A panel of experts gathered at Artistry Honolulu to take their best shot at the urgent question “What Can Hawai‘i Teach the World About Climate Change?” The Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute “Pau Hana” event brought together Chip Fletcher, a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa geologist; Robert Lempert, a RAND Corporation scientist and contributor to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and Joshua Stanbro, chief resilience officer for the City and County of Honolulu.

Despite the recent torrent of grim United Nations reports, and terrifying TV footage of Florida beach homes being blown to smithereens, the evening’s tone was relatively upbeat. While nationalistic leaders bellow about withdrawing from international climate accords, states like Hawai‘i and California are aggressively pursuing their own environmental paths, and the panelists suggested that significant work is being done at the state and local level to keep Earth from turning into a giant Sahara.

Much of the discussion, which took place before an overflow crowd, focused on how the most remote of U.S. states (as well as one of the smallest) could become a climate-change laboratory and set an example for others to follow. Moderator Catherine Cruz, host of Hawai‘i Public Radio’s “The Conversation,” dived straight into the question of how Hawai‘i—which lately has been battered by torrential rains, volcanic eruptions, and other torments—can bring its citizens together around climate-related issues.

Stanbro, the Honolulu official, acknowledged that even experts sometimes are unsure how to size up the risks to the planet—and figure out how best to respond. “We don’t know how this is going to shake out, so we’re sort of inventing it in real time,” he said.

That’s one reason, Stanbro explained, why Honolulu city and county are holding a series of nine meetings around the island of Oahu, to get a sense of what various communities are doing to address specific local problems, set priorities, and develop action plans. Stanbro said that many cities and counties have stepped up their responses to global warming, now that bond agencies are including climate change as a risk factor in evaluating municipal credit ratings. If a municipality doesn’t have a good plan for mitigating these threats, a bond agency may give it a lower credit rating, making it more expensive for the municipality to get credit and take on debt.

Lempert, the RAND expert in climate management and adaptation, said he has studied communities around the country that are making climate-change response a critical part of their planning. Stage one of this process, Lempert said, is simply for communities to notice and acknowledge that climate change is happening. Step two is making a risk assessment. Step three is coming up with an action plan to reduce the municipality’s carbon footprint.

“We’re just starting to see people moving into it, and there’s a lot going on,” he said, citing communities that are developing new guidelines for bridges, roads, and other infrastructure that now have to take climate change impacts into account.

Fletcher, the geologist, said he recently co-authored an op-ed in a local newspaper about sea-level rise, which could reach one meter (about three feet) by the end of this century. Hawai‘i is very susceptible to this menace, particularly during the summer, and high-tide flooding could prove catastrophic before mid-century, if present carbon emission rates persist.

Rather than stick their heads in the sand, communities need to start adapting to these changes, Fletcher said, and some are doing just that. He has proposed that if a community is going to invest in long-term expensive infrastructure, like a coastal power plant, it needs to anticipate as much as a six-foot sea level rise because it’s unclear how fast the Antarctic ice shelf will melt. Fletcher also said that improved climate-change modeling also can offer better predictions on how (for example) erosion caused by rising seas will affect Oahu’s north and south shores in different ways.

Climate change is in many ways a numbers game: A rise in global temperature of 1.5 degrees centigrade could prove devastating. Such a figure may sound small, Lempert said, but on a global scale, over long periods of time, “that’s a gigantic number.”

“When we were six degrees colder, we had miles of ice on top of North America,” Lempert said. “When you gather up all the scientific evidence, half a degree makes a surprising difference.”

Such an increase could swamp parts of Hawai‘i, whose seas already have risen 3.5 inches since 1960, according to some calculations. And with world temperatures currently heading for 3.5-degree centigrade increase by the end of the century, much will hinge on what happens in places considerably bigger and more densely populated than the Aloha State. There’s a growing demand for new energy, and about half of this is coming from India and China, whose populations are eager to enter the global middle class.

What’s really needed, the panelists concurred, is “a war on carbon.” The developed world needs to be helping poorer countries buffer themselves against the worst effects of a warming atmosphere while slashing overall carbon emissions by about 50 percent per decade, if global warming is to be limited to no more than 2 degrees by mid-century. That scenario, the panelists conceded, would be a huge stretch. But Hawai‘i, which has vowed to be virtually carbon-free within three decades, already may have helped sway California Governor Jerry Brown to make the same pledge, Stanbro suggested.

Hawai‘i also can learn from other communities. Fletcher said he recently did some research on how flood-threatened Miami has invested a small fortune to build 80 pump stations which will take rain runoff and other water, spin out some its contaminants, and recycle it into Biscayne Bay. The city is studying how to sacrifice the first and second floors of buildings to allow water to move back and forth through these structures, and also how to raise many of its most vulnerable roads.

Some of those same strategies could be applied to Waikiki Beach, he said, because it’s obvious that fleeing an area is simply too costly and too difficult technically. “We’re wondering how to adapt in place” to surging seas, said Fletcher, adding: “A year ago, I was wondering when are we going to get going on this. Now I stand in amazement at the city and county of Honolulu, and also the state, at the progress we’ve made… in the last two years.”

During the audience question and answer segment, one attendee asked how renewable energy could figure in plans to grow Hawai‘i’s rail system. “By 2045, the entire grid is going to renewable,” Stanbro replied. “As the grid gets greener and greener, the train gets greener.”

Another audience member asked how to make fossil fuel corporations aware of their environmental responsibilities. “We need to stop subsidizing them,” Fletcher responded—but, he continued, we should remember that fossil fuels helped lift humanity out of the hunter-gatherer phase. The problem is that we should’ve started shifting away from fossil fuels in the 1970s. That didn’t happen, and the energy companies “are a main reason why it didn’t.”

A third audience member asked how to ensure that we don’t put the costs of environmental sustainability on the poor and on indigenous communities. Stanbro said that such groups already have borne a disproportionate share of climate-change impacts. “We’ve got to figure out how we put equity into this,” he said.

Still, the challenges before us are monumental, the panelists agreed, and they’ll require many municipalities to experiment with many different approaches. “Humans have been figuring their way out of pinches and problems for a long, long time,” Stanbro summed up. “I am optimistic about the models and the innovations that are going to come out as a response to the challenges.”

The post Can Hawai‘i’s Local Communities Lead the Global Fight Against Climate Change? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But to the Volkswagen Group, which sold about 500,000 VW and Audi diesel cars between 2008 and 2015, green meant money. In 2015, none other than the Green Police, in the guise of the EPA, caught up with VW because its cars were spewing 10 to 40 times the legal amount of nitrous oxide, a potent pollutant that causes smog. (The range takes into account variations between models and driving conditions.) VW recently agreed to fix or buy back the vehicles, pay fines, and invest in “green vehicle technology.” Eventually we’ll know whether it’s on the hook for $10 billion, $18 billion, or more.

The VW scandal is the result of a cult of cheating among some car manufacturers, an underfunded U.S. enforcement system, and the increasing power and meaninglessness of the word green. There’s no question that VW’s actions were criminal, but simply letting the justice system deal with the problem is missing the bigger issue: If we’re going reduce carbon and pollution emissions from transportation, we consumers need to face the fact that “green” transportation is meaningless unless it’s a compostable bicycle or a horse in a diaper. The VW scandal reveals how little power consumers have in the current system—and why we need to take it back.

The story of the VW cheating scandal is one of two separate cons—one on the government and the other on consumers. Diesel fuel is energy-dense, so diesel vehicles get more miles to the gallon than gasoline. However, burning diesel releases nitrous oxides and particulates implicated in asthma. In 2004, Audi was selling cars using an expensive catalyst and urea injection process to reduce pollution, but the product, called Bluetec, added thousands of dollars to the cost and maintenance of the cars. In 2006, VW engineers and executives viewed a Powerpoint about using software to trick emissions tests while allowing pollutants to flow from diesel cars’ tailpipes during normal driving. Since 2009, this con has resulted in the emission of an estimated 13,000 to 59,000 extra tons of nitrous oxides in the U.S. alone.

The second con, as the Green Police ad suggests, was on a particularly anxious strain of green consumer—the well-off early adopter who wants to be above reproach (while still having a lot of torque). VW played these buyers cynically. The cars’ reputation for passing “stringent emissions tests” and being fun to drive won them a bunch of “Green Car” awards. By 2014, VW was even lobbying the government to give buyers of these diesel cars rewards usually reserved for cutting-edge electric vehicles: tax rebates and access to HOV lanes.

The initial regulation of tailpipe pollution and fuel economy had nothing to do with consumers. The tailpipe standards were the result of 1970s Clean Air Act, and they were an industrial policy focused on limiting pollution and smog. Fuel economy measurements (and the Corporate Average Fleet Economy, or CAFE, standards) were started by Gerald Ford in 1975 as a response to the 1973 Oil Embargo. They were not about the environment, but limiting OPEC’s power. To conserve fuel, Ford proposed fuel economy standards along with removing gasoline price controls, building the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and a campaign to allow turning “Right on Red.”

CAFE standards initially aimed to double the fuel economy of passenger cars to 27.5 mpg within 10 years. When Jimmy Carter tried to extend them to pickup trucks and past 1985, he got shot down. Over the decades, the targets generally rolled back under Republicans and forward under Dems. And in 2011, the Obama administration set the target at nearly 55 miles per gallon by 2025.

Over time, testing and standards became a kind of proxy for environmental friendliness because they worked to reduce fuel consumption. By 1985, the U.S. fleet got twice as many miles to the gallon as 1975, and by 2002, the standards were saving 2.7 million barrels of gasoline a day. Between 2003 and 2014, CAFÉ standards played a significant role in reducing U.S. gas consumption, which was a surprising 6 million barrels a day less than the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected Americans would use over that period.

Shrinking oil consumption brings environmental bonuses—lowering carbon dioxide and pollution emissions and reducing the odds of oil spills. It also saves Americans billions of dollars that would otherwise be spent on fuel. CAFE standards drive economists crazy because they’re not as economically efficient as a carbon tax, but on the whole, when standards are high, they’ve accomplished their industrial goals.

However, outside the aggregate, there’s always been tension between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. The EPA testing regimen—which supplies data for tailpipe emissions, the Department of Transportation’s CAFE standards, the Department of Energy’s fuel economy listings, and the IRS’s gas guzzler tax—has been vulnerable to cheating since the beginning. In July 1973 , the EPA found that VW had installed devices to trick emissions tests on its Beetles. GM’s Cadillac got busted in 1995. Since then, a host of companies have gotten caught: Honda, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and lately Mitsubishi, Daimler, and Peugeot.

Beyond the cheating, there’s widespread kludging of the intentions of the law. Because light trucks were not initially subject to standards, manufacturers aggressively marketed them as passenger vehicles, lowering the overall efficiency of the U.S. fleet significantly. For many years, auto companies tuned their cars to get more miles per gallon doing 50 mph or less because that’s how they’re tested, even if this isn’t how we drive in the real world. The 1994 Oldsmobile Olds 88, for example, got 34.6 miles per gallon when driving 55, but only 24 mpg at the more usual highway speed of 75—a drop of 30 percent in fuel economy. (See table 4.29 in this report.)

There’s no real reason to expect that automakers will straighten up and fly right. Roland Hwang, an engineer and vehicle efficiency expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, notes that as the emissions and fuel economy standards get higher manufacturers have greater incentives to cheat. Hwang thinks the only way to eliminate cheating on fuel and pollution will be to remove fossil fuels from the equation and move to an all-electric fleet, with perhaps some hydrogen cars, and trucks and planes running on biofuels. “You’re chasing the tail end of the stick with internal combustion engines. We need a paradigm shift.”

That may well be the end point, but in the middle here, what is a confused consumer to do?

The short answer is that no car is green—all cars carry environmental costs, some steeper than others. But consumers don’t have all the data to understand what those costs are. The current system of testing and standards, caught up as it is in a political struggle between competing interests, prioritizes test performance over what consumers want, which is cars that run cleaner in the real world.

Consumers need to take back the concept of green, if not the word. We need more sophisticated metrics than the EPA’s numbers, but without them we’re dependent on marketing. We need transparency—perhaps an open-source version of data gatherers like OnStar and Verizon Hum that can “ground truth” claims about the vehicles. If we let manufacturers and the government proceed alone—as we have with fuel economy—consumers will have little control over how these new cars develop.

And car designs are changing fast: Cars are probably going to be driving themselves soon—making tradeoffs that consumers need to see, and judge. As we rely more on vehicle navigation systems, how should they prioritize routes, by time traveled or by emissions avoided?

Ironically, that terrible Audi “Green Police” ad was right about something: Consumers are victims in the current system—terrified of getting punished for doing something wrong, but with nowhere to turn for information.

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