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Transition Targets for the Dynamic City
Bryn Davidson, Dynamic Cities Project.
We've added two new slideshows which provide a background and foundation for the agressive transition targets we are advocating for leading "dynamic cities".

"Energy Transition and the Dynamic City" (PDF)

"Timelines and Targets: Updates to the DCP Depletion Model for North America"  (PDF)

In each case we're attempting to transcend some of the uncertainties and nit-picky details associated with depletion and climate models while still getting to a level of resolution that can be relevant to decision makers.  Our approach is to focus on risks, opportunities, and leadership while still providing a defensible set of hard targets.Next step: Find the world's top 10 dynamic cities.
(23 May 2007)
Other presentations are available from the menu at the original article. The Dynamic Cities Project is "a non-profit organization creating energy transition strategies as a proactive response to peak oil and climate change."

Contributor Bryn Davidson writes:
I'd appreciate some help from all of you peakniks out there on creating a depletion model for North America. Ideally we'd craft a document that could be acclaimed by consensus (a la the IPCC reports) and could be adopted as policy by states, cities, and regions.

Greg Pahl's Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook
The Reality Report via Global Public Media
The Reality Report hosts Greg Pahl, prolific author of five books on sustainable living and renewable energy. This show discusses his most recent book, "The Citizen Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis." Greg explains how community based renewable energy projects are key to local economic revival and security and encourages listeners to learn more by going to www.postcarbon.org. Jason Bradford hosts The Reality Report, broadcast on KZYX&Z in Mendocino County, CA.
(21 May 2007)

Seeing the future from high above Greenland
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
Last week, I flew over the coast of Greenland at 800 kph.

...As symbols, it doesn't get much better than that: rocketing across the sky in an aluminum tube, nibbling on a "seasonal salad" and casually admiring the way the melting floes below resemble the drifts of apple blossoms covering the sidewalk near my house earlier this spring, while going over my notes from the two conferences I spoken at over the last week on climate change, the sustainability crisis, and how big business can respond.

We are all chained to a paradox: in order to change these things, we must to transform our economy into one capable of thriving within a one planet footprint; we have to continue to use more and more of the very tools which are eroding our planet's atmosphere, ocean and living systems in the first place. No one's hands are clean here.

To pretend otherwise is silly. We absolutely all should do what we can to shrink our own footprints. But much of the damage we do is done by others in our names, and is intricately connected to being able to work in an effective way. I've made clear my ambiguous feelings about flying before (feelings which grow less ambiguous the more I fly, regardless of how many offsets I buy), but the reality is that I am certain that my personal share of the CO2 left floating in the contrails behind me is a good investment when weighed against the opportunity to share worldchanging ideas with audiences capable of creating real change. It's not ideal, but we can't afford the self-deception of false purity.

...We cannot accept the tyranny of small steps -- the idea that little actions are enough, and that calling for the big systemic changes we need is somehow too radical.
(23 May 2007)

Shining a Bright Light on Energy Efficiency
Joel Makower, Two Steps Forward
Energy efficiency came back into the limelight this week, a seemingly rare but welcome occurrence. Given the magnitude of our climate and energy challenges, the opportunities to use energy more efficiently and effectively have remained largely unexploited, as I've noted in the past. In our gadget- and gizmo-obsessed culture, in which status is expressed by what we can show for ourselves, not necessarily by what we do, being energy efficient is a decidedly tough sell.

Example: We'll spend irrationally on solar panels, whose economic payoff may be years away, if ever, but whose existence offers a "Hey, look at this" opportunity for both individuals and institutions. But we'll shun smaller investments that have more immediate economic and environmental payoffs: insulating buildings, installing devices that ration energy use to the times and places it's actually needed to provide comfort or service, and upgrades of appliances and other energy hogs with the latest models that do the same job with far fewer tons of coal, barrels of oil, and the like.

True, it's hard to get green cred for bragging about your company headquarter's R-34 insulation, but that may well be the wiser choice from an economic and environmental perspective.

It's not either/or, of course -- we need both clean energy and efficiency. It's simply that one of those two seems to have a much better press agent.
(18 May 2007)