Everybody who follows the green beat knows green roofs are cool, and cooling. I would argue that they're still not getting enough attention, and neither is the importance of vegetation in urban areas in general. I'm going to go back to my own city as an example.
What makes industrial areas so unpleasant? I think when it comes down to it, it's all the greyness, the paved-ness. Of course industrial areas are also often filled with "weird" smells and loud sounds you wouldn't find near residential. These added bits of unpleasantness just add to the argument for more vegetation in these areas. Green roofs have been found to lower local temperatures in urban areas, tamping down the urban heat island effect somewhat, meaning less greenhouse gases spent on cooling. They also have been shown to reduce heating costs in winter and increase air quality. Vegetation can also serve as a sound buffer. In other words, ugly, polluted, noisy industrial sectors could be pretty well camoflaged and made more pleasant by adding some greenery. Not only that, but areas with factories, call centres and other large employment buildings tend to have big parking lots to go along with them. Green roofs might reduce the building's cooling and heating costs, but what about the cars parked in the lot? Parking lots and spaces are receiving more and more criticism for their single-useness and the fact that a lot of the time they're not even being used for that use. The least cities could do would be to encourage the greening of parking lots, whether it be through trellises of vegetation over them, large shade trees surrounding them or in them, or through the use of parking tiles rather than asphalt so that vegetation may grow through (although this isn't likely to shade and cool cars as much overhead vegetation, it would significantly cool off the surrounding asphalt and provide for better water absorption).
The question remains how to get businesses and residents to plant more vegetation. Property tax breaks? Promoting the financial benefits? Or plain old regulation? Another weird idea would be a more market-based incentive, such as allowing rooftop space to be rented for community or individual gardens. The safety and horticultural implications are a bit complicated, but surely an entrepreneur could find some simple fixes to keep people from falling to their deaths while gardening and to provide the necessary conditions for the desired vegetation. (Not as persuasive when you bring up the pesky "loose ends" of the idea, is it?)
A couple of additional comments on this idea and climate and environment related projects. First, unused space can have other uses as well, the big one being probably solar. Solar panels continue to become more flexible, to the point where they can be incorporated into clothing or even painted onto surfaces. It's arguable whether this is a better use for a parking lot or roof space. I'll leave that up to geographers and people who like to crunch numbers and run models. The other big aspect, and something that goes for such things as changing public transit, is that cities often don't have a lot of money to sink into these schemes. I don't know if any city has gone to the carbon markets and Kyoto setup to try to get money for their projects by showing the climate change fighting aspects or not, but considering cities are where the bulk of greenhouse gases are now produced and that they're often not well funded or able to run up debt, they should be prime targets for carbon credits. The impact of these kind of projects is probably going to outweigh planting trees in most regions of the world, because not only is the vegetation acting as a carbon sink, it's also preventing more greenhouse gases from being emitted by providing heating and cooling at appropriate times of the year, not to mention likely helping with flood control as an added benefit. Public transit is the same thing, preventing the emissions from going out in the first place.
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Friday, November 16, 2007
Green the City...or Just Your House
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January 7th, 2008 at 2:10 pm e
Does anybody know about this site ( www.earthlab.com ) ? I have seen other environmental sites with carbon calculators like yahoo and tree huggers, but I am wondering what the deal with earthlab.com is, is it credible? I saw they also published a list last month of the top ten greenest cities ( http://www.efficientenergy.org/Top-Ten-Green-Cities-in-the-United-States ). Does anyone know if this site is better than say WWF site? Fill me in
I took their carbon foot print test and it was pretty interesting, but they said that I put out 4.5 tons of carbon while another test gave me like 15 tons? I think I trust earthlab.com’s test a little more (because my score is lower). Does anyone know about any other tests?
January 7th, 2008 at 4:37 pm e
I don’t personally know of the site, but I can say the only thing that would make that huge of a discrepancy in your carbon footprint (4.5 tons vs. 15 tons) is probably air travel. It’s the single biggest emitter. I did a post about it at one point. Going back to that post I mentioned TerraPass. They also have several carbon footprint calculators.
January 8th, 2008 at 2:09 pm e
Thanks for being the first to comment on my site http://prairiesaver.blogspot.com/. Best wishes to your blog for the New Year. Keep up the great work!
February 8th, 2008 at 12:19 am e
I really enjoy reading your blog, it always has great insight. But I am very frustrated with the fact that so few people are talking about presidential candidates and their thoughts on global warming. Now that it is down to just a few candidates I would think that this would be a bigger issue.
Live Earth just picked up this topic and put out an article ( http://www.liveearth.org/news.php ) live earth is also asking why the presidential candidates are not being solicited for their stance on the issue of the climate change. I just saw a poll on www.EarthLab.com that says people care a lot about what their next leader thinks of global warming. Does anyone know of another poll or other results about this subject?
Here is the page where I saw the EarthLab poll: http://www.earthlab.com/life.aspx. This is a pretty legit website; they are endorsed by Al Gore and the alliance for climate protection and they have a carbon footprint calculator. Does anyone have a strong opinion about this like I do? No matter what your political affiliation is or who you vote for this is an important issue for our environment, our economy and for homeland security.
February 12th, 2008 at 3:00 pm e
Grist did a climate forum. Then they also covered how well the forum was covered. Being such a great website, they also got around to posting this video of a historian traces the roots of climate change denial in the United States. To get to recent history, skip to about 29 minutes in.
The lack of coverage of climate change is multi-faceted. The media, especially television media, which tends to get the big debates and the broadest audience, is not very good at covering the election in a serious way. There has been criticism and study of how much more time is spent on talking around the election, about strategy and unrelated, but entertaining, election “stories.” TV media plays to the worst in human psychology by bringing in what they think will manage to hold our attention span best between commercials and playing up conflict rather than talking about real political issues. There’s also what’s talked about in that YouTube clip. The American public has been misled. It’s amazing the issue has finally begun to penetrate, but it’s likely that the public either doesn’t see this as being as big of an issue as terrorism or the war, or alternatively, it’s TOO big an issue, so they’ve clicked off. There’s probably a lot of different reasons for the lack of coverage, both related to political coverage in general and the nature of the climate change problem politically and psychologically. The Republicans didn’t even show up to Grist’s forum, and their reticence on this issue is being more and more linked to how it’s intrinsically related to regulation. That again ties into the denial process explained by the historian in the clip. It’s an interesting but complex subject. If nothing is done and climate change really catches up with us in a horrific way, it’s something that will no doubt be dissected in even more detail as time goes on. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.