ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

In a Lane County case, the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) has held that a local government may not prevent other parties from participating in a local on-the-record appeal by an applicant. LUBA’s reasoning in Families for a Quarry Free Neighborhood v. Lane County goes even farther, suggesting that participation by parties may not be restricted, even where the appellant is not the applicant.

Lane Code 14.600(4) sets forth who may participate in an appeal:

Participation Criteria. Persons who may participate in a Board on-the-record hearing for an appeal are:
(a) The applicant and the applicant’s representative.
(b) The Director.
(c) The appellant and the appellant’s representative.”

LUBA held that even if Lane Code can be interpreted to prohibit participation by other parties, such a result would contravene state law:

[I]t is not consistent with ORS 197.763 to authorize an applicant that does not prevail in that final legal argument at the conclusion of the quasi-judicial evidentiary hearing a second chance to present legal argument to another local decision maker in an on-the-record appeal, with all other parties forced to the sidelines and denied any right to present written or oral legal argument to the second decision maker. * * * ORS 215.422, unlike LC 14.400 and 14.600, does not include any language that even arguably authorizes a procedure that would (1) permit an applicant to appeal a land use decision that is the product of a quasi-judicial evidentiary hearing and (2) prohibit any other party to the quasi-judicial evidentiary hearing from presenting any legal argument in the applicant’s on-the-record appeal.

* * *

Given the above code and statutory context, although it is a reasonably close question, we conclude that LC 14.400 and 14.600 are not correctly interpreted to bar non-applicant parties in the evidentiary phase of a proceeding from participating in an on-the-record appeal filed by the applicant. However, even if we are wrong and the text of LC 14.400(9)(b) and 14.600(4) is not overcome by the above-noted context, we do not believe ORS 197.763 and 215.422 can be interpreted to permit such a procedure, and the county cannot do away with rights that are protected by those statutes. As we explained in a case with some similarities to this one, a county commits a procedural error that prejudices a party’s substantial rights where it denies them a right to participate in land use proceedings that is guaranteed by statute. (Citati0n omitted).)

While LUBA’s holding in this case is limited to the circumstance where the local appeal is filed by the applicant, LUBA’s reasoning would apply equally to a circumstance where an appeal is filed by a party other than an applicant. In both situations, the reasoning that other parties must have a right to rebut the substance of any ex parte contact or respond to new evidence that might be introduced would still apply. Similarly, LUBA’s reasoning that ORS 197.763 does not authorize an applicant a second chance to present legal argument while denying all other parties the same opportunity would apply as well to other parties.

LUBA also held that a person could not be forced to appeal an initial decision in order to preserve his or her right to appeal to LUBA, explaining a person could be satisfied with an initial decision and thus have no reason to appeal but then not be satisfied with a subsequent decision should another party appeal. LUBA’s reasoning here would support the more expansive reading of its holding on standing: people have a right to participate in local appeal hearings regardless of who files the appeal, at a minimum to have the opportunity to protect their positions taken in prior hearings.

LUBA held that LC 14.600(4) could be interpreted to allow parties other than an applicant/appellant to appear in an on-the-record appeal hearing. However, LUBA in relying on statutes seems to concede that this holding is a stretch; besides, LUBA’s limited holding fails to directly address the situation where an appellant is not the applicant. The results of this case demand that LC 14.600(4) be amended to provide that all parties may participate and provide legal argument in an on-the-record appeal.

Cities as a whole have been estimated to produce up to 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, decisions on the structure, including the building types, density, location and public transport, establish the long-term frames for the greenhouse gas emissions of a community.

But a new study from Finland – Implications of urban structure on carbon consumption in metropolitan areas – finds that, when it comes to carbon emissions, urban structure doesn’t make much of a difference.  The study looked at dense center cities , where apartment buildings dominated housing and diverse public transport was available; and “rural” cities with a lower density, a high share of detached houses, and weaker public transport. The study considered the effects of density, dominant building type, private driving and income on the carbon consumption.

Surprisingly, the study found the carbon consequences of urban density and dominant building type to be insignificant, based on a life cycle assessment: there proved to be no clear correlation between urban density and carbon consumption. Despite the identified connections between carbon consumption and urban density, it seems that the effect of density on carbon emissions is rather low, and that other factors override the effect.

The researchers seemed to have stumbled upon something they hadn’t anticipated or designed the study to analyze: what really seems to matter is income. As incomes rise, people engage in more carbon-spewing activities:

The rest of the carbon categories, the consumption of goods and services, reflect clearly the effect of income on the emissions. However, this part of the carbon consumption was not the focus of this study, and also cannot be analyzed in depth with the presented hybrid model. The model shows that traveling abroad and the use of services grow as earnings grow * * * but regarding daily consumption, it is not possible to differentiate amount and quality.

One interesting notion about the relation of income and carbon consumption is that emissions seem to grow as income grows, but with decelerating speed. * * * It seems that the share of savings increases rather rapidly as earnings grow.

The slight growth in energy-related carbon consumption found in less dense areas compared to the denser metropolitan core is overwhelmed by the high correlation of income and carbon consumption.

The results of the study may not be directly applicable in the U.S. Consider that in the E.U., the transportation sector generates 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, while in the U.S., transportation accounts for 33% of total greenhouse gas emissions [in Oregon, 34% of emissions are from the transportation sector; in California, 36%]. In Finland and the rest of Europe, the effect of private transport on overall carbon consumption per capita is quite weak when all emissions related to driving are calculated, including car manufacture, deliveries and maintenance of vehicles (the share of fuel combustion of all all emissions related to private transport is 50–70%, the rest being dominated by emissions related to car manufacture and maintenance). Thus, growth in trip generation due to a decline in the density of the city structure has a relatively minor effect on the overall carbon consumption. Here in the U.S., the contribution of fuel combustion to total emissions may be much higher.

The studies’ authors offer a modest suggestion.

When solutions for low-carbon living * * * are searched for, consumption-based assessments of emissions are essential.

Now here’s a truly revolutionary idea: if we are to emit less, we’ll have to consume less. No more growing the economy; rather, we’ll have to shrink the economy. It’s that simple. It’s the economy, stupid.

In Oregon, the land use wars are never over. Activists struggle mightily to reduce the amount of farm land set aside for eventual development in urban reserves, and celebrate when a greedy Washington County land grab is temporarily slapped down. An over-ambitious Bend urban growth boundary (UGB) expansion unexpectedly gets remanded by the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC), and we rejoice. An exceptions or a nonresource lands application gets remanded by the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA), saving a few or a few hundred acres of farm or forest land from the real estate developers, and we congratulate ourselves on a hard-fought victory. The Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) proposes tightening up the rules to make it harder to argue that land is not really farm or forest land, and years of behind the scene groundwork pays off.

But the war is never won. There’s always another UGB expansion, another application to destroy farm or forest land. The best that can be said is that in Oregon the flood of “development” has been slowed, compared to what would otherwise be, as seen in other states – California, Washington, Texas, Georgia – where growth has gone completely unchecked and its devastation has spread, a cancer metastasized across the landscape.

Land use activists have never dared, still do not dare, to admit that we’re against growth. Lacking the courage to take on the zeitgeist and admit what we really think and believe, we instead dissemble that we’re for smart growth – an oxymoron if there ever was one, as the phenomenon of global warming is making clear.

Land use activists are not alone in their error. Tim Murray observes that the environmental movement as a whole has failed to identify and grapple with the real enemy, and asks: What if we stopped fighting for preservation and fought economic growth instead?

Each time environmentalists rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate it as a park “forever,” as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively, causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy Canada may indeed have “saved” – at least for now – two million acres, but many more millions have been ruined. And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest, or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists, fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles but losing the war.

Despite occasional setbacks, the growth machine continues more furiously, and finally, even lands which had been set aside “forever” come under pressure. As development gets closer, the protected land becomes more valuable, and more costly to protect. Then government, under the duress of energy and resource shortages and the dire need for royalties and revenue, caves in to allow industry a foothold, then a chunk, then another. Yosemite Park, Hamber Provincial Park, Steve Irwin Park… the list goes on. There is no durable sanctuary from economic growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation. Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet. . . .

Environmental watchdogs bark, but the growth caravan moves on.

Murray argues the practice of designating hallowed places as nature reserves must no longer be seen as “victories,” but rather as concessions. The same holds true in the land use arena: there’s no victory in limiting the amount of land lost to UGB expansions, to urban reserves, or to real estate development.

Aldo Leopold ‘s vision of the land was ecological, encompassing the entirety of the community which the land embraces:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Saving what’s left of the land requires an explicit recognition of the ethical premises to which we hold, that humans are members of the land community.

It’s time to make our ethics explicit: the land is sacred, and is the ground of our being. It’s time to direct our energies into stopping the economic growth that is destroying the land – and inexorably, ourselves.

For the last 25 years, the Urban Mobility Report (UMR) created by the Texas Transportation Institute has driven transportation policy in the U.S.  Its results have been used to justify billions of dollars in expenditures to build new roads and highways.

Now a new report titled Driven Apart: How sprawl is lengthening our commutes and why misleading mobility measures are making things worse, finds the solution to the problem of commute time has much more to do with how we build our cities than how we build our roads.

Driven Apart ranks how long residents in the nation’s largest 51 metropolitan areas spend in peak hour traffic, and in some cases the rankings are almost the opposite of those listed in the 2009 Urban Mobility Report. While peak hour travel times average 200 hours a year in large metropolitan areas, Driven Apart proves that some cities have managed to achieve shorter travel times and actually reduce the peak hour travel times.

Here is the report’s key finding, in a nutshell:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Some metropolitan areas such as Chicago and Portland have land use patterns and transportation systems that enable their residents to take shorter trips and minimize the burden of peak hour travel.  Such cities have actually seen reductions in average peak hour travel times. Driven Apart concludes that if every one of the top 50 metros followed suit with Chicago and other higher performing cities, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use two billion fewer gallons of fuel, for a cost savings of $31 billion annually.

The UMR depicts Chicago as having some of the worst travel delays, when it actually has the shortest time spent in peak hour traffic of any major US metro area. In contrast, Nashville jumped from 31st to first on the list of those with the longest peak travel times.

The UMR has a number of major flaws that misstate and exaggerate the effects of congestion, particularly the Travel Time Index (TTI).  TTI is the ratio of average peak hour travel times to average free flow travel times. Furthermore, for the 51 metropolitan areas analyzed in Driven Apart, the UMR overstates the cost of congestion by about $49 billion. Because UMR methodology does not take into account travel distances, it universally rewards cities that are spread out as opposed to compact urban areas.

Driven Apart suggests new metrics that focus on trip distances and total travel times – two statistics not reported in the UMR – because they point to a broader and more powerful set of public policy options for dealing with urban transportation problems.  The report recommends a new system for measuring urban transportation performance that includes emphasizing accessibility and focusing on measures of land uses, trip lengths and mode choices as well as travel speeds. The Texas Transportation Institute is listening, and is considering introducing a Total Travel Time performance measure and sustainability factors in future mobility reports.

Transportation costs are often the second highest expense for working Americans, behind housing costs – so it’s critical that transportation investments are guided by accurate and meaningful data.

Professor Orrin Pilkey, one of America’s most outspoken coastal geologists, warns we’re set to experience one of the first major impacts of global warming:  sea levels will rise by 2 meters by 2100.

Two meters far exceeds the projections of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4th Assessment Report, which range from a low of .18 meters to a high of  .59 meters. However, the IPCC report contains this disclaimer:

This report does not assess the likelihood, nor provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.

The IPCC projections explicitly exclude future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The IPCC range assumes a near-zero net contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to future sea level rise, on the theory that Antarctica’s ice sheets will gain mass from an increase in snowfall.

The two-meter rise that Pilkey warns is possible is consistent with recent research based on semi-empirical models.

Estimates for twenty-first century sea level rise from semi-empirical models as compared to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

Semi-empirical models have the merit that they reproduce past sea level rise very well, unlike the physical models used thus far. But they too have a serious limitation: there is no way to ensure that the historic relationship between sea level rise and temperature will continue to hold in future.  The semi-empirical approach does not account for non-linear changes. When it comes to ice sheets, the relationship between temperature and sea level rise may not be linear, and the ranges shown in the chart above could underestimate future sea level rise.

Pilkey says more needs to be done to prepare coastal communities from climate change threats – including planning for an orderly retreat.

If you’re going to have development and its close to the beach, make sure the buildings movable. It means you recognise there’s rising sea levels and you move things back as required, or you demolish the buildings.

As sea levels rise over the next 50 to 100 years,  we can try to fortify and protect existing development, and repair it when damaged. But in many cases, retreat will eventually be the only option. Whole communities may have to be relocated. Where will the money come from, and who will pick up the tab?  These questions are certain to be at the center of future political and legal battles.

Johnny Cash said his song Five Feet High and Rising wasn’t just a lamentation about destruction. The flood waters left a blessing in their wake.

My mama always taught me that good things come
from adversity if we put our faith in the Lord.
We couldn’t see much good in the flood waters
when they were causing us to have to leave home,
but when the water went down, we found
that it had washed a load of rich black bottom dirt across our land.
The following year we had the best cotton crop we’d ever had.

But this time, the water’s not coming down – at least not anytime soon. Or maybe we just need to take a longer view of things.

Orrin Pilkey is Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, and Founder and Director Emeritus of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines (PSDS) within the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

A new study finds Oregon’s landmark land use planning program has been successful in protecting farm and forest land – but perhaps not as successful as thought, and perhaps for different reasons than previously thought.

The review focuses on published research evaluating the forest and farm land conservation effects of Oregon’s land use planning program. The authors explain that land use planning in Oregon seeks to influence rates and patterns of land use change and development through zoning and permitting processes. Its effects are largely incremental and occur over long periods of time, and are therefore difficult to measure. It is particularly difficult to distinguish the effects of the planning program from the many other confounding factors that also influence land use change and development such as socioeconomic effects, urbanization pressure, the spatial location of land relative to existing cities, and topography. Controlling for these other variables is necessary to accurately gauge the effectiveness of the planning program.

One study cited by the authors suggests Oregon’s land use planning program prevented 13% of the developable supply of land from being developed between 1982 and 1997. A bit surprisingly, the study found that the most effective land use policies – incentive-based policies, such as tax deferrals – have reduced the supply of developable land in Oregon by 8%.  This means the planning program itself is responsible for only 5% of the land saved from development. Still, a lot of land has been saved from development – about 2,442,000 acres, according to estimates. If Oregon’s regulatory system is responsible for saving 939,000 acres of farm and forest land from development, that’s a pretty remarkable achievement.

The authors point out that the planning program wasn’t designed to stop development. Rather, it is a growth management program: it restricts the rates, locations, and densities at which development can take place and facilitates the orderly and efficient development of rural lands while protecting forest and farm lands and conserving them for farm and forest uses. But merely protecting farm and forest lands does not guarantee the continuation of commercial farming and forestry on those lands. In the authors’ minds, whether land use planning is resulting in sustained or improved farming and forestry viability remains an unanswered question.

The study’s co-authors include Hannah Gosnell, Garrett Chrostek, and James Duncan from OSU and Jeffry Kline from the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. The study, titled Is Oregon’s land use planning program conserving forest and farm land? A review of the evidence, is published in the January 2011 issue of Land Use Policy. The study is available through a free sample issue online.

Scientists predict in a new study that fewer than one in five of the plants and animals which currently live in the world’s rainforests will still be here in 90 years time. The culprits? Climate change and deforestation.

The study, “Correlative and mechanistic models of species distribution provide congruent forecasts under climate change”, is published in the June edition of Conservation Letters, an open-access journal. Here’s the abstract:

Good forecasts of climate change impacts on extinction risks are critical for effective conservation management responses. Species distribution models (SDMs) are central to extinction risk analyses. The reliability of predictions of SDMs has been questioned because models often lack a mechanistic underpinning and rely on assumptions that are untenable under climate change. We show how integrating predictions from fundamentally different modeling strategies produces robust forecasts of climate change impacts on habitat and population parameters. We illustrate the principle by applying mechanistic (Niche Mapper) and correlative (Maxent, Bioclim) SDMs to predict current and future distributions and fertility of an Australian gliding possum. The two approaches make congruent, accurate predictions of current distribution and similar, dire predictions about the impact of a warming scenario, supporting previous correlative-only predictions for similar species. We argue that convergent lines of independent evidence provide a robust basis for predicting and managing extinctions risks under climate change.

By 2100, climate change and deforestation could have altered two-thirds of the rainforests in Central and South America and about 70% in Africa. The Amazon Basin alone could see changes in biodiversity for 80% of the region.

A U.K. Telegraph article about the study quotes Daniel Nepstad, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, which studies climate change in Massachusetts:

This study is the strongest evidence yet that the world’s natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes including severe alterations in their species composition through the combined influence of climate change and land use. Conservation of the world’s biota, as we know it, will depend upon rapid, steep declines in greenhouse gas emissions.

Rural life is extremely energy intense, especially in terms of oil. Exurban living – people living “consumer lives with prettier views” – depends on very long supply lines. Alex Stefan at Worldchanging explains why the exurban lifestyle is not only not “green”, it is at risk in an environment where energy prices can go nowhere but up.

[W]e know that big, dense cities are greener; that the energy used in shipping food is a small portion of its overall impact, that transit is more energy efficient than driving (and indeed, that cars are the largest contributor to climate change), and that the benefits of urban living in compact, walkable, wired communities can extend far beyond living in smaller homes, served by more efficient infrastructure and not owning a car, to include a dramatic overall drop in one’s environmental impact. What’s more, we know why these things are so[.]

Unfortunately for people living in rural areas, we know a lot more about how to live a prosperous-yet-low-impact urban life than we do about how to live a rural life of equal prosperity with a small ecological footprint. Rural areas are poorer than urban areas, and offer fewer opportunities. Envisioning how people rural areas  will be able to prosper and live decent lives  in an environment bereft of cheap and abundant energy is a challenge that has yet to be faced.

A meta-analysis published recently in the Journal of the American Planning Association finds the most important single factor in minimizing driving is to develop in existing areas of high destination accessibility – like city centers. Going back in time (or back to the future), that would be villages.

Other factors like mixed-use, street and intersection design, and block size prove to be less important than destination accessibility. Still, these factors are more important than mere density. Density is less important than land-use mix and having shops, schools, and workplaces near to where people live.

Not surprisingly, driving is found to have energy and climate implications:

The transportation outcomes . . .  vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and vehicle trips (VT), are critically linked to traffic safety, air quality, energy consumption, climate change, and other social costs of automobile use.

Figuring out a way to drive less – much, much less – is key to coming to grips with peak oil and to arresting global warming before we reach a tipping point beyond which Earth’s climate will spin out of control, resulting in an Eaarth we no longer recognize and which is no longer fit for human habitation.

The free-access analysis, Travel and the Built Environment, was authored by Reid Ewingab of the University of Utah’s Urban Land Institute; and Robert Cerverocde, University of California (Berkeley) Transportation Center, Institute of Urban and Regional Development.

Here’s the abstract:

Problem: Localities and states are turning to land planning and urban design for help in reducing automobile use and related social and environmental costs. The effects of such strategies on travel demand have not been generalized in recent years from the multitude of available studies.

Purpose: We conducted a meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature existing at the end of 2009 in order to draw generalizable conclusions for practice. We aimed to quantify effect sizes, update earlier work, include additional outcome measures, and address the methodological issue of self-selection.

Methods: We computed elasticities for individual studies and pooled them to produce weighted averages.

Results and conclusions: Travel variables are generally inelastic with respect to change in measures of the built environment. Of the environmental variables considered here, none has a weighted average travel elasticity of absolute magnitude greater than 0.39, and most are much less. Still, the combined effect of several such variables on travel could be quite large. Consistent with prior work, we find that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is most strongly related to measures of accessibility to destinations and secondarily to street network design variables. Walking is most strongly related to measures of land use diversity, intersection density, and the number of destinations within walking distance. Bus and train use are equally related to proximity to transit and street network design variables, with land use diversity a secondary factor. Surprisingly, we find population and job densities to be only weakly associated with travel behavior once these other variables are controlled.

Takeaway for practice: The elasticities we derived in this meta-analysis may be used to adjust outputs of travel or activity models that are otherwise insensitive to variation in the built environment, or be used in sketch planning applications ranging from climate action plans to health impact assessments. However, because sample sizes are small, and very few studies control for residential preferences and attitudes, we cannot say that planners should generalize broadly from our results. While these elasticities are as accurate as currently possible, they should be understood to contain unknown error and have unknown confidence intervals. They provide a base, and as more built-environment/travel studies appear in the planning literature, these elasticities should be updated and refined.

What are the energy and emissions consequences of continuing to allow rural sprawl – the proliferation of nonfarm dwellings throughout the rural landscape? That’s one of the questions currently being addressed in Lane County by a task force looking at the county’s land use policies.

Rural development patterns enabled by cheap and abundant fossil fuels have energy and climate consequences, as almost 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are associated with residences and cars. Changing development and transportation patterns can significantly impact energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Data that break down per capita CO2 emission rates along other important categories of the United States, such as by urban vs. suburban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, apartment dwellers vs. homeowners, or by ethnic/racial origin is hard to come by. But new studies are beginning to shed some light on the issue.

A 2008 report by the Brookings Institution found that the average American in a metropolitan area has a carbon footprint of 8.21 tons — 14% less than the average American living outside the city.

Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, reached a similar conclusion in a study titled The Greenness of Cities:  Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development. Glaeser and co-author Matthew Kahn found that cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas. The city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York, which developed prior to the dominance of the automobile.

A new study titled Cities produce surprisingly low carbon emissions per capita appearing in the April issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization looked at cities in a variety of countries and, for the most part, affirms these findings. Analyzing the per capita emissions from 12 major cities in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, the study’s author, David Dodman of the International Institute for Environment and Development found that per capita emissions from cities were typically smaller, and often far smaller, than their nation’s averages.

For example, greenhouse gas emissions for New Yorkers are less than a third of those of the national average for the USA. Those of Barcelona residents are half the average for Spain.  Londoners have little more than half the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the UK average. Brazil’s two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have less than one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the average for Brazil.

Tokyo has considerably lower emissions per person than either Beijing or Shanghai, suggesting that prosperity need not inevitably result in greater emissions and that well designed and well governed cities can combine high living standards with much lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, the study cautions that emissions from manufacturing are currently allocated to the countries in which these greenhouse gases are produced, rather than to the locations in which the finished products are purchased and used.

The main driver of greenhouse gas emissions is unsustainable consumption, especially in the world’s more affluent countries.

Recently the media have given a lot of coverage to a supposed new scientific consensus that sea levels will rise by about one meter by 2100. For example, this is from a story in Physorg.com:

Recent studies agree that sea level will rise by roughly one meter over this century for a mid-range emission scenario. This is 3 times higher than predicted by the IPCC.

New research from several international research groups, including the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen provides independent consensus that IPCC predictions of less than a half a meter rise in sea levels is around 3 times too low. The new estimates show that the sea will rise approximately 1 meter in the next 100 years in agreement with other recent studies. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.

But it’s not that simple, as this chart posted at Climate Feedback shows:

As you can see, the lower range of estimates of sea level rise are converging at around one meter. The upper range of the latest estimates is now hovering around two meters.  And it seems that every year, as scientists’ understanding of ice sheet dynamics grows, estimates of future sea level rise are growing as well.

You’d think people who live along the coast would be beginning to get a little concerned, wouldn’t you?  Think again.

From Florida, Mark Schrope reports that coastal development continues virtually unabated in Miami in spite of its vulnerability:

Right now Florida is showing almost no leadership on responding sensibly to storms and to rising sea level,” says Robert Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Orrin Pilkey of Duke University in North Carolina, a well-known proponent of greater constraints on coastal development, is even more forthright. “I call it an outlaw state,” he says. “Florida has been particularly irresponsible and it’s going to pay the price very soon.

As Climate Feedback points out, worse than just ignoring the threat of sea level rise, the state of Florida has taken drastic action to ensure that waterside properties damaged in storms can be rebuilt in the same locations time and time again.

Here in Oregon, plans by the City of Newport to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion and to impose new rules governing how construction can occur in them are raising the outrage of property owners. Oregonlive reports:

Property owners here are furious over city plans to redefine areas prone to landslides and erosion — and how construction can occur in them.

Proposed building code changes for new construction in areas known as geologic hazard zones will cost property owners billions of dollars, they say, and are bound to trigger lawsuits.

Talk about the changes began circulating town this month. Angry locals swamped a Planning Commission meeting and quickly formed the Central Coast Home and Business Owners Association to fight the changes, which they accuse Newport officials of trying to sneak in.

At the heart of the battle is the city’s plan to adopt maps made by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries in 2004. The maps show landslide and erosion zones, coding them in red, orange and yellow according to the degree of risk. Red is the highest. . . .

Opponents say the changes are naive and wrongheaded — and will cost everyone. They fear that under the changes, existing buildings in red zones would become “nonconforming” uses, making them nearly impossible to refinance, sell or insure.

The city has backed off some of the most controversial proposals, and “further revisions are likely.”
Better an inevitable “natural” disaster than what development interests call an “economic disaster.” In Oregon, as elsewhere, it seems our approach to an unpalatable situation is to bury our heads in the sand. Until we drown.

An analysis by the Urban Land Institute finds that the typical household in the study area spends upwards of $22,000 annually on housing, which represents roughly 35% of the median household income ($68,036). With transportation costs for the typical household reaching nearly $12,000 annually, the combined costs of housing and transportation account for roughly 54% of the typical household’s income.

Similar studies conducted for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C., region have found average housing and transportation cost burdens of 59% and 47%, respectively.

“Drive until you qualify” make no sense when the transportation costs offset the lower house prices.

When gasoline prices rose to over $4 per gallon in 2008, the high prices hit exurban areas hard and magnified the housing bust in areas such as Riverside County, CA.

A news story in the Minneapolis -St. Paul Star Tribune now reports a reversal in the migration to suburbs and exurbs in Minnesota:

New estimates suggest that the movement into suburban and exurban counties within commuting distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul has stopped cold for the first time in recent memory.

For many years, the combination of robust growth, a multitude of freeways and plenty of open space helped ignite an explosion in exurban living. People were commuting for hours from towns such as Mora, Glencoe and Owatonna. National experts classed the Twin Cities as having the nation’s third-largest exurban flight from 2000 to 2005, ahead of even sprawling Atlanta.

But the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates — the first to reflect the impact of 2008’s $4-a-gallon gas — suggest that:

• With people abandoning foreclosed and unsellable homes, the two-state ring of exurban counties is hardly growing. For these counties as a group, 2009 marked the first time more people left than moved in.
• In the five big suburban counties closest to the center (Dakota, Scott, Carver, Anoka and Washington), new arrivals have slowed to a standstill. With a wave of baby boomers sitting on empty nests in older suburbs such as Eagan, and new construction all but extinguished in once-booming counties such as Scott, growth is half what it was a decade ago.
• The two big core counties of Hennepin and Ramsey, losing tens of thousands of people a year as recently as five years ago, are on the rebound. Growth is gaining by the year.

When gas is cheap, moving farther out as a way to get more space for less money can make sense. But there’s a trade0ff. Time spent commuting is time not spent with a spouse, a child, a dog. Distance can be a drag. When gas prices rise and housing prices collapse, being upside down on a mortgage can make it difficult or impossible to escape.

Ominously, gas prices are now rising again.

Over the last 60 years, anti-urban policies have resulted in an energy-sucking, emissions-spewing U.S. Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, points to subsidization of highways and home ownership as deliberate policy choices that have bled cities and encouraged a suburban and exurban infrastructure – one that is dependent on high levels of energy inputs (resulting in emissions outputs) both for transportation and to power buildings.

Glaeser cites studies that find each new federally-funded highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18%. Cities don’t benefit much from that highway infrastructure because dense areas already have good means of getting around – like walking.

Subsidizing home ownership is also anti-urban. Glaeser gives Boston as an example: 62% of Boston homes are rented; 78 percent of suburban Wellesley homes are owner-occupied. Cities are dominated by apartments, and more than 85% of homes in multi-unit structures are rented. Suburbs are dominated by single-family detached houses, and more than 85% of such homes are owner-occupied. Multi-unit structures are generally both smaller and more energy-efficient than detached single-family dwellings considering both embedded and operating energy and emissions – at least up to a point.

Subsidizing home ownership, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the home mortgage interest deduction, lures people out of apartments and cities, increasing their energy and emissions footprints.

The U.S. isn’t alone in promoting sprawl. Canadian government at all levels spends more than four times as much on highways as on transit, thus opening up suburbs for development. As in the U.S, Canadian cities and suburbs artificially limit density through single-use zoning that also imposes density limitations and minimum parking requirements.  Low density limits the number of people who can walk to jobs, shops or transit stops, thus making development more car-oriented. But overall, the Canadian government promotes sprawl less aggressively than the United States – and gets less of it as a result.

One consequence of “less bad” anti-urban policies, Canadian cities are healthier and more vibrant than American cities. Among the ten cities that were America’s most populous in 1950, eight have lost population- often by huge margins.  The most extreme example is St. Louis, which lost 59 percent of its population between 1950 and 2000.  By contrast, every single one of Canada’s 1950 “Top Ten” cities has gained population.

So how to reduce energy consumption and emissions? A good start would be to eliminate highway subsidies, to stop subsidizing home ownership, and to give more respect and provide greater rewards to renters.

Energy Information Agency data shows U.S. liquid fuels consumption declined by 810,000 bbl/d (4.2 percent) to 18.7 million bbl/d in 2009, the fourth consecutive annual decline. That’s 10% off the peak in consumption of 20.8 million bbl/d in 2005.

As energy analyst Jeff Rubin points out, the U.S. will never regain pre-recession peak levels of oil consumption – and ditto for oil consumption in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or anywhere else in the OECD economies.

But don’t expect oil prices to go down. Rubin says:

Back in the 1990s, that kind of demand contraction in the OECD would have foretold a big decline in oil prices, since those countries accounted for almost three quarters of global oil demand. Today, they account for barely half, and tomorrow they will account for even less.

In a world where oil supplies have most likely peaked, global oil consumption has become a zero-sum game:

As China moves from consuming 8 million barrels a day to 10 million barrels, and OPEC ramps up its own daily consumption from 10.5 million to 12 million barrels, somehow, somewhere else in the world, there must be a corresponding decline in oil consumption. That somewhere else just happens to be the U.S. market and the oil markets of the other OECD economies.

Automobile sales in the U.S. have also peaked, never to regain former levels. Calculated Risk reports estimated car sales for February 2010 at 10.4 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate).

The current level of sales are very low – far below the 17 million that were sold each year between 1999 and 2007 – and are still below the lowest point for the ‘90/’91 recession (even with a larger population).

All of our land use and transportation planning assumes that vehicle travel will continue to grow at historic rates. Based on those assumptions, reducing the historic rate of increase would require heroic efforts; reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled (VTM), even more.  Reducing overall VTM significantly enough to achieve even the modest emissions reductions goals that are currently on the table would be a Sisyphean task, especiallyif population were to continue to increase as projected.

Given the new reality of dwindling fuel supplies and collapsing vehicle sales, it may be wiser to devote our planning efforts to figuring out how people can live and get around in communities with far less fuel and far fewer vehicles. The new reality is, the era of car-dominated communities is drawing to a close.

Lane County is convening a stakeholders group with the objective of revising the county’s comprehensive plan and development code to address the burning issues of the 21st century: how to best ensure cleaner, healthier, safer, and more prosperous communities in a world increasingly threatened by energy shortfalls and a warming climate.

Here’s the text of an email sent out by Planning Director Kent Howe:

All,

As part of the citizen involvement process for Lane County’s Long Range Planning Program, you have volunteered to participate in the Lane County Stakeholder Group that will be reviewing potential revisions to land use policies and regulations.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners has directed Land Management Division staff to facilitate this group process.

The first meeting of the Stakeholder’s Group is Thursday, February 25th, 6:00pm, Harris Hall, 125 E. 8th Ave, Eugene.

At the Feb 17, 2010, meeting the Board specified the Stakeholder Group review the first 6 policy issues in the Goal One Code Amendment Proposal, attached. These correspond to lines 1-24 on the Preliminary List of Code Amendments spread sheet, also attached.

We look forward to working with you. If you have any questions, please give me a call.

Thanks,

Kent Howe
Planning Director
Lane County
541-682-3734

The text of the amendments proposed by Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County is available here.

So all of you Lane County folks who are concerned about figuring out a way to strong local economies that will be resilient enough to grapple with the challenges we are already beginning to face, here’s your chance to take on the developers who normally have their way.

See you Thursday!