Posted by Kaid Benfield in Curbing Pollution , Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
After so many wonky posts in a row, this time I'm going to lighten up with one of those fun internet quizzes that I can do more or less all day when I have something I want to procrastinate. This...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Curbing Pollution , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
When faced with a situation where rapid growth is occurring, such as I discussed yesterday, the best thing to do environmentally is to manage and shape it so that a good quality of life is maintained with the least environmental harm. This...
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...
