Cities are indeed our future. And they're more interesting, vibrant, and full of economic opportunity, too, as many young people will be glad to tell you!
In the 21st century, we need to encourage an influx to the cities, just as we encouraged an exodus in the 20th century!
By Douglas Foy and Robert Healy
The Boston Globe | Wednesday, April 11, 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: Many of the world's most difficult environmental challenges can be addressed and solved by cities.
This may come as a surprise to those who think of environmental issues largely in the context of wild places and open spaces. Cities, often congested, dense, and enormous consumers of resources, would not be the place one might first turn for environmental solutions.
In fact, cities are inherently the "greenest" of all places. They are much more efficient in their use of energy, water and land than suburbs. They provide transportation services in a remarkably equitable and democratic fashion.
Cities help to save natural areas and open space by relieving growth pressures on the countryside. And cities will be the pivotal players in fashioning solutions to the growing problem of climate change.
New York City, for example, is the most energy efficient place in America. Yes, it houses 8.2 million citizens and uses an enormous amount of energy to do so. Its electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as all of Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in Manhattan are on foot, bike or transit, New York City uses dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses less energy, on a per capita basis, than any state in America.
When one considers that another 750,000 commuters also enter New York every day to work and use large amounts of energy in their daily business there but don't even count in the per capita energy calculation, the city's efficiency performance is even more remarkable.
Carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas and the primary cause of global climate change, comes largely from the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gasoline and natural gas. Nearly half of all the energy those fuels produce is used in buildings - heating, cooling and lighting our homes, factories and offices. Another third of all the energy is used for transportation, primarily fueling automobiles, trucks and transit fleets.
In order to address the challenge of climate change, it is imperative that we make both buildings and transportation vastly more energy efficient. And cities are the place to start. In a way, cities are the Saudi Arabia of energy efficiency - vast mines of potential energy savings that dwarf most of the supply options our country possesses.
It is with that efficiency goal in mind that the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Kendall Foundation have developed for Cambridge the most aggressive energy efficiency program ever deployed in a city in the United States.
The outlines of the program were announced on March 29. It will involve the investment of nearly $100 million, largely raised from private capital sources, in buildings of all types throughout the city.
We will invest in energy efficiency measures in homes, condos, apartments, offices, hotels, institutions, hospitals, factories and schools. We will measure and verify the savings and document the carbon dioxide reductions and other environmental gains. And all of this will be done with the energy savings paying for the cost of the program, without the need for any government subsidies.
By mining Cambridge's efficiency opportunities, the city will become more competitive, save money, add hundreds of quality jobs, help build an efficiency industry that can produce a model that can be replicated in cities all over the United States and add its weight to a solution for global climate change.
The old paradigm of the pollution-filled city as a blight on the landscape and the leafy-green suburbs as the ideal is outdated and does not lead us to a future of energy independence, clean air and a stable climate. Cities are the best hope to realize our need for a bright, sustainable, and promising future.
Douglas Foy, former secretary of the Office of Commonwealth Development, is president of DIF Enterprises. Robert Healy is city manager of Cambridge. This article first appeared in The Boston Globe.
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