Asking the question of (and getting the answer): "How 'green' is Nashville? For now, no one really knows." In this article, the focus is on how Nashville's green programs are doing, in particular focusing on reducing carbon emissions as the gauge of the rest of the programs:
As The City Paper discovered, Metro hasn't exactly been keeping a close eye on how its "green" programs are actually affecting carbon emissions — at least not up to this point.
The report, titled "Together Making Nashville Green," is the keystone document, containing 16 goals and 71 recommendations for the city's environmental programs. Likewise, it essentially became Bowles' professional mission statement when, last year, Dean created the office of Environment and Sustainability and hired him as its director.
Earlier in 2009, Metro government took an extensive inventory of the city's GHG emissions, establishing a 2005 baseline of approximately 650,000 CO2 equivalent tons of annual municipal government output (representing, it's worth noting, just 4.5 percent of the 14.4 million tons the entire community emits). The largest contributing factor, at 44 percent, was energy usage at Metro-owned buildings, followed by its vehicle fleet and Metro employees commuting to work, both at 15 percent.
In January 2008, Dean signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection agreement, which, among other things, theoretically obligated his administration to lower municipal emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels. The 2009 inventory estimated those came to 460,000 tons per year, meaning that goal would have been 428,000 tons per year by 2012. But the GRC let the mayor off the hook on that point. Their stated goal was not a reduction from the 2005 baseline, but rather to stabilize at the 2005 level by 2012.
According to the inventory, yearly increases were averaging about 1.3 percent, so Metro should expect to have curbed its anticipated increases by about 5 percent in 2009, the year the inventory was taken. To hit the 2005 baseline, 2012 emissions should be 9.4 percent (61,000 tons) below what they would have been if nothing were done.
It's a solid numerical goal, and Metro government has seemingly taken great strides in getting there: requiring that all new Metro buildings obtain LEED certification, making an effort to phase in energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs for Metro facilities, adding a free downtown bus service, reducing the size of Metro's fleet and adding energy efficient vehicles to it, initiating a no-idling policy for Metro employees, installing geothermal energy systems and solar panels to Metro Development and Housing Agency buildings, and many more. Nearly all of them take reducing greenhouse gas emissions into account.
Bowles couldn't say. At all. With just one year to go before its target date, he said, Metro government hasn't been monitoring its greenhouse reductions, and beyond that, there isn't even a ballpark estimate of how much any of its already-enacted programs ought to have reduced GHG emissions.
The lack of incremental progress updates suggests that, novel-length list of accomplishments aside, Metro government has no true sense of whether it has enacted the right programs to meet that reduction goal in the most expedient way.
"So I'm not surprised that Metro hasn't yet done another inventory. That's fairly common. A city will only do one at best every year, more often every couple of years," he said. "I am pretty surprised that they haven't made those estimates."
Although the article doesn't bring many good tidings on the progress as to carbon emissions inventory, it does bring some good news as to transportation issues:
On Jan. 27, the Metropolitan Transit Authority announced it had made the very ambitious move of taking a $1.18 million federal grant, plus $437,000 from its own funds, to pay New York City-based consulting firm Parsons Brinckerhoff to conduct a transportation study of Broadway and West End. According to the MTA news release, "The study will identify the transit needs of the corridor and examine all feasible high-capacity transit options such as Urban Street Car, Light Rail Transit or Bus Rapid Transit that could be implemented to meet those needs."
A new rail or BRT line would also, of course, be a boon for Dean's three-year-old environmental initiative. Chris Bowles, director of the Mayor's Office on Environment and Sustainability, held back on saying whether he, in his official capacity, was hoping for a build recommendation from the study. But he certainly sees the very existence of the study as a positive sign.
Let's hope for a street car or light rail, instead of a BRT line that would hardly have a dedicated roadway to make it truly helpful in the West End area.
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