Thursday was encouraging, as the Austin City Council voted 7-0 to continue negotiations with Gemini to build what would be the largest solar power plant in the U.S., a 30-megawatt plant in Webberville.

Encouraging because today Austin put goals first, and economic efficiency arguments (which are greatly lacking in street-cred. these days) in their rightful place. As the seconded motion to vote on the proposal was on the table, a research scientist rushed into the room, asking the council to allow him time to speak.

The scientist stated that a solar plant would reduce Austin’s carbon emissions by .5 percent, whereas a nuclear plant could reduce the carbon emissions by 60 percent.

Nevertheless, the council approved negotiations with Gemini and established parameters: all tax benefits from building a solar plant must pass through to consumers, a council-approved stakeholder task force must be involved in the negotiations, and the related local Green Choice option (a plan that would allow residents to affirmatively indicate their preference for green-produced power) would be specifically labeled as a choice for solar, rather than as a general choice for renewables, which would also include biomass and wind power.

Among the supporters of green lighting the negotiations were Public Citizen, Austin Energy, and a renewables expert who had been part of a losing bid to build the solar plant. The expert, Mr. Sicilliano, recommended that Austin capitalize on Gemini’s below-market bid.

David Power, Deputy Director of Public Citizen, along with several other supporters, urged the council to include all stakeholders in the negotiations process, including both individuals and industry players.

Several benefits of the solar project were cited during the meeting, including the following: a Gemini representative claimed that 50 percent of the labor in building the plant could come from Austin, $30-45 million in local materials could be used, resulting increases in electricity prices could be limited to 1.5 percent, there is no risk of transmission congestion, and solar will fill in wind-power’s gaps during peak demand in the summer.

From The Energy Collective:

“The House of Representatives approved the conference report of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act today, by a vote of 246-186. Not a single Republican joined Democrats in approving this version of the bill, which was the product of long negotiations between leadership in both the House and Senate, as well as a block of centrist Senate Democrats and Republicans who have taken control of much of the debate on the stimulus. . .

Public Transit and Rail – Subtotal: $16.2 billion
$8 billion for construction of high speed passenger rail and intercity passenger rail service.

$1.3 billion for Amtrak (the National Railroad Passenger Corporation) rail investments.

$6.9 billion for public transit construction, maintenence and upgrades.”

Read the rest on The Energy Collective

Today’s paper for my Topics in Sustainable Development class is a 2-page essay.  Unlike previous postings, this paper is presented in a more traditional format.   Our essays were written in response to the following:

Andrew Light: “The Moral Journey of Environmentalism: From Wilderness to Place”

Chusid: “Natural Allies: Historic Preservation and Sustainable Development”

Vincent B. Canizaro: “Regionalism, Place, Specificity, and Sustainable Design”

Donovan Rypkema: “Historic Preservation and Affordable Housing: The Missed Connection”

Click the following link to view the essay:

“Sustainability as Compassionate Action”

I agree with Light that the formidable experiences of the environmentalist are to be found in the realm of feeling or emotion.  I would add that environmentalism is compassion for your surroundings, especially the people and culture.

Through Chris McAndless (See Into the Wild), I’ve found that at the height of connection with nature or solitude lies the realization that life is about creating spaces in which one being can connect with another.  The beauty of separation is not being alone, but appreciating contact with others.  And that is what the Alley Flat initiative is about. Creating spaces.  Building; not bulldozing.

For me, oceanic and deep ecology as described are the great destroyer of labels in pursuit of true sustainability.  So while activists can be effective by confining efforts to a targeted area, we must realize that it’s all one thing.  There’s little point in having a clean city in which some kids receive substandard education.  There’s less point to a good education without collective recognition of the right to access to existing medical care.

Furthermore, there is little use for the divide between academia, industry and social action.  In the TSD class and my public interest law class last week, there were debates about when a lawyer or academic becomes  a social activist.   In university, it sometimes seems people would debate whether to stop a fight between two children, discussing the right to do so.  There is a time for thought and a time for action.  I believe some moral foundation is a prerequisite to adhesion of education and sustainability.  I believe sustainability is more about action than thought because at its center lies compassion, which exists outside thought.

While we are busy in consensus-seeking committees on the right to act, the bulldozers are hard at work.  Some in the TSD class have rejected shared equity as being wrong because it persuades “unsuspecting”, low-income people to give up ownership rights while enlarging the size of the shared-equity group.  Capitalism has elevated desire for ownership above the fundamental need of a place to live.  No feasible alternative for getting people into homes in the bottled-up Austin housing market is offered. A bond model was offered and I reject it because it doesn’t start from the bottom up.  Shared-equity empowers the individual rather than placing them at the mercy of the benefits of the state.

Unlike Rypkema, I do not consider the potential for pre-fab as lying solely in its presentation of an alternative method for acquiring wealth through homeownership.  The great potential within pre-fab and shared equity is re-Valuation of the American Dream from “owning my own home” to “living in an affordable, clean, safe place close to mass-transit or the places I frequent.”  Pre-fab and shared-equity demand a fundamental shift in the role of housing.  And while I’m with Rypkema that the time is now, I do not see federal tax credits as an option-it’s a top-down method both polluted and slow.  Prefab and shared-equity are immediate, bottom-up solutions.

My husband told me that he once asked a German foreign exchange what the most noticeable thing about the U.S. was, and the student said “how new all the buildings are.”  He went on to say that his house in Germany was more than 100 years old.  In the U.S., we have strongly adhered to the frontier mentality that you clear things out and then erect something new; a mentality that was based even at the outset on what William Cronon calls a fiction-the idea that North America was a “wilderness” before 1492.  We are always anxious to move up in the world.  We’re at a point where we have to explore what else there is to do, like watching the trees grow in the suburbs we’ve already built.

Preservation is essential to sustainability, and Chusid’s point about both the builder’s ego and LEED standards not encouraging preservation or re-use brings us back to Sean Garretson’s point last week-that industry too strongly influences governmental decisions.  We have put the cart before the horse with capitalism. I am no longer interested in a system that is broken, in LEED standards, etc.  Sustainability is a peaceful revolution that must carried out from the bottom up, with solar panels and alley flats, pre-fab homes and water collection tanks, and with shared equity.  There is a place for capitalism, but we don’t have to offer our neighborhoods in worshipful sacrifice to it.

The University of Texas and Dell are sponsoring a competition to fund a social innovation submitted by a college student.

Please check out the ideas submitted for Dell’s 2009 social innovation competition and vote for mine if you like it.  My idea is “Internet Consortiums on Global Social Issues”.  You can read it and others and vote here.

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News 

tstutz@dallasnews.com

AUSTIN – New homes in Texas would have to be at least 15 percent more efficient in energy use and new appliances would have to use significantly less electricity than they do now under a clean air bill filed Thursday in the Senate.”  Link to article.

Students in the TSD class mentioned a New York Times reference to “green” modern prefab in Austin.  Check out Ma prefab by Austin design/build firm KRDB–look here .

My Topics in Sustainable Development class read more papers this week, and I am again posting the summaries I turned in.  Shared Equity Ownership is a new concept for me, so I am still developing an opinion and the prompt was to write a critical analysis.  But I enjoy developing or changing my mind about things and because alternative homeownership forms obviously work, it seems likely I will.  The papers we read this week were:

“Recovery and renewal for survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Texas” by Kristin Carlisle.

“Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities?” by Scott Campbell

“Shared Equity Homeownership”, Chapters 1, 2, 5 by the National Housing Institute

Kristin Carlisle (Topic: Plight of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Hurricane Rita in Texas.)

Summary

There has been an inadequate governmental effort to rebuild the homes, neighborhoods and lives of people who formerly lived in areas destroyed by the hurricanes.  Those hardest hit were poor, and there have not been concentrated efforts by the federal government to fix houses and rebuild their neighborhoods, resulting in dislocation and worsened poverty.

My responses

This is really disheartening.  While it’s surely helpful to dissect how the federal aide system could be improved, the ultimate problem is the lack of desire to improve it.   It’s not the lack of desire to help from the “compassion fatigued”, but the lack of desire to help from the powerful “never cared.”  In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein said:

•          ”The news racing around (a Hurricane Katrina shelter in New Orleans) that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, ‘We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans.  We couldn’t do it, but God did.’  Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: ‘I think we have a clean sheet to start again.  And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities.”  All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a ’smaller, safer city’-which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos.”

Scott Campbell (Topic: City planners should define “sustainability” as achieving a balance of interests.)

Summary

Most planners have chosen a single planning priority-economic growth, social justice or environmental protection.  The three corners of the sustainable development planning triangle represent the key goals in planning, and the three axes represent the three resulting areas of conflict and complement.  The center, the balance, is “sustainability”.  It may take a long time to reach the balance, to reach “sustainability”.

My responses

•           The triangle is a good starting point for discussion.  But I’m resistant to the author’s insistence that the definition of “sustainability” exclude the mythic, the romantic, the indigenous, as these lie at the heart of culture and I believe culture is the heart of the planet.  But I liked the author’s method of discussing potential definitions by exploring what should be excluded.
•        The author states that one way he measures social justice is intergenerational fairness.  In a public policy class I took at the law school, one of the readings pointed out that it can be very difficult to strike a balance between the perspectives of growth economics and intergenerational fairness.  In growth economics, the highest value is ascribed to what can be utilized today, which creates a fundamental conflict with the intergenerational approach.  For example, the national deficit-legislators have consistently chosen to spend knowing full well it would have detrimental effects on future Americans.

John Emmeus Davis (Topic: Pros and Cons of alternative forms of homeownership.)

Summary

Shared Equity Housing creates access to homeownership for people whose incomes rise more slowly than consumer prices and defends against the ill-effects of rising property values and speculative buying. Any current lack of evidence about the effectiveness of alternative ownership systems indicates a need for further study, not an inherent lack of viability.

My Responses

•       The alternative ownership forms seem to reach Campbell’s definition of sustainability.  At the same time, the high level of involvement of a controlling entity in the third market is novel in the U.S.  I tend toward favoring what Campbell calls an unrealistic and romantic notion, a city that is sustainable from the bottom-up through the collective effect of individuals making sustainable choices, rather than a city that is sustainable through a new form of top-down system.
•        I have some gut-reaction reservations about the limitations on rights to use aspect of cooperative ownership because I live in a gated residential community (through acts of the fates) with neighborhood covenants and the restrictions on use frequently infuriate me.
•       The author proceeds from the assumption that home ownership is something most people want to achieve, and it seems likely that’s true.  But I’m currently speculative about the American notion of “owning your own home”, and question the value we ascribe to homeownership.  Does aspiring toward homeownership make sense today in the same way that it did in the early 20^th century?

My Topics in Sustainable Development class at UT recently read three papers on the topic of–sustainable development. We were asked to write a summary and critical analysis that totaled no more than 2 pages.  Click the link below to read my summary.  The papers were:

“Sustainable Policy? A Public Debate about Nature Development in the Netherlands” by Wiebe E. Bijeker.  

Chapters 1 & 2 of “Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature” by Douglas Farr. Hoboken, NJ.: Wiley, c2008

“Ecology and Land Development: Past Approaches and New Directions in the Practice of Sustainable Development” edited by D.R. Porter. Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute.

Wiebe E. Bijker (Topic: Sustainable Politics & the Constructionist view of Technology)

Summary

In the past, technology and science threatened democracy in an obvious way: WWII, nuclear.  Today their threat to democracy is occurring, but it’s less obvious—it’s more insidious.  People assume that science is a neutral process and therefore new products and how they are used are inevitable.  But that’s not true:

How technology develops is a conscious decision—not the inevitable result of a neutral scientific process.  Inasmuch as we guide the direction scientific development, the decision regarding the direction should be made democratically.  Sustainable politics in a technological society is about remembering that it is the people who determine what we want to do, not just scientists telling other people what we can do.  Goals first, Tools second—whether the tools be scientific developments or free markets.

My responses

This is true.   For example, Nuclear Energy is still an enormous threat to democracy, yet it is still used and promoted throughout Europe and the U.S because it is consistently viewed only as a sound scientific development rather than as a way of producing energy that feeds concentrations of powers and counters the freedom of the individual in many ways.  

The Platform Science and Ethics sounds like a good idea—It makes relevant not just available scientific methods (i.e., A-Bomb, genetically modify food), but also what various people prefer (i.e., numerous native American groups in the U.S. and Canada that have protested nuclear power plants—simply the fact that they are against them matters).  

Scholarly articles should be in written in plain language and placed on the Internet.  An article shouldn’t be so mysterious as to hinder quick expansion on the ideas.    I hope our paper for the Alley Flat project is more readable.

Douglas Farr (Topic: Redefining “sustainability” and “urbanism”)

Summary

If you act like a pig, you’ll find yourself living in a pigsty.  The American standard of living—what is considered a desirable way to live—is the major factor lying at the root of nationwide physical and mental health and environmental problems.  A change in mindset—a sustainable way of being—will positively affect all aspects of life in the U.S.:

Cities do not have to be the dark, problematic places known in our collective subconscious.  Using the principles of smart growth, they can be bright sources of our primary solution to current living conditions.

My responses

One thing  the chapters touch on that is so true but hardly anyone says is that sustainability demands recognition of the interconnectivity of all the environmental movements.  I see that notion as applying not just between environmental groups, but between environmentalism and other areas, like policy, law, and politics.  It’s all one thing—as a goal, there’s little point to isolating a clean environment from an improved educational system and the right to information.

These chapters are particularly relevant to Austin today.  A lot of homes are being built that are “green” in only one sense—but “green” McMansions are not the answer.  Last week, someone in class asked who the teacher and guests envisioned living in Alley Flats and I wanted to say: us, me, you—because essential to any green building movement in Austin is a campaign to redefine: “The kind of house I live in”, “The kind of neighborhood I live in”, “The way I get around”.

The Buckminster Fuller quote is like Gandhi’s quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  I think this is the only avenue to a better planet.

Douglas R. Porter (Topic: Urban designs that preserve environmental and cultural integrity)

Summary

Through efforts on the federal, state and local levels, many American cities have been planned with regard to open spaces and containing sprawl.

My Responses

On page 12, the authors state that, “prospects for using land use controls to achieve open-space preservation are uncertain. . .the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council intimidated public officials from advocating noncompensatory land use regulations . . .”  I think that as momentum for sustainability builds, states (which is a collective way to refer to the people in an area) will be more likely to offer better compensation to property owners in order to put in place sustainable land use regulations, and also that courts might be more inclined to find that a state has a justifiable  interest in taking by regulating land use for sustainability reasons.  Where takings have been most problematic is when the power is essentially used to kick poor people off land that has become valuable just to build a money-making machine, like a stadium.

balewatch.com

One of the most effective ways Americans can advance sustainability is to differentiate more between desire and necessity and moreover, to reevaluate their perceptions of what is desirable.  Sustainability is not just about being “green”, it’s about being more conservative as well.  For example, reducing energy demands instead of maintaining the same demands but meeting them with solar.  A green McMansion advances the same gluttunous attitudes that lie at the root of our environmental problems.  We need to see ourselves as the people who live in smaller dwellings.  We need to see our dwellings as a more functional place and less as a symbol of our accomplishments.  Please go to www.balewatch.com to view plans for about 60 dwellings starting as small as 275 sq (up to 10,000 sq. ft.) and with estimated building prices starting as low as $10/sq. ft.  and which incorporate considerations such as green building, replicability, energy (physiological/metaphysical).

I’m thinking more about the possibility of a city-wide “no travel day”.   It would be powerful to have a day where everyone chose not to drive gas-powered vehicles (except emergency vehicles, etc.) for several reasons.  One is that it would be interesting to see the effect on the city’s ozone levels for the day.  But, more importantly, it would deliver a powerful message and example.  Each individual choosing to make global warming and resources a priority for a day would show that people can work together toward direct solutions. It would be important because it would reveal that we can sometimes create solutions without persuading rulemakers, without jumping through the hurdles of bureaucratic agencies, without conflicts with corporations, and without appeals to those with money. A citywide no travel by gas-powered vehicle day would demonstrate that with our individual choices and cooperation, we can directly impact our environment.  Moreover, it would be an opportunity to encourage people to use their local resources.  ”It is possible to join forces, to identify common goals, and to agree on common action.”–Gro Harlem Brundtland.