Posted by Kaid Benfield in Curbing Pollution , Environmental Justice , Green Enterprise , Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
Last week my longtime NRDC colleague Eric Goldstein posted a blog entry highlighting five laudable environmental sites (green apples) and five awful ones (bad apples). Eric got it right as usual. I am particularly a fan of his because, like...
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 Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
The blogosphere is awash this week in chatter over a new report from the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (a NAFTA creation). The report points out that a substantial portion of greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings, along with all...
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 , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming
One of the biggest challenges to managing the way we grow and develop land, or the way we conserve land, is that our settlement patterns and our ecosystems do not match up with the way that we are organized to...
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 Solving Global Warming
It's amazing the things one runs across when trying to catch up with email that's been backlogged for two months. This, forwarded to me by one of the crown princes of transportation and land use analysis, John Holtzclaw, is great. ...
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 Curbing Pollution , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
In the policy circles I inhabit, “congestion pricing” is all the rage. This is mostly because New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed that anyone entering midtown or lower Manhattan in a motor vehicle during peak hours should pay...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
Hello. My name is Kaid and I’m a new urbanist. (All together, now: “Hello, Kaid.”) No, really. New urbanists - members of the school of architecture and planning that advocates compact, walkable, mixed-use communities - catch some grief 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...
