Sustainable Cities: What It Takes

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

Can high energy efficiency and fighting global warming bubble from the bottom up?

Portland, Oregon claims so. In 1993 it became America’s first city to adopt a strategy to reduce emission of carbon dioxide (CO2), the heat-trapping gas primarily responsible for global warming. The goal then: reduce CO2 emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2010.

More than a decade later, there’s dramatic progress to report: per capita emissions for Portland and surrounding Multnomah County have dropped 13 percent. Overall emissions are already under 1990 levels.

How did Portland do it?

By an across-the-board strategy of interlinked steps, developed systematically since the late 1970s. Examples:

• Aggressively seeking renewable electricity sources for city buildings -- 12 percent achieved so far, the agreed-on goal 100 percent. (A utility-scale wind power project is now being explored.)
• Saving watts by replacing incandescent traffic signals with LED bulbs, cutting the city’s electricity bill by $265,000 a year.
• Initiating a 20 percent biofuel mix for all diesel vehicles and equipment using the city’s fueling stations.
• Cutting auto driving by a web-based ride-sharing service, new biking and walking paths, and adding two major light rail and a city streetcar line (with a 75 percent increase in public transit ridership).
• Achieving 53 percent recycling of trash -- among the country’s highest. (Buried and burned garbage means energy is being wasted. For example: compared to the energy expenditure of original manufacture, it takes 90 percent less energy to remanufacture aluminum or plastics, 50 percent less for steel or paper, 30 percent less for glass.)
• Constructing nearly 40 high-performance green buildings.
• Planting over 750,000 trees and shrubs (which absorb CO2 from the atmosphere).
• Aggressive steps to weatherize thousands of homes and multifamily units.
• Getting state help -- namely energy-efficiency incentives for homes and businesses through the newly-created Energy Trust of Oregon.

So, one asks, could New England cities achieve as much? The answer: at least one -- Burlington, Vt. -- actually has. Burlington’s been pursuing truly sustainable development “since before the term was invented,” claims Mayor Peter Clavelle. Today the city as a whole is actually consuming 2 percent less energy than it did in 1989.

How? Aiming “to conserve rather than consume,” says Clavelle. The city tries to promote compact urban development and less sprawl, partly through major downtown and waterfront development. It has an active trash recycling program.

And Burlington Electric, the municipally-owned utility, has moved its percentage of energy from renewable sources to 42 percent. One major source: electricity from wood chips, a regionally available and renewable resource. The utility’s next aim: wind power from proposed (and hotly debated) new Vermont wind farms.

[Originally published November 2005]

Photo Credit:

Institute for Sustainable Communities

Burlington, Vt., now fills a startling 42 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources.