Driving the policies of energy change

"Most of the action in energy, environment, and climate policy is actually at a state and local level, not at a national level."

Thus began Rocky Mountain Institute's Chief Scientist Amory Lovins' conversation with Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper at RMI's 2008 National Solutions Council event last weekend.

So how do you get policymakers onside, when politicians have to juggle many different demands, influences and ideas from their constituencies?

Lovins had this message for Hickenlooper and others in his position, and it begins closest to home, or in this case, his place of work.

"Mayors have a mea culpa and platform of leadership to do the cheapest thing first. So all municipal facilities ought to be really efficient whether new or retrofit. When this happens, what people will see every time they come into city hall is going to be a lesson for whatever else they do," Lovins said.

The wide-ranging conversation covered many topics, but government policies to promote public transport in our car-orientated societies was a prevalent subject:

There are a lot of good city rules. Two examples come to mind. San Jose had the bright idea that rather than requiring developers to have two parking spaces for an apartment or condo, they would prohibit providing parking for a condo or apartment but require instead annuitizing a perpetual public transportation pass. The developers liked that idea because it was about 10 times cheaper and people could get parking in the private market. One of the ways you could do that is to allow people who have street parking outside the house they own to rent it during the day.

Or in Stockholm they almost passed a really interesting ordinance: If you want to be allowed to drive downtown during a given month, you have to buy a permit for your windshield. But it's also portable and is a pass for the entire public transport system. So if you bought it, you might as well use it.

We really have to get to a county and municipal level to start de-mandating and de-subsidizing sprawl. Also we need to look hard at zoning so we don't mandate separation and dispersion but rather cluster everything within a 5-minutes walk of where you want to be. This would be a lasting contribution.

As for how to make cities walkable, Amory stressed it was imperative to eliminate driver subsidies:

Drivers should pay for what they get. Singapore does that. They pretty much internalize the full social cost of driving instead of socializing most of it to everybody else.

The result is that they have essentially no congestion even though they have a more prosperous capital than Bangkok, which has such dreadful congestion that people will set up offices and bathrooms and so on in their vehicles.

So look at the difference, it's just one of policy. If you have free enterprise for everything else and corporate socialism for cars and especially if you have over-provision of parking and roads as apparently free goods, you will have way too many cars. But if you design your city around people rather than cars, they'll be a lot more livable.

Here is the complete transcript of the conversation, The Policy of Energy Change (PDF).

Maria Stamas is an analyst with Rocky Mountain Institute.