switch from driving to work every day to walking and taking the bus, I can attest that driving on roads as crowded as ours is much more stressful and competitive than the other ways of traveling, which may well harm our emotional and even physical health.  Maintaining the infrastructure necessary to move so many cars is expensive, and filling those cars up with gas is becoming financially ruinous very quickly.  Death and serious injury are occurrences on our roads.

Then there is the pollution.  The American Lung Association’s State of the Air report for 2007 lists Atlanta as the 15th-worst city for year-round particulate pollution and 25th-worst city for ozone pollution.  The air pollution problem is sometimes, unfortunately, confused with the greenhouse-gas issue (see this column by Larry Kudlow, for instance, which advances the supposed cleanliness of the air in the U.S. as a reason not to regulate greenhouse gases!), but the fact is that particulate and ozone pollution kill. 

And, of course, there are the emissions of carbon dioxide.  According to a recent report from scholars at Georgia Tech, The average Atlanta resident emitted 1.634 tons of carbon dioxide annually as a result of highway transportation (Atlanta’s profile can be viewed by clicking the link at the bottom of the page).  The national average was 1.31 tons. 

This writer, for  one, would have predicted Atlanta to be a bigger emitter relative to the average than it is, but the presence of mass transit and a certain degree of density in the city help.  And the important thing to remember, of course, is that the average is way too high to begin with.  The climate operates according to physical laws, so what matters is whether we and the rest of the world are emitting so much that climatic instability will result, not whether we have succeeded in being not that much worse than everybody else.  Assuming the average stated above and a metro population of 5 million, Atlanta emitted over 8 million tons of carbone dioxide last year from highway transportation alone.  This, it goes without saying, is much, much higher than it ought to be.

Look for an upcoming post on a potential way, not much discussed, to reduce the number of miles we drive.

“In Atlanta they are constructing a giant misbegotten organism that will almost certainly not be able to function far into the future. . . . Atlanta has become such a mess that really nothing can be done to redeem it as a human habitat.”- James Howard Kunstler

“Some places will fare better than others. The suburbs of Atlanta don’t seem to me to be a great place to be living right now.”- Bill McKibben, in response to a question about the best places to live in a warming world asked during a March 23, 2007 interview with Salon.com 

Record drought.  The unbearable heat of the summer of 2007.  The nearly complete absence of snow in the winters this century.  For Atlanta residents, like me, who believe the theory that global warming is happening, and that it is being caused by human activities, these are frightening developments.  And based on the theory, things are only going to get worse.

 Combine the growing feeling of dread with a look at the Downtown Connector, even on weekends, or a glance at another story about our state legislature’s basic resistance to any measure that would threaten the primacy of coal as the source of our energy, and the temptation to throw up one’s hands, to give up, becomes powerful.  And when a writer like Bill McKibben, who has improbably managed to be both clear-eyed and hopeful about the warming crisis for two decades, suggests that the best thing an Atlantan can do is to move, and quickly- well, how should one respond?

Rationally, of course, it is easy to agree with McKibben and Kunstler.  Do we really believe our traffic problems can be “solved”?  Is it possible to get our energy from a source that won’t make our problems worse?  Will we have enough to drink?  If and when the industrial food system begins to break down, can we muster the individual and collective will to plant in the suburbs and the city?  Without even considering the social and economic challenges our city is likely to face (which are by no means separate from our environmental problems), is the best thing we can do just move somewhere else and start over?

For someone with deep roots in the area, however, the response must also be somewhat emotional.  Pride is sometimes justified and sometimes justifiably ridiculed, but it is difficult for this writer to read the statements above without feeling defensive.  Undoubtedly the way that this city has developed has been misguided, certainly it has been very destructive, with that much it is easy to agree.  But the thing to do when a house is messy is not to pack and leave.  It is to clean up the mess.

In any event, there is not another option.  If Atlanta is irremediable, then so are hundreds, if not thousands, of other settlements in this country and others.  Depopulating these areas, as Kunstler mentions, and moving those populations elsewhere is simply not a possibility- what area of the globe today isn’t under severe environmental stress?  The only other way to depopulate Atlanta, of course, is by large numbers of deaths.  While this might be good for the environment, presumably no one wishes it. 

This blog will be an exploration of how we can begin to move (and are already moving) this city in another direction.  I hope to post two or three times a week on topics ranging from energy to transportation to land use to water, food and waste.  Comments on writers and books (McKibben’s Deep Economy certainly among them) that have informed my thinking may also be posted, as well as topics of general application (proposed federal greenhouse legislation, for example) that nevertheless are relevant to Atlanta’s environmental problems.  I will try to assume that readers do not have a lot of knowledge concering the issues I discuss, but hopefully more informed readers will find ideas of value here as well. 

The future, for us, will come with immense, unprecedented challenges.  I hope that this blog will be a way for me (and even you) to remain confident about our ability to overcome those challenges.

A few other notes:

First, solving our environmental problems can contribute to the solution of other problems as well.  One principle that is often discussed in environmental circles, where people are generally concerned with figuring out how to do more with less, is integrated design- the need to look at systems as a whole and to solve multiple problems at once (in contrast to solving a problem in one part of a system but, as a result, creating another problem elsewhere).  I will try to highlight other reasons besides “saving the environment” for pursuing a particular solution.

Second, the fact that the future will come with a lot of challenges necessarily means that there will also be a lot of opportunities.  Jane Jacobs writes persuasively about how urban economies work in The Economy of Cities, and one point she makes is that the enterprises that pursue innovation successfully are often small.  I will try to point out areas that might be opportunities for new businesses. 

Third, as our problems are not purely local, I will necessarily comment from time to time on issues that are national or global in scope but that affect life in Atlanta.

Fourth, if you don’t believe that human-induced global warming is occurring, or if you believe that it isn’t really a problem, then this blog is probably not for you.  This writer firmly believes, and the content on this blog assumes, that climate change and a myriad of other environment problems are realities, in many cases brought about by human activity and in every case demanding a human response.   

Finally, please be aware that the writer of this blog is an amateur.  I do not have a degree in urban planning, ecology, public policy or anything else particularly relevant.  What I seem to have is a concern about these issues and a desire to learn more.  So this blog will be as much an exploration for me as I hope it will be for you.

Maybe I’ve just watched too many movies, but I do believe that there is a future for this city, and that it can be beautiful.  If you believe (or want to believe) this too, please check in from time to time.  Thanks for reading.