Alex Steffen - Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities That Can Save the Planet

Editor: Carissa Bluestone

Critical feedback on this project provided by:
Alex Aylett, Sarah Bergmann, Dan Bertolet, Dawn Danby, Kyra Davis, Mike Eliason, Pete Erickson, Rob Harrison, Denis Hayes, Sarah Kuck, Julia Levitt, Gabriel Metcalf, Amanda Reed, Sarah Rich, David Roberts, and Justus Stewart.

Until January 1, 2013, this work is Alex Steffen, 2012, all rights reserved.

After January 1, 2013, this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercialShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Contents

Forewarned

Our Current Options: Extremely Dangerous and Catastrophic

Its Not Too Late to Avoid Catastrophe

Zero, Worldwide

Our Urban Future

Our Urban Opportunity

Our Cities as Climate Solutions

Imagining Carbon Zero Cities

ConsumptionBased Footprinting

The Clean Energy Supply Challenge

The Brutal Realities of Energy Politics

The Other Energy Path

The Power of Cities

Electric Vehicles

Not Transportation, But Urbanism

Compact Communities and Access by Proximity

PeopleFocused Streets and Deep Walkability

Rebuilding the Suburbs

Healthier Cities

The Coming Urban Boom

CarFree Places

Eco Districts

Smart Neighborhood Infill

Tentpole Density

The PlaceMaking Dividend

Walkshed Technologies

Walkshed as Innovation Platform

City Innovation as Transportation Solution

PeopleFocused Places and Fairer Cities

Retrofitting

Building for Carbon Zero Cities

New Building Types

Historic Buildings and Bespoke Innovation

PeopleFocused Places and Green Building

District Systems

District Energy and Smart Grids

Innovation Zones

Surplus Capacity

Collaborative Consumption and Sharing

Rethinking Needs

New Technologies and Adding New Capacities

Drawbacks of the Digitized City

Smart Urbanism

Recombinant Manufacturing

The Death of Speed

Upskilling

Scenius, Attention Philanthropy, and Incubation

Systems Storytelling

Food and Climate Change

Farming and Ecosystems

Foodsheds

Green Infrastructure

Cities and Soil

Restoration as Ruggedization

The Economic Benefits of Survivability

Forewarned

On Monday the 29th of October, 2012, a tidal surge 13.9 feet high (the highest ever recorded) washed up and over the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, pushed forward by the superstorm Sandy. That same week, the storm destroyed large swathes of coastline from the New Jersey shore to Fire Island, while driving torrential rains, heavy snows and powerful winds inland across the Eastern U.S. and Canada. By the time the storm blew out, it had killed more than 100 Americans, made thousands homeless, left millions without power and caused at least $50 billion in damage. Sandy was, by any reckoning, one of the worst natural disasters in American history.

Maybe, though, the word natural belongs in quotes. Because what was surprising about Sandy wasnt that it happened (indeed, many had predicted that rising seas levels and storms intensified by warmer oceans would make something like Sandy inevitable), but that it was seen so clearly, and so immediately, for what it was: a forewarning of what a planet in climate chaos has in store for us.

Sandy was far from the first sign that climate change is herescientists have been warning for decades of the dangers of a heating planet, and in the last ten years weve seen a flurry of unprecedented storms, droughts, floods, melting glaciers and wildfires, as well as recordbreaking heat waves following one after another. Sandy, though, knocked down walls of denial and inattention that have kept us from admitting whats happening to our world.

Whats happening is that were losing the climate fight. Climate change is here, its worsening quickly, its effects are more dire than many thought they would be, andif we continue with business as usualwere on a track to unleash an almost unimaginable catastrophe on ourselves, our children and our descendants.

Part of learning from [Sandy] is the recognition that climate change is a reality, said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at the time. Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable. He added later, Anyone who says there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is denying reality.

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Our Current Options: Extremely Dangerous and Catastrophic

To not warm the planet at all no longer remains an option. The Earth is already dangerously hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

We used to think that warming up to two degrees (centigrade) fell within a sort of safe zone, where we could expect change but not crisis. But in a world weve warmed only by about one degree (again, centigrade) above the historical baseline, were already seeing massive climate impacts across the planet. These unexpected impacts, along with new projections from everimproving climate models, tell us that the climate is not nearly as forgiving as wed like it to be. As the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Researchs Kevin Anderson puts it, One degree is the new two degrees. Two degrees, meanwhile, now appears not just dangerous, but extremely dangerous.

The means the menu of choices in front of us no longer includes a completely safe and stable climate. Instead, our choices come down to two options: a world in which climate change becomes extremely dangerous, or one in which it becomes totally catastrophic.

To keep climate change within that merely extremely dangerous range, scientists say, we must limit the rise in global temperatures to 2C. Allowing warming to accelerate beyond 2C to 4C takes us beyond extremely dangerous into downright insane.

Yet thats where our current emissions trajectory is leading us: to a world 4C hotter, perhaps as soon as 2050; and perhaps even 6C hotter by the end of the century. Four degrees global temperature rise involves so many utterly catastrophic impactspermanent droughts, largescale shifts in agriculture, megastorms, rapid sealevel rise, ecosystem collapses, and so on (all triggering social instabilities)that we cant expect our global civilization to avoid serious disruptions, and in many places, longterm ruin. A world 4C hotter is, as some put it, beyond adaption. (A world 6C hotter is almost beyond comprehension: to conceive of a world six degrees warmer, imagine alligators in the Arctic.)

A world thats 4C hotter would also be vulnerable to nonlinear climate feedbacksways in which the effects of warming (like the melting of the Arctic permafrost) could rapidly worsen warming itself (by, in this case, releasing enormous volumes of CO2 and methane now trapped in frozen soils). Some worry these feedbacks could lead to runaway climate change, wherein a cycle of warming and greenhousegas releases and more warming spirals viciously out of control. At that point, even the wildest geoengineering ideasfor example, creating artificial volcanoes to fill the stratosphere with sulfate particles, blocking some of the sunshine headed towards Earthwould be, at best, Hail Mary strategies (and would do nothing to address other catastrophic effects of rising emissions, like the acidification of the oceans and the resulting mass dieoffs of ocean life). Spiraling climate chaos of this severity would leave us on a profoundly different planet than the Earth we now call home.