What Can Green Do For Your City?

 After watching Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles at the Clinton Global Initiative announce the Mayors Climate Action commitments, I was inspired to investigate what cities are doing and how their action on the front line will impact our future. Climate change is now and it will not wait for culture to catch up to its concerns. As Mayor Garcetti had mentioned, a majority of the United States population resides in cities and 70% of the United States emissions originate in them, so the Mayors of these cities (especially large cities) cannot get by on inaction. The best place to strive for meaningful change is at the source.

Mayor Garcetti presented a few action plans for top city agendas and a few are as follows:

Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles:

• Harnessing solar power energy and creating energy star buildings

Mayor Parker of Houston:

• Retrofitting streetlights with LED fixtures

and Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia:

• Creating large scale green infrastructure

While these actions appear prosperous, what are their actual impacts and what can be done to make them better?

How will harnessing solar power in Los Angeles offset carbon emissions on a large scale?

In Los Angeles:
Mayor Garcetti is not personally planning to implement large scale solar panels, but instead make it easier and more affordable for the residents to do so themselves. Mayor Garcetti is taking to City Hall to streamline permits for residential solar systems which will include making these available online. With these changes in current procedure, the city is expecting it's current 13,000 residential photovoltaic systems to TRIPLE by 2016. The reduction of power demand will reduce stress on the city to supply energy and actually give pay backs to residents who push power into the system.

How useful is solar energy to reduce carbon sourced electricity consumption? Great, but you will need to live in a place that facilitates its functionality.

In Houston:
While you would imagine places like Houston would be boasting about their capacity for photovoltaic systems, the highlight of carbon emission cutting at CGI was their street light LED retrofitting plans. Houston plans on converting all 165,000 street lights to LEDs over the next five years. This change is expected to use 50% of the old conventional HID's, a reduction that is expected to save Houston around $26 million over the next 10 years.
BUT, there are downsides to this LED retrofitting. The preparation and procedures for the implementation are lengthy and require a large amount of documentation and administration. And, more notably, the start up costs are enormous (often 2-4 times more expensive than their HID counterparts). This could be an issue if smaller cities that do not have the capital large cities are afforded want to hop aboard the LED express.

I foresee if LED technology reduces in cost, at least to a point where it is competitive with HIDs, it will be nationally implemented based on its projected energy consumption.

In Philadelphia:
In February of this year, the EPA awarded $5million of funding to researchers investigation green infrastructure in Philadelphia. With this funding, Philadelphia plans to explore the possibilities of more efficient storm water management by using pervious pavement, green roofs and rain barrels that will allow the storm water to seep into a surfaces or be temporarily stored rather than immediately rushing into the sewage system proceeding heavy rain. Among other things, many smaller (and large cities) such as Syracuse, New York, that face common issues will reap great reward from the research being done to prevent flooding and promote green friendly environments.

Check here for more information regarding alternative energy in major cities.

The Fruits of Failed Labor: CGI, A Review of Failure by Alexander Grashow and President Grimmson of Iceland

Fail, to fail, failure, failed. The root of these always radiates a negative connotation.

During this past weeks Clinton Global Initiative, Alexander Grashow, the Founder and CEO of The Adaptist, The GIIFT, and "Can we fail faster, bigger, and better for greater impact?" breakout session moderator brings life to the what failure should mean and challenges the world to utilize, not hide from failure.

Grashow playfully points out that when assembling the panel for this discussion it was near impossible to find an American to join and discuss failures, interesting.

A lesson in failure: Alexander Grashow set out to end poverty in several third world countries, spending millions of dollars sourced from partners with similar goals. As they continued to dump funding into their efforts, their train to change was derailed when they were told that their efforts may very well be setting the community back further than where they started. 

Considering all they had done, Grashow offers "How can we make sense of that"?

The conclusion he comes to are that in life there are two types of failures, dumb failures and smart failures.

Smart failures are what fuel progression. With smart failures, we learn from our mistakes publicly, not privately. By increasing our accountability, measurement and transparency (as they have learned to do), mistakes or "failures" that are made become learning experiences and aids in future endeavors. Smart failures allow society to "fail forward", the next best thing to success. 

While on the other hand, dumb failures are exactly the opposite. By hiding, or being ashamed of our non-successes we are erasing an important part to every trial and error experiment, knowing and learning from what did not bring success.

Grashow offers that what the world needs, is a different kind of conversation about failure.

The first speaker for this breakout session was Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the President of the Republic of Iceland. If anyone has reaped the benefits of utilizing failures, it is Iceland.  
6 Years ago, Iceland was hit with a traumatic financial crisis during which their financial sector (banks etc) dove into bankruptcy. Throughout the initial wave of economic decline and failure, President Grimsson did something extraordinary, he turned against the prevailing system on how crisis should be handled and looked to democracy in order to function and make fiscal decisions. This really allowed the people to oversee how the situation would be handled and also allowed them to better understand why and how the situation would get better. 

Iceland agreed to let the banks slip into bankruptcy and not bail them out. By allowing the banks to fall into bankruptcy a diamond emerged from the rough of the situation. Since the banks had become so "high tech", requiring workers in the field of engineering, computer science, and many other technical skill sets, the decline of banks led to an incline of skills on the job market. Looking desperately for work, these men and women joined other job fields and provided much necessary talent and expertise to the sectors that were previously unable to grow. The result? A boom in innovation, progression, and collaboration. The appeal of the financial district (money) had imprisoned Icelands more skilled workers from working in sectors that really needed their talent. The result of this all has lead to great success over the past six years, leaving Iceland as President Grimmson has said, in a better state than where they were before the crisis started.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the situation in Iceland, it is that there are alternatives, some that may even work better, than the prevailing system on how things should be handled. And although there are many alternatives, the one thing that needs to happen is a change in the way that we face possible failure. President Grimmson states that people are afraid to be recognized by their failures, so they often never leave their comfort zone in order to secure their status and sometimes even their elected positions. Without exploring where ideas can take us, bottling these notions and inspirations has prevented possible progression and meaningful reforms that may have result in a better system than what resides today.

In short, culture needs an adjustment. An adjustment where politicians are not be afraid to transform political society, but rather be willing and inspired to go to the world and attempt to make meaningful change without the fear of failure and without the fear of loosing their next election.