The Barr Foundation in Boston recently announced that it is committing $50 million to the fight against climate change. The Barr Foundation is the largest environmental grantmaker in New England and has a history of making grants in the areas of open space, water resources, environmental stewardship, environmental justice and smart growth. It was a difficult decision to narrow the foundation's focus, but the urgency of the situation demanded it:

"As we refocus our environmental work on climate change, we have to gradually phase out other strategies. There are hundreds of deserving environmental programs in our community, many of which we have been proud to fund for the past decade. The decision to narrow our focus to climate change was not an easy one. But the urgency of the problem requires swift action. It is the defining issue of our time, with a clock that is running out." (Pat Brandes, Executive Director)

The Barr commitment will be a significant new resource for the climate change field, and one of the largest commitments to date to local, place-based climate action. It will make Barr one of the leading climate change funders nationally.

USA partners John Cleveland and Pete Plastrik of the Innovation Network for Communities were privileged to support the Barr initiative with background research and market scoping that helped them frame their strategic choices. Cleveland and Plastrik produced two sets of analysis: 

· An assessment of opportunities for local climate action impact, based on interviews with over 40 players in the Boston region, and a exhaustive review of climate action strategies, particularly those that take into account the need for social equity in mitigation and adaptation strategies. 

· An assessment of opportunities for national climate action grant making, based on interviews with key national funders and larger national NGOs engaged in climate change.

Barr choose to focus its work at the regional level, in the areas of building energy efficiency and transportation:

“The Barr Foundation is committed to mitigate climate change by supporting work locally and disseminating successful approaches nationally. Our goal is to significantly reduce Metro Boston's carbon footprint and to do so in a way that distributes costs and benefits equitably. It is our intent to demonstrate how other metros can do the same. Our investments are focused on achieving emissions reductions from the two largest producers of greenhouse gasses: buildings and transportation.” (http://www.barrfoundation.org/Making/index.html)

We wish Barr well in this important work and look forward to tracking how this investment takes climate work in the Boston region to a new level.

For more information, check out this Boston Globe article on the Barr announcement. 

The rain was falling sideways when I landed last week at Logan Airport from Colorado, where I live. The January thaw had arrived in the guise of a major tropical storm, with high winds and temperatures near 60. Dressed for winter, I was sweating as soon as I got off the plane. For the two days that followed, I spent most of my time asking people to turn down their thermostats. Though the weather was balmy, the places I visited, from a Boston restaurant to a business in Waltham to the friends’ house in Belmont where I was staying, were still being heated as if it were freezing outside. That it was in fact nearly thirty degrees warmer didn’t seem to matter.

Which is why I was heartened to see that also last week Massachusetts launched one of the most ambitious energy efficiency programs in the country. Part of the state’s 2008 Green Communities Act, the new initiative puts energy efficiency front and center as Massachusetts’s “first fuel,” dramatically expanding consumer outreach and incentives for conservation measures like home insulation and efficient appliances. With $1.6 billion committed to the program and a target reduction of 2.4 percent in electricity use over the next three years, the state is positioned to overtake California as the nation’s efficiency leader.

While this is great news for energy conservation, the Massachusetts program also highlights a lingering gap in the debate about energy consumption in the U.S. For the most part, policymakers and energy advocates have focused on technical or economic solutions like energy audits, weatherization and product rebates. Each is important, but ignores the most obvious conservation challenge: human behavior.

What I experienced during the thaw last week was neither a technical nor an economic problem; it was a behavioral one. Nobody was turning down the dial on their thermostats. Simple actions like this by U.S. homeowners and property managers could result in energy savings of between 25-30 percent. This is the equivalent of the energy produced by 240 medium-sized coal-fired power plants and would prevent the emission of 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, even when high efficiency technologies are installed, 30 percent or more of the energy savings that could potentially be achieved through such technologies is lost because of human behavior.

But the challenge isn’t just about adjusting our thermostats. It’s about our expectations for comfort and relationship to nature itself. Most of our buildings in cities like Boston, New York and Chicago are very warm in the winter and very cold in the summer; we tend to inhabit extreme indoor environments, even when outdoor temperatures are moderate. Our homes, offices, hotels and airports are often their own micro-climates, with little resemblance to ambient conditions, let alone operable windows. We have become the victims of our own clever engineering. HVAC and other modern building systems have conditioned us to expect extremes of hot and cold in our buildings. This has resulted in a variation on what the journalist Richard Louv calls “Nature Deficit Disorder.” We’ve lost our connection to the outdoors while becoming dependent on technology to make us comfortable.

Thirty-one years ago, President Carter donned his famous cardigan sweater in a speech in which he urged Americans to conserve energy by turning down their thermostats. Unfortunately, his message fell on deaf ears. Carter and his cardigan simply weren’t cool. But Massachusetts has the opportunity to succeed where Carter failed. Public awareness about energy use and climate change has never been greater. Nor has people’s desire to take action. Governor Patrick and civic leaders across the Commonwealth should take a page from Carter’s sartorial strategy. They should start wearing their beefiest fleece pullovers to work and, come summer, their lightest cotton knits, adjusting their office thermostats accordingly. The Governor and others can help make cold cool and warm hot.

Just a few degrees up or down in the State House and buildings across Massachusetts could make a big difference, not only in energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, but our relationship to the environment which, after all, is why we’re doing this in the first place.

A former Cambridge resident, William Shutkin is a Founding Partner of Urban Sustainability Associates and a Visiting Scholar at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

America’s push to become greener revolves around buying new, greener replacement products – with “green” meaning that they use less energy than the old products. This ignores the fact that there are energy and emissions costs in producing both the old and the new products – and sometimes production of the new products can be more environmentally costly than the old ones they replace.

Thinking about a more energy efficient dishwasher? New models of appliances contain a hefty amount of “embodied energy,” the amount of energy used to mine and refine or create materials or even the energy to recycle old products. On top of that is the considerable energy used in packaging appliances and transporting them to their new homes.

Cars are another example. The Prius is commonly considered one of the greenest cars on the road. The Department of Energy’s GREET model (Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation) calculates the energy to make a Prius at 38,650 BTUs per pound while most other cars require only 31,362 BTU; the Prius needs 23% more primarily due to its batteries. This means the energy cost of producing a 3,042 pound Prius is much higher than the energy cost of producing a 2,630 pound Honda Civic—the equivalent of 727 more gallons of gas. To decrease your footprint, a new car has to have operating energy savings large enough to cover the energy cost of building that new car such that it exceeds the embodied energy plus operating energy costs of your current vehicle.

In “Building Preservation,” a recent report released at nupolis.com, I provided a similar case for why reusing buildings—rather than demolishing are replacing them, even with greener facilities, can actually waste energy.

Every time we replace a product—appliances, cars, or buildings--we are disposing not only the old product but also the energy it took to create it. Even when parts are recycled, a significant portion ends up in a landfill.

Reps. Donna Edwards D-MD, Russ Carnahan (D-MO) and Steve Driehaus (D-OH) introduced federal legislation (HR 4202 -- the Green Infrastructure for Clean Water Act of 2009) December 3 that authorizes up to $300 million annually in green infrastructure (GI) planning and implementation grants. The bill will also establish GI centers of excellence in planning, implementation and policy, and help states establish Green Infrastructure Portfolio Standards that would incrementally grow states use of green infrastructure stormwater management, akin to renewable energy portfolio standards.

This is an opportunity to finally extend federal investment in green infrastructure’s ecologically and economically effective water conservation approaches. Green infrastructure returns rainwater from a stormwater problem back to the most critical, valuable resource we have. Green infrastructure protects and restores clean water, saves energy embedded in water treatment and pumping, and enhances communities’ health and vitality through expanded natural areas.

Communities across the country, from Chicago to Los Angeles, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, Toledo, and many more, are expanding their use of sustainable, permeable practices like rain gardens, green streets, roofs, alleys, tree planting and permeable pavement. This legislation will help expand the opportunity and effectiveness of green infrastructure nationwide.

The Act would authorize up to $100 million per year for planning grants and up to $200 million for implementation grants, officially establishing a green infrastructure program in EPA’s Office of Water to administer the grants, centers of excellence and associated programs. The legislation also authorizes the creation of a “green infrastructure portfolio standard” that is defined in the following way: “GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE PORTFOLIO STANDARD.—The Administrator, in collaboration with State and local water resource managers, shall establish measurable goals, to be known as the ‘‘green infrastructure portfolio standard’’, to increase the percentage of annual water managed by eligible entities that uses green infrastructure.”

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has worked with a coalition of conservation groups (National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), American Rivers, the American Public Works Association (APWA), the Water Environment Federation (WEF), Clean Water Action, and the Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrators (ASIWPCA) on developing the proposed legislation.

The federal legislation follows passage earlier this year of Illinois’ Green Infrastructure for Clean Water Act, which instructed Illinois EPA to develop statewide standards and goals for green infrastructure. CNT is a partner in developing policy recommendations for that study.