Climate Change

While Parisians are starting to complain that "an invasion of noisy scooters and motorcycles and a rise in accidents involving pedestrian and motorcyclists" is one of the "unintended consequences" of Mayor Bertrand Delanoe's traffic reduction policies, "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz's consulting firm just issued a report claiming that New York City could better meet its long-term sustainability goals by adding more scooters to the traffic mix. Commissioned for Piaggio, the Italian manufacturer of Vespa scooters, the study says:

After Mayor Bloomberg's December announcement of his PlaNYC initiative to prepare for a sustainable New York of 9 million people by 2030, New York New Visions, the group of architects and planners originally organized around Ground Zero rebuilding, announced it was expanding its scope to tackle the new challenge. Last night, in a stark white room in the basement of the American Institute of Architects building in Greenwich Village, a collection of almost equally stark white faces began reimagining the New York of the future.  

On Thursday, as New York City's highest ranking transportation officials argued before City Council that the city's increasing traffic congestion and automobile dependence is "an indication of the vitality and the growth of the city of New York," London's Mayor Ken Livingstone was in Davos, Switzerland announcing that he aims "to make London the world's leading center for research and financial development on climate change." Livingstone said:

The top brass over at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are patting themselves on the back about the PA's plan to take over Stewart Airport near Newburgh, NY. "The region clearly needs additional capacity for air travel," Anthony Coscia, the agency's chairman, was quoted as saying in the New York Times. "It's undeniable. This is intended to remedy exactly that problem." If the deal goes through, Stewart, 60 miles north of New York City, will become the region's fourth major air hub.

While Americans are just waking up to the idea that they might have to do something about climate change, small groups of self-styled carbon-reduction activists in the United Kingdom are taking personal accountability for their emissions to the next level, as reported in the Observer of London.

Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff, along with Daniel Rosenblum, today announce the foundation of their new organization, the Carbon Tax Center. The Center's mission is "to educate and inform policymakers, opinion leaders and the public, including grassroots organizations, about the benefits of and critical need for significant, rising and equitable taxes on carbon emissions from fossil fuels." My favorite part so far? The title of their e-newsletter, "An Inconvenient Tax." Check out their presentation above.

It's not just the weather that's in an uproar these days, it's the weatherpeople, too. After Heidi Cullen, host of the Weather Channel program "The Climate Code," wrote on her blog that she thought forecasters who deny manmade climate change were uneducated on the issue and should perhaps have their American Meteorological Society credentials revoked, she came under attack for smothering scientific debate, both on her own blog and elsewhere. On the website of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Marc Morano wrote:

If the melting of Greenland can't make the American people pay attention to global warming, can anything? Environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose The End of Nature was one of the first books to raise the alarm on climate change for a general audience in 1989, is hoping that "Step It Up 2007," a day of rallies planned for April 14, will at least get things started.

Mayor Bloomberg's Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability is running a series of meetings with community groups. Though the meeting times are posted publicly on the PLANYC 2030 web site, no locations are listed and word has it these borough-wide "Community Leader" meetings are going to be pretty strictly invitation-only.