Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Expanding NEPA to include climate impacts and adaptability won't necessarily mean a future free from this. Photo: Macomb Politics

Since 1970, the National Environmental Protection Act has required federal agencies to consider the impacts of their projects on air, water, and soil pollution — but not on climate change.

Until recently, carbon dioxide, which causes global warning, wasn’t classified as a pollutant and so couldn’t be regulated under environmental laws. The EPA in 2009 asserted its power to regulate carbon emissions but hasn’t applied it to NEPA analyses for infrastructure – until now.

President Obama hasn’t made the announcement yet, but Bloomberg reported Friday that he “is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects, from pipelines to highways.”

There’s more – projects could also be evaluated according to resiliency in the face of climate change. Would the new infrastructure be destroyed if faced with flooding, drought, or other severe weather? Bloomberg reports that the White House is also “looking at” requiring these climate adaptability and resiliency reports for projects “with 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions or more per year, the equivalent of burning about 100 rail cars of coal.”

Does this mean no more highways?

The conservative National Review’s headline about the changes was, “Did Obama Just Block Keystone?” Columnist Stanley Kurtz speculated that Obama could publicly approve the Keystone XL pipeline and then let the new environmental review process rule it out.

Could the same go for highway projects?

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FYI, 54 degrees Celsius is 129 degrees Farenheit. Image: Wired

Here’s the big news of the day: Autonomous cars are making a big splash at the Consumer Electronics Show right now. Audi is testing its self-driving cars on Nevada roads. Google’s already done it in California. Toyota and Lexus are getting ready too.

Here’s the other big news of the day: The planet’s getting hotter. Australia has had to add a new color to its heat maps. If climate change has an illustrator, it’s the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. If it has a color, it’s pink and purple.

Do these two news items have anything to do with each other? You bet they do, if the driverless car becomes the mass transit of the future (hold the “mass”). This incarnation of personal rapid transit futurism looks to some like a cleaner, safer transportation system. To others, it looks like a senseless replacement of a public transportation system — which, by right, should still have generations of improvement ahead of it — with single-occupancy vehicles. That’s one backward future.

These cars are not fully driverless yet, the carmakers emphasize – Jim Pisz, a Toyota corporate manager, told Wired, “We believe the driver should always be in control of the vehicle.”

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Deron Lovaas is the Federal Transportation Policy Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. This article is cross-posted from his blog on Switchboard.

This map, developed by the FTA, shows where rainfall and sea changes (color shading) intersect with transit systems (the dots). Image: FTA via NRDC

The Boy Scout motto (“Be prepared”) should guide state transportation departments (DOTs), metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and transit agencies as we recover from the destruction Hurricane Sandy wreaked. This superstorm was deemed historic for transit right off the bat by Chairman Joseph Lhota of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA): “The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night.”

The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) has already put thousands of “boots on the ground” to assess and address the damage to livelihoods, lives and property. As they do their jobs and FEMA taps into its multibillion-dollar fund for emergencies such as this, it’s worth recalling advice the agency gives regarding prevention: Each dollar invested in hazard mitigation saves four dollars in avoided damage costs.

I learned this advice from a report prepared about a year ago by Tina Hodges when she was at the Federal Transit Administration (she recently moved down the hall to the much bigger Federal Highway Administration): “Flooded Bus Barns and Buckled Rails: Public Transportation and Climate Change Adaptation.” It’s one of several FTA resources that seem downright prescient right now, all available for download and perusal here.

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If there’s any good news to come out of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, it’s that political leaders and the press are actually talking about climate change. At the end of a long campaign season with barely a mention of the issue, it’s a relief to hear some sane discussion of the issue based on the premise that global warming is real.

While climate scientists hesitate to attribute any single weather event to global warming, many agree that elevated temperatures and sea levels conspired to make this storm especially damaging. And the frequency of storms like Sandy, they warn, will only escalate as global temperatures rise.

We’ve collected, below, some of the most notable statements about the connection between Sandy and climate change, and what it means for the future:

• Bloomberg Businessweek made the scene of a flooded NYC street its cover, carrying the news that global insurers are beginning to warn about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. A Germany-based insurer reported that the number of weather-related loss events in North America has nearly quintupled over the past three decades.
• The Center for American Progress reports that the United States experienced a record 14 extreme weather events that caused more than $1 billion in damage and there have been seven so far this year. Only five states were spared damage.
• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wasn’t mincing words on the topic. “Part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality,” he said Wednesday during a helicopter tour of the damage. “Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable. There’s only so long you can say, ‘This is once in a lifetime, and it’s not going to happen again.’”

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Traffic congestion, air pollution, and lack of mobility disproportionately harm the poor in the developing world when transportation investments favor automobiles. Photo: Owni

If you think the United States is doing a bad job shifting toward sustainable transportation, take a look at the developing world. The places with the most to lose from auto-oriented development are doubling down on it — to the enormous detriment of their citizens, especially the poorest.

The number of cars in the world is expect to grow as much as 375 percent by 2050. Road fatalities in low- and middle-income countries are expected to rise by 80 percent just over the next eight years, with pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable users making up about half those deaths. Harmful air pollutants that already cause 1.3 million premature deaths each year, mostly in developing and middle-income countries, will rise. And carbon dioxide emissions from transport could grow 300 percent over 2005 levels by 2050 — with most of the growth, again, coming from the developing world.

The energy consumed by the transportation sector globally more than doubled between 1970 and 2005. Source: Worldwatch Institute.

Michael Replogle and Colin Hughes warn of these dire outcomes in their article on sustainable transportation for the 2012 State of the World report, published by the Worldwatch Institute. While international climate change agreements have historically overlooked the transportation sector, the authors note some promising changes afoot as international development banks seek to add transit projects to their portfolios.

Replogle and Hughes frame transportation policy in terms of both sustainability and equity. The urban poor lose out disproportionately when car-oriented infrastructure dominates, they note, since the lack of affordable transportation forces them “to choose between low incomes in informal sector employment close to affordable housing and higher-wage jobs that force them to spend a large share of their income and hours each day commuting.”

Compounding the inequity, fossil fuel subsidies disproportionately allocate public funds to the wealthy, the authors report: “The International Energy Agency estimates that only eight percent of the $409 billion that the world spent in 2010 to subsidize fossil fuel consumption (about half of which is used for transport) went to the poorest 20 percent of the population.”

Unfortunately, say Replogle and Hughes, international agreements on poverty reduction and climate change have largely ignored transportation. Even the Agenda 21 agreement, a bogeyman among far-right cranks, included “no targets, goals, commitments, or other forms of accountability” for sustainable transport.

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A coalition of civil rights and environmental groups is crying foul over proposed changes to an important environmental protection as lawmakers attempt to hammer out a last minute deal on the transportation bill.

NEPA help save Michigan wetlands from destruction, but this important environmental review procedure could be weakened in the transportation bill negotiations. Photo: eWashentaw

The weakening of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, would disproportionately harm minority groups, according to a statement from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. This law requires agencies to solicit public feedback and consider less damaging alternatives before moving forward on federally funded transportation projects.

NEPA is perhaps the most important tool local residents have in fighting unwelcome highway projects — which have disproportionately affected communities of color.

The environmental reviews required by NEPA have been a target of some conservative actors who see it as an onerous layer of bureaucracy that slows the delivery of transportation projects. But the NAACP, the Alliance for Biking and Walking, the American Public Health Association and dozens of other groups say these processes have often resulted in major cost savings and major project improvements.

These groups point out that, following public outcry, NEPA allowed for the overhaul of a highway project on Michigan’s US 23. The changes resulted in the preservation of important wetlands — and a savings of $1.5 billion.

“While we agree that transportation project delivery needs to move as efficiently as possible, it is important that in our eagerness to facilitate project development, we do not sacrifice the democratic tool available to communities that ensures full and fair participation in the decision making process of the federal government,” the groups wrote in a letter to members of the conference committee working on the bill.

Advocates for keeping the NEPA requirements say that the concern over delays is overblown. Ninety-six percent of federal transportation projects fall under the categorical exclusion of NEPA and don’t require any reviews. Three percent get an environmental “assessment” but not a full review. That leaves just one percent of the very biggest and most complex transportation projects that must undergo a full environmental impact review.

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Martin Kelly Jones sued the MBTA for providing Boston bus riders with real-time arrival information. Photo: MBTA

Lloyd Dobbler, John Cusack’s generation-defining character in Say Anything, notably said, “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career.”

Martin Kelly Jones lives by a similar creed. He doesn’t make or sell anything. Instead he makes his living by attacking transit agencies for using real-time tracking technologies that he says he owns. It’s a practice known as “patent trolling.” Lloyd Dobbler probably wouldn’t want to be a patent troll either, but Jones has made it into his entire career.

Jones filed his first transit-related patent in 1993, securing rights to the idea of letting parents know when school buses were running late. More than 30 additional patents of similar ideas followed.

Jones doesn’t develop or sell any technology relating to real-time vehicle tracking, but that hasn’t stopped him (and his two offshore firms, ArrivalStar and Melvino Technologies) from punishing anyone who does. To date, he’s filed more than 100 lawsuits against anyone who uses such technology – everyone from Ford to Abercrombie & Fitch to American Airlines to FedEx. He’s one of the top 25 filers of patent infringement suits according to a database maintained by the patent tracking site PriorSmart.com.

Lately, Jones has focused his litigious impulse on transit agencies around the country. According to a brief by the Georgetown Climate Center, “ArrivalStar has brought suit against at least ten transit entities, and at least eight more have received demand letters.” GCC, which convenes the Transportation Climate Initiative, worries that the suits can create a chilling effect, discouraging agencies from employing vehicle tracking technologies. Providing real-time bus arrival information has been shown to increase ridership [PDF], taking cars off the road and reducing vehicle emissions.

Jones’ strategy is not to sue transit agencies for all they’re worth, but to offer them a relatively low-cost way to keep these cases out of court. In fact, not one of his lawsuits has gone all the way through trial. They always end up settling, usually for $50,000 to $75,000, though the demands can go as high as $200,000.

“That’s $75,000 of taxpayer money that’s going into ArrivalStar’s pockets without the validity of the patent ever being challenged,” said attorney Babak Siavoshy, who represents the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If they make the settlement amount low enough, where the costs and benefits favor settling, then most municipalities are going to settle, and it costs them a lot of money, because the cost of litigation is a big stick.”

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Here's what the administration wants you to know about its energy security efforts: It may have no impact on gas prices, but oil companies are drilling away! Source: White House

It’s been almost a year since the Obama administration released its Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future, but more importantly, it’s been two weeks since Energy Secretary Steven Chu got chewed out for not caring enough about lowering gas prices. And Newt Gingrich, whose presidential campaign is slipping into irrelevancy, can still do some political damage with his claim that he could bring gas prices down to $2.50.

So, the administration is taking this opportunity to show off what it’s done to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil with its one-year progress report on the blueprint.

Two weeks ago, Chu said something in a Congressional hearing that vaguely hinted that reducing gas prices so Americans could continue to guzzle fuel in SUVs was not actually his top priority. Here’s how it went: Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-MS) was grilling Chu about what the department was doing to lower gas prices. Nunnelee wasn’t impressed by Chu’s talk of developing “cost-effective” alternatives, like new battery technologies and natural gas – he wanted relief from high prices now.

Nunnelee started to ask, “But is the overall goal to get our price —”, but didn’t finish the sentence before Chu replied, “No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy.”

It’s the “no” that killed Chu. The point he was making is unassailable – that the administration is looking far beyond day-to-day price fluctuations and toward real economic and environmental sustainability. But all conservatives heard was the “no” and went around proclaiming that President Obama’s energy secretary is still trying to “figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” as he advocated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal before assuming his current position. (He has since repudiated that idea.)

The revised blueprint comes at the perfect time to bring home what Chu actually meant in his comments to Nunnelee. But it’s not all the rosy picture environmentalists might have wished for.

The first thing the report highlights is the fact that domestic oil production has increased every year Obama has been in office, reaching the highest level since 2003. Then it goes on to boast about the administration’s advances in natural gas, much of which is extracted through an extremely dangerous and dirty process known as fracking. All this means oil imports are down to 45 percent of U.S. consumption, from 57 percent when Obama took office. That’s not so exciting when you realize what it’s being replaced with.

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Judging from the level of our national debate, you would guess we are a nation strongly divided on the issue of climate change. But you’d be wrong, according to a new poll from Yale University.

Americans favor transportation policies that would address climate change, such as increased transit and bike lanes, according to a new poll. Photo: Green Chip Stocks

A representative survey of 1,010 adults found that 71 percent think that global warming should be a “very high,” “high” or “medium priority” for the president and Congress. Americans overwhelmingly support policy changes that would help address the issue, the poll found. Participants favored developing clean energy sources by a more than 9-to-1 ratio.

“We find very strong bipartisan support for a variety of climate and energy policies in this country,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “It runs contrary to what you might expect looking at, for instance, the current make up of Congress and the Republican candidates for president.”

Transportation and planning policies to avert global warming also enjoyed wide approval among survey participants: 77 percent said they support adding bike lanes to roads, and 80 percent said they support expanding public transportation service.

This was true even among self-identifying Republicans. Some 74 percent of Republican respondents said they supported bike lanes and 80 percent signaled their support for increased public transit availability.

Majorities also supported expanding mixed-use zoning, reducing sprawl and promoting energy efficient apartments over single-family homes.

Republicans were more evenly split on issues of zoning and sprawl; 59 percent said they opposed zoning for mixed-uses in order to reduce the need for a car. However, Republicans were split 50-50 on using zoning to reduce sprawl and commute times.

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Dear sustainability advocate: I know you are tired.

You spend your life looking climate apocalypse in the eye and knowing that human behavior needs to change to avert catastrophe. But are humans changing their behavior? Not fast enough.

And why not? You’ve started carpooling and weatherized your house and it wasn’t so hard. So why don’t your neighbors get it? Why aren’t they doing anything?

Pictures of polar bears on melting ice floes may tug at the heartstrings but they won't change people's climate-damaging ways, according to behavioral scientists.

These questions have unleashed a new field of climate change-related behavioral science. I write now from its epicenter: the Garrison Institute symposium on Climate, Cities and Behavior in New York’s Hudson Valley. The idea is to figure out what mental processes are at work when people decide to change something in their own lives for the greater good – specifically, for the environment. After all, cities can set emissions reductions targets all they want but they need people to actually reduce their emissions to meet their goals. And no one can force your neighbors to turn off their air conditioners. They’ll have to make that decision themselves.

Here are some strategies, from the behavioral scientists to you:

Attitudes follow behavior, not the other way around.

Here’s what we wish would happen: Joe Schmo stumbles upon a brilliantly researched and written article in, oh I don’t know, Streetsblog, for example, that convinces him that climate change is real and dangerous and that he needs to do something. So he ditches his car and starts riding a bike to work. That’s an unlikely scenario, sadly. Maybe it’s because people get defensive when their lifestyle is criticized before they’re ready to give it up. Anyway, the more likely scenario is that Joe Schmo already rides a bike, maybe for exercise, maybe because he lives in a compact city that doesn’t require a car. When someone comes around trying to gather support for green cities, he gets on board – he already feels like he’s got skin in that game.

People aren’t scared enough yet by climate change.

We’re wired to feel real fear and urgency around threats that are present right now. Though the effects of climate change are being felt already all around us, from extreme weather to damaged crops, it still lacks the urgency needed to catalyze immediate and dramatic action.

When people do get scared, they get overwhelmed.

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