Seattle.BloggersPub

I just heard that a video interview I did at MAX with Builder.au. I think this is my first press interview as an Adobe employee and it was a lot of fun. We talk about AIR, AMP, Thermo, Ajax and a bunch of other things. I think I was able to get across a lot […]

Bee Movie?

On the weekend we discovered that Japan has taken a marked interest in Halloween… Harajuku and Omote-sando were filled with costumed children and adults, some carrying plastic pumpkins to various shops that apparently were giving away small treats.

Small superheroes

Some people even lined up outside department stores, presumably for some sort of treasure.

Mostly costumed lineup

Harajuku had clusters of costumed children. We didn’t make it out to the annual Kawasaki-area Halloween parade, but I understand that’s an even bigger event than what we spotted in Omotesando.

We can perhaps thank global commerce and expert marketing, but Halloween seems to be roughly a week-long event in Japan. Costumes start on the weekend preceding the holiday, as far as I can tell, and continued all the way into bars and restaurants on Halloween night.

Bakeries offer pumpkin filled cookie sandwiches and in the shape of Jack-O-Lanterns, and I even found a Halloween-themed tenugui, or dyed cotton cloth. Halloween is all about commerce, much as it is in the US, without all the visceral impact the symbolism of Halloween has to most Americans, weaned on ghost stories about witches and zombies, during horror movie season.

Ladybug and wizard: Off we go

Obon and Halloween are really the same holiday, differences in rituals aside. Since I usually avoid coming to Japan during the peak heat of summer, I have only witnessed Nikkei celebrations of obon, and those a month earlier than typical (to fit in to the more important Seafair schedule in Seattle). But both are ways for living people to come to terms with death and the unknown.

In Japan, though, any of Halloween’s association with the supernatural is apparently nonexistent. Cuteness rules all costuming decisions; nobody tries to be over-the-top disturbing, and everyone appears to use Halloween as an excuse for consumption.

In contrast, I remember being at a shrine in Kamakura just after dark many years ago, and my Japanese companion was clearly slightly unnerved… I was unable to relate, as I felt none of the same goosebump-raising vibrations that come from a lifetime of association of shrines with death and ghosts. Americans, more influenced by Christian teachings that tried to quash pagan leanings in indigenous European cultures, are more likely to find their hair raised by the shadows and noises of Pan’s forests.

Prism is an interesting project from Mozilla Labs that further blurs the line between the desktop and the browser. Sort of like AIR or Silverlight, but seemingly more sensible.

They don’t really celebrate Halloween. Why? It’s silly, that’s why. Dressing up in costumes and asking for candy? Lame. Childish. Much too unrefined for the British lot.They would much rather set things on fire in memory of Guy Fawkes. You…

You know Washington CEO, right? That free business mag lying around the office? Pretty boosterish, with end of the year lists?

Well, it turns out they have a blog and it’s, uh, really good. Check out these two posts by senior writer Aaron Corvin: here and here. This is thoughtful, nuanced writing about Sightline-ish stuff like land use, transportation, and climate change. (Lots of business coverage too, obviously.)

To me, it’s further proof that there’s a sea change happening about climate protection. In 2002, I co-authored an article (pdf) for Washington CEO; it was about the projected economic impacts of climate change on the state. After the piece ran, the editor told me they had never received more negative mail from any article.

Ouch.

It soothed my bruised ego only a little that the published letters in response were gimcrack denials that global warming was happening, not substantive objections to the article’s content, which was pretty straightlaced and science-based.

But nowadays, the magazine is doing credit to itself by hosting well-reasoned discussions about the links between the economy, climate emissions, energy prices, transportation planning, and smart growth. More like this please.

Japan is awesome and I’m really looking forward to MAX tomorrow. The price is $150 for two days (an amazing deal for this conference) so I think we’re going to see some huge numbers. Unfortunately it’s really discombobulating being in this time-zone for a news junkie like me. Everything exciting happens while I’m sleeping. But […]

Surveys show Canadians want action, vision, and leadership on climate change. In fact, Canadians’ concern about the environment is
off the charts (see recent numbers at the bottom of this post). There’s a real opportunity here for Canada’s leadership to win hearts and minds with
decisive climate policy.

But what they’re getting in Canada is doublespeak. Aspirational targets for reducing carbon intensity? That may sound positively “green” — even uplifting, but on closer inspection it’s simply gobbledygook. In a speech excerpted by the Vancouver Sun this week, Jim Hoggan, president of  James Hoggan & Associates — which has recently completed “the most comprehensive [opinion] research project on
sustainability and the environment ever undertaken in Canada” — PR-speak that obscures inaction on climate change is making Canadians cranky.

Canada’s political leaders – including Prime Minister Stephen Harper –
are calling for a reduction in “carbon intensity,” which is the ratio
of carbon emitted per unit of production. It may sound fine and dandy. But that’s exactly the idea – it sounds a lot like you’re reducing carbon emissions – but if
productivity increases, so do greenhouse gases. For example, Canada’s Suncor Energy brags online about
significantly reducing “carbon intensity” over the last decade. But they forget to mention that they actually increased greenhouse gas emissions by 131
percent.
Not insignificant if you’re one of Canada’s top emitters. (“Carbon intensity.” Where have we heard that before? Oh, right, that’s
been the Bush Administration’s mantra on climate change, too. )

Another term, “aspirational targets” – batted around by APEC
members (Canada included) in the “Declaration of Climate Change, Energy
Security and Clean Development” issued after
September 2007 talks in Sydney, Australia, has a positive, feel-good
ring to it. But as Jim Hoggan, puts it, “…even Microsoft’s spell-check
software rejects that as spin. ‘Aspirational’ is a marketing term
which, like many words in the PR lexicon, is designed to suggest that
you’re doing something when you’re really doing nothing.”

This kind of deceptive wordsmithing just isn’t flying with an electorate that’s
deeply—and genuinely—concerned about global warming. If Canada’s
leaders are listening, they’ll turn down the PR-speak and crank up some
meaningful action.

A snapshot of Canadian opinion on climate:

• Ever
  since 2005, Canadians have been telling pollsters that the environment
  is their number 1 concern (in the US, environment rarely makes the top 10).
• 89 percent of Canadians say they are “very worried”
  about the environment.
• 60 percent reject the Harper’s proposal of “intensity-based” targets.
• Asked in a March Angus Reid survey who they trust on environmental
  issues like global warming, 77 per cent of Canadians said they trust
  scientists and 62 per cent said environmentalists.
• 82 percent placed
  sustainability as a high priority or a top priority (it’s noteworthy
  however that the term “sustainability” stumped Canadians – 53 percent
  had never heard of the word. Even among those who “knew” it, only 30
  percent could define it. Once they understand the language, however,
  Canadians “get it” immediately and they care deeply about the concept
  of sustainability.)
• Eighty-one percent of those recently polled said, “PR experts help
  deceive the public by making the environmental performance appear
  better than it really is.”

This is excellent news:

Seattle is one of the first major U.S. cities to claim it has cut
greenhouse-gas emissions enough to meet the targets of the
international Kyoto treaty aimed at combating global warming.

The achievement, at a time when the city has enjoyed a boom in
population and jobs, sets Seattle apart both from the nation as a whole
and other cities that have seen greenhouse gases soar in recent years.

Well, good on Seattle.  But at risk of sounding like a stick in the mud, there’s still a question mark in my mind about how much progress the city’s really made.

The big problem is that this kind of greenhouse accounting isn’t just tough, it’s mind-bogglingly tough.  (And in the spirit of full disclosure, our own Eric de Place is married to one of the authors of Seattle’s GHG inventory.) 

The difficulties are myriad.  First off, there are no consistent accounting standards for how a city should run a greenhouse inventory — which means that the exercise requires dozens or even hundreds of judgment calls.  How does Seattle account for flights taken by city residents to and from SeaTac (which, after all, is outside of Seattle city limits)?  How does a city track electricity generated in some other part of the state, or even in another state altogether?  What about gasoline that’s purchased outside the city, but used in city limits (or vice versa).  Should the city count heating emissions related to a particularly cold or warm winter as evidence of lasting changes? The decisions are virtually endless.  And while I have no reason to doubt that the Seattle inventory’s choices were made in good faith, there’s no question that an equally defensible set of accounting choices might have yielded different results.

One of the biggest challenges in a city inventory is accounting for materials flows — especially, the things Seattle residents buy that were manufactured or grown elsewhere. 

Take food; a fair chunk of Seattle’s emissions, broadly defined, come from the food we eat. Yet trends in agricultural inputs, and long-distance food transport, simply aren’t reflected in a GHG inventory that focuses on the city itself.  We could be eating higher up on the food chain, and our food could be traveling farther and farther farm fields to our plates; but a greenhouse inventory focused within the city boundaries wouldn’t detect that. The same thing goes for manufactured goods that were once produced close to home, but now are shipped from distant shores.  Same, too, for Seattle’s energy-intensive cement plants that have cut back on their production in recent years;  Seattle’s inventory notches those cutbacks as a GHG decline, but what really matters is how much cement we consume, not how much we produce.  But tracking the flow of cement into and out of the city, over the course of 15 years, would be an exercise in frustration.

Perhaps the city would have liked to included the greenhouse impacts of materials flows in its inventory.  But it’s a moot point. The data are simply unavailable — they couldn’t include it, even if they’d wanted to.

I don’t mean to downplay the city’s accomplishment:   Seattle deserves hearty congratulations for taking the time to assess itself — and for bucking the national trend towards rising emissions. Yet I have to remain a wee bit skeptical:  without better measures, we can’t know if the city’s truly made the progress it’s been hoping for.

This is pretty cool: an interactive map of Seattle’s natural systems. Using a Google maps interface, you can travel all across the city’s public places to find detailed information about the presence of native (and non-native) plant species. Kinda fun to play with, and probably quite useful to restoration efforts. It’s the handiwork of Seattle Urban Nature.