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“Planned Atrocity”

When emergencies such as severe weather events, wildfires, water crises, and earthquakes occur, how are they framed? If they are viewed as natural disasters, is the suffering that follows also viewed as inevitable? Who is most impacted and who profits? What are the structures in place that sanction racialized suffering?

 In the Meaning of Disaster Under the Dominance of White Life, Rodriguez unpacks two major environmental perturbations and situates them in the context of violent racial power structures. Rodriguez looks at Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and the Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, and calls into question how these events were handled by the state and normalized.  

Rodriguez calls Katrina a “planned atrocity.” The physical and social structures that were in place in New Orleans pre-Katrina set the African Americans of that city up for suffering when the hurricane struck. The author implicates the hand of White Supremacy in the needless suffering there. In the lens of the profitability of disaster capitalism and the recognition of the violent history of slavery, the incident seems particularly sinister.

I agree with Rodriguez that in the broader context of state-sanctioned violence, it is critical to resist the normalization of such events.  How these events unfold is a reflection of the power structures in place.  We are going to experience more and more disasters that will cause suffering disproportionately. How we build resilience before these disasters and how we respond to them will not be just if we do not also resist dominant power structures and racism.

Photo Credit: STR/Reuters

 In the environmental movement, this critical examination of power is especially important. We cannot look at the climate crisis without taking into account structures of state sanctioned racism and perpetuations of racist ideology. The disproportionate suffering is indeed violent, as Rodriguez suggests. Environmentalists must firmly break away from the roots of white supremacy still embedded in the movement like a stump in an old coppice system.

In Orion Magazine, Charles Wohlforth states, “Understanding the history of racism in the conservation movement is important, not to assign blame, but to diagnose our unhealthy relationships with each other and with nature, learn from our mistakes, and begin cooperating in the ways that we must in order to reverse our destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems.”

 A small part of this understanding is to illuminate those environmental heroes from marginalized groups. If our heroes were all white supremacists who linked conservation with the ideals of social dominance, is it not time to elevate other heroes? Environmental groups lament that there is a lack of diversity in the environmental fields. Well, not only do people of color not see themselves reflected in the environmental movement, not only do we need to consider staff culture, bias, and compensation within our groups, but we also need to recognize the history of oppression that still permeates the fabric of the mainstream environmental structure.  As Wohlforth notes,“Without justice and equality, conservation can become, rather than an intrinsic good, a part of a greater evil”

Photo Credit: http://drrobertbullard.com/

Dr. Robert Bullard, father of Environmental Justice. A true hero. 

- PALMER 

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Meredith Brown

Photo by Meredith Brown | Gay Pride Parade, Santiago de Chile -- Showing community members working together to influence policy changes for equal rights for the LGBTQI community.

Photo by Meredith Brown | Badajoz, Spain, Instituto Zurbaran -- Public high school fair, bilingual section, promoting active community participation to fight for equal rights. 

Week 9 Response

The idea of the abstract citizen makes me think a lot about my own personal values and interests, because by identifying what I enjoy and what I am passionate about, I clearly see that I fall into the definition of an abstract citizen. I fall into the category that I am sure the majority of F&ES students fall into – the citizen that needs to be properly controlled and monitored to prevent “rebellion,” as Scott mentions in his introduction (pg. 2, Scott, 1998). Those of us who question the status quo and work toward making changes to better our environments and the quality of life of all people are seen as abstract citizens. To control such actions, the state creates social order and a system of regulations and language. I recall two specific examples from my travels with my family when I was little that have remained present in my mind over the last two decades.

The first memory is from an outdoor orchestra concert on the waterfront in Victoria, British Colombia. People were enjoying the concert from the grass, the streets, their nearby apartments, and restaurants. I was 11 years old and found a large tree on the waterfront with perfect climbing branches, surely hundreds of years old. There were several people already sitting on its various enormous branches enjoying the music. A sign stood in front of the tree – “Please don’t climb on the tree.” I ignored it and climbed up, as those before me had.  Minutes later, a little boy in lederhosen, not more than 5 years old, came running up to the tree and yelled to us all – “PLEASE, don’t climb on the tree! The sign says, ‘Don’t climb on the tree!’” And he ran off. It made me sad to see a young boy so nervous about climbing a perfectly healthy and strong tree simply because the municipality had put up a sign. There was no damage being done to this tree, it was an extremely healthy and large individual and I could see no real reason for the sign. Enjoying the natural existence of the tree proved a dangerous idea to the state and thus, they discouraged it.

My second memory is from an airport, also traveling with my family when I was younger. As we walked down the hallway toward our gate, an announcement came on the loud speaker: “Attention please, no yelling.” My sister and I looked at each other and began laughing hysterically. It was by far the strangest airport announcement we had ever heard, especially so because at that moment, nobody in the airport was yelling nor was there anything strange going on. It was as if the airport authorities wanted to anticipate any raucous activity and immediately dissuade it from happening.

These kinds of rules and restrictions from my childhood memories demonstrate, in minute ways, how the state attempts to plan for its abstract citizens, by controlling and monitoring us.

The piece by Mendez that discusses the process through which the Oakland Climate Action Coalition directly influenced the City of Oakland’s Energy and Climate Action Plan with “community engagement, organizing, political mobilization, and education” (pg. 353, Mendez, 2015) shows us a successful example of influencing the environmental policymaking process through utilizing knowledge production, values, and culture. To work against the state’s interest in keeping society in monitored boxes, we must work together in our communities and engage not only one another but all relevant stakeholders. Oakland accomplished this. They gathered together and formed an interdisciplinary coalition made up of specialized committees and they were explicit about social equity and environmental justice in their work. By using these best practices, among many others that they utilized, we see how the environmental policymaking process can be influenced when we choose to work together and use local knowledge and practice to create change.

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Governments often plan for “abstract citizens” through the use of universal metrics and a priori ideas. In this way, the citizen is a figure created not from experience and context but from theoretical imaginings. For Scott (1999) in the Introduction and Part 1 in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, ‘high modernist’ governmental schemes which seek an idealized. disciplined vision can have destructive effects on the environment and human life. Establishing order required legibility and state simplifications, while abstract renderings sought to wipe away contextual complexities. According to Scott, these efforts of the modern state ignored the local and culturally-specific diversity of social and environmental life which are ill suited to such a standardized mold.

In contrast to the use of the ‘abstract citizen’ in policymaking, efforts to consider locality in policies highlight epistemological diversity. As Mendez (2015) writes in “The Civic Epistemologies of Urban Climate Change” urban climate action plans can allow for different ‘ways of knowing’ to have a role in environmental policymaking. He points to the City of Oakland’s Energy and Climate Action Plan as an example of incorporating local knowledge and experience in setting policies in ways that are ‘place-specific’ rather than theoretical (339-40). A broader and more inclusive approach to environmental and climate policymaking can also allow for the incorporation of intersecting issues such as public health and urban planning which may be more reflective of local, place-based values and experiences. Jasanoff (2005) in “Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society” in States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order emphasizes the roots of science and technology in human agency, and the contributions of STS in showing the great variety of “accommodations made by particular practitioners to specific, messy, local challenges” (37). Highlighting and acknowledging these ‘messy’ contexts are critical for the environmental policymaking process.

Photo 1: an arch dam (wikipedia)

Photo 2: tract housing (wikipedia)

- Stephanie

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James Scott’s Seeing Like a State explores so-called “high modernist” examples in which a state’s desire for “legibility” leads to prioritization of centralized control and order above localized structures and knowledge. Such “legibility” is a complex idea that is difficult to capture in a single definition, but Scott’s first example of the German experiment with scientific forestry is illustrative (Scott p. 11-22). The old growth forests that dominated the area in the 18th century were difficult to manage for timber, prompting officials to clear-cut forests and plant a single species in orderly lines with no underbrush – essentially treating the forest as a crop.  While production initially boomed, the second generation of trees failed, because the diversity and complexity that were foundational to a thriving forest ecosystem had been eliminated in favor of a simple, straightforward system that lent itself to easy management.

This same impulse to eliminate complex human social structures in favor of centralized, top-down management approaches assumes an “abstract citizen” who does not have any unique identity. Scott describes him or her as having “no gender, no tastes, no history, no values, no opinions or original ideas, no traditions, and no distinctive personalities.” (Scott p. 346) By not taking into account the particularities of place and the local knowledge that has developed there over time, such centralized planning exercises, however well-intentioned, result in outcomes that benefit the state rather than local people.

Inherent in this high modernist approach is an uncritical support of science and technology, and the belief that such knowledge is generated and operates in an objective sphere separate and apart from the society that produced it. Sheila Jasanoff pushes back against the separation and undue glorification of science and technology in her exploration of “co-production,” arguing that “the realities of human experience emerge as the joint achievements of scientific, technical and social enterprise: science and society, in a word, are co-produced, each underwriting the other’s existence.” (Jasanoff p. 17)

The lived, on-the-ground experiences of Oakland residents were crucial to the development of the municipal Energy and Climate Action Plan (ECAP), as Michael Mendez documents in “From the Street: Civic Epistemologies of Urban Climate Change.” Especially striking to me was the way that the organizers engaged a diverse range of communities on the impacts of climate change and how it applied to their everyday lives, using concerts, volunteer activities, and interactive games to educate and empower (Mendez p. 354-355). This engagement provided the foundation of long-term and sustained interest and support for the ECAP. In this way, the Oakland experience is a prime example of one of co-production’s four occurrence pathways, that of making representation. By moving climate change from the abstract to the real and tangible, Oakland was able to contribute to a richer and more complex understanding of how climate change impacts communities.

Photo credit: 2015 People’s Climate March

--Shannon

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Jasanoff describes the four common instruments of co-production: making identities, making institutions, making discourses, and making representations. Of these, making institutions seems closely tied to governments plan for abstract citizens. She writes that "institutionalized ways of knowing things are continually reproduced in new contexts, either because they are socialized into actors and therefore unquestioningly reenacted, or because it would be too disruptive to examine them openly" (40). If the ways a government plans environmental policy for an abstract citizen relies on and reproduces this institutional knowledge, then that government locks itself into a cycle in which the abstract citizen does not change. Passing on and presenting that knowledge also makes it harder for the actual, non-abstract citizen to deviate from those ways of thought. How can qualitative, traditional, or local knowledge - all important to the process in Oakland described by Mendez - be integrated into this knowledge reproduction? Or is something lost when local/traditional knowledge is institutionalized?

I'm also interested in how science decides what to research, what advances to pursue, for the abstract citizen (if that is who is being decided around at all). For instance, Jasanoff writes about the cloning of Dolly the sheep and the immediate political response. How does the biotech/scientific community approach the issue of cloning differently than the government? I think an interesting parallel situation is genetically modified organisms in food. Though there's a general consensus that GMOs in food are not dangerous or harmful to human health, some jurisdictions still pursue, or at least entertain the idea of, GMO labeling policies. The abstract citizens at the heart of each of these perspectives, both the research and the labeling policies, are different. If environmental science and environmental policy are both approached with different abstract citizens in mind, how does that play out in terms of actual ecological and social impacts?

Oakland draws on its history of environmental and civic activism in planning for the abstract citizen - challenging ways that the government might have approached that planning process (Mendez). Though the citizen, individually, may be abstract, a collective type of resident and collective line of priorities are gleaned from this activist legacy. A sort of contrasting environmental policy approach can be seen playing out right now: Republicans and the president have doubled down on an anti-climate, anti-environmental legislative agenda. The "abstract citizen" in their plans might be a person who lives in a region with a coal-reliant economy, or someone who does not want to pay taxes for environmental programs. But the abstract doesn't line up with reality. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication recently put out a report on how Trump voters view various environmental issues - and it doesn't line up with Trump's agenda. What is the cause for disconnect here? I wonder if the abstract citizen idea allows for easier manipulation of public opinion in this way.

Scott writes that "the concept of a uniform, homogeneous citizenship" was a "revolutionary political simplification" (32). This point and the discussion that follows makes me think of the argument that the United States could never achieve the social/political structures that exist in, say, Scandinavian countries, because our population is not homogeneous. Later, Scott writes about demographic and statistical information about populations allowing the "simplification and rationalization" (91) previously related to forests and nature, to be applied to human populations. I think there is a tension here, and am curious how those two ideas balance or oppose one another. Having more information about a population might better allow a government to plan for a more accurate, more ideal abstract citizen. But what use is that detailed data if it's simplified down into one person as proxy profile for a whole country? (I'm thinking here about the way that water pollutants' risks and impacts are calculated based on the body of an "average" sized man - we know that doesn't represent everyone, but it still stands.)

Photo 1 Source

Photo 2 Source - This image, found in working on a project for another class, takes planning to its most literal level. This is one relatively small patch of Connecticut, with so many zones and differentiated patterns of land use. Each town has its own needs and interests, and in Connecticut especially, town boundaries are significant, powerful, and identity-forming. Who is the abstract citizen and what do they want - how can that be determined with this level of detail and categorization? I don’t think that having this granular detail is a bad thing - it can only help, but I do think it challenges the idea of an abstract citizen. It’s not so easily to condense down what “the people” want.

Kate

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By James Scott’s analysis, governments plan for abstract citizens insofar as those citizens can be extracted for the state’s narrow set of needs. The state needs tax revenue, an army, and to maintain power over its population. These needs require bureaucracy and administration with some amount of complexity, but that complexity never matches that of a state’s population and frequently comes into conflict with incompatible social conditions. As Scott writes “a human community is far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae” (Scott, 22). Despite this, states must engage in some level of abstraction in order to make any decisions about how to provision resources to its subjects who “needed so many square feet of housing space, acres of farmland, liters of clean water, and units of transportation and so much food, fresh air, and recreational space” (Scott, 346). But obviously there is a huge amount of variation in the degree to which states attempt to homogenize or make legible the existence of infinitely variable social conditions. It almost seems like all knowledge production that exists in the service of state administration is guilty of erasure. Every time some populations are identified and included in legislation they are confined by a set of standards while other populations continue to be ignored. Or, for example, something like LEED certification, while providing a new way of measuring the sustainability of buildings that didn’t exist before, also becomes the dominant and accepted way of thinking about green building and makes it harder for competing ideas to be taken as seriously.

Source: http://www.bullittcenter.org/

While a building like the Bullitt Center is considered a perfect example of sustainability in buildings, an anti-capitalist squat in Berlin might not.

Source:https://unsceneberlin.blogspot.com/2016/01/wtf-is-up-in-rigaer-strasse.html

I was thinking about this with CalEnviroScreen, which Michael Mendez discusses in his paper, “From the Street: Civic Epistemologies of Urban Climate Change.” Even though the purpose of this tool is to increase the legibility people and places who are marginalized by environmental degradation, it relies on standardized metrics that still must abstract conditions of environmental injustice, potentially leave some conditions unseen. These scientific metrics are, as Sheila Jasanoff emphasizes in “Ordering knowledge, ordering society,” culturally constructed and derived from hierarchies of acceptable knowledge. The climate plan written by environmental justice groups in Oakland, represents a type of knowledge collection that is not strictly quantifiable or traditionally used for analyzing and writing policy. It’s interesting to think about how hierarchies of acceptable cultural knowledge creation are likely linked to state power. If environmental justice groups were radically rethinking the way that government enacted environmentalism in a way that was threatening to its power, would their climate plan be accepted as legitimate knowledge, or would it be dismissed with accusations of radicalism or lack of scientific validity. 

Jacqueline

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Sara

According to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, governments plan for abstract citizen by creating a very standardized society. They are standardized in their needs with no difference of opinion or values. This simplifies the role of those in power and allows them to hold this power. For example, the act of giving people surnames allowed the state to incorporate those people into their tax base (Scott 69). They also ignored existing common property regimes of indigenous peoples. They swiped the slate clean and gave everyone metrics so that they could be in control. This was also seen in the way they managed natural resources. Forestry science came from the desire to maximize production and profit by organizing and quantifying everything. As Scott put it, the “chaotic old growth forest [transformed] into a new, more uniform forest that closely resembled the administrative gird of its technique (Scott 15). This obsession with numbers in environmental management is still very much alive today. Mendez’s paper points out that climate change plans often focus on the number of carbon emissions reduced, and fail to incorporate any aspect of equity and how those plans will impact vulnerable people. This is in part because we have developed a culture where data is highly valued. As Jasanoff points out “Our methods of understanding and manipulating the world…reorder our collective experience (Jasanoff 10). We have used data and science to understand nature and now we lean on those methods and that information when coming up with environmental policies and management techniques. “…the worlds we have already constructed loop back on our efforts to construct new ones” (Jasanoff 25). For example it is hard to ramp up funding for public transportation or biking when we have invested so much in infrastructure for cars and developed a culture of driving in the U.S. My first picture visualizes this issue. My second picture shows the result of how we’ve chosen to structure cities (Mexico City).

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/bikes_and_cars/

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Yanin

Scott (1998) argues that a legible society provides opportunities for large-scale social engineering, particularly when coupled with high modernist ideology and a weakened citizenry. “Legibility” in effect becomes a central component of statecraft. Scott claims that complex social practices and spatial configurations were standardized––gridded––to be monitored by state officials, which ultimately enhanced state capacity. Geometric order was imposed on human settlements, rendering them more legible and, therefore, more controllable. Legibility was achieved through such means as documented surnames, national languages, and centralized traffic patterns, as well as segregating the population by class and function. 

In the realm of city development, citizens must be abstracted and standardized to enable planning initiatives. Though esteemed planners of the 20th century, such as Le Corbusier, were committed to egalitarian principles of equitable social living, individuals were reduced to generic subjects to accommodate planning methodologies. Top-down governmental planning, therefore, relied on quantitative approximations to measure and meet the basic needs of an imagined, abstract citizenry. This abstracted citizenry––one devoid of history, culture, race, and gender––further enabled planners to dismiss the underlying power dynamics apparent in planned, modern neighborhoods. In other words, planning for the abstract citizen involved an erasure of identity and, consequently, agency.

Likewise, resources were allocated to a faceless population across uniform units of housing space, farmland, and the like. Within the context of these large scale planning efforts, questions were also to be addressed with quantitative responses. In this way, the natural world was subdivided and transformed to increase profits. Evident in the Taylorist factory, machine-like movements that optimized efficiency prevailed. 

However, this planned social order often ignores informal practices that can’t be codified. Scott argues against a hegemonic planning mentality that excludes local, practical knowledge.

In modern day environmental policy making, decisions are influenced by knowledge production, values and culture. Jasanoff (2004) looks at co-production in science and technology studies, paying attention to the ways in which new phenomena are understood in the world through the interplay of cognitive, institutional, material and normative dimensions of society. Science is made social in this way. Jasanoff analyzes the emergence of new facts and systems of thought (constitutive analysis) and the ways in which these facts merge with the existing, demarcated natural and social order (interactional).

Mendez (2015) looks specifically at the integration of local knowledge into climate action planning. He describes the ways in which municipal governments are called upon to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by developing Climate Action Plans that consider local patterns of urban development, economic activity, infrastructure and energy use. Looking toward civic epistemology, these Climate Action Plans call attention to knowledge creation, driven by geography and sociocultural factors, within environmental justice communities. An understanding of how citizens “come to know things” can be applied, Mendez argues, within political processes where regulatory practices, public participation, and the ways in which science is legitimized differ greatly based on geographical and sociocultural factors. Mendez points to Oakland, CA as a case study where the city’s Climate Action Plan embedded local knowledge and participation and focused adaptation plans on vulnerable communities. New forms of knowledge, including a reframing of health co-benefits, ultimately informed climate change governance and public policy decisions.

The following images highlight the stark differences between legible cities planned for abstract, homogeneous citizens (Celebration Florida, US) and those formed through organic bottom-up processes (Accra, Ghana).

Celebration Florida. Photo credit Eric E. Johnson.

Accra, Ghana. Photo credit Wikimedia Commons.

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The readings of this week address the issues of knowledge production, both technical and social, ranging from general theories that can help to analyze the creation and validation of knowledge, to some of its implications in urban planning to a specific example of local knowledge applied to urban planning. The three of them, can provide some insight about the role of knowledge in environmental policy and in its implementation.

In Seeing like a State, Jacobs reflects about the rise of information and data not only as tools for decision making for planning purposes, but also as mechanisms of control from the planning elite to the citizens; and, while not necessarily ill-intended, it requires the standardization of the communities and their ways of living in order to make planning more effective. As a consequence, the local knowledge, context and practices that might be a core component of the identity of these communities is lost; the result is that from a planning perspective, the subjects that are supposed to gain benefit for the planning efforts are virtual dehumanized, without preferences, desires, history or values; in what Jacobs referred as “abstract citizens” (Jacobs, 1998). From a public planning viewpoint, what he defined as high modernism, is arguably still a predominant conception in public policy, where technical knowledge is to be prevailing driver of decisions, unchallenged by other views or perspectives, and which could lead to failures in the implementation of those planning instruments.

Particularly in the environmental field, the type of knowledge, its perceived value and the cultural background of the stakeholders involved, plays a significant role in many of the policy making process. In many specific fields, such as Climate Change or Risk Management, there are conflicts about the way in which traditional technical and scientific knowledge, usually from established institutions, is incompatible with lay knowledge of local communities, and the efforts to try to bridge this differences are becoming more common. In that regards the concept of co-production of knowledge explained by Jasanoff (1998) is relevant, given that it provides an avenue for creating new technical knowledge about the best way to effectively deal with this environmental issues, as well as knowledge about the social relevance of local knowledge. The case of the elaboration of the Climate Action Plan (CAP) of the city of Oakland described by Mendez (2015), is an example of this approach; where both traditional scientific experts and local EJ communities, produced an instrument that could tackle with the issue of Climate Change, including both perspectives; and at the same time creating a new discourse of the relevance of lay knowledge for this instruments.  

The pictures below are an example of a city planning concept based in a strictly an aesthetic view. The city of Lima has a lack of public spaces; however, many planning approaches still include the construction of ornamental parks where access is forbidden and the infrastructure is only there to be looked at (Picture 1). Last year, due to the lack of space in a nearby area, many citizens decided to actively use one of these look-don’t-use spaces, and while there were problems of lack of order and tidiness afterwards; the reaction of the local authorities was to treat this event, not as a symptom of the problem of public spaces, but as a lack of education of the people involved, without acknowledging the real issue or challenging the validity and usefulness of their planning approach. 

Picture 1, Source: Peru21

Picture 2. Source: La Republica

Diego M

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Scientific Classifications of Nature

(Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles) 

Caroline Acheatel

In order to measure and codify the evasive and vast movements of a hard to pin down, “abstract” citizenry, James Scott explains In Seeing like a State that the government, as seen in the example of absolutist France in the 17th century, “struggled to...carry out a cadastral mapping of landholdings”(Scott 24) in order to simplify and make legible information about human life. (Scott 24)

(Charles Marville,  Passage Saint-Guillaume (vers la rue Richelieu) (first arrondissement) 

Scott makes a Foucauldian summary using this example.He says “where the pre-modern state was content with a level of intelligence sufficient to allow it to keep order, extract taxes, and raise armies, the modern state increasingly aspired to “take in charge” the physical and human resources of the nation and make them more productive.” (51) This “bureaucratic state” needs to collect “vital and other statistics” with disciplines like forestry, rational agriculture, public hygiene, climatology” etc. that largely contribute to the knowledge production surrounding environmental policy today. With various examples of power and resistance throughout this book, Scott repeats that knowledge production on an aggregate scale must “abstract and summarize” in order to be effective. (Scott 87)

In his chapter on the High Modernist City, Scott gives an example of how cultural values can be swept away in the process of shaping the environment, and created as something entirely new, with the example of Le Corbusier, who believed that he had a singular vision to “build places where mankind will be reborn,” as part of a quasi-geometric “ordered relation to the whole.” (114) In her writings in Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society, Sheila Jasonoff confirms that this type of tabula rasa approach is a recipe for failure, noting that top-down plans often fail to realize “that in most exercises of world making, neither science nor society begins with a clean slate but operates always against the backdrop of an extant order.” (Jasonoff 19) In her chapter, Jasonoff traces the genealogy of thinkers who have meditated on the idea that “science and technology are indispensable to the exercise of power,” and ultimately wonders if “a co-productionist approach can ever predict” societal futures. Based on this,the article From the Streets, offers an successful example of a co-productionist approach, where science and technology are “interpenetrated with cultural expressions and social authority.” (Jasonoff 18)

Mendez uses the concept of civic epistemology to show how environmental policymaking practices are closely linked to local culture--for example in Oakland, where is a strong community of environmental activists, “expert driven processes” were “displaced” in favor of a “holistic concept of the environment that identified geographically and socially uneven impacts of climate change and promoted health equity.” (Mendez 343) The Oakland ECAP effectively “incorporates local knowledge in its development of climate policy” a way that James Scott and Sheila Jasonoff would endorse, using particularities of metis and “changing climate knowledge from an abstract to an urban and local phenomenon” (Mendez 353) 

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Epistemology and Governance: Abstract Citizens -

Governments must understand their constituents, think about future generations, and be clear on who and what they are prioritizing when setting policy.  In this regard, how governments conceptualize the population is important.  Are their citizens an abstraction (a modernist approach) or are do they have knowledge on par with “expert knowledge” (a post-humanist approach)? Is there an awareness of the articulation of co-production, as introduced by Jasanoff (2005)? 

Photo source: museumofthecity.org 

Brasilia was designed as an ultra-modernist city: decontextualized, forcefully constructed in less than 5 years, shaped like an airplane, intended to deter rebellion. In planning, citizens were thought of in the abstract; the design situates knowledge of experts technology over citizens and nature. In my experience, today’s capital bursts the design seams, with sprawl, art, ecogenesis projects, and social symptoms of planning in this fashion. As Scott notes, (Jasanoff (2005), Scott (1998:127)) the illegible citizens that created Brasilia disrupted the neatly organized modernist plan.   

Scott in "Seeing Like a State" (1999), discusses the historic valuation of local knowledge as it pertains to land use in the 1600s in Europe.  Scott notes the shift from local illegibility, that is, the concept that people who live in a town have cultural norms that might be confusing to outsiders (1999:54), to cadastral mapping (codifying systems for tax purposes). The drive to quantify every variable in the economic system benefited the ruling class (Scott: 37).  It valued the expert's knowledge over the lived experience of the commoners (Scott:47). 

 As Latour suggests in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), these cadastral maps, census notes, and the like, demonstrate that “power concentrates in centers of calculations”(Jasanoff 2005:22).  In today's society, this foundational assumption can have some tremendously detrimental implications (as Scott notes, p 83), including in the environmental justice arena. 

 Photo source: allifaction.tumblr.com/post/74462784509/image-source-happy-birthday-to-robert-boyle

Jasanoff references the discussion of Boyle vs Hobbs and their infamous air pump. Latour writes: “While.both Boyle and Hobbes are meddling in politics and religion and technology and morality and science and law, they are also dividing up the tasks to the extent that the one restricts himself to the science of things and the other to the politics of men.” What is the role of epistemology in governing today? Awareness of Hybridity?

Mendez, in “The Civic Epistemologies of Urban Climate Change” (2015), outlines the role of knowledge valuation and Freirean praxis in urban planning, through a case study of Oakland California. The city of Oakland has had conflicted views of how to serve "abstract citizens" throughout its history, as one can see by looking at the economic, social, and environmental development patterns in that city.  However, the Climate Action Plan that was adopted in 2012 demonstrates that traditional government structures of decision making can be greatly improved when citizens move from the abstract to vociferous leaders in partnership-based models of planning, a shift in knowledge valuation (Jasanoff: 2005).  The process included multi-lingual communication, neighborhood-based outreach, and linking co-benefits to GHG policies (Mendez 2015:347). Oakland residents redefined Knowledge and in doing so, expanded the dialogue.

This is not to exclude the validity of trained experts either, I think it is important to note given the current political de-valuation of scientific knowledge. Instead, drawing from Latour, there is co-creation and hybridity in politics, culture, science, and nature that should not be seen as independent. Oakland’s plan is like Scott’s naturalist, farmer, and forester coming together to create better solutions.

Finally, Mendez (2015) notes, quoting Jasanoff, “conventional policies detach global fact from local value, projecting a new totalizing image of the world as it is, without regard for the layered investments that societies have made in worlds as they wish them to be. It therefore destabilizes knowledge at the same time as it seeks to stabilize it." (Mendez 2015: 363 from Jasanoff 2010: 233) It is the universalization of the population or "totalizing image" in attempting to make policy in the best interest of a city that obfuscates its citizens into abstraction. 

-PALMER

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Week 9 Reading Response - Jeremy Hunt

According to James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, governments plan for “abstract citizens” through application of an economic lens supported by science and technology to guide the policymaking processes. Wherever possible, governments have sought to simplify processes to produce order and control opting for scientific knowledge in substitution of local knowledge and know-how. Scott opened with the scientific sustainable forest example--trees were neatly plotted out in a straight-line grid equidistant from one another. The trees selected were all of the same variety and during the first timber harvest, the scientific simplification approach thrived, but after the local forest environment was disturbed through the re-engineered forest approach the entire ecosystem, including timber production suffered. In this case, policymakers though order and control could provide sustainable use of a forest, but they failed  to incorporate local knowledge and a systems-thinking approach. Scott also discussed Authoritarian High Modernism urban planning as applied by city planners. In the past, western governments hired city planners such as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, to design city layouts that would simplify utilities, neighborhood functions, transportation, etc., providing a clean grid approach from an aerial view. Le Corbusier opted for replacement of historical and organic cultures and communities with clean, straight lines and a segregated grid. As demonstrated with the city of Brasilia, which features rectangular blocks and now wide, empty public spaces, high modernism designs failed to account for where/how the local people want to live and work. Segregating neighborhoods by functions does not allow for synergies between diversity and density overall, and potentially leaving areas more susceptible to economic downturn. 

In terms of the environmental policymaking process, we are now entering an age where the local and regional levels of government present the best opportunity to address climate change head on. As Michael Mendez described in “Civic Epistemologies of Urban Climate Change,” local communities and especially diverse disadvantaged communities present new perspectives for addressing current environmental concerns. In Oakland, a city with deep ties to civil rights history and inequitable environmental degradation, the Climate Action Coalition looked beyond scientific advisors and experts to draft the city’s greenhouse gas reductions targets and climate adaptation plan. The city sought the input of its immediate community members and local knowledge to assist in what Jasanoff terms knowledge “co-production.” Environmental justice groups held public workshops to inquire about the concerns of disadvantaged community members and sought to link climate adaptation and GHG reductions with urban planning and public health. As a result of this knowledge co-production, the city set forth some of the most progressive emissions reduction targets in the entire state, and became the first city in the country to explicitly link affordable housing to climate change policy and GHG reductions. In the case of Oakland, with its history of activism, civil rights, and diverse cultural heritage, it was important to account for this local knowledge in the city’s climate adaptation plan, as these are pieces of vital and intricate local knowledge that science cannot account for. Scientific and technological solutions put forth by experts attempts to oversimplify problems and tends to gravitate towards linear solutions without accounting for the greater ecosystem in play. I think this is what Jasanoff gets at when she discusses the importance of recognizing local community identity versus when policymakers attempt to redefine societies and policies to fit the mold that can be most easily controlled and understood. I believe the ideal policymaking process involves participation from local communities as well as effective communication strategies that helps scientists and policymakers give meaning to their science and facts in ways that can shape policy to better serve communities (equitably).

Below: Bioswales in New Haven, CT photo credit: http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/the_digging_is_the_easy_part/

Detroit’s “Agri-hood” - repurposing of urban areas to grow crops and foodstuffs in low-income, residents actually want to live in view of the farm, changing perceptions of the land.

Photo credit: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/01/detroits-new-agrihood-is-the-future-of-urban-plann.html

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Caroline, Meredith, Yanin

*Sustainability vs. Climate Action Plans: 1. What are the key differences between a sustainability master plan and a climate action plan?

The main differences between sustainability plans and climate action plans are their scope and their approach to framing the issues. Sustainability plans are broader in scope and aim to help guide local officials toward quality of life improvements for their constituents, including social equity, environmental and economic conditions through applying sustainable principles to their services, land use, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, climate action plans focus specifically on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by addressing their energy sources, such as transportation, wastewater treatment, and buildings. Something often found in climate action plans is the idea of co-benefits, which are the added benefits, such as public health, produced by trying to control climate change.

a. Are there benefits or disadvantages between the plans?

Climate Action Plans are, by definition, more narrowly focused on reducing greenhouse emissions, which can oftentimes overlook the other important aspects of quality of life that we see covered in sustainability plans, such as environmental justice and community participation concerns. Sustainability plans include more areas on which to focus our efforts, which can positively affect the local communities. The other way of looking at it is that sustainability plans are too broad and thus are not as effective at gaining measurable and meaningful results. People may think of the sustainability plan as a guideline rather than an actual plan to follow toward concrete results.  

2. In your assessment, what plan is stronger, the Yale Sustainability Plan or the UCSF Climate Action Plan. In your response provide several key examples.

The UCSF Climate Action Plan is ambitious and seeks to place the university as a leader in taking a responsible and proactive stance that demonstrates stewardship of our planet. The plan does this by first laying out three specific emissions goals for the university that were developed through a policy decision two years prior including a third and final goal of attaining climate neutrality “as soon as possible.” The Climate Action Plan was subsequently developed to track and report the university’s greenhouse gas emissions and describe the university’s mitigation and reduction strategies to reach the aforementioned goals. The plan’s framework has a strong focus on strategic and financial methods that the university will utilize to support work toward these three emissions goals and their commitment to reporting their GHG emissions to regulatory agencies beyond the required basis.  

Taking into account the urban setting of the university and its role as the second largest employer in San Francisco, the UCSF Climate Action Plan, developed back in 2009, was an important model for the city as well as for other universities.  

A weakness I saw in this plan is that the first ~50 pages are a review of sustainability efforts to date. It seems relevant to include these previous efforts, but as this is a report focusing on ways in which the university will reach future emissions goals, it would be more significant to dedicate the majority of the paper to the section on Future Reduction Measures. The Future Reduction Measures section is strong and includes a range of aspects important for any university moving toward carbon neutrality, including education and outreach, green building design, clean energy standards, sustainable operation and transportation, recycling and waste, and sustainable food services.

The Yale Sustainability Plan, on the other hand, is a road map painted in broad strokes. Its methods are not as strong as the UCSF Climate Action Plan. The plan’s “Vision” is broken up into nine “Ambitions,” which are each accompanied by objectives and goals. Though call outs are provided to illustrate past initiatives and those in the pipeline, the information presented remains at a very high level. Supplementary documents will surely be required to move the plan forward, and the plan should not be considered a stand alone piece.

That said, the Yale Sustainability Plan presents a coherent vision for the university and surrounding community; an overarching and unifying road map for campus-wide initiatives. Though it does not provide the level of detail visible in the UCSF Climate Action Plan, it serves to keep all departments of the university that are working toward sustainability in alignment. Furthermore, all departments of the university are held accountable and treated as equal partners in the plan. Finally, sustainability is approached holistically with “Ambitions” such as Empowerment described alongside more conventional categories such as Mobility.

3. How does the Yale Carbon Charge relate to the Yale Sustainability Plan? Are they integrated well? Provide key examples.

The Yale Carbon Charge is a specific initiative of the Yale Sustainability Plan, and both are similar in that they emphasize change through promoting behavior based initiatives. Within the larger framework of the Sustainability Plan, the Carbon Charge fits into “Ambition” 4––the creation of an emissions reduction program and a campus resilience plan, and “Ambition” 6––the maintenance, operations, and occupancy standards of the Built Environment.

However, the Yale Sustainability Plan merely nods to the Yale Carbon Charge with little detail provided. After testing schemes for internally billing departments for carbon emissions in the 2015-16 academic year, Yale became the first academic member of the Carbon Leadership Pricing Coalition. While the Yale Sustainability Plan introduces the Yale Carbon Charge, key findings are left out and the plan points readers to a website to learn more.

Looking at “Ambition” 4, for example, the Yale Carbon Charge is not mentioned explicitly but instead falls under the broader category of “2050 Carbon Neutrality.” Similarly, “Ambition” 6 touches on multi-departmental task forces, educational efforts, and stewardship initiatives for maintaining and operating Yale owned buildings, but does not explicitly call out the carbon charge.

*Yale Carbon Charge Case Study: 4. What are the pros and cons of fixed versus rolling baselines? Yale is currently using rolling baselines, i.e. moving forward from one year to the next. For example, if a baseline is the average of the previous three years, in 2017 it will be 2014-2016, and in 2018 it will be 2015-2017. An alternative is to employ fixed baselines. For example, imagine if Yale decides to always compare units to 2005, year after year.

The rolling baseline used in the Yale Carbon Charge Case Study between 2013 and 2015 is advantageous because it not only takes into account the fluctuating “programmatic changes that influence energy use” each year, it also acknowledges that the school is likely to “bring in new faculty with energy intensive research equipment or add more students” (13) Yet despite the fact that the rolling baseline might more accurately consider the needs and dynamics of the University, a fixed baseline makes it easier to track carbon use and to more accurately develop carbon pricing schemes because the rolling baseline resets the data constantly.

5. How might Yale's scheme have differed if its policy objective were about immediate, guaranteed emissions reductions, instead of behavior change?

If Yale’s motive in implementing the Carbon Charge were primarily about immediate, guaranteed emissions reductions instead of about behavior change, the scheme might have indeed been different. First, because the objective was about “establishing the right incentives,” Yale used a revenue-neutral pricing model instead of one that focused on garnering funds. Additionally, the university sought to engage a broad swath of the Yale community and a diverse range of “buildings and organizational structures,” leading them to select a variegated range of study participants instead of just the “ biggest energy users or those with the most low-hanging fruits in terms of energy efficiency.” (9)

6. What are the drivers behind emissions reductions across the pilot units? How can Yale better structure its approach to determine this? Could the results from the Yale's carbon charge pilot show a false positive?

Across the pilot units, it seems like there are a few drivers of emissions reductions. One clear one was the pricing of carbon emissions, although despite economic incentives, the “Yale pilot confirmed that a price signal itself may not be enough to change behavior, especially when the financial incentives (net charges/rebates) were much less than the original $40 per ton CO2e price.” (19) Another driver may have been an increased communications push about energy reductions within the larger Yale community.  A large driver was also effective stakeholder engagement. In the example of the residential colleges, “Jonathan Edwards College conducted a poll to survey students’ awareness and found that only half of the respondents knew how to operate the radiators in their rooms, which presented significant education and outreach opportunities.”(21) In future phases of the Yale Carbon Charge, the university could better structure its survey questions within different stakeholder groups to determine what the main drivers of emissions reductions are. Furthermore, the results of the Carbon Charge could show a false positive because the sample size and relative duration of the experiment is short, and should be tested in multiple years to determine a pattern of carbon reduction.

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Sustainability and Climate Action Plans

Yasha, Kate, Michele

Whereas a sustainability master plan is a “common framework…that ties together a community’s goals, strategies, implementation plans, and metrics for improving sustainability” (ICLEI, “What is a Sustainability Plan?”), a climate action plan is narrowly focused on sustainability as it relates to climate change; thus, it has a tighter scope. The benefits to a sustainability plan include that it is (theoretically) comprehensive, and that there are enough diverse elements within it to excite and inspire any reader; the disadvantage is that the aim can get watered down in exchange for breadth. On the other hand, a climate action plan is narrowly tailored to climate change mitigation and adaptation, which could allow for more depth over breadth, but might also alienate readers who are less interested in (or don’t even believe in) climate change. The types of strategies included also differ; sustainability plans tend to address livability, land use, and general health and well-being, whereas climate action plans are generally focused on either emissions mitigation or adaptation—with at most a co-benefit or most-vulnerable approach to the interrelated issues.

 The UCSF seems stronger than the Yale Sustainability Plan because it provides many more specific details on current consumption levels, the actual inventory, etc. For instance, the UCSF provides a much more thorough inventory of emissions sources (section 2.3); Yale only provides the goal to “By 2020, meet or exceed the 2005 commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below 2005 levels” (page 23). On the other hand, the Yale document is far more readable for a lay audience (or even someone with limited time), and there are presumably other documents—like the Carbon Charge outline—that provide a greater degree of detail. In terms of actual objectives, the Yale Sustainability Plan has a mix of more ambitious (carbon-neutral by or before 2050) and extraordinarily vague (“Objective 2.2...By 2018, launch an initiative to promote dialogue about sustainability, inclusion, and justice on campus and in New Haven” (page 15) goals. On the other hand, the UCSF document, in 78 pages, never mentions “justice,” “environmental justice,” “equity,” or “dialogue” at all; the closest it comes to discussing these issues is section “3.5.1 Jobs housing imbalance,” in which it discusses affordable housing and the high cost of living in San Francisco (pages 32-34).

Sustainability Plan. image source: environment.yale.edu

The Yale Carbon Charge is technically not within the Yale Sustainability Plan, though the two initiatives dovetail together well. It does fit within Part 4 of the Sustainability Plan, Climate Action, particularly the step in the carbon neutrality strategy, "Define and commit to an iterative on-campus investment approach to achieve 2050 carbon neutrality" (p 23). Given this specific goal, it would not be difficult to better integrate the Yale Carbon Charge and the Yale Sustainability Plan.

A carbon charge program would be an appropriate piece of a Climate Action Plan, however, which Yale does not have - though if there is a Climate Action section of the Sustainability Plan, why not have a Climate Action Plan? The ICLEI writes that climate action plans typically include "an analysis of the opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from energy use in transportation, solid waste disposal, buildings, lighting, and waste water treatment and water delivery" (p 2). This aligns with the steps taken as part of the carbon charge program development. It may even be that a Climate Action Plan could bridge the gap between the Carbon Charge and Sustainability Plan, integrating all three into a cohesive sustainability strategy for the university.

As the case study mentions, a rolling baseline helps alleviate obstacles due to weather-related energy use, energy intensive research, and increased numbers of students or building occupants. This is certainly a pro of the rolling baseline, but there are numerous downsides and other considerations. How did Yale choose to use a three-year average for its rolling baseline? (As opposed to two years, five years, etc. At a university, four years might make more sense.) Without deeper explanation by the case study, this number seems fairly arbitrary. 

Image: Kroon Hall, FES Source: Solaripedia.com

On the whole, a rolling baseline does not seem as effective as a set baseline. For instance, if the number of students and energy intensity of research continue to increase each year, then the baseline will increase as well. Hitting energy reduction goals remains easy, and perhaps allows the university to bypass more meaningful and significant energy use changes. Looking at peer institutions' climate action plans, it's most common for universities to set a single baseline year by which they mark their carbon emissions reductions. As the case study document notes, a rolling baseline resets progress regularly. This creates a requirement for more staff time to recalculate the new baseline and new progress; it may also discourage building occupants or university community members that they have to re-start their efforts. It also paints a less accurate picture of that progress. Tracking steps and change from a single baseline better represents what changes are actually made.

Yale had multiple goals in the Carbon Pricing pilot project. The objective was to reduce emissions, and also to provide an opportunity for experimentation, learning, and behavior change.  As Brad Gentry stated, “Many economists think that putting a price on carbon is how the world should address climate change. But there’s a long way to go between theoretically setting a price on carbon and having it change people’s behavior.” Brad Gentry, Professor and Associate Dean for Professional Practice at Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, member of the Yale Carbon Charge Task Force (19). Yale had to take this position, given its status as a leader in education; It could not let the opportunity to make it a learning experience slip away. The sacrifice was perhaps that behavior change is sometimes slow or erratic. It depends on leadership, motivation, and factors that are apt to bend and sway. A focus on immediate reductions, on the other hand, perhaps in the form of a mandate, would have been a different type of experiment. The creative solutions could have revolved more around technologies. However, in reality, humans operate technology and it is more realistic that carbon reductions are dependent upon human tendencies, as Gentry intimated.

The drivers behind the emissions reductions across the pilot units were in leadership (22), personal motivation (21), existing structures (23), creative investigation into ways to improve efficiency (22), and engagement. Buildings differed depending on baseline output, capacity, and perceived trade-offs (22). The results could be misleading because the model (carbon charge system with rebates) inherently results in a “less salient price signal.” With additional time invested, Yale could create a more detailed structure which smooths out imbalances to improve the price signal.

 The other main driver is economics. The head of the project was Nordhaus, who is a leader in his field of climate change and economics. However, the model relies on what is economically comfortable. If the goal really is to reduce carbon fast, is the economic lens too confined and limited because of its position within the dominant paradigm?    

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Group: Caroline Scanlan and Ad Walker

*Sustainability vs. Climate Action Plans:

1. What are the key differences between a sustainability master plan and a climate action plan?  Are there benefits or disadvantages between the plans?

Both sustainability master plans and climate action plans guide local governments or organizations in implementing projects and initiatives toward determined goals, but they function at different scales and scopes.  While a sustainability plan aims to incorporate all goals relating to sustainable functioning, a climate action plan is focused primarily on the goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  In many cases, a sustainability plan will include a climate action plan as one of its many components, pairing it beside other environmental initiatives, such as landscaping for water conservation, as well as economic and social efforts, such as workforce training and public health.  The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives notes that a sustainability plan will include a “broader, more holistic view on community sustainability,” than a climate action plan, because sustainability plans include specific and explicit objectives beyond GHG reductions. (ICLEI, p.2)  Though climate action plans are likely to reference the co-benefits of certain initiatives as they relate to economic or social outcomes, the plan will not necessarily have explicit objectives for those metrics in the same way that a sustainability plan will.

The benefit of a sustainability master plan is that it can influence major structural change, by addressing sustainable actions at both the department level and at larger structural levels.  With a broader scope of desired outcomes, a sustainability plan has the potential to catalyze more comprehensive changes and therefore lead to greater improvements.  However, by attempting to create change and manage initiatives across a government or organization and towards multiple different outcomes, a sustainability plan runs the risk of becoming unwieldy and difficult to enforce.  Assessing progress and determining ownership of tasks can become difficult, and can strain the resources of a Sustainability Office.  In contrast, a climate action plan will generally be easier to implement and to assess, since greenhouse gas emissions are easily quantifiable and traceable.

2. In your assessment, what plan is stronger, the Yale Sustainability Plan or the UCSF Climate Action Plan. In your response provide several key examples.

I would have perhaps expected the UCSF Climate Action Plan to be stronger, since it is dealing in more easily quantifiable reduction goals and on a shorter timescale than the Yale plan.  However, the lack of a clear timeline for implementation of future reductions, along with the plan’s limited mention of how responsibility for pursuit of reduction goals will be divided, suggests that the UCSF plan may have difficulty leading to the desired outcomes.  The plan outlines very clearly the mechanisms for measurement of GHG emissions, as well as existing projects that will lead to the desired outcomes by 2014, but the necessary initiatives for 2020 outcomes are left in summary and not divided into clearly implementable tasks.  The report does not address which departments at UCSF will manage the different “Future Reduction Measures.”

In contrast, the Yale plan provides deadlines for each of its initiatives, breaking up major outcomes into measurable goals and setting proposed years by which each will be accomplished.  The Yale plan also notes an “implementation report” that further outlines departmental responsibility and management of certain tasks, though I was unable to find that report on the Office of Sustainability website and I wonder how the enforcement of those responsibilities will be managed, particularly if the report is not publicly accessible.  Though the plan would be much more successful if these divisions of responsibility and accountability were clearly outlined alongside the initiatives, the inclusion of time deadlines makes for a more successful plan.  It is worth noting, though, that the Yale plan includes many goals based on rather vague outcomes.  For example, the plan lists “Sustainability Literacy” as a primary component of its Empowerment goal, including in the timeline the task of launching campaigns to improve campus understanding of sustainability.  In fact, this exact task is that which the student group STEP has been attempting to accomplish for years, and yet the student body still struggles with basic sustainability actions like recycling and reducing food waste.  The Yale plan could do a better job of, as the UCSF plan does, including pre-existing initiatives into their thinking, describing how future efforts will improve upon the current situation.

Though the UCSF plan does compile a list of funding possibilities, neither plan sets out a clear financial structure for funding and implementing its proposed initiatives.  This is particularly troubling in the case of the Yale plan, which suggests the creation of multiple task forces and working groups without describing how paid staff time will be allocated to these tasks.  Will new staff need to be hired, or are current staff expected to incorporate these sustainability goals into their existing full-time work?  Both plans would be well served to have clearer financial strategies for implementation.

3. How does the Yale Carbon Charge relate to the Yale Sustainability Plan? Are they integrated well? Provide key examples.

The Yale Carbon Charge and the Yale Sustainability Plan, though related, are not integrated in a coherent way.  Both the Yale Carbon Charge and the Yale Sustainability Plan aim to inspire reductions in GHG emissions, the first by incentivizing investment in lower-carbon options and the second by shifting operations through other means.  However, though the Yale Carbon Charge references the Yale Sustainability Plan, the latter includes no mention of the former, even when describing the projects and tasks associated with its “Climate Action” initiative.  It is possible that the Yale Carbon Charge could be incorporated into the sustainability plan’s proposed “Carbon Neutrality Strategy,” “Emissions Reduction Program,” or “Campus Resilience Plan,” but at this time it is not mentioned.  The Yale Carbon Charge notes that a key challenge moving forward is incorporation of the carbon charge into budget and accounting systems, so that it can be a more “integral” component of decision making.  In this regard, it seems appropriate for the Yale Carbon Charge to advocate for its inclusion in the Sustainability Plan, which will thereby allow it to be a more consistent component of future sustainability decisions and ideally provide clear timelines for tasks moving forward.

*Yale Carbon Charge Case Study:

4. What are the pros and cons of fixed versus rolling baselines?

In the Yale Carbon Charge Pilot Study, two of the pilot schemes required the setting of “baseline” energy use and emissions values by which to measure changes in consumption. These baseline numbers were rolling, meaning that they were determined by taking an average of the previous three years. These baselines would then be recalculated in three-year cycles. One of the benefits of a rolling consumption/emissions baseline is that it doesn’t “penalize” university units in the long run for increasing their student population or for participating in new research or programming that may require extra energy needs. Rolling baselines also allow for university units to adjust their usage in response to changes that are out of their control, such as climate or other environmental factors. One of the major downsides of a rolling baseline is that it would theoretically allow for a unit or the university at large to increase usage/emissions over the long term – rolling baselines “reset” every three years and thus don’t allow for long-term goals to be integrated into energy reduction planning. With the high stakes of climate change and the future in mind, maybe the university should prioritize low-energy research and programming in addition to investments that increase our resiliency in the face of environmental change. Alternatively, a fixed baseline is more unyielding and allows for high goal setting and clearer tracking of progress. Unfortunately, lofty goals can seem abstract and hard to plan for in the short term. And in the rare chance that goals are quickly surpassed, fixed baselines are not as flexible as rolling baselines, which can adaptively increase targets as targets are met.

5. How might Yale's scheme have differed if its policy objective were about immediate, guaranteed emissions reductions, instead of behavior change?

Of the four schemes tested in the pilot study, the redistribution scheme was most effective at efficiently reducing usage/emissions in the near term but was also perceived by participants to be the “least fair.” If community buy-in and long-term behavior change is also a goal, then trade-offs between efficiency, fairness, and political feasibility must be taken into consideration. Behavior change might be particularly important for the centrally-supported units at Yale, whose energy-use decision makers are not necessarily the people keeping the books and footing the bill.

If the policy objective was truly about immediate guaranteed emissions reductions, then an internal tax per unit carbon emitted could be instated or a more ambitious cap on university emissions. Additionally, the “worst offender” units or “low-hanging fruits” could be targeted first, to ensure the greatest potential reductions in emissions right off the bat. And of course, the university could have also agreed to divest a fraction of its $20 billion worth of investments, to “lead by example,” borrowing the university’s own words.

Yale’s scheme attempted to develop conversation and buy-in across varying unit types (offices, residential buildings, graduate schools, sports facilities, IT, etc) throughout campus. The university’s desire to spark connection, dialogue, and cooperation amongst its stakeholders will likely compromise its emissions reductions in the near term. But will it contribute to a growing wave of support for more stringent reductions down the line? Unclear.

6. What are the drivers behind emissions reductions across the pilot units? How can Yale better structure its approach to determine this? Could the results from the Yale's carbon charge pilot show a false positive?

The reported major drivers behind emissions reductions ranged from net financial incentives, to increased attention towards energy use and GHG emissions via price signals and energy reports, to intrinsic motivation on the parts of the building coordinators, to positive engagement from the project team, to the “spotlight effect” – a sense of responsibility caused by increased visibility and attention. Participants in the pilot units cited all of these reasons as drivers behind emissions reductions, but it is unclear which drivers were linked to which schemes and which drivers were most effective at driving emissions down.

Some drivers could be ineffective (or unpredictable) in the long term – for example, the “spotlight effect” will likely wear over time if internal carbon pricing becomes ubiquitous across the university. Additionally, intrinsic motivation as well as project team engagement will likely shift down the road, as members join and leave teams. In all of these cases, any effects due to these drivers during the pilot project could falsely indicate projections for future emissions reductions. Realistically, some of these more socially-motivated drivers may be important for developing salience and moral in the short time, but might not have legs for the long term.

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Group: Sara, Steph, Jacq

1. What are the key differences between a sustainability master plan and a climate action plan?

A key difference between a sustainability plan and a climate action plan is the difference in scope. Climate action plans really focus on greenhouse gas emissions reductions. However, greenhouse gas emissions and general sustainability have a lot of common ground as GHG reductions can be found in a variety of sectors including waste reduction, infrastructure and building requirements, and habitat preservation. Climate action plans may often result in especially technical recommendations, focusing on factors like buildings, transit, and waste, perhaps narrowing in too much on technology as the driver of climate mitigation, rather than considering some of the potential social factors or interactions of culture with technology.

a. Are there benefits or disadvantages between the plans?

Climate action plans may not address social concerns as effectively as sustainability plans. Planning for emissions reductions don’t necessarily overlap with issues such as inequity, effective governance and community participation, or economic welfare. Sustainability, as a framework, may be more expansive in a productive way. However, this expansiveness may also allow people to be less rigorous.

2. In your assessment, what plan is stronger, the Yale Sustainability Plan or the UCSF Climate Action Plan. In your response provide several key examples.

These two plans really illustrate some of the themes from the readings this week. In the most obvious sense, the UCSF plan is extremely technically oriented and focuses on emissions reductions mostly through building energy use and a few other factors like transit. UCSF has a brief section on “Education and Outreach,” but it does not look quite as expansively at sustainability as Yale’s plan which places leadership, health and well-being, stewardship, and empowerment, as individual pillars of the plan, each on equal footing of importance with climate action and built environment. In this sense, Yale’s plan thinks beyond sustainability as what Bulkeley and Betsill characterize as “a technical matter of institutional restructuring, traffic management, architectural design and the development of green technologies,” and is able to think across more scales of action (Bulkeley and Betsill, 43). The UCSF plan is more rigorous technically but the word “justice” is never found in the document and it fails to think far beyond energy use. I think the Yale Sustainability Plan lays a better foundation for approaching campus sustainability, however the devil is always in the details so it is somewhat difficult to compare the two.

3. How does the Yale Carbon Charge relate to the Yale Sustainability Plan? Are they integrated well? Provide key examples.

The Yale Sustainability is Broader in scope than the Yale Carbon Charge. It provides the school with a vision for how to become more sustainable in many facets of campus life. The goals in the YSS may be related to reducing carbon emissions but this is not necessarily the only benefit. For example prioritizing reuse and high density over new construction potentially saves open space which can provide stormwater infiltration, groundwater recharge, oxygen and shade from trees, and habitat. The YSS  mentions the carbon charge a few times in the narrative sections, but the climate action section does not explicitly mention the carbon charge as a way of achieving emissions reductions goals, although this may be what they are referring to when they say “expand energy conservation and emissions reductions through applied research” on page 22. The focus tends to be on other emissions reduction strategies. Perhaps they could have highlighted how the carbon charge fits into their goals more clearly.

4. What are the pros and cons of fixed versus rolling baselines? Yale is currently using rolling baselines, i.e. moving forward from one year to the next. For example, if a baseline is the average of the previous three years, in 2017 it will be 2014-2016, and in 2018 it will be 2015-2017. An alternative is to employ fixed baselines. For example, imagine if Yale decides to always compare units to 2005, year after year.

A rolling baseline sets the bar higher each year and allows for exponential improvement. It also provides room for change, since buildings will not be penalized for new faculty or research projects with energy-intensive research. A con of this approach is that it may be hard to ensure everyone involved in the plan has the capacity to make this kind of rapid, and increasingly hard improvement.  It may also be harder to get people to agree to this more aggressive plan.  Moreover, it “washes out benefits every few years” since the baseline is reset constantly.  The benefit of a fixed baseline is that you have the satisfaction of potentially seeing a bigger difference from the baseline which may increase morale for those involved in the effort. It may also be a more attainable goal. A con of a fixed baseline is that is a less ambitious goal and could make the effort look better than it really is.

5. How might Yale's scheme have differed if its policy objective were about immediate, guaranteed emissions reductions, instead of behavior change?

A focus on guaranteed emissions reductions may be successful in the immediate future but not necessarily involve the behavioral, institutional, and infrastructural changes needed to ensure that reductions can be sustained over the long term. In theory, carbon pricing schemes with the objective of behavior change can also help institutions anticipate GHG emissions reductions, rather than attempt to change in response to new government-imposed regulations. One justification identified by the Yale Carbon Charge Case for internal, voluntary carbon pricing is that decision makers can internalize the cost of carbon emissions and thereby support a shift to low-carbon practices. Additionally, the carbon change scheme allowed for greater opportunities for collaboration, education, and research than might otherwise have occurred with a top-down guaranteed reductions approach--something which the university suggested was where Yale could have the greatest impact.

On the other hand, behavioral change can be time intensive and not guaranteed--if business as usual resumes when financial incentives are withdrawn, the focus on behavioral change may have diverted attention away from the immediate changes needed. In the case of Yale’s scheme, rather than aiming to achieve the most emissions reductions by targeting low-hanging fruit or the biggest energy users, the university sought to test a diverse set of buildings as part of their commitment to generating knowledge about a carbon charge. In this regard, the objective to understand behavior change clearly meant that maximizing immediate gains was not pursued.

6. What are the drivers behind emissions reductions across the pilot units? How can Yale better structure its approach to determine this? Could the results from the Yale's carbon charge pilot show a false positive?

There were 20 pilot units for Yale’s carbon charge project distributed between four carbon pricing schemes. First, the drivers behind the “redistribution scheme” pilot unit were primarily centered on competition between buildings. For Kroon Hall, which was in the “redistribution scheme”, the case study identified the enthusiasm and research efforts of students, rather than economic incentives, as important drivers in the project. Similarly collaboration and stakeholder engagement were critical factors. Second, the “target scheme” had a 1% below baseline target universally applied to all buildings. In this scheme, performance is measured internally, compared to a fixed target--in contrast to the external competition which drove emissions reductions in the first scheme. Third, the “investment scheme” relied on units receiving revenue to invest in energy efficiency in a self-guided, decentralized way, rather than through external university policies. Fourth, the “information scheme” provided units with a monthly building energy report but with no financial consequences. In this case, the ability for information alone to be a driver of emissions reductions was measured. While information had impact for the Gilder Boathouse, ultimately this alone was deemed insufficient overall.

Yale may be able to better structure its approach to determine the drivers of this through enhanced information and data collection, broader implementation of the second phase of the pilot, and incorporation of the carbon charge into budgeting. Some areas for potential ‘false positives’ may also be found in the carbon charge project. For example, in the case of the “redistribution scheme” the results may show a false positive because while the pilot itself could be successful, it can allow for increasing university emissions since efforts are measured comparatively and there is no ultimate cap on emissions. Additionally, in the case of the “target scheme” emissions reduction, success depends on setting an appropriate target--if the target is too easily achieved, the scheme may appear successful but result in fewer reductions than is actually possible.

[fes614b-blog]

Week 7 Reading Responses

Group: Shannon Dulaney, Emma Greenbaum, Jeremy Hunt, Diego Manya

Q1: 1. What are the key differences between a sustainability master plan and a climate action plan? Are there benefits or disadvantages between the plans?

A sustainability master plan is a common framework implemented by governments/institutions/organizations to improve the social equity, environmental, and economic conditions in their authority. Sustainability plans tie together a community’s goals, strategies, implementation plans, and metrics for improving sustainability for both current and future generations.

A climate action plan focuses primarily on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions resulting from both the local government’s operations and from the community as a whole. Climate action plans typically include an analysis of the opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from energy use in transportation, solid waste disposal, buildings, lighting, and waste water treatment and water delivery.

A sustainability plan can be considered a climate action plan with a broader, more holistic view on community sustainability. A climate action plan often addresses the co-benefits of its initiatives, such as improving air quality and public health or reducing stormwater runoff. However, a climate action plan does not explicate these other issues as thoroughly as a sustainability plan. Sustainability master plans address a wider range of issues and tie them together, whereas climate action plans focus on reducing greenhouse gas reductions. Sustainability master plans are more advantageous because they apply a more community-centric focus and seek to address social equity, economic, and environmental issues in a systematic method which will include more community engagement and broader community co-benefits. One of the key benefits of sustainability master plan is the integration of the sectors and forces the community to scrutinize options and avoid linear solutions, given that equity, economic, and environmental interests are all tied together. Sustainability master plans also weigh the present impacts on communities and set better precedents for continuity of plan initiatives than climate action plans.

Q2: In your assessment, what plan is stronger, the Yale Sustainability Plan or the UCSF Climate Action Plan. In your response provide several key examples.

Overall, is difficult to assess which plan is stronger given the different final objectives that they pursue: Integration of sustainability in university practices for the Yale Sustainability Plan (YSP) and GHG emission reduction / neutrality for the UCSF Climate Action Plan (UCSF - CAP); however, there are some significant differences in some key aspects that in my opinion gives the UCSF-CAP more strength and coherence than the YSP.

In relation to the Climate Change Component, the UCSF-CAP is much more detailed in terms of previous data and the baseline information, and provides specific levels of reduction that are much more stringent, “Reduce campus emissions by 1990 levels by 2020’, than the ones provided than by YSP (By 2020, reduce emission to 43% below 2005). However, UCSF-CAP does not incorporate specific information about a concrete measurement of Scope emissions, something that YSP does. Overall, given the ambition of the plan to reduce emission to levels below 1990, the UCSF-CAP could be considered stronger.

Another difference is related to the explicit targets that the YSP has included in terms of developing several instruments: Sustainable Transportation Framework (STF), Strategy for “pay as you throw”, standards for packaging, landscape management standards, Yale Bike/Walk Strategy and so on. Taken as whole, these documents suggest that explicit improvement will be postponed until the completion of these plans including baseline, which will be in 2019. On the other hand, the UCSF-CAP proposes more specific measures to address with some particular issues around GHG reduction, ranging transportation initiatives, waste management, air travel reduction measures, food services and so on. These initiatives in many cases have included specific targets such as: Procuring 20% of sustainable food products by 2020, or achieving 05 non-recycle waste by 2020. In this regard, the UCSF-CAP provides a more established set of initiatives, based in previous data and numeric targets for different issues that will in the end achieve their end goal of GHG reduction.

Finally, the UCSF-CAP provides more integration to local and state legislation than the YSP. While this might be related to the specific legal conditions that the state of California has in terms of GHG emissions and reduction, it is particularly important for these initiatives to be linked to larger initiatives and goals in the region. In that sense, while the YSP might not be rooted in local regulation, it will be important to connect future plans to local initiatives, so synergies with the city of New Haven can be achieved.

Q3: How does the Yale Carbon Charge relate to the Yale Sustainability Plan? Are they integrated well? Provide key examples.

The Yale Carbon Charge (YCC) seeks to reduce carbon emissions associated with campus buildings’ energy use by adopting an internal price on carbon, $40 per ton of CO2 equivalent (the social cost of carbon). The YCC conducted an initial pilot program in the 2015-2016 academic year to compare how participating buildings responded to a carbon price under one of four different schemes: redistribution, target, investment, and information. Based on the program’s initial results, a second phase of the pilot is now underway.

This effort is clearly linked to two ambitions in the Yale Sustainability Plan (YSP): Climate Action (Ambition 4), and Built Environment (Ambition 6). With the goal to “by 2020, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below 2005 levels,” and to “by 2019, develop a strategy to achieve carbon neutrality by or before 2050,” the YSP has set “aspirational but achievable” goals for the university. Improving the energy efficiency of buildings, as the YCC seeks to do, will be a crucial part of meeting these goals.

However, neither the YSP nor the case study on the YCC references the other. This raises the question as to how closely the two teams are working together, and how the findings of the YCC pilot program will feed into the development of the long-term carbon neutrality strategy.

Q4: What are the pros and cons of fixed versus rolling baselines? Yale is currently using rolling baselines, i.e. moving forward from one year to the next. For example, if a baseline is the average of the previous three years, in 2017 it will be 2014-2016, and in 2018 it will be 2015-2017. An alternative is to employ fixed baselines. For example, imagine if Yale decides to always compare units to 2005, year after year.

As discussed in “From budgets to boilers: Yale University’s experiment in internal carbon pricing,” there are clear trade-offs when choosing fixed versus rolling baselines. While fixed baselines provide a clear target to strive for, they may result in unintended and unwanted consequences.

The Yale Carbon Charge (YCC) pilot program used an average of the prior three fiscal years (FY 2013-2015), which not only allowed for “a degree of control over weather and annual programmatic changes that influence energy use,” but, if adopted campus-wide, would enable “long-term growth, not penalizing units for bringing in new faculty with energy intensive equipment or adding new students.” Still, this use of rolling baseline would mean that every few years the benefits would be “washed out” when the baseline is reset.

This is one of the inconsistencies between the Yale Sustainability Plan (YSP) and YCC. As set in 2005 and reaffirmed in the YSP, Yale has an overall goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2020, compared to 2005 levels. If a carbon charge program is implemented campus-wide, this inconsistency will need to be addressed in order to ensure that climate action-related policies and programs are aligned.

Q5: How might Yale's scheme have differed if its policy objective were about immediate, guaranteed emissions reductions, instead of behavior change?

Had the goal of the carbon charge scheme been guaranteed emissions reductions, efforts would have first focused on the largest energy users and the ‘lowest hanging fruit’ for energy efficiency initiatives. The carbon charge scheme would allow for selecting administrations with a more varied set of energy needs, and would encourage longer-term decision making toward decreased energy use. An immediate emissions reduction mandate may have created less incentive for long-term capital investments into energy efficient upgrades or new construction. Additionally, Yale had several other intended roles aside from emissions reductions. The Task Force saw the carbon charge as a place where scholarship and practice could be mutually reinforced, as Yale would serve as a testing ground for more broadly applicable market and behavioral carbon schemes.

Q6: What are the drivers behind emissions reductions across the pilot units? How can Yale better structure its approach to determine this? Could the results from the Yale's carbon charge pilot show a false positive?

In the evaluation, respondents showed there were three main drivers motivating behavioral change to reduce emissions:

Net financial incentive: rebate

Personal moral responsibility

Energy report and price signal directing attention to emissions

As is evidenced by these responses, the price signal and rebate is only one component of the behavioral change, yet the program is structured entirely around these two drivers. Yale would be better able to pin point successes by taking into account the types of initiatives in place prior to the program, evaluating the motivations of key players before hand, and evaluating their change in behavior afterward.

Results from the carbon charge could show a false positive as each institution is charged and refunded based on their performance relative to the average change in emissions across the pilot entities. Because there is no definitive cap on overall emissions, if emissions across the campus are growing rapidly, even the smallest reduction in emissions for a particular entity could present as a success yielding returns from the carbon charge scheme.