Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
The American Institute of Architects has announced their annual “Top Ten Green Projects,” as chosen by the Institute’s Committee on the Environment (affectionately known as “COTE”). Now I have to say that I personally like and am impressed by just...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
If you live in an average-sized household, and your household drives 20,000 miles or fewer per year, you are probably paying too much for automobile insurance. If, on the other hand, your household is driving more than 22,000 miles per...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Matthew Yglesias on theatlantic.com points out that it is not just large cities and metro areas that can adopt smart growth practices. He correctly explains that there are plenty of places in America that will never have, for example, sophisticated public...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
The nationally syndicated writer Neal Peirce has a great column out this week on the nation’s infrastructure woes. It basically confirms what we all have thought as we drive over ridiculously broken roads, try to crowd into too-few buses or...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
One of the things that has challenged me as an advocate of smart growth is that, while we see substantial evidence of smarter development around us, we also continue to see a lot of sprawl. So it can really be...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
I’m a bit fickle about this. At first I was sure the country's best example of smart growth was Atlantic Station, in Atlanta. Then I thought it was one of the iconic transit-oriented developments in the west, The Crossings in Silicon Valley or...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
You have to know that smart growth is making more and more sense to more and more of the right people when it shows up in Business Week. And on the website of that venerable and most mainstream of publications, Alex Steffen...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
If you know anyone who is still in denial that growth is real and that we had better get our act together quickly in figuring out how to live and develop sustainably, send them to Peter Russell's World Clock. The...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil
Easy for me to say, I know. Sorry about that. But the good news is that exurban development is slowing to a near-halt, while smarter, closer-in locations are holding their value. And, unlike the situation with previous problems in the...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Warning: serious policy-wonk blog entry coming up. This week’s enactment by Congress of a 35-mpg vehicle efficiency standard, using a formula that includes SUVs and other so-called “light trucks” (most of the SUVs I see aren’t hauling anything more than the driver...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Neighborhoods can be cool in more ways than one. We are on the verge of a neat new technology that can identify the particular places within a metropolitan area that have the smallest global-warming footprint. In a previous entry...
