Houston as a Model City: Meeting the challenges of an environmental crisis
Global Warming, Impacting today's urgent issues
by Vicki Wolf, March 2006

Global warming and health issues related to living in a fossil-fueled car-based city are the most urgent issues facing the community today, according to experts working to solve health and environmental problems in Houston. The health issues are most acute and severely impact quality of life and safety. The global warming issues, directly related to fossil fuel use, have longer term and greater consequences. More importantly, global warming issues are of such size that, like acute health-related issues, they demand action now so that we can start the solutions process. Fortunately, both kinds of issues can be effectively addressed by citizens taking action now. People tend to underestimate the importance of their own actions and become immobile when they think a problem is out of their control. “Here we are, each in our individual actions causing the problem, and yet we don’t think we can each in our individual actions change it,” says Karl Rábago, Energy and Buildings Solutions group director with the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), “We have to change that mindset.”

A higher quality of life for more people now and for future generations is possible if we reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption beginning today. It can be as simple as screwing in the right kind of light bulb, according to Rives Taylor, research scientist with HARC’s Energy and Buildings Solutions group and sustainability leader for Gensler Architecture. “Incandescent light bulbs are 90 percent heaters and 10 percent light,” Taylor says. “They don’t last long, they are not energy efficient and they heat up space, which increases the need for air conditioning.”

Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) last longer, use 50-80 percent less energy than incandescent light bulbs, and they are safer because they are cool. If every household in the United States replaced one light bulb with a CFL, it would prevent as much pollution as taking one million cars off the road.

Switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs is just one of the things all households and businesses can do today to impact the climate change crisis. Taking advantage of daylight rather than turning on electric lights during the day, using innovative lower-energy consuming systems for heating and cooling, recycling, driving less, reducing and eliminating the use of plastics all can make a difference (see “What we can do today”).

To make changes needed immediately requires strong and effective leadership with a clear agenda that addresses critical environmental and health issues. “When it comes to buildings and other permanent structures, our political and academic leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to address the environment for the common good,” says Brian Yeoman, HARC senior research scientist and director of Education and Development for the National Association of Educational Buyers (NAEB). “They can set the example for Houston’s captains of industry by leading their organizations to a dramatic reduction in their carbon footprint. Together these leaders could mobilize organizations with broad reach, including the Greater Houston Partnership, the Association of General Contractors, the Building Owners and Managers Association and the Greater Houston Home Builders into taking definitive measurable steps to reduce their carbon footprint.” Yeoman adds that Houston needs to begin with environmental and quality-of-life indicators to measure where it is and where it is going. He says, “It is not environment, environment, environment, but rather environment, economy and society – successful strategies win in all three categories at the same time.”

Education starts the shift needed for positive change. Consumers can take the lead when information about sustainable choices is available. “If consumers change, businesses listen, then government folks say it makes sense,” says Taylor. “Often it takes two approaches – we have to get leaders to let consumers know about choices and consequences of the decisions we make.”

“The meaning of your message is the response you receive,” Rábago says. The fact that most people are not taking this environmental crisis seriously and changing behaviors is an indication that the message from leaders is not being taken seriously.

“I applaud Mayor White for putting some of these issues on the table. On electricity service, his campaign to make customers aware of choices is an essential step,” Rábago says. “With problems as big as global warming pollution and rising energy costs, no one can afford to ignore their energy usage.”

Leaders need to encourage citizens to do what they can do now instead of waiting for measurements and studies to document that conditions are bad enough to need changing. “The mentality that we need to measure before we can do anything about it is a copout,” says Winfred Hamilton, Environmental Section director for Baylor College of Medicine. “There are things each of us can do to reduce our ecological footprint. Government could get involved with incentives,” Hamilton says. For example, parking should be expensive and citizens should have some way to keep environmentally unfriendly businesses out of their community.

Hamilton reports that recently a CVS Pharmacy came in with large parking lots to an area recently revitalized and reclaimed to be pedestrian. “Now there is a very hot, polluting car-filled parking lot and a store front that does not match the aesthetics of the community – it’s almost demoralizing,” Hamilton says. “We have no tools to stop this from happening except begging,” she adds.

“The whole sense of creating a green Houston would be a walkable Houston, with systems that connect people and places.” Hamilton says being more pedestrian-friendly would help clean up the environment and reduce the carbon footprint. A walkable Houston would encourage integrating physical activity into daily life and a sense of community. “I don’t see how we can create a livable Houston when it’s divided by 24 lanes of freeway,” Hamilton says. “We can’t develop a sense of community when we drive two hours, isolated in our cars, to get to a place that might be more green and quiet.”

“Houston could be a model city in lots of ways,” Hamilton says. “We have one of the most ecologically interesting areas in the world with beautiful bayou systems, next to the gulf, at the divide with the Big Thicket. Anything will grow here despite our pollution,” she adds. “We could be the green energy capital of the world, selling ideas and technology and a showcase for application.”

For long-term improvement of the environment and for sustainability Taylor says, “Houston needs to implement mass transit, encourage density of development while saving green spaces, and address the diseases that our lifestyles and man-made environment are creating. The toxic pollution created by producing the materials that are part of the man-made environment must also be addressed.”

“We have the tools to fix the problems and to save future generations from the worst consequences,” Rábago says. “After all, sustainability is simply living and working as if you really do believe there will be a tomorrow.”

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