Smaller Cities are Leading the Way in Sustainability Innovation

These days you don’t even have to be a city plan­ner or pol­icy wonk to geek out on the redeem­ing qual­i­ties and end­less poten­tial of urban design. From polit­i­cal to envi­ron­men­tal to fash­ion mag­a­zines, it’s become almost unten­able to not have a sus­tain­able city sec­tion. Hardly a day goes by with­out announce­ments of ground­break­ing urban farm­ing leg­is­la­tion in San Francisco or record-setting bicy­cle friend­li­ness in Portland. The big guns, from New York to Chicago to L.A., have entered the fray, out­rac­ing each other with bold plans to become greener and leaner, sooner than later. Even at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio last month, one of the few things that everyone—whether they were from devel­oped or devel­op­ing coun­tries, rep­re­sent­ing civic, busi­ness or gov­ern­ment sectors—seemed able to agree on was that we should pay major atten­tion to mak­ing cities more sus­tain­able, yo. 

Metropolitan areas around the globe, from Vancouver to Nantes and Curitiba to Copenhagen, are out­rac­ing each other in short­en­ing com­mutes, green­ing rooftops, switch­ing to renew­ables, and becom­ing cli­mate resilient. It’s a wel­come, hope­ful devel­op­ment, to be sure. Big cities don’t just have the math and demo­graph­ics; they also have the trend­set­ting power that comes with being an inter­na­tion­ally revered cul­tural hub. For bet­ter or worse, the human mind seems to attribute dis­pro­por­tion­ate sig­nif­i­cance to shiny objects. When Jessica Alba rolls around Paris on a Vélib’ it’s con­sid­ered a big, sexy day of news. When the town of Babylon, New York passes one of the most ambi­tious green build­ing codes in the U.S. to reduce the car­bon foot­print of each par­tic­i­pat­ing house­hold by 20-40%…well, what hap­pens in Babylon stays in Babylon.

While many of the big cities we hear about in the news have the inter­nal bud­gets and eco­nomic force to develop their own sus­tain­abil­ity offices and pro­grams, smaller and medium-sized com­mu­ni­ties often have the same appetite, but not nec­es­sar­ily the same fund­ing and expo­sure. Since almost 75 per­cent of all American cities with pop­u­la­tions over 100,000 are still smaller than 250,000, these munic­i­pal­i­ties are the obvi­ous next fron­tier in green­ing our cities. Unfortunately, so far, their efforts and accom­plish­ments have received very lit­tle national attention.

But beware: Babylon is about to strike back.

Smaller Cities Doing the Heavy Lifting

With wind in their sails from the Powering the New Energy Future from the Ground Up report, spon­sored by the Henry M. Jackson Foundation and released last week by Climate Solutions, Babylon and 21 other cities across the U.S. with pop­u­la­tions under 250,000 are estab­lish­ing them­selves as lead­ers in pio­neer­ing clean energy solu­tions and address­ing green­house gas emis­sions. From inno­v­a­tive financ­ing and ambi­tious require­ments for new con­struc­tion to cre­ative com­mu­nity out­reach and part­ner­ships with exist­ing insti­tu­tions, the report offers the first com­pre­hen­sive look at the diverse and cre­ative ways America’s smaller cities are reduc­ing fos­sil fuel depen­dency while also cre­at­ing jobs.

Here are just a few of the many inno­v­a­tive projects and plans pro­filed in the report:

• Babylon, NY lever­aged its solid waste fund for res­i­den­tial energy effi­ciency retrofits, by expand­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of solid waste to include carbon emissions.
• Bellingham, WA launched a suc­cess­ful local busi­ness energy effi­ciency pro­gram to help busi­nesses com­plete improve­ments from light­ing retro­fits to solar.  
• Boulder, CO pub­lished a trio of ordi­nances for build­ing safety and energy effi­ciency and imple­mented a multi-jurisdictional Energy Smart pro­gram to help builders meet the higher bar set by the ordinances.
• Eugene, OR set a goal of hous­ing 90 per­cent of its res­i­dents in com­pact com­mu­ni­ties, in which all ameni­ties would be acces­si­ble within a
  20-minute auto-free trip.
• Fort Collins, CO has set out to cre­ate the first net-zero dis­trict in the coun­try based on a robust part­ner­ship of pub­lic and pri­vate enti­ties, lever­ag­ing busi­ness com­mu­nity lead­er­ship and mak­ing the most of a sig­nif­i­cant fed­eral invest­ment in smart grid technology.

• Jackson, WY cre­ated a for­mal gov­er­nance part­ner­ship between the town, the county and the local util­ity to drive and over­see projects related to energy effi­ciency and clean energy.
• Knoxville, TN has laid crit­i­cal ground­work for clean energy eco­nomic devel­op­ment through a fed­eral grant to build 2 megawatts of solar elec­tric­ity capac­ity, an edu­ca­tional pro­gram about solar instal­la­tions for con­trac­tors and per­mit­ting offi­cials, and invest­ment in 10 elec­tric vehi­cle charg­ing sta­tions pow­ered by solar energy.
• Oberlin, OH set a goal of going beyond car­bon neu­tral by gen­er­at­ing 90 per­cent of its energy from renew­able sources and off­set­ting addi­tional green­house gas emis­sions in the sur­round­ing areas. 

Toward an Ecological Economy

“We’re really try­ing to take a holis­tic approach and tackle this prob­lem from a lot of dif­fer­ent angles,” says Will Schweiger, oper­a­tions man­ager at Long Island Green Homes in Babylon. While each community’s sit­u­a­tion is unique, the chal­lenges faced in shift­ing away from an unsus­tain­able fossil-fueled infra­struc­ture and way of life are ulti­mately shared by cities of all sizes — and a range of dif­fer­ent solu­tions is required. While any com­mu­nity can get started right now with cheap and obvi­ous car­bon reduc­tions like insu­lat­ing and weath­er­iz­ing exist­ing build­ings, oth­ers are already going for deeper infra­struc­tural changes, like Eugene, Oregon’s 20-minute neigh­bor­hoods. 

Quigley notes that there’s a whole range of rea­sons why many of these smaller cities are so aggres­sively get­ting in on the action. Some do it because they’re con­cerned about cli­mate change. Others are try­ing to pro­tect their com­mu­ni­ties from the poten­tial dam­age from antic­i­pated increases in storms, fires, floods, or droughts; and to be part of a grow­ing global cli­mate move­ment. In Babylon, for exam­ple, a 2006 study showed that res­i­den­tial build­ings were the largest con­trib­u­tors to Babylon’s green­house gas emis­sions, and that pro­vided the cat­a­lyst for action. “We decided we had to do some­thing about our res­i­den­tial emis­sions,” Schwieger says, “to put our town on a tra­jec­tory to make a dif­fer­ence and reduce our pollution.”

Two thou­sand miles to the west, in Fort Collins, CO, the city set very high energy effi­ciency goals for the elec­tric util­ity. They’re out to reduce car­bon emis­sions to 20 per­cent below 2005 lev­els by 2020, and to 80 per­cent by 2050. “We are charged with reduc­ing our total energy con­sump­tion by about 1.5 % per year,” says util­ity man­ager Steve Catanach. “That’s a very aggres­sive goal.”

Climate change isn’t the only moti­va­tor. According to Quigley, many city lead­ers are look­ing for the eco­nomic devel­op­ment that clean energy inno­va­tion can bring to their com­mu­ni­ties. Economic devel­op­ment might not be the most press­ing envi­ron­men­tal issues of our time; but it’s safe to say that the way we struc­ture our eco­nomic activ­ity is at the core of whether or not there is a future for humankind to live in bal­ance with the earth’s ecosys­tems. If we can cre­ate a viable econ­omy that is rooted in the long-term ben­e­fit of all plan­e­tary stake­hold­ers and doesn’t exter­nal­ize the true costs of doing busi­ness it won’t mat­ter why we par­tic­i­pate, as long as we get in on the action.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at AlterNet.org.