Smart Growth Around America

Smart Growth America coalition member TransForm has developed a certification program called GreenTRIP to encourage building the kinds of places we need to reduce our carbon emissions. The certification program rewards developers and municipalities that reduce traffic and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. It acts as a complement to the LEED for Neighborhood Development program (LEED-ND), one that focuses specifically on the place transportation occupies in sustainable land use.

Washington, DC – The latest version of the Senate climate-protection bill put forth by U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, would provide significant resources and incentives to communities to plan and build cleaner, more convenient travel and living options.
The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act [...]

This is the latest edition of the Washington Update from Smart Growth America. The Washington Update is a typically policy-heavy newsletter covering federal policy developments here in Washington. If you want to know more about the details of policy and would like to receive this regularly via email, you can sign up for it (and [...]

Photo from domesticfuel.com

We wrote last week about how you should tell your Senator to put more funding for clean transportation in the climate bill.  Here’s a few more details:
Last Wednesday, Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts released their version of the climate bill, “The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power [...]

The Boxer-Kerry bill requires states and Metropolitan Planning Organizations to come up with long-range plans for greenhouse gas reductions from transportation, providing funding for planning and strategies that can help them meet their targets. The House bill gave clean transportation only one percent of total revenues, even though transportation is responsible for one-third of our [...]

The National Academies recently released a report on driving and the built environment in which they concluded that increasing job and population density in city centers would benefit the environment by reducing vehicle travel, energy use, and CO2 emissions. (We reported on the release of that report a few weeks ago.) Two years ago, Smart Growth America and a number of other organizations collaborated on a report called Growing Cooler which similarly demonstrated the impact of our built environment on curbing climate change. However, Growing Cooler’s findings showed that the built environment’s impact on the environment was far greater than the conclusions of the National Academies’ report. Reid Ewing, Arthur C. Nelson, and Keith Bartholomew of the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Research Center (none of whom work for Smart Growth America) have issued a response to the authors of the National Academies report detailing how their original numbers remain more valid than the “moderate” findings of the new report.

A new report released yesterday chronicles how the record public transportation ridership of 2007 and 2008 helped cut carbon dioxide emissions by 37 million tons in 2008 — and more importantly, how increasing transit ridership in the future is an essential strategy for helping us reach our ambitious national goals of cutting emissions and preventing climate change. Read the report (pdf)

The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science yesterday released a Congress-commissioned report entitled, Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use and CO2 Emissions. The study by a panel of transportation planning experts looked at the role smarter planning and development could play in reducing oil [...]

You may have seen oilman T. Boone Pickens around lately.
If not, then you haven’t turned on your television, radio, or opened a newspaper in the last few weeks. He’s been touting his new Pickens Plan nonstop to nearly any outlet that will listen, taking out full-page ads in newspapers from coast to coast and even [...]

It’s about to start, but we wanted to let you know that SGA communications director David Goldberg is testifying with several others in front of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming this morning (6/18). The panel of experts will be talking about how better planning, more transit, and increased walkability will [...]

In regards to the news stories about people adjusting their behaviour in light of high gas prices, we’ve been wondering: What will people in metro areas do when they’ve squeezed all the efficiency they can out of their car, combined all the trips they can, and elminated as much driving as they can, but still [...]

[UPDATE: 12:33 p.m. Do read Andrew Revkin's post on the NYT's Dot Earth Climate blog for some other thoughts about the debate and political wrangling going on with the bill.]
After many months of behind-the-scenes work, the first piece of comprehensive climate legislation reached the floor of Congress this week. The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act is [...]

We noticed this new report from the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, entitled “Primer on Transportation and Climate Change.” (H/T to David Crossley of the Gulf Coast Institute.) In it, they say some really terrific things about facing up to the realities of climate change while acknowledging we have to change our behavior [...]

While we hope that Congress passes a global warming bill with a hard cap on emissions (cap-and-trade) to limit our overall emissions and incentivize even more reductions, people are beginning to realize that much of the power and leadership required to fight global warming will come at the state, regional, and local level.
Consider this story [...]

“We” love the “we” campaign, but it has some glaring omissions
Many of you may have seen the hopeful television commercials over the last week with pictures of windmills, solar panels, and all things “green.” Former Vice President Al Gore launched a three-year, $300-million dollar campaign last week, officially called The Alliance For Climate Protection,” but [...]

As we’ve highlighted this week, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change is out in its final, sharp-looking book form. Released in a preliminary technical form last fall, the book has been revised, updated, and published as a beautiful hardcover book, replete with informative graphics, pictures and illustrations.
The crux? It will be [...]

Pass this on to your friends, colleagues and others to let them know about the release of this exciting new book! Forward this announcement with the link below to your friends and colleagues, or add it to Digg, Reddit, Google Bookmarks, and other social sites.
Visit our Growing Cooler page for more information. There, you can [...]

I’m just a Bill on Capitol Hill…

I just wanted to announce a new action page on our website that covers all of our current work on federal policy. It’s a great place to go to learn more about the legislation moving on the Hill right now — and what you can do about it. We’re [...]

BusinessWeek published a special report on Green Design and Innovation this week, and one of their top stories highlights the core message of Growing Cooler: meeting the demand for the walkable neighborhoods and cities that result in less driving is one of the best solutions for reducing emissions.
Alex Steffen reworked his longer essay that appeared [...]

Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging.org picked up on Growing Cooler in a fantastic recent essay on climate change called “My Other Car is a Bright Green City.”
Sprawled-out land uses generate enormous amounts of automotive greenhouse gases. A recent major study, Growing Cooler, makes the point clearly: if 60 percent of new developments were even modestly [...]

After nearly two years of study and debate, the Congressionally mandated, bipartisan commission charged with predicting our nation’s transportation future emerged last week with it’s collective hair on fire, screaming that our driver-less SUV of a federal policy is headed for a cliff. To which the news media responded with a collective yawn, except for [...]

When a timber company proposed a new development on a lake in central Maine that would clear 14,000 acres of forest to build roughly 2,300 homes, forward-looking leaders in Maine questioned the wisdom of a mega-project on pristine wilderness so far from existing [...]

As you could see from our last two posts chronicling the candidates’ positions on energy and climate, it varies from being a core issue among 11 or 12 others, all the way down to not being mentioned much at all. And as interested as some candidates may be in the issues, they still haven’t reached [...]

The Energy and Climate page explores the connection between energy independence, climate change, and how it all relates to smart growth.

You can download the new fact sheet on “The Link to Energy Security and Climate Change” on that page as well.

Want to learn more about energy, climate change, and sustainability? We’ve got a couple of [...]

Click to watch the video “A New Economic Engine: Energy in the 21st Century”

Be sure to check out a recently-added video from the Center for American Progress, titled “Capturing the Energy Opportunity: Creating a Low-Carbon Economy,” including an appearance by SGA executive director Don Chen.
This video is part of a series by CAP on [...]

In July of 2006, U.S. meteorologists and climatologists issued a statement while studying  climate change and how it may be affecting the weather:
…the more urgent problem of our lemming-like march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention. We call upon leaders of government and industry to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of building practices, and [...]

I recently spent five wonderful days in Houston. When I tell people that, they think I’m joking. Most people outside of Texas seem to regard Houston as little more than a bloated, polluted, overheated hellhole. Not a baseless assessment, I’ll grant you, but the smugness with which it is delivered is utterly unwarranted.
First off, as [...]

Voters decided on a handful of ballot measures related to transit and transportation funding yesterday, but it’s worth pointing out two specific cases here from opposite sides of the country.
Charlotte: Transit funding upheld
An overwhelming 70 percent of Charlotte voters renewed their commitment to the city’s ambitious transit plans, upholding a half-cent tax that funds both [...]

Devastation was wrought across California over the last two weeks as a spate of wildfires, powered by the mighty Santa Ana winds, roared across the landscape, while firefighters struggled for days to gain control and citizens scattered in the face of danger. While most people probably didn’t give much of a thought to the “why”, [...]

Joel Kotkin teamed up with Ali Modarres last Sunday to pen a piece for the Washington Post entitled “Hot World? Blame Cities, ” in which they ignore most of the scientific evidence about lower per capita carbon emissions of city residents, placing the blame for global warming largely on the shoulders of city-dwellers, and proposing [...]