Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- Time for a TurnaroundWell, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
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- Time for a Turnaround
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Did WSJ just give Boulder the big green beatdown?
Even Boulder Finds It Isn't Easy Going Green, by Stephanie Simon, WSJ
Last Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published a story about Boulder on its front page: “Boulder Struggles with Green Dream: Even Boulder Finds It Isn’t Easy Going Green.”
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This spring, city contractors will fan out across this well-to-do college town to unscrew light bulbs in thousands of homes and replace them with more energy-efficient models, at taxpayer expense.
City officials never dreamed they’d have to play nanny when they set out in 2006 to make Boulder a role model in the fight against global warming. The cause seemed like a natural fit in a place where residents tend to be politically liberal and passionate about the great outdoors.
Instead, as Congress considers how to encourage Americans to conserve more energy, Boulder stands as a cautionary tale about the limits of good intentions.
Ouch.
The article, in general, focused on the fact that since individuals wouldn’t motivate to make energy-efficient upgrades to their own, the city of Boulder (like a cross, eye-rolling nanny) planned to do it for them. By Monday, Boulder’s supposed fall from green grace had made its way around the Internet echo chamber, showing up on a handful of high-profile blogs. Take, for example, this joke that introduced a post on the Time magazine Web site:
How many residents of Boulder, Colorado, does it take to screw in a light bulb? 100,000: Taxpayers foot the bill for teams of techies to go door-to-door and caulk windows, swap old light bulbs for compact fluorescent ones, and install programmable thermostats, all in the name of energy efficiency. Should saving energy—and money—be this difficult to achieve?
Even in an exceptionally progressive, environmentally sensitive town like Boulder, it seems nearly impossible to get residents to lift a finger, spend a buck, or change their habits to save the planet.
So is this true? And if not, what’s the real story? Is Boulder green or isn’t it?
First, it’s not that Stephanie Simon, who wrote the WSJ article, is wrong. If there’s one thing that city leaders have learned over the last couple of years, it seems to be this: Even armed with good information (replacing this light bulb will save me money and help save the planet over its lifetime of 5 to 7 years….) Boulderites don’t seem inclined to make changes on their own.
This is the way Brad Tuttle put it in his Time blog post (after the part about how many people does it take to screw in a light bulb):
Convincing business owners and residents to tackle even the tiniest energy-saving projects seems as easy as convincing a child to eat his vegetables—and presumably, that’s also difficult in healthy, outdoorsy Boulder. When it comes to a child at the dinner table, explaining the wonderful long-term benefits of broccoli doesn’t do the trick.
So if Simon’s article wasn’t entirely inaccurate (though there were some minor problems with numbers and dates and facts), was it unfair? And this is where we head down the slippery slope of tone. For some, the WSJ article struck this tone: “If Boulder can’t convince people to add a little insulation and caulk a few windows, no one can. All is lost. Let’s just bag the whole idea of weatherizing homes across the country, as the Obama administration has encouraged.”
But many city officials don’t see their admitted failures to inspire action that way. Instead, they seem to be thinking this: “Boulder’s on the leading edge, which means we’re going to try things that don’t work. We realized, in fact, that our original programs didn’t work, and so we’re trying something new — going door-to-door and helping people actually make the changes they say they want to make. This, in fact, is helpful to the rest of the country because now they don’t have to make the mistakes we made.”
Today, the Daily Camera ran their own story about the WSJ story:
The fact that it’s hard to get people in Boulder to make these changes isn’t inaccurate — in the experience of the city’s environmental staffers — it’s just old news.
In 2007, the year after Boulder residents voted to tax themselves on their carbon use, the city created a Climate Action Plan, which outlined its strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By early 2009, it was clear that the city’s largely education-based approach wasn’t working and that a significant barrier existed for most people between knowledge and action.
“I appreciate (reporter) Stephanie Simon’s coverage of the challenges that Boulder is facing with its Climate Action Plan efforts,” said Kara Mertz, who heads up carbon-cutting programs for the city. “However, most of the programs she described were 2007 and 2008 programs.
“The city recognized that these programs were not successful enough to reach the greenhouse-gas reduction goals established by City Council, nor were they adequate to satisfy our community.”
In response, the city retooled its Climate Action Plan in the summer of 2009, shifting the strategy from outreach to action. The plan’s cornerstone program, called Two Techs and a Truck, will begin sending contractors door-to-door in May to replace light bulbs, adjust thermostats, set up clothes lines and do some basic caulking. The “techs” will also help homeowners make appointments, and ultimately, get financing for larger upgrades like adding insulation and replacing hot water heaters.
So it stands that Boulderites, perhaps like everyone, don’t make energy-efficient upgrades like they know they should. But, Boulderites do make other green changes that others often don’t. They are nearly 20 times as likely to bike to work, and they take the bus in much larger numbers than average Americans. They also divert more than 50 percent of all their waste from landfills (with a combination of recycling and composting). The city itself has some of the strictest green building codes in the country and they’ve limited runaway development by purchasing more than 45,000 acres of open space land around the city.
Now we want to know what you thought about the article. Take a read of the WSJ story yourself and leave us a comment below.
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Indeed, the city of Boulder has struggled to create action directly from the public sector. But, it should be noted that Boulder’s progressive actions, along with help from the Governor's Energy Office and legislation voted in by statewide citizens has created a successful new energy economy. Hundreds of private companies have sprouted up in the community in the past few years creating jobs and a more resilient economy in a dramatic recession. These companies have been working hard to develop a strong infrastructure and reputable industry standards to continue the path of exponential growth, as the local and national economy improves.
In particular, one innovative company has spawned from a solar photovoltaic company into a turn-key energy solutions provider. Energy Efficiency Manager, Eric Van Orden, states that “each year from 2007 to 2010 the company has more than tripled in growth of revenue and staff size. Standard Renewable Energy (SRE) has a successful track record of encouraging energy saving action through an affordable Review, Reduce, Renew process.” Starting with an energy audit, this process helps people to review the home and identifies the most cost effective energy saving solutions. Then the energy efficiency consultants help each homeowner to utilize the numerous rebates and tax credits available to reduce energy usage without sacrificing lifestyle and often improving comfort. The company also helps to install on-site renewable energy resources like the popular Solar Photovoltaic panels, which make use of of Colorado’s 300 plus days of sunshine and Xcel's Energy's rebates that sometimes total more than $25,000. Mr. Van Orden noted that this process has successful helps hundreds of home and business owners to save more than $921,759 on their energy bills and reduce carbon emissions by more than 12,628,100 pounds of CO2 emissions each year. The company regularly monitors this information for goal setting and updates these numbers on their website at: http://www.sre3.com
[...] So why is it so damned hard for customers to adopt energy efficiency technologies? Consider the recent article from the Wall Street Journal profiling the challenges faced in Boulder, Colo. – one of the most environmentally inclined communities in North America – in encouraging energy-efficiency measures. The WSJ article spurred some navel gazing among the green-conscious Boulder citizenry, as witnessed in this blog post. [...]