Daily Score Blog

Am I the only one who senses a remarkable shift -- or, really, 3 shifts -- in how the press is covering climate change?

First, a year or so ago I started seeing much less coverage of climate change as a scientific controversy, and much more coverage that accepts the actual state of affairs -- namely, that the scientific underpinnings of climate change are remarkably uncontroversial, and that the vast majority of atmostpheric scientists think that it's real.

More recently, I've seen much more coverage of the economic costs of climate change -- take for example, the British report suggesting that unchecked climate change could lead to a global recession. Previously, the larger part of the coverage talked only about the costs of fighting climate change -- as if those were the only costs worth thinking about.  As I've said before, one-sided coverage of the costs of climate change enables "magical thinking" -- namely, that if we just bury our heads under our pillows, the costs will go away.  Balanced coverage -- making it clear that "business as usual" carries huge costs and risks -- makes that sort of magical thinking harder to sustain.

And now, I've started seeing mention of the ethical dilemmas associated with climate change.  See, most recently, this, from the Christian Science Monitor.  The following quote nails it:

"Climate change not only raises ethical questions, but the most profound ones - literally matters of life and death, who's going to survive, the fate of nation states, obligations of one nation to another, of the rich and the poor."

In some ways, this third trend in media coverage is the most heartening to me.  It's not that economic arguments don't matter.  Far from it.  Still, they only go so far -- especially for genuinely long-term problems, where costs accrue right now, but the benefits go to people who don't even exist yet. On purely pragmatic and self-interested grounds, it's a hard sell to convince me to pay $10 now to avoid $100 in potential costs a century from now.  After all, I won't be around to reap the fruits of my labor.

That's where ethical arguments can have some sway.  I, for one, would rather pay $10 now to prevent climate change, than face the thought that other people -- especially my grandkids -- might view me as a moral midget.

Nice: 

New York City developer George Aridas turned a few heads among Vancouver's condo builders with his presentation earlier this year to the Urban Development Institute. Mr. Aridas' talk was funny, sported great visuals, and brimmed with financial and technical facts.

But the real reason many Vancouver developers were on the edge of their seats was the New Yorker's details on how his company made a lot of money building an environment-friendly residential tower. Now that got their attention!

Sounds like a big win all the way around. 

Aridas' project, the Solaire, uses 35 percent less electricity and half the water of a typical residential high rise.  Plus, it takes a great approach to affordable housing:

[T]here is a mandated sprinkling of "affordable" housing on all building floors, rather than on physically separate sites. "They are integrated through most parts of the building," says Mr. Aridas of the Solaire's affordable housing units, "so riding up the elevator, nobody knows if the person standing next to you is paying one fifth the rent for almost the same apartment."

Seems like Vancouver's paying attention.  How about Seattle and Portland?

Here's an interesting factoid from the Transportation Research Board's new Commuting in America study: of all the metropolitan areas the study looked at, Seattle posted the largest percentage decline in drive-alone commuting from 1990 to 2000. It was a small drop -- just 1.5 percent -- but it bucked the national trend. Portland also showed a slight decline, along with San Francisco, Phoenix, and Atlanta; and four other cities, including Los Angeles, Sacramento, Dallas and Las Vegas, held steady.

I don't know what to make of this, exactly. I know from our past work on sprawl that Portland, Seattle, and Phoenix (yes, Phoenix) actually grew more compact over the decade, with a larger share of people living at transit-friendly densities in 2000 than in 1990. The same happened in Sacramento and Las Vegas, and I suspect in San Francisco and Los Angeles too.

But I doubt it happened in Atlanta. Everything I've read about the city suggests that greater Atlanta went through a sprawl boom, and a net decline in urban and suburban density, during the 1990s. I haven't run the numbers, unfortunately; but the other southeastern cities that we studied, Nashville, TN and Charlotte, NC, saw a mind-boggling increase in sprawl.

So I'm not quite sure what accounts for Seattle and Portland's relative success in trimming drive-alone commuting over the 1990s. Good records in fighting sprawl may be part of the explanation; but given Atlanta's similar declines in drive-alone commuting, it seems like a city can still notch some progress in commuting trends even if its land use patterns are going in the wrong direction.