Hope to see you there!

Earlier this week I chanced upon the walkscore website, which ranks the walkability of hundreds of United States neighborhoods by calculating the average distances between homes and basic services to determine their ease of accessibility to people on foot. From the site:

Picture a walkable neighborhood. You lose weight each time you walk to the grocery store. You stumble home from last call without waiting for a cab. You spend less money on your car—or you don’t own a car. When you shop, you support your local economy. You talk to your neighbors.

What makes a neighborhood walkable?

• A center: Walkable neighborhoods have a discernable center, whether it’s a shopping district, a main street, or a public space.
• Density: The neighborhood is compact enough for local businesses to flourish and for public transportation to run frequently.
• Mixed income, mixed use: Housing is provided for everyone who works in the neighborhood: young and old, singles and families, rich and poor. Businesses and residences are located near each other.
• Parks and public space: There are plenty of public places to gather and play.
• Pedestrian-centric design: Buildings are placed close to the street to cater to foot traffic, with parking lots relegated to the back.
• Nearby schools and workplaces: Schools and workplaces are close enough that most residents can walk from their homes.

Streets Designed for Everyone

Complete Streets are roads are designed for everyone who uses them, including bicyclists, pedestrians of all ages and abilities, and people getting on and off transit vehicles. These streets are:

• Accessible: There are wheelchair ramps, plenty of benches with shade, sidewalks on all streets, etc.
• Well-connected: Streets form a connected grid that improves traffic by providing many routes to any destination.
• Built for the right speed: Lanes are narrow or traffic calming is in place to control speed.
• Comfortable: Pedestrian medians at intersections, count-down crosswalk timers, bicycle lanes, protected bus shelters, etc. make the street work better for those outside of a car.

It’s a beautifully simple concept, and one that’s at the heart of current land use planning and public health efforts. In our car-centered culture, “walkability” has become an elusive (and so desirable and increasingly marketable) quality. It’s something our ancestors took for granted: ready, car-free access to life’s amenities, with an intangible boost to quality of life (related to exercise, knowing your neighbors and the makings of a desirable “place”)  thrown in.

As detailed in many recent studies, many of the same land use principles that support environmental health also often support improved public health. Some of the greatest public health challenges of our time  - obesity and respiratory illness - have been traced to inactivity and poor diet, which, in turn, appear to result from living and working in places that are car-centered and do not encourage (or actively discourage) individual physical activity and healthy food choices. It is hard to log 10,000 steps per day on a pedometer if you spend all your spare time driving to and from work, school and a big box shopping center. Walkable neighborhoods improve the well-being of those who live in them by reducing the circumstances that lead to  problems like obesity and respiratory illness.

The environmental benefits of  “smart growth” practices include improved air quality, reduced carbon emissions,  and a reduced physical development “footprint” that encourages people to leave behind suburban sprawl and car travel. Further benefits to wildlife habitat and water quality result from the creation of regional parks and trail systems that reduce impermeable surfaces and provide adequate space for natural areas and catchment/filtration of stormwater runoff. Those regional parks are more affordable to developers when residential lots are more densely placed.

Local governments and public health officials are beginning to understand that land use planning tools can solve two problems at once by reducing environmental  ills and improving public health. The Congress for New Urbanism (which will hold its annual conference in Denver in 2009) has long advocated for this model -  looking to patterns of pre-industrial European cities, and older US “streetcar” neighborhoods for inspiration. A New Yorker magazine article several years ago described New York City as the Greenest City in America because of the qualities that make it hard to drive there: it is densely developed, transit-oriented, and “mixed-use” (combining residential, commercial and retail uses in the same area) an idea that fell out of favor in many mid-century U.S. zoning codes .

The fact that “sustainability” and public health professionals have reached the same conclusions about desirable land use types is helping to produce new coalitions, as both groups seek to influence local zoning, planning and economic development guidelines. The “Healthy Communities” movement of the 1990s, forged in part by hospitals working with community leaders, is increasingly moving toward creating healthy places, or “livable communities“ and that has public policy makers trying to understand how to measure the extent to which gross-level land use decisions can or should be driven by public health goals and indicators.

Examples in Colorado include:

The redevelopment of the 4700 acre former Stapleton Airport site was the Denver region’s first major “new urbanist” project in the mid-1990s to explicitly emphasize sustainable development principles in its master plan. It was the first major project in Denver to embrace the now-common goal of “urban villages”, with dense multi-use development augmented by ready access to transit and large and plentiful regional parks and trails. Once Stapleton redevelopment was underway, its potential to support improved public health attracted funding by the national Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and others to bolster programs for active living, including incentives and information to encourage transit use, biking and walking.

The Denver Safe Routes to School and national walking school bus efforts seek to get kids walking and biking to school together.

The  Metro Denver Health and Wellness Coalition seeks to make the Denver region the healthiest in the country through a combined approach, including an emphasis on locally produced food in schools, and increased urban mobility.

Humana recently provided major sponsorship for the Freewheelin bicycle kiosks at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN.

And, last but not least, Kaiser Permanente is partnering withThe Colorado Health Foundation and The Colorado Physical Activity and Nutrition (COPAN) Program to sponsor LiveWell Colorado - a statewide effort to increase public nutrition, mobility and fitness in the interest of public health.

So far, the land use-public health connection with all of these programs is more implicit than explicit.

Some questions raised:

• Does walkability translate into higher real estate values, all else being held equal?
• Are suburbs bad for your health?
• Is just living in a well-designed community enough to change your lifestyle?
• Does it help to live in a pedestrian friendly community if you must commute by car to your job every day?
• How much social engineering are we willing to support, or will the market be sufficient to drive the land use changes sought by environmental and public health advocates?

I welcome your comments!

A quick recap of some end of week highlights:

Wednesday 8/27: the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado hosted 3 days of panels in its Big Tent (sponsored by Google and Digg). The most interesting to me was T. Boone Pickens, with former Clinton Chief of Staff (and Center for American Progress president and CEO) John Podesta, and Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope on a panel to discuss the audacious Pickens Plan to build the largest wind farm in the world in Texas - spending an estimated $12 billion to create a 12,000 megawatt facility that he estimates will save the U.S. a net $300 million per year in energy imports. If you’ve spent anytime watching prime time television in the last month, you’ve seen his ads.

T. Boone Pickens describes his plan to save us from ourselves

Pope commented early in the panel that If our politics were working, anything that Boone, Podesta and Pope agree to would have gotten done long ago. The 80-year old oil and gas man from Texas did not disappoint. A study of contradictions, T. Boone Pickens described his lack of profit interest in the effort, and the $700 million donated to charity in recent years, while staff handed out fliers for his book (The First Billion is the Hardest, Crown, 2008). The principal funder behind the “swift boat” ads against John Kerry in 2004 also insisted that he intended to keep this work nonpartisan, and insisted he didn’t have a horse in the race in 2008. His stated goal: to engage enough supporters (1 million) for his plan that a bipartisan group of lawmakers will help make it possible by:

- Establishing rights of way for transmission of renewable energy

- Extending renewable energy production tax credits, and

- Providing incentives for alternative fuel vehicles.

Pickens opined that “a fool with a plan will beat a genius with no plan” and described the opportunities for thousands of new green collar jobs in the development of wind and solar corridors (from Texas to Canada, and Texas to California, respectively - note that all roads begin in Texas). He pointed out that we are now importing almost 70% of our oil (which is 25% of the world’s supply, for the U.S., which has 4% of its population), which he estimated (with a famous track record) will cost us $700 billion/yr 10 years from now under a ‘business as usual” scenario – or close to $10 trillion for foreign oil over that period of time. This constitutes, he continued, the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, with nothing left for health care or education. The second significant step advocated by Pickens is to convert to “the only fuel we have to replace foreign oil” and use natural gas to reduce imports by 50% in 10 years.

Thursday and Friday 8/28-29: Stood in line for hours for two tapings of The Daily Show at Denver University’s Newman Center. Watched the Obama acceptance speech from the Wazee Supper Club in downtown Denver where they’d stuck a big sheet up on the wall in addition to dozen TVs. Could have heard a pin drop, then everyone started cheering. The Google-Vanity Fair party brought coastal opulence and glamour to Denver’s warehouse district (people arrived and departed on shuttle buses in 15-20 person waves), complete with red carpet, top tier national politicians and Chevy Chase (go figure).

On Friday the city exhaled and celebrated its successful hosting stint.

As for the green legacy? So far, it’s subtle - reflected in new green offerings by hotels, restaurants, caterers and event staff, in the 30+ bikes left behind by Freewheelin for the city’s nascient bike share program, and the general buzz generated by the Zero Hero bins (”Why are all those people standing there?” one friend asked me about the volunteer waste sorters) and the various symposia held the week of the DNC. Many people who biked for convenience to avoid the traffic of the DNC are still on their bikes this week. As a city that wants to be liked, we take our cues from the national media, and there seems to be some pride in having carried off the greenest DNC ever that with luck will carry through into private and public events and decisions in the future.

Next up?

A friend sent this account from the Alliance Center office building next to the Big Tent:

If you haven’t already,  visit the NYTimes website and look at today’s videos near the middle of the page, then select the video titled the Carpetbagger at the Convention. You’ll see the tent next to our building and then. . . wait for it!. . . he goes inside to speak w/ Ariana Huffington- in suite 307! I’ve never been so proud of that unassuming space. Poise and grace infuse every panel of the recycled, non-toxic, carpet squares affixed w/ vegetable-based mastic. Watch the clip. . .

Based on a my junket yesterday afternoon, it’s madness. The building is absolutely full of people, boxes, assorted crap, and the third floor smells like an Aveda salon took over an Indian restaurant. Who knew lentils could be used for aromatherapy? All the back ground noise you hear in the video is authentic; it might be the press interviewing Daryl Hannah whom I stopped to watch only briefly and yes, she is tall. Between us, she went a little heavy on the bronzing lotion but bless her heart, she departed in dramatic and thematic fashion by riding in the back of a bicycle rickshaw. The whole thing felt like a National Lampoon movie set. I emerged from the stairwell on the third floor and the first person to look at me and not acknowledge me was some swami in all white, from turban to toe. Next I held the door for Lenny Kravitz- I swear it was him but it probably wasn’t. There were a couple earnest tenants who were still trying to work in their offices.  And there must have been about 25 20-somethings, all under 5’2” who seemed to be taking their responsibilities very seriously. I’m not sure what their jobs were but I was almost trampled by a stampede of nearly-dwarfs. I saw Ariana Huffington from a distance. I tried to call out but froze when the phalanx of nearly-dwarfs reappeared. Maybe I’ll make another foray tomorrow afternoon but I’ll need to hear what my therapist says about returning so soon.

Also yesterday, a sort of moveable feast of political street theater was everywhere to be seen in lower downtown. In addition to the MSNBC donkeys and elephants on segways, I saw a band of about 10 women dressed up in red white and blue bikinis, looking like a bunch of slightly over the hill Texan cheerleaders, waving a  giant reversable Bush/McCain head, until you noticed the silver, er, accessories they had strapped around their waists.

Back at the lemonade stand, a giant Ostrich puppet appeared and took shameless advantage of the kids’ youthful enthusiasm (and press appeal) by having them chant things about the republican candidate’s head in the sand.

Ostrich chanting

Later, I attended an event for Democratic Mayors at the old Denver Dry Tea Room where, after watching Hillary Clinton’s speech on a large screen TV, guests sampled cuisines of the nation’s cities. There were real Philadelphia Cheesesteaks (and real cheesesteak guys!), Italian/ Portuguese food from Providence, amazing fresh tomatoes and crab from San Francisco, cheesecake from Chicago, Bison from Denver and a whole table of Washington wines and salmon from Seattle.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin with Denver's own Mayor John Hickenlooper

Through it all, the city is functioning, it is not impossible to drive if you know how to get around  (though it is much slower) and in general it all seems to work relatively well. The FREE BIKES at the Freewheelin stations set up all over downtown are being well used (1200 rides the first day and more the second) and New Belgium Brewing Company is providing cool cruiser bikes for the blogging crowd at the Big Tent. Freewheeling folks even helped me make some small repairs to my own heavily used bike when they noticed my tire pressure was low and my chain was squeaking.

SF Mayor Gavin Newsom

On Thursday the city will literally stand still for history. Interstate 25 will  be closed for several hours in the afternoon for security at the football stadium, throngs will descend on the venue midday and Bruce Springsteen will play directly after Obama’s speech there. The Google-Vanity Fair party is the hot ticket tomorrow night, though there are doubtless a dozen others as well. With luck, I’ll be sitting in the audience of The Daily Show, one of the best ways to make sense (and humor) from the madness of it all.

Freewheeling bikes

From my vantage on the hill just north of downtown life has not changed much. I still walk into downtown and can easily move to and from my office by car or bike. But, once downtown, there are throngs. Free bicycle stations everywhere. MSNBC taping live on a screened in stage behind Union Station, the Big Tent on Wynkoop Street  hosting a variety of Digg forums with activists and celebrities (and celebrity activists). Free smoothies from Google. Pedicabs  doing a brisk business and giant donkeys and elephants patrolling the streets on segways. Parties everywhere, all night long.

Given the giant carnival it is,  it was appropriate that the first official event took place at Elitch Gardens - Denver’s major amusement park. 15,000 journalists, DNCC staff  and Denver Host Committee members strolled the midway, rode the rides, won giant stuffed animals, watched fireworks and danced to Denver’s own Flobots and the Railbenders. Governor Ritter, Mayor Hickenlooper and Senator Ken Salazar opened the festivities (after being briefly stranded after dinner when their official convention Tahoe hybrid wouldn’t start (!)). The Denver Newspaper Agency sponsored the event, as an historic tribute to the 1908 Denver Democratic Convention, when the media first partied at Elitch’s. Green Teams were out in significant numbers with Zero Hero trash sorters, composting all the corn-based cups, plates and utensils and trying to send as little as possible to the dump.

Elitch's Media event

Green Sunday featured the Green Frontier Fest at the Denver Performing Arts Complex (including a giant wind turbine blade, courtesy of Belgian wind giant Vestas, which is now creating green jobs in Colorado), as well as Green Sunday at Red Rocks.

green sunday

The genesis of this concert was in Laurie David’s spring 2007 visit to Denver, when she drew about 3000 people to the Convention Center for a conversation about global warming (spawning a number of related initiatives by inspired listeners, including the Denver bag ban proposal and a group that makes tote bags from recycled clothing). Laurie and the Mayor (with me standing by), discussed the potential of the DNC to increase awareness about climate, and imagined a great concert….15 months later, Sheryl Crown, Dave Matthews, Sugarland, Robert Kennedy Jr., Van Jones and several others came together and played to a full house at Red Rocks.

On Monday the convention was underway.The Big Tent on Wynkoop Street downtown was full of bloggers, speakers and audiences,

the streets of downtown were filled with conventioneers, the protesters got busy, and there were many police everywhere. I lucked into a ticket to be inside the Pepsi Center on Monday evening to watch the Mayor welcome the crowd, and see Senators Nancy Pelosi & Claire McCaskill, Caroline and Ted Kennedy (a remarkable performance coming as he was direct from a hospital bed) and, finally, Michelle Obama, who was nothing short of pure inspiration.

Unlike reports of Boston in 2004, this convention is surely proving to be a boon to Denver business. The hotels and restaurants are full, and until 3:00 everyday, most delegates and journalists are free to wander by foot or free bicycle and spend freely. The weather’s been good. You can’t walk a block without passing a button or t-shirt vendor (not unusual in New York City but virtually never seen here).

MSNBC live stage

Google Juice at the Big Tent

But next week the Democratic National Convention comes to Denver, and it’s impossible not to get caught up in the transformation in the city as it prepares for 30,000 guests, and the wild proliferation of “green” events and opportunities related to this historic event. Ariana Huffington is setting up shop in my husband’s office downtown, with a yoga and wellness center. CNN is just down the street and Jon Stewart’s got a live studio across town at Denver University. Friends I haven’t seen since college or graduate school, who have since become prominent journalists and political operatives are calling out of the blue, looking for lodging and local contacts. Local artists have produced cool locally oriented convention pins. There will be parties, speeches, film festivals, meditation gatherings, protests and art events, and there is a palpable buzz and excitement in the central city everywhere you go. And, in a shift of priorities not previously experienced in my lifetime, everyone is trying to “go green”.

From the luddite (wooden hotel keys) to the high tech (green frontier fest solar and wind energy demos), from the local (DNC caterer food sourcing specs) to the international (British scientist Sir Nicholas Stern speaking on climate change), the greening of the Denver convention has caught on and been adopted to a degree that was almost unimaginable in Boston in 2004. The efforts of Parry Burnap (Greening Director for the Mayor’s Office) and Andrea Robinson (DNCC Greening Chief), the Denver Host Committee, the Governor’s Energy Office, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, the Metro Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (which recently posted a carbon calculator and offset options on their website), the hotel and restaurant associations and others to numerous to mention, have been remarkable.

A few highlights:

• 1,000 bikes will be available to anyone who wants to avoid the downtown traffic crunch, from various stations throughout the city, courtesy of Boulder-based nonprofit Bikes Belong and Humana.
• The Green FrontierFest on at the Denver Performing Arts Complex on Sunday August 24 from 10-6 will feature exhibits, games, music and green living information, presided over by Mayor Hickenlooper, Governor Ritter and Daryl Hannah, among others.
• The Sustainable Living Roadshow BE THE CHANGE tour will park itself on the two square blocks in front of my office and feature a similar variety of eco-delights and inspirational speakers (including, rumor has it, Michelle Obama).
• As part of the Rocky Mountain Roundtable series, a sold-out all-day Energy and Climate Change Symposia on Tuesday 8/28/08 at the DCPA, featuring Senator Amy Klobuchar, NRDC president Frances Beinecke, Ira Magaziner, John Podesta and Sir Nicholas Stern, among many others.
• A special E-Town DNC concert at the Buell Theater on Tuesday 8/28, featuring James Taylor, Graham Nash and David Crosby and Ani DiFranco.

As for me, I plan to offer free 10-minute consultations to anyone who drops by my office to visit, see Jon Stewart Live at least once, enjoy Willie Nelson at the CH2MHill bash, and take my children around town to enjoy the spectacle, and walk and bike everywhere to avoid nightmare traffic.

While it’s true that green buildings sometimes cost more up front, the premium paid for related benefits is generally recouped through reduced energy bills and increased productivity in 2-4 years, after which the savings represent a significant net gain to owners and residents.

For this reason, there is strong and growing interest by both public and private sectors in the benefits of “green” affordable housing: units that are built in order to minimize monthly energy costs and maximize indoor air quality. Those who stand to benefit the most from reduced monthly energy bills are, of course those with the lowest monthly incomes. Energy efficiency measures thereby makes green housing more affordable, especially as energy costs rise.

a green and affordable home model from the New Orleans Holy Cross project

The additional up-front cost to build green represents the greatest barrier to low cost green housing, since the profit margin to build affordable housing is generally very narrow, and often depends on low interest loans and government support. Local governments and housing agencies are increasingly looking for ways to bridge the gap for housing developers, and to offer them permit relief, training, marketing and other benefits to incentivize green affordable housing.

According to californiagreensolutions.com, “a study published in the Appraisal Journal documented that the market value of a home increases $20 for every $1 decrease in the annual energy costs.”

A related goal for affordable housing is its location, or “transit-efficiency” - the degree to which low cost housing is convenient to public transportation and services - thereby providing benefit to both the resident (in terms of avoided transportation expenditure) and to the environment (in emissions avoided). The Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago was the first to suggest and develop a “transit-efficient mortgage” to acknowledge the income impacts of easy transit access - an option institutionalized by Fannie Mae as the Location Efficient Mortgage. While these products never gained widespread traction or acceptance by lenders, there is a new wave of financial instruments under development today, and local governments are increasingly requiring or incentivizing energy efficiency in publicly subsidized affordable housing and other building programs.

Brad Pitt has famously supported the development of new, green and affordable housing in the reconstruction of New Orleans, post Katrina, in partnership with the national nonprofit group Global Green, among others. Other areas with burgeoning green affordable housing programs include the cities of Seattle and Chicago.

So what’s happening locally? More and more, it seems. The recently completed Denver Housing Plan calls out the Green Communities standard from the national nonprofit Enterprise Communities as a new minimum for any city-supported housing development.

New Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) being built on current and future Denver region FasTracks light rail lines (including the Gates project, and 10th & Osage developments, among others) represent a great opportunity to include housing that is transit-efficient, green and affordable in the mix.

I was involved in commissioning early green building standards for the Stapleton Airport redevelopment back in 1997 (pre-LEED) at a time when builders complained that the market wouldn’t support such amenities. While those standards were never applied, the Master Developer, Forest City Stapleton, was one of the first real estate developers in the country to require that all housing meet certain green building standards. What began as a reluctant practice soon revealed a competitive advantage, resulting in builders attempting to “outgreen” each other for their environmentally conscious buyers. Today Stapleton requires that all housing be built to the Energy Star standard, thereby ensuring that a homebuyer on Stapleton will pay significantly lower energy bills per square foot than their counterpart in other parts of the city. It is worth noting, however, that affordable housing is not a large part of the Stapleton market.

A smaller but also exciting precedent was set recently with the opening of RiverClay Condominiums in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Denver, which are both green and affordable. Zocalo Development ensured that the project was certified by both the US Green Building Council’s LEED residential standard, and Energy Star. Seedco Financial Services in Denver helped to finance the project and hopes to identify and support more such projects in the future.

I believe that, in the not-too-distant future, all publicly supported housing (and most commercial housing as well) in all income brackets will include a high level of energy efficiency in design and construction. It just costs too much not to.

1. The City of San Francisco is once again on the bleeding edge of new environmental policy, and has instituted the first direct emissions-based “carbon tax” in the country. The City of Boulder passed its own carbon tax in 2006 on residential and commercial electrical use, the proceeds from which (about $800,000 per year) pay for programs to offset citywide emissions. The San Francisco law is the first to create a tax focused primarily on commercial/ industrial greenhouse gas emissions. From Environmental Leader:

“The San Francisco Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s board of directors voted overwhelmingly (15-1) to charge area companies 4.4 cents per ton of carbon dioxide they emit, a first for the U.S.,The Associated Press reports.

The new rules, which impose fees on businesses for emitting greenhouse gasses, are expected to generate $1.1 million in the first year to help pay for programs to measure the region’s emissions and develop ways to reduce them. They are set to take effect July 1.

Of the more than 2,500 businesses that will be required to pay the proposed fees, the biggest payers will be seven power plants and oil refineries that would have to pay more than $50,000 a year. The majority of businesses would pay less than $1, the district estimates.”

There’s additional interesting commentary on Steve Newcomb’s blog here.

2. The New York-based national environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has an innovative new resource available to businesses online, the Greening Advisor. It provides a useful basic overview of activities businesses can take to green their activities. It does not convey any particular marketing benefit or certification, but is a useful summary of the “universe” of greening actions applicable to many businesses.

3. GoogleEarth (a great free software application to try if you haven’t already) has, with help from the British government, added a climate layer that allows users to view global warming impacts over time. As reported in Google Earth Blog:

“Opening (the google climate file) will first show you an image overlay of the Earth which indicates temperature change over time from 1999 and forecasted through 2099. Use the time slider to watch the changes over time. Also in the file are placemarks with accounts from people around the world speaking about how climate change has effected them, as well as information from the Met Office about possible effects as temperatures continue to rise.”

4. Here in Denver things are gearing up for the Democratic National Convention, which was last hosted here in 1908! There is a great deal of excitement and anticipation, and wondering what the infusion of 35,000 delegates, reporters and hangers-on will mean for us as we go through our daily lives. The DNC greening effort is heating up (so to speak) and a small army of volunteers are organizing dozens of innovations in everything from bicycles available to all who want them (1,000 at last count) to carbon emissions calculations and offsets for the event, to training of hotels and restaurants in green business principles, and the use of green materials in building and operating the convention, to a full day of forums on Energy & Climate featuring major national policy and industry players. Now, if only we had a candidate….

Stay tuned for more news in the weeks to come.

Founded 11 years ago by former Senator and current United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth, the Wirth Award honors programs and people who have made a significant contribution to the state of the environment in Colorado and beyond. This year’s program focused on Pioneers in the New Energy Economy, and included awards to Auden Schendler, Environment Director for the Aspen Skiing Company, Dr. Anu Ramaswami, Director of the IGERT sustainable urban infrastructure program at UCD, John Powers, founder of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado and Kim Jordan, CEO and Owner of Ft. Collins-based New Belgium Brewing Company. Former Senators Tim Wirth and Gary Hart (the current Wirth Chair Fellow) spoke at the luncheon awards ceremony attended by over 400 people, and Mayor John Hickenlooper presented the awards with UCD School of Public Affairs Dean Kathleen Beatty . Awardees Schendler, Powers, Conover and Ramaswami are pictured above.

The Wirth Chair has notably been involved over the past 18 months in the development of a Presidential Climate Action Plan (PCAP), which has produced strategic recommendations for the first 90 days of the new presidential administration, with the help of a nationally reknowned advisory board, including Interface Carpet Chairman Ray Anderson, Natural Capitalism Co-Author L. Hunter Lovins, Yale School of the Environment Dean and former UNEP and WRI Director Gus Speth and Author/ Oberlin College Environmental Studies Director Dr. David Orr. I participated in the drafting of the PCAP at one of several meetings held at the Wingspread Center in Racine, Wisconsin in 2007

There are a handful of widely recognized products (ISO 14001, GRI, Six Sigma) that track, analyze and allow apples-to-apples reporting on company operations practices, but for most consumer products no single standard has yet prevailed. This leaves room in the current “green rush” for misleading marketing, and for brand competition as companies position themselves to fill the void. Without third party verification or public endorsement, it can be hard to know who to believe. The LEED standard for green building is a success story - the LEED product was developed with broad industry and professional input and consensus, includes a clear approval process, and so has been widely and aggressively accepted and adopted by both public and private developers. A multitude of similar standards are being developed for different types of products, with announcements in recent weeks of new standards for cosmetics and carbon offset products, to name just two.

The cosmetics industry, rife with “natural”, “organic” and “eco-friendly” products with no required content standard, saw a challenge from Burt’s Bees in 2007, to adopt what they are calling The Natural Standard. Environmental Leader recently announced adoption of a national standard specifically for organic cosmetics, Oasis, that has been adopted by 30 companies nationally.

In late 2007, the Voluntary Carbon Standard was launched by three prominent international carbon offset interests. The Standard “provides a robust, new global standard and program for approval of credible voluntary offsets - an rapidly growing industry that has been the target of a great deal of criticism for its lack of standardization.

According to the VCS website: “VCS offsets must be real (have happened), additional (beyond business-as-usual activities), measurable, permanent (not temporarily displace emissions), independently verified and unique (not used more than once to offset emissions).” . The Chicago Climate Exchange offers similar verification as a sort of standard for all of its traders, but does not appear to have adopted the VCS.

At the end of the day the most meaningful standards may be those adopted or created and enforced by nonprofits or regulatory agencies, whether national or international, where no specific commercial benefit is at stake. Until such time as such standards exist, however, caveat emptor.