Mayor Daley has so carefully cultivated his ecofriendly image—he’s the rust-belt mayor who installed a garden atop City Hall!—that not even his critics question his commitment to going green. But maybe they should.
With Green Metropolis, Owen, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is intent on bringing us back to earth and all its ecological troubles. And he particularly wants to give us a close look at New York City, which he argues (sorry, Mayor Daley) is the greenest burg in the U.S.
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The suburbs, of course, are an easy target. But Owen takes on some liberal pets, too, including many revered by Mayor Daley and other urban greenies. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program has become a popular measure of sustainability in architecture; Mayor Daley’s Chicago Standard requires that new municipal buildings attain LEED certification, and just last month Chicago made headlines for having more LEED-certified structures than any other city. Owen maintains that the program is not only deeply flawed but counterproductive, “not a comprehensive, objective assessment of true environmental impact but, rather, a values-laden incentive system that encourages projects which adhere to a very particular view of the environment and, especially, to a very particular view of high-end real estate development.”
But it’s about as practical to suggest a sudden and complete switch to hybrid cars as it is to suggest we raze the suburbs. After the unambiguous recognition that climate change is the critical environmental issue of our time, what’s required is sound public policy that provides incentives for decisions—both individual and collective—that are sustainable, and disincentives for those that aren’t. In other words, we need a way to ensure that the costs of emitting greenhouse gases, and the benefits of avoiding them, are worked securely into our economic system. The most comprehensive, viable ideas advanced so far are in the cap-and-trade concept, in which businesses buy and sell limited rights to emit, and the carbon tax. Most environmentalists and economists favor cap-and-trade, since it places firmer boundaries on emissions and lets the marketplace determine the price we pay for doing the wrong thing. The U.S. House has already passed a cap-and-trade bill, and the Senate is expected to take it up sometime in the next year.
Thu 10/1, 6 PM, Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan, 312-922-3432, ext. 271, architecture.org, $5-$15, registration requested.
