Gas Prices around the World

There has been an awful lot of hand-wringing in the news concerning gasoline prices and its impact on transportation, mass transit use, shipping, city travel, tourism, and most every other sector of the economy. Add to this discussion is the recent carbon tax initiated by the BC Government and the recent mulling of a Federal Carbon Tax from Mr. Stephane Dion of the Liberal Party of Canada. To hear it from the media and call-in radio, we are at the brink of utter collapse across every economic sector, leading to the collapse of our entire system because of these spectacular high prices.

Just how bad is it?



We have a long way to go before North America even comes close to world prices. Our issue is structural. We have designed our urban environment - cities, towns, industry - based upon a premise of cheap oil - cheaper than water. Gas is still a great deal (how much is a litre of water going for?) but now that price point isn't working so well with how we've laid ourselves out. That is going to have to change, and it's going to be a paradigm shift that is going to hurt - but one that is inevitable.

Ethical Progressive Intelligent Consumer

Check out this upcoming event in Vancouver. Thanks to Shari for the heads up!

http://www.epicexpo.com/

The Great BC Easter Dinner

Easter loomed early this year. No sooner had the last dregs of winter quietly been washed away by Spring's gentle temperatures, and had the early markings of lilac buds peeped out from branches deadened with the dull grey of March, than Easter was upon us.

Three weeks ago, with Easter but a faint memory of last year's Creme Eggs, I sat in a crowded classroom at the university and listened with rapture to a talk by James McKinnon and Alisa Smith, authors of the 100-Mile Diet. As they detailed the bounty and sheer variety of crops and foods available in th lower mainland, I sheepishly thought back to the Costco run from the night before, mentally compiling a list of the origins of the fruit and vegetables stuffed into an already over-stuffed fridge. Exotic locales immediately came to mind: California, Mexico, Peru, why, on a cold day at the beginning of March, even Washington and Oregon began to sounded alluringly exotic.

I've always made a conscious effort to think of consumption in terms of seasons. In the summer in Kamloops, the 100-mile diet is transformed into more of a 500-metre diet, as I tear myself from slumber early on Saturday mornings, make my way to the farmer's market a mere 3-minute walk from my house, and load up on precious gifts from the earth around me. I dreamt wistfully during the talk of how our wedding celebration in Newfoundland this coming summer would be a meal coming from farms on the bountiful Avalon peninsula. But this now was winter, and I was forced into buying produce from elsewhere, my upcoming birthday would be in winter, with Easter coming fast on th heels of the Equinox.

My first foray into local winter eating was then to be my birthday party. We were lucky enough to find produce - potatoes, turnip, hothouse lettuce and apples - all coming from BC (100 miles would really limit us to little more than apples and wine), in addition to BC goat milk feta. We feted the evening with potato latkes, mashed turnips, salad, and for desert, canned cherries from a friend's backyard.

This wasn't so bad. In fact, it seemed downright easy. A culinary experiment limited only by my lack of imagination and low tolerance for potatoes.

Easter, however, turned out to be a different story. The turkey was a snap - a simple matter of filling out a form at the health food store guaranteed us a local free-rang turkey. The produce, however, was, well, an exercise in frustration to say the least. I was, of course, able to find potatoes (red, however, not the russets I had hoped for, and which make for fluffy, airy mashed potatoes), apples and pears. I was elated to find signs in the store indicating the kale and beets had come from BC. I also found a sign for BC squash, and yet, on closer inspection, found a tag on the squash that read "product of mexico."

The staff, a good ten years younger than me, and through no fault of their own (yet don't get me started on the millennials), were unable to help me, and the best they could do was forage through boxes in the back of the store with the hopes that the origin would be printed on them somewhere. There were no squash boxes left. Their advice was for me to find a squash with a different sticker and that brand may be from BC. When I asked about the contradiction in signs and labels, their answer was that they often don't change the signs, but the produce comes from all over, so it was most likely an old sign that hadn't been changed. So I grabbed a different squash, one with a purple label and no definitive origin, and hoped for the best. Arriving at the counter, I thought it best to double-check the labels on the kale and the beets. Both were from Mexico.

Easter dinner this year ended up being a learning experience, celebrated with copious libations of Okanagan wine. My experiment with searching out local produce forced me to buy vegetables I would never have normally chosen for such an occasion. The dinner ended up being a cornucopia of colours: red beets, orange squash, green kale. I also learned not to trust grocery store signs, to ask questions even if the staff don't know the answers (maybe one day they'll get the hint), to make a point of writing letters to grocery stores demanding adequate consumer information, and that sometimes, the most important things, just like in yoga, are awareness, intention, and breathing.

Understanding your carbon footprint

John and I (my coworker and fellow conspirator) picked up a fantastic contract the other day to develop an Integrated Growth Strategy for a small community of about 10,000 people in British Columbia. What's fascinating about this job is that new legislation is in the running right now, Bill 10, which will - among many other things - provide municipalities with the authority and mandate to develop Greenhouse Gas Emissions targets and reduction strategies, and create bylaws to implement these strategies. This is a companion piece of legislation that builds upon the throne speech from last month, laying out the Live Smart BC strategy.



Another interesting snippet of information that flows into this whole sustainability jigsaw puzzle is the BC Climate Action Charter, in which numerous communities (106 and counting) have pledged to go carbon-neutral by 2012, in just 5 years. I'm happy to say that my own home town (Kamloops) has signed up to do it, as has my client community. Which brings us to the fun.

We had a lovely start-up meeting, where we were asked "So we've signed up to this climate charter thing ... how do we - you know - DO it?" That's a very good question, I thought, and decided to do a little homework.

It turns out the idea of going carbon-neutral as a municipality is much the same as trying to do it yourself - you need to figure out all your numbers and where you're spending your money, then figure out what that means in terms of carbon footprint. I looked up a couple websites like carbon neutral (among others) where I discovered that it takes about 7 trees to offset 1 tonne of CO2 is British Columbia (depends on your ecosystem) and purchasing a carbon offset will cost you about $16-$19 per tonne, depending on who you go with. All well and good. I also discovered that these websites offer some pretty straightforward tools for inputting data and discovering your carbon footprint with the input of a few key variables. I think these would be a terrific resource for individuals and small businesses to decipher their operations.

But what about large businesses and municipalities? I traveled over to the Canadian Green Building Council (CaGBC) which is currently the leader for LEED implementation in Canada and oversees the process of LEED accreditation. They have a lovely section of their website called "Resources" where you can look up technical information related to LEED design. Under this category, I found this fascinating tool called eMission which is a greenhouse gas calculation tool devised especially for - YES - municipalities and corporations! I immediately downloaded a demo to check out.

To see how it worked, I decided to model my own corporate office and see how easy the software was to use, and to see how it was doing the calculations (and what assumptions it was making). The software first asked me several starting questions, including my desired energy coefficients (?) and fuel coefficients (?!?). A quick trip to the help file convinced me that I should accept the defaults until my knowledge grows a little. Fortunately the program contains defaults that I could select for BC, which incorporated our use of Hydro and sharing of coal-power with Alberta.

I moved on. The next section asked me to develop an inventory for my corporate operation. The "facilities" tab asked me to get together the electricity and natural gas bills for my company, work it out to an annual number, and enter it. I had a bunch more options for other stuff (if you run a chemical plant or pulp mill, may be interesting to you) but I stuck with my kwh and m3, works fine. It turns out in my office that we don't actually get the bill - the landlord gets it, splits it proportionally among all the tenants based on floor size, and stuffs it into the rent. So for our office, it would require some approximation to figure out the actual energy usage we're producing. Unfortunately, the program only asked for floor area and number of employees - no extra tabs for workstations etc., so I've placed a call to the building manager to see if I can get ahold of those bills.

Next, the Office Commute. I roamed the office and asked everyone how long their commute was and how they got here. I ended up with the following stats:

• 9 car ~10 km one-way
• 1 light truck ~60 km one-way
• 2 heavy trucks ~6 km one-way
• 1 bus ~6 km one-way
• 2 walkers (including me)

The program comes with presets for fuel efficiencies for various modes, so I did a bit of minor alterations and entered my data, which then spat out the amounts of fuel consumed by each mode. It also spat out our CO2 production for all the commuting. WOAH! 35 tonnes!

Next step was to look at our business travel. We do a lot of driving around, renting cars, trucks, flying off to Vancouver, Calgary etc. I had to do a bit of approximation to figure that all out. For example, I fly to Vancouver quite a bit on a Dash-8. It turns out that a Dash-8 has a fully loaded fuel economy of about 2.3 L/km of jet fuel, which is - well - not that super, when you think about it. Dumping all that data in gave us an annual footprint of 39 tonnes of CO2.

Now I haven't run the building energy data yet, but we have a lot of desktop computers and IT won't let us turn them off - and for security reasons (?) we keep a lot of the lights on at night. I imagine our energy use is pretty high, though it's going to be hidden amongst all the other tenants and I'll have to parcel that out. But, so far we're at 74 tonnes of CO2 and counting.

This means that for our office to offset our commuting and business travel, we should be planting over 500 trees a year, or contributing $1,406 to a carbon offsetting organization. It's going to go up when I work the building in - and there's only 15 people in my office!

Carbon offsetting is an important piece of information to understand about the impact of our our operations, and this high-level analysis isn't perfect and is pretty crude, but the carbon calculator websites give you a good headstart on understanding what you need to do to get a handle on your own contributions to climate change. The eMission software goes deeper and lets you analyze energy efficiency scenarios, which I'll be poking around with over the next few weeks. One thing is for sure - 500 trees per year is an impressive number, and our forests in BC could use all the help they can get.

A Corporate Eco-Credit System

Nature
Originally uploaded by Spatial Mongrel

The other day, I was thinking about the issue of sustainability and how a smart company could capitalize on the potential market on an in-house basis. It seems to me that there are lessons to be learned, and profit to be generated, from the eco-credit system that is currently being used to offset carbon emissions. When flying Air Canada, or participating in other activities, companies and individuals are now purchasing “carbon offset credits” to provide the funds to initiate green infrastructure projects, finance sustainable projects, plant trees and other carbon-reducing projects. Why are they doing this? In most cases, there is no connection between the money paid, and the actual project delivered. That is, when I fly Air Canada and purchase carbon offsets, I have no knowledge that these funds are really being used to plant trees.

In all of these, a third-party is collecting that revenue and dispersing it to projects of note (minus a handling fee). While worthy in vision, the issue is capital is being removed from one source, is held by another, and goes to yet another party again – and the initial pool of money is diminished at every stage. It seems to me that this is inefficient for the first party, provides uncertainty that the benefit is being realized, and removes considerable investment potential for meaningful projects.

I therefore propose that companies consider an in-house eco-credit system, as a corporate sustainability structure.

How the system would work is that the company in question (Spatial Mongrel Designs, let's say) would develop “classes” of projects that would result in CO2 emissions, or conduct an audit of current uses and activities (travel, building systems, administration), and factor these multipliers in to project accounting as part of our service delivery package. For example, a road design and transportation project may be assessed an additional 1% in fees as part of an “eco-fund carbon offset”. This 1% would be kept in house and would flow to the "Corporate Eco-Fund" which would be a separately administered and transparent fund with an oversight committee. This committee is there to ensure that the funds are used for meaningful and measurable projects that are of direct benefit to our corporate mandate of sustainability, and to (hopefully) prevent abuse. (More thought needed there, I think).

This in-house eco-fund would, from time to time, be used to help finance projects that are geared towards improving our own, corporate sustainability – in effect, we would use these funds to improve our own bottom-line, and reinvest in ourselves. For example, funds from the eco-fund could be used to convert office lighting fixtures to a low-energy system, or make administrative improvements that reduce paper use, or provide an office car-sharing system to encourage transit ridership among employees. Thinking large, it may even be possible to hire ourselves to look at bigger picture projects such as providing a seed investment and design for an alternate energy source, which would then be used to power the office. A precedent for this would be the Calgary LRT system investing in a wind farm project in southern Alberta and committing to purchasing “wind power” for the entire LRT system. Hypothetically, I could hire myself to design a tidal project in Atlantic Canada, and power my office from the Bay of Fundy.

In the long-term, once established and successful in-house, this eco-fund management service could be marketed to other corporations and provide assistance to them in greening their own operations.

The primary benefit of this in-house fund is that the company would retain direct control over the management and investment of these funds and could allocate them strategically both to improve their own bottom-line position, and as an investment platform for the long-term. Marketing wise, it helps position that company as a sustainability leader and demonstrates their willingness to move strongly ahead with the vision.

The primary risk is marketing – how can we sell this additional 1% surcharge? Is the climate right for this, and would it find acceptance? How about the visibility, of flowing money directly into our own pocket? Transparency, accountability and solid marketing is the key to this challenge. I believe that, with the growing respectability of the carbon offset trading program and the increasing political shift towards concern for the environment, that the time is right for such a manoeuvre – and with a strategic marketing job, a company investing in this strategy can show that they are adding value to clients, and that the funds used are providing a real benefit on a sustainable future.

The Benefits of Street Trees

Kamloops
Originally uploaded by Spatial Mongrel

The new Live Smart BC Speech from the Throne raised some interesting points which YUPPIES will be commenting on over the next few weeks. One item in particular caught our attention, and that was mention of a new urban afforestation program called Trees for Tomorrow which will provide funding and incentives to dramatically increase the number of trees in our urban environment. To that end, we thought it would be good to provide a few resources to help gauge the cost and value of what trees are worth in the environment, and to focus in on street trees since our public ROWs are where we can start planting immediately - and save what we already have.

Tree Valuation
A quick review of literature relating to tree valuation (Council of Tree and Landscape Appraisers (1992) and International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) publications (ACRT 1997)), produces the following rough "rule-of-thumb" equation for quickly estimating the compensatory replacement value for a tree:

Basic Value = CS * $/cm2

Where

• CS = cross-sectional area of the tree at about 1.4 m up
• $/cm2 = the dollar value of the tree to be replaced, based on species and region.

From looking around at the various landscaping companies and the trees they have on offer, the average price for a tree in the Interior BC market is around $7/cm2. This then provides the base replacement cost for a tree of similar size and character.

However, speaking with an arborist, the value then needs to be multiplied by 2.5 for installation and landscaping costs associated with planting - the bigger the tree, the more expensive.

For example, a tree with a radius of 15 cm (equivalent to a good-sized, 25-year old maple) would be calculated the following way:

Area = 3.14 * (15)^2
Area = 706.5 cm2
Basic Value = 706.5 cm2 * $7/cm2
Basic Value = $4,900
Installation Value = $4,900 *2.5
Full Value = $12,300

This valuation does not include other benefits associated with street trees or long-term cost-benefits, just straight out replacement cost. So as you can see, trees have a lot of built-in value!

Other benefits are nicely summarized by the following presentation from Dan Burden at Walkable Communities. These include benefits such as:

• pollution control (absorption of greenhouse gas emissions, production of oxygen and co2 retention)
• aesthetic enhancement - trees have a proven market impact of between 15% - 25% to the value of real-estate with a mature canopy spread (not insignificant!)

An "urban forest" program is a welcome program to introduce in any town, and makes a lot of sense for the health of a community. There are many resources out there to help jump into such a program, and we urge you to post any information you find in the comments below.

Kamloops Energy Fair

Your Kamloops...: Kamloops Energy Fair - Exhibitor Package...

Kamloops Councillor Arjun Singh provides a link for the Kamloops Energy Fair on his blog. The Energy Fair is an annual event put together by the BC chapter of the Sustainable Energy Association, to be held this year on May 25th, 2008 at McArthur Island Sports Centre in Kamloops. This would be the 2nd year for the event, and hopefully it will be even bigger and better. YUPPIES is planning on attending in one way or another, to either have a booth, or report on it. This is a marvelous event that showcases the best available technology in Kamloops for improving your sustainability profile and reducing your carbon footprint. Exhibits last year ranged from vermiculture to fancy hybrid cars, to geoexchange products for your home.

Perhaps YUPPIES will do some recruiting at the energy fair...

Link to the Energy Fair page at BCSEA

Case Study Library - Transport Canada

Case Study Library - Transport Canada

Michael Haynes at Active Transportation has noted that Transport Canada has put their Urban Transportation Showcase Program online, which provides some fascinating information for how to effectively implement active transportation in your community. This is important because this information provides "made in Canada" practical case studies for how to improve the urban environment and recapture the public right-of-way for a "people-first" movement strategy. The typical average for a Canadian city is that 30% of the area of a City is directly under control of the municipality - with the majority of that space consisting of our public right-of-ways. Adopting a 50% auto/active split would recapture a tremendous amount of public space, while policies influencing pedestrian-oriented development for private lands would further enhance the outdoor environment.

Participate in the Earth Hour Challenge - March 29th

On March 29 between 8:00pm and 9:00pm, homes and businesses across the City of Toronto will be turning off their lights, as a collective movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and as a symbolic gesture to demonstrate support for measures against global warming.

Last year in Sydney, Australia, 2.2 million people participated in the challenge, resulting in a 10% reduction in electricity consumption! This year, the Earth Hour challenge has spread around the world. Along with Toronto, other major cities around the world will be participating including Chicago, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Manila and Tel Aviv.

 

Visit http://www.thestar.com/earthhour for more information.

Ideas for improving personal sustainability

Kelly-Anne and I are trying to reduce our own carbon footprint and improve the sustainability of our own lives in an incremental fashion. Here's what we're planning to do:

1. Create a decent sized garden in the back patio and plant vegetables
2. Plant a couple of fruit trees in the garden
3. Fix water leaks (toilet!)
4. Get a community garden plot
5. Have a home energy audit conducted
6. Replace all windows with energy-efficient windows
7. Turn off water in shower when shampooing/soaping
8. Get rid of big fridge, replace with smaller, more efficient fridge with no freezer (already have a dedicated freezer, no need to duplicate)
9. Hide away most dishes, only have a few on hand to encourage hand-washing. Keep dishes tucked away only for parties/special occasions
10. Turn off TV power bar at night to reduce "vampire power" drain
11. Change fish tank to 10 am - 10 pm cycle
12. Get up to work by means other than the car (bus, walking, cycle etc.)
13. Switch car to leisure insurance
14. Fill car once per month
15. Buy heavily from Farmers Market
16. Buy local and direct from local farms (buy a cow, etc.)
17. Can produce in summer, in season
18. Transition to 100% BC-diet (we like our salmon too much to go 100-mile)
19. Look at ways to go off the grid where possible (solar? Hmm...)
20. Switch to Green Hydro
21. Invest in green, ethical companies
22. Start YUPPIES discussion group once per month

We'll be working on this list slowly over the next year to see what we can do at home to make a difference incrementally, and change our own lifestyle.

Founding of Y.U.P.P.I.E.S.! (Young Urban Pragmatic Professionals Interested in Environmental Sustainability)

Welcome to the inaugural founding of YUPPIES - the central gathering and organization place for Young Urban Pragmatic Professionals Interested in Environmental Sustainability! This group is for young professionals who are deeply concerned about the state of the environment and recognize the clear and present danger to our future prosperity and the stability of our civilization. We have watched the boomer generation recklessly control the levers of political and economic power, and have been powerless to stop the horrendous abuse and short-sightedness that has led us to our current predicament. Well, ENOUGH. Now it's our turn, and we're kicking the boomers out of the driver's seat and taking charge. We're hoping there's still time to change direction before we go over the cliff - and so we need to throw our collective weight behind the task.

YUPPIES is about bringing together the next power generation - leveraging our new political and economic clout, and organizing together to take over the positions of power and effect change. We will run for City Council - we will run for Parliament - we will take over the leadership of our multinational corporations, and bring environmental sustainability directly to the forefront in the operating agendas of these institutions. We will do so, and succeed - because in most cases - we are already there. YUPPIES members are urban planners, lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists - people with knowledge, information, and the clout to make things happen - and together, we will change the world.