If you live in Boulder, you’ve almost certainly noticed the construction along US-36 — aka the Boulder-Denver Turnpike. The main thing that’s being built here is one new lane in each direction. However, it’s not your average road-widening project. Usually when additional capacity is added, it’s rapidly consumed by induced demand. Instead, the two new lanes are going to be special managed lanes. What does that mean?
These new lanes are going to be optimized for mass transit, in this case buses. It won’t quite be Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), in which the lanes are used exclusively by buses, passengers pay on the platform, and board like you would on a subway or light-rail line. The US 36 system will be somewhere between that and the express service that we’ve got now. Even at peak hours, when buses are departing every 3-5 minutes, there will still be a significant amount of spare capacity in the managed lanes. This capacity will be made available to high occupancy vehicles, and those that are willing to pay a toll. There may also be a number of permits issued for electric vehicles, though how that would work remains to be determined. The toll value, the number of passengers required to be considered “high occupancy” and the number of EV permits that might be issued will all be managed to ensure that the buses go at least 50 miles per hour. The two general purpose travel lanes in each direction will remain free to everyone.
The past couple of years have been rough on Colorado, in terms of climate change related disasters. First a couple of record setting wildfire years, and then floods of “biblical” proportions. At a gut level we know we have to respond, but our public discourse is having trouble addressing the root cause directly. Instead we’re dancing around the issue, and failing to either adapt adequately to our new reality or to mitigate further climate change.
Creating a wildfire risk map, and rating all properties on a scale of 1 to 10, requiring that risk designation to be disclosed before any property sale, and making it available to insurance companies for use in setting their rates.
Charging those living in the “wildland urban interface” a fee based on their risk exposure, that would be used to defer some of the additional public costs incurred in protecting their private property.
Creating fire-resistant building codes for high risk areas, affecting both the materials used in construction, and requirements for defensible space around buildings.
Make no mistake: these are climate change adaptation measures, and Colorado has rejected them.
As the Denver Post reported in September: developers didn’t like the idea of increased construction costs; the real-estate industry didn’t like the idea of making a lucrative market much less attractive; homeowners in high risk areas certainly didn’t like the idea of paying for the risks they’ve taken on, or making those risks transparent to potential buyers of their property.
Would the discussion be any different if people understood that the wildfire frequency and intensity is likely to just keep increasing as climate change marches on? This is about as close as the article from September gets to mentioning climate change:
Colorado terrain ravaged by wildfire has quadrupled from 200,000 acres in the 1990s to nearly 900,000 acres in the 2000s. “Scientists tell us this pattern isn’t going to change,” Hickenlooper said.
Why is the “pattern” there in the first place? What kind of scientists was the Governor was talking to? None of the press articles linked to from this post mention climate change even once, despite universally pointing out the trend. For example: As Colorado wildfires continue to worsen, only moderate laws proposed. And why are they worsening? No comment. Even the wildfire task force’s report mentions climate change only once in 80 pages.
The only big risk factor we’ve talked about directly is where we choose to build our homes. This is an important discussion too. The overall wildfire risk — at least to human lives and property — is something like:
(human risk) = (area burned) x (pop. density in high risk areas)
Climate change will in large part determine how much of our state burns each year, but we have a choice about how many people and how much property to put in areas subject to burning. Reducing our exposure to the increasing wildfire risk is an adaptation to climate change — an alteration of our behavior, in light of the expected risks going forward. For the moment at least, we seem unwilling to listen to the warnings.
But hey, at least the state had a conversation, and decided not to do anything.
Cause and Effect
So what are the causes? According to the US Forest Service, the enormous bark beetle kill is due in part to warmer winters, resulting from climate change. These forests filled with dead trees are warm and dry for longer each year, lengthening the western US fire season by about 2 months. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the number of large wild fires per year has already increased from 140 in the 1980s, to 250 in the first decade of the 2000s. This infographic from the Union of Concerned Scientists is a good cartoon summary:
The third panel is probably the scariest for Colorado. The dark red swath covering most of the western half of the state means that we expect more than six times as much land to burn each year in the near future, with just 1°C (1.8°F) of additional warming — and as Kevin Anderson and many others have pointed out, it is virtually certain that we will see another 1°C of warming… if not 3°C, or even more.
So our elected representatives are right to be concerned about increased risk from wildfires, and about the safety of the firefighters who try to protect us from those fires. But we’re still missing the point: We control our exposure to risk locally, and we control the magnitude of that risk globally.
Mitigation?
Policies aimed at avoiding or reducing climate change (like putting a price on carbon) are mitigation efforts. We’re not talking about them much, even in the context of an obviously climate mediated risk like wildfires. This is bad. If we can’t have a conversation about what’s increasing the wildfire risks, how can we hope to respond appropriately? Is our refusal to respond to change related to our refusal to accept the cause of the change? Or is it more a kind of landscape amnesia — an inability to even see the change? Are we going to forget what normal fire seasons looked like, in the same way that we’ve started to forget what a normal winter feels like:
Double Climate #Fail
Right now we’re managing to fail doubly with respect to climate change. We are both unwilling to adapt to the foreseeable risks, and unwilling to even mention that these risks are linked to our greenhouse gas emissions, let alone talk about what we might do to mitigate those emissions and the risks that they create.
If we really care about our firefighters, if we really are intent on avoiding ever more costly and tragic conflagrations in our state, we need to both adapt and mitigate. We need to start building for a warmer world now, and we need to stop warming the world as quickly as possible.
Price is not the only economic variable to consider in deciding what kind of generation a utility should build. Different kinds of power have different risks associated with them. This is important even if we set aside for the moment the climate risk associated with fossil fuels (e.g. the risk that Miami is going to sink beneath the waves forever within the lifetime of some people now reading this). It’s true even if we ignore the public health consequences of extracting and burning coal and natural gas. As former Colorado PUC chair Ron Binz has pointed out, risk should be an important variable in our planning decisions even within a purely financial, capitalistic framing of the utility resource planning process.
Utility financial risk comes largely from future fuel price uncertainty. Most utility resource planning decisions are made on the basis of expected future prices, without too much thought given to how well constrained those prices are. This is problematic, because building a new power plant is a long-term commitment to buying fuel, and while the guaranteed profits from building the plant go to the utility, the fuel bill goes to the customers. There’s a split incentive between a utility making a long-term commitment to buying fuel, and the customers that end up actually paying for it. Most PUCs also seem to assume that utility customers are pretty risk-tolerant — that we don’t have much desire to insulate ourselves from future fuel price fluctuations. It’s not clear to me how they justify this assumption.
What would happen if we forced the utilities to internalize fuel price risks? The textbook approach to managing financial risk from variable commodity prices is hedging, often with futures contracts (for an intro to futures check out this series on Khan Academy), but they only work as long as there are parties willing to take both sides of the bet. In theory producers want to protect themselves from falling prices, and consumers want to protect themselves from rising prices. Mark Bolinger at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs took a look at all this in a paper I just came across, entitled Wind Power as a Cost-effective Long-term Hedge Against Natural Gas Prices. He found that more than a couple of years into the future and the liquidity of the natural gas futures market dries up. In theory you could hedge 10 years out on the NYMEX exchange, but basically nobody does. Even at 2 years it’s slim!
Reading the the Copenhagen accords of 2009, it would seem that virtually the entire world has signed up to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at levels that will keep warming below 2°C, consistent with the scientific understanding of the climate system, and on an equitable basis globally. Unfortunately, virtually nobody is considering policies that actually lead to that outcome. Among others, the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that our current emissions trajectory is consistent with 6°C of warming by the end of the century, which is considered by many to be inconsistent with an organized global civilization. In fact, even if we implemented all the “reasonable” policies we’ve talked about so far (which we’re not doing) the outcome looks a lot more like 4°C than 2°C.
Yet almost nobody is willing to either give up on 2°C publicly, or — maybe more constructively — start a serious discussion about what scientifically grounded, equitable policies that are actually likely to result in less than 2°C of warming look like. Almost nobody, but not quite.
For the last several years Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows of the Tyndall Center for Climate Research in the UK have been trying to publicize this massive disconnect, and get policymakers and the public to acknowledge that in reality there are only radical futures to choose from — either a radical alteration of the climate, or the radical emissions reductions required to avoid it. There is no status quo option. Anderson and Bows are critical of both the scientific establishment for playing down this disconnect, and leaders for refusing to acknowledge in public what some of them understand very well in private.
This conversation isn’t going to go away any time soon. Some selections:
Here’s an hour-long invited talk by Anderson at the Cabot Institute from 2012:
We should begin levying a modest carbon tax, in the range of $5 to $25/ton of CO2e.
The tax must be applied to the fossil fuels used in electricity generation (coal and natural gas). Ideally it should also be applied to gasoline, diesel, natural gas used outside the power sector, and fugitive methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, but those are less important for the moment.
New electricity generation resources must be allowed to compete economically with the operation of existing carbon-intensive facilities, and fuel costs must not be blindly passed through to consumers without either rigorous regulatory oversight, or utilities sharing fuel price risk.
Carbon tax revenues should be spent on emissions mitigation, providing reliable, low-cost financing for energy efficiency measures and a standard-offer contract with modest performance-based returns for new renewable generation.
Over time the carbon price should be increased and applied uniformly across all segments of the economy, with the eventual integration of consumption based emissions footprinting for imported goods.
A carbon price alone is not enough to get the job done — there are other pieces of our energy markets that also have to be fixed to get us to carbon zero.
A couple of already pretty awesome publicly available tools for looking at transportation, land-use, and affordability have just gotten big upgrades, which is wonderful as Boulder heads into updating its Transportation Master Plan and the comprehensive housing strategy discussion over the next year.
First, WalkScore has done a big overhaul of their data and algorithms, and now they’re using real-world routes to determine the time of travel — it’s a great interactive tool for getting a quick idea of how accessible various locations are by mode — also interesting to see visually how something like the Foothills Parkway or US 36 acts as an impenetrable wall, increasing travel times because you have to go out of your way to cross them. All of the BHC Co-ops are in highly walkable locations, with at least decent access to transit and great (by US standards) access to bike facilities. Chrysalis is a “Walker’s Paradise”, just a couple of blocks from Pearl downtown.
I looked up the WalkScore ratings for both the Long’s Garden and Hogan-Pancost properties, which I’ve talked about recently in connection with human scale development (or rather, the lack thereof in Boulder…). Right now they’re both car-dependent — especially Hogan Pancost — but the area around Broadway and Iris could, if it were re-developed well, extend the largest contiguous walkable area within the city — rather than creating an isolated island of human scale urbanism, which is all you can ever get with a development at the margin, like Hogan Pancost, or even the Table Mesa shopping center — which on its own it’s fine, but it’s disconnected from the rest of the city from the pedestrian’s point of view. In Alex Steffen’s vocabulary, both NoBo and Table Mesa lack “deep walkability“, while the Long’s Garden area could potentially tap into the deepest pool we’ve got.
Second, the US DoT has worked with HUD and Chicago’s Center for Neighborhood Technology to develop a tool that allows you to explore the cost of living by location, including both housing and transportation costs — either typical for the region, or customized by your own travel preferences and rent/mortgage. You’d think this would be standard practice, but alas, it’s not. CNT has been doing this for a long time, but the Feds are only now picking up on it. And a lot of the mortgages that went belly up in 2008/2009 and which continue to under perform are the ones stranded in utterly auto-dependent exurban disaster areas. The tool takes the form of an interactive Location Affordability Index map. I love that it lets you build your own particular household, instead of having to go with the regional averages. I saw the story over at The Atlantic Cities first.
It’s really interesting to look at the location affordability of central Boulder vs. Longmont or Louisville — they’re actually not that different, especially if living in central Boulder means your household can ditch a car. Some of the rents I saw estimated in their tool for Boulder were pretty low though — I adjusted them up significantly, and central Boulder was still competitive if it meant one fewer vehicles or one fewer commuters.
PEAK COAL REPORT: U.S. COAL “RESERVES” ARE INCORRECTLY CALCULATED, SUPPOSED 200-YEAR SUPPLY COULD RUN OUT IN 20 YEARS OR LESS
Federal Estimates Overstate Reserves by Including Coal That Cannot Be Mined Profitably; Production Already Down in All Major Coal Mining States… And Utility Consumers Are Facing Rising Energy Bill Prices.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – October 30, 2013 – America does not have 200 years in coal “reserves” since much of the coal that is now left in the ground cannot be mined profitably, according to a major new report from the Boulder, CO-based nonprofit Clean Energy Action (CEA). The CEA analysis shows that the U.S. appears to have reached its “peak coal” point in 2008 and now faces a rocky future over the next 10-20 years of rising coal production costs, potentially more bankruptcies among coal mining companies, and higher fuel bills for utility consumers.
Last night seven Boulder city council candidates visited the Rad-ish Collective, an activist co-op that does a lot of volunteering behind the scenes of Boulder Food Rescue.
The candidates had some motley seating, including one stool made out of the back half of an old bike frame (Andrew Shoemaker) and a chair upholstered in what appeared to be a faux Yeti pelt (Sam Weaver). Half the walls were covered with murals, and the other half with event flyers, political literature, and all the daily household bookkeeping that goes into making a co-op run smoothly.
The crowd’s median age was probably under 25, and most of us sat on the floor. As the event progressed, more and more people filtered in, and those sitting shoulder to shoulder in the front slowly scooted forward until we were within reach of the candidates’ feet. Sam Weaver remarked at some point that it was probably the largest or second largest audience of any forum they’d attended, even though it was being held in a living room!
Streetfilms shows us what a real cycling city looks like, in the Dutch university town of Groningen:
I can’t help but laugh and sigh whenever someone touts Boulder as a “world class cycling city”. We are so, so far from that. But hey, it’s good to have aspirational goals… like 50% of all trips done by bike. Maybe we just need to elect some young leftists to city council, like Groningen did in the 70s!
![Colorado Waldo Canyon Fire [Image 19 of 24]](https://i0.wp.com/live.staticflickr.com/8144/7487692936_977515617f_z.jpg?resize=640%2C427&ssl=1)
