Cities Are the Answer

Cities Are the Answer

The Cambridge City Manager sees cities as collections of energy users.
(Douglas Foy and Robert Healy, "Cities are the answer," Boston Globe, April 4,
2007) It explains his destructive policies toward trees and wildlife. He favors
technology over nature. He minimized green public open spaces.
This essay indicates the Manager's anti-human policies. He digitizes people
dehumanizing them into a collective. He runs Cambridge like a for profit
business.
Vulnerable persons suffer under Healy, who shows little concern for their
quiet desperate struggle to enjoy life. The focus here is on an academic elite
exercise studying city life. All Robert Moses without any Jane Jacobs.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

Cities are the answer
By Douglas Foy and Robert Healy
Boston Globe
April 4, 2007

MANY OF the world's most difficult environmental challenges can be addressed and
solved by cities. This may come as a surprise to those who think of
environmental issues largely in the context of wild places and open spaces.
Cities, often congested, dense, and enormous consumers of resources, would not
be the place one might first turn for environmental solutions. But in fact,
cities are inherently
the "greenest" of all places. They are much more efficient in their use of
energy, water, and land than suburbs. They provide transportation services in a
remarkably equitable and democratic fashion. They may be the best of all places
for seniors to grow old. Development in cities helps to save natural areas and
open space by relieving growth pressures on the countryside. And cities will,
without question,
be the pivotal players in fashioning solutions to the growing problem of climate
change.

New York City, for example, turns out to be the most energy efficient place in
America. Yes, it houses 8.2 million citizens, and uses an enormous amount of
energy to do so. Its electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as
all of Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more
efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in Manhattan
are on foot, bike, or transit, New York City uses dramatically less energy to
serve each of its citizens than does a state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses
less energy, on a per capita basis, than any other state in America. When one
considers that another 750,000 commuters also enter New York every day to work,
and use large amounts of energy in their daily business there but don't even
count in the per capita energy calculation, the city's efficiency performance is
even more remarkable.

Carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas and the primary cause of global
climate change, comes largely from the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal,
oil, gasoline, and natural gas. Nearly half of all the energy those fuels
produce is
used in buildings -- heating, cooling, and lighting our homes, factories, and
offices. Another third of all the energy is used for transportation, primarily
fueling automobiles, trucks, and transit fleets.
In order to address the challenge of climate change, it is imperative that we
make both buildings and transportation vastly more energy efficient. And cities
are the place to start. In a way, cities are the Saudi Arabia of energy
efficiency, vast mines of potential energy savings that dwarf most of the supply
options our country possesses.

It is with that efficiency goal in mind that the city of Cambridge and the
Kendall Foundation have developed for Cambridge the most aggressive energy
efficiency program ever deployed in a city in the United States. The outlines of
the program were announced on March 29. It will involve the investment of nearly
$100 million, largely raised from private capital sources, in buildings of all
types throughout the city. We will invest in energy efficiency measures in
homes, condos,
apartments, offices, hotels, institutions, hospitals, factories, and schools. We
will measure and verify the savings, and document the carbon dioxide reductions
and other environmental gains. And all of this will be done with the energy
savings paying for the cost of the program, without the need for any government
subsidies.

By mining Cambridge's efficiency opportunities, the city will become more
competitive, save money for its citizens and its businesses, add hundreds of
quality jobs, help build an efficiency industry that can be the pride of
Massachusetts, produce a model that can be replicated in cities all over the
state and the nation, and add its weight to a solution for global climate
change.

The old paradigm of the pollution-filled city as a blight on the landscape, and
the leafy-green suburbs with pristine lawns as the ideal, is outdated and does
not lead us to a future of energy independence, clean air, and a stable climate.
Cities are the best hope to realize our need for a bright, sustainable, and
promising future.

Douglas Foy, former secretary of the Office of Commonwealth Development, is
president of DIF Enterprises. Robert Healy is city manager of Cambridge.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/04/
cities_are_the_answer/