Excrement, Insulation, Bike Paths Trim CO2 Emissions in Cities

By Jeremy van Loon, Bloomberg, Jan. 7, 2009

In East Berlin’s communist-era apartments, warm air used to seep through drafty walls. Heaters had to run overtime, taxing power plants and increasing greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.

No more. A 2 billion-euro ($2.7 billion) urban-renovation program paid for foam insulation, cutting energy use almost in half, said Karin Lompscher, Berlin’s environment chief. The urban fund, also notable for turning human waste into biofuel, has helped the German capital trim emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide 20 percent since 1990, according to city data.

From Berlin to Vancouver cities are creating bike paths, making windows air-tight and building cleaner power plants to counter the threat of global warming more quickly than national governments. When 189 countries sent delegates to Poland last month to debate climate change, proposals to reduce heat-trapping emissions worldwide were left on the negotiating table.

“As cities, we can no longer tolerate this inaction,” David Cadman, president of Local Governments for Sustainability and a Vancouver city council member, said in an interview.

In Berlin, where Max Planck won a Nobel Prize in 1918 for developing quantum theory of wave energy, sanitation engineers are using funds from the five-year-old urban-renovation program to set up a plant for burning methane from fermented human waste. Excrement will be used to create a combustible gas that releases less CO2 than coal, the traditional fuel for making electricity.

“We can’t belittle the opportunities to tackle climate change in cities,” Lompscher, 46, who studied architecture in Weimar, said in an interview from her office overlooking renovated apartments near the Alexanderplatz railway station.

Trams Versus Cars

Berlin’s building codes were changed to encourage residents to fix up homes and live closer together in the inner city. New trams and bicycle paths were added. Those measures led to a 2.6 percent reduction from 1998 to 2004 in trips by automobiles, one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions.

The city aims to keep car ownership low, Lompscher said. Berliners have 322 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, lower than the German average of about 500 per 1,000 population and the U.S. figure of 725, U.S. Department of Transportation figures show.

In Minneapolis, 100 miles (160 kilometers) of bike trails were installed in the past few years, bringing out cyclists even on snow-covered roads, according to the city’s Web site. The city is encouraging real estate developers to build more housing downtown to end the need for long commutes to suburbs,Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said.

‘Compact’ Cities Needed

“We need to reframe the city and make it more compact,” Rybak, the son of a pharmacist, said in an interview. Still, Rybak said he doubts the combined reductions of cities will make enough headway in slowing global warming. The big changes needed, from insulating buildings to installing emissions-free wind turbines for power generation, must come ultimately from national governments because they have much greater resources, he said.

In the meantime cities, not national governments, are taking the lead.

Toronto, Canada’s largest city with about 5 million inhabitants, double-paned windows and insulated many of its office towers built in the 1960s, MayorDavid Miller said in an interview. The project will cut municipal emissions by 5 percent when completed, Miller said, without estimating the cost.

In contrast, a 5 percent cut pledged on a global level is faltering. Under the United Nation’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol agreement, 37 industrialized nations agreed to cut greenhouse gases an average 5 percent through 2012 from 1990 levels. More than half of the signatory nations are headed to miss their targets, UN data show.

New York Bicycling

Bicycle commuting in New York is increasing by an annual 35 percent, the city’s Department of Transportation said in an Oct. 30 statement. More bike paths and a spike in the price of regular gasoline to a record $4.11 a gallon in the U.S. in July helped.

Vancouver’s Cadman and Ronan Dantec, vice mayor of Nantes in western France, tried to convince delegates at the UN-sponsored talks last month in Poznan, Poland, to adopt CO2-emissions cuts of 30 percent by 2020. Cadman’s group of more than 1,000 cities worldwide seeks to reduce their greenhouse-gas output by at least as much as they asked nations to achieve, he said.

UN delegates at the final session of the Poland talks on Dec. 13 vowed to produce a new treaty to stem global warming, succeeding the Kyoto accord, by December 2009. That goal probably will be missed, said Alan Oxley, a former Australian diplomat.

“We can’t get a deal done within a year,” Oxley, who heads World Growth, an Australian non-governmental organization that promotes sustainable development, said in an interview.

Matching Kyoto

C40, a group of the world’s largest cities including Toronto and New York with a combined 700 million population, has committed to reaching Kyoto’s 5 percent reduction goals by 2012 from 1990 levels, Toronto’s Miller said. Measures will include insulating buildings and expanding public transit.

Cities are home to more than half the world’s population, a proportion that’s widening as people stream in from the country.

People flock to “see the lights and drink clean water,” Entebbe, Uganda, MayorStephen Kabuye said at the UN talks in Poland. An influx from Uganda’s countryside has overtaxed city water and energy resources; dead dogs and garbage are dumped into Lake Victoria. Kabuye said problems like these are best tackled by towns, where “the government is closer to the people.”

Back in Berlin, Lompscher said there’s more work to be done slashing emissions. Many buildings and power plants still need upgrading after the decades-long separation of eastern and western districts during communism. Also, more people might be enticed to ride bikes or buses that release less CO2 than cars.

“There’s a lot that comes down to lifestyle choices and those can’t be made by city or federal governments.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy van Loon in Berlin atjvanloon@bloomberg.net.

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