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We have to reduce about 80% of our greenhouse
gas emissions over the next 10 to 15 years."
- William Jefferson Clinton, 1 August 2006
Paris, 25 February 2007
Dear Mr. President,
80%? Eigh-ty percent? Ouch! You certainly have captured my attention. And your public commitment to this is exactly what is called for to sound the trumpet and mobilize all our talents, energies and resources to start to break the impasse that today is strangling our societies! Let's see now how we can build on this.
What I appreciate about your gaspingly high target is that not only does it deliver a very strong message, but also that it makes it clear that if we are going to get even close to it we must be ready to challenge and change everything. If we content ourselves with being cautious and conservative this time around, this is going to lead to a reappearance of our old friend, "business as usual" -- and hand in hand with it the equally paralyzing "politics as usual".
If we allow ourselves to go this old familiar and safe route, Mr. President, we can be pretty sure that we will fail in the mission you have set for us. To get even close to your target we are going to need to break a lot of the old defining molds and ways of thinking. Einstein put it something like this: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." Exactly.
The second thing we like about your target is that your choice of C02 (I will continue with this as an abbreviation for the full lot which of course extends to the complete and ugly family of greenhouse gasses, particulates, et al) stretches far beyond just atmosphere issues, important as they are. Lots less CO2 in our cities means, inevitably, lots less traffic (which of course is the vital key for what now needs to happen). Lots less traffic leads in turn to more livable and efficient cities, quieter and safer streets, healthier and sweeter lives, and saner personal and collective economics. Add that up to your parallel call for fossil fuels savings (the correlation with CO2 reduction being close to 100%) and we have an agenda which many of us will be pleased to work with you on.
Transport in cities - A hard nut to crack
Our specific expertise here in the New Mobility Agenda lies specifically in the transport end of your project. And in this respect we want you to know that there are at least a couple of thousand people around the world with solid expertise and vision in the field who are eager to take up this challenge, and are ready to share their ideas and energies with you. The site, information and views that you see here at http://climate.newmobility.org -- we call it our "collaborative workpad" -- is just our first rough cut. There is a lot more there where it comes from if you need it.
At the end of the day the big problem when it comes to issues of transport in cities from a policy perspective is that it does not lend itself to the same kind of one shot analysis and decision-making that may do the job in other sectors of city life. What we call "transport" is, in sharp contrast with the rest, an enormously fussy, fuzzy, chaotic, continuing, iterative, non-stop part of daily life. The crux of the remedial policies in this sector in our pluralistic democratic societies is that they require that we find ways of understanding and influencing many thousands, millions of mainly minute and personal decisions made by individual citizens and groups with very different views on the topic of how they are to get around in their daily lives. This is a long way from, say, buying "clean fuel" garbage trucks or buses.
The First Five Percent
Now, is this to say, Mr. President, that we sit here smugly and can guarantee you a policy kit that will get your 80% reduction world wide in the next decade or so? No, of course not -- but what we can do is set out the basics of a radical city transport reform package that can start to achieve significant CO2, traffic and fossil fuel savings in the several years immediately ahead - despite the fact that this in a sector in which currently all the basic indicators everywhere are moving in exactly the opposite direction. And as we start to eat into the problem percent by percent, this is not only going to give us the first solid improvement but also set us off on a learning experience that will open up new ideas, energy and confidence for more and better in the years that follow. We are for now calling this program, The First Five Percent, as you will see here.
To make all this happen is going to require a combination of vision, pragmatism, generosity, and commitment. Along with rare political leadership and a certain dose of, I have to say it, guile. This is something that of all the programs and institutions know today, the Clinton Foundation just may be one of our greatest hopes, simply because it is not tied down to some more or less fixed agenda, interests, or over concern for perpetuating itself out into the indefinite future. But for this to work there must also be in parallel a world wide networking effort which brings to the program the best of the experience, perspective and expertise available on these issues. Maximum diversity in the minimum space. And that is possibly where we can lend a hand.
Nobody asked us to do this of course, but my world-wide colleagues and I want your challenge to succeed and since we know a thing or two about our particular end of all this - namely about how people and goods get around in cities all over the world, for better and worse -- we would be poor world citizens and rotten parents if we were just to sit back and wait for someone to take care of it all for us.
Mr. President, we want this to work. We need it to work! We are most grateful to you for putting this challenge into high relief and shaking up the entrenched thinking on all this. And we have every intention of keeping at it from this end. I very much hope this will serve you and indeed all of us well. After all, if we don't dig in here and now, who will?
Respectfully,
Eric Britton
The New Mobility Agenda
The Commons, Paris
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| Three minutes of your time (to round out the above) | |
Before we dig into the explanatory text and pages that follows let me offer you the following three minute video introduction (warts and all):
| Two bits of background to set the stage (Audios) | |
2006: Click here for Clinton Climate Initiative Announcement Los Angeles , August 1, 2006.
This audio transcript of the presentation lasts for one hour and includes President Clinton's challenge address.
(Print transcript available here)
1996: Click for 1 minute voice intro to OECD conference follow-up: Sustainable Transportation's Dirty Secret, 14 Oct. 1996, OECD Paris.
This is an unedited audio extract introducing a presentation made in Paris by Eric Britton to an OECD working group on sustainable transportation in October 1996, subsequent to the 1996 OECD World conference "Toward Sustainable Transportation" that took place in Vancouver Canada in March of that year.
What is quite appalling about this message and warning is that today, a full decade later, we have not only failed to make any global progress on these challenges that were already pretty cleared noted back in 1996 by at least some of those participating in the conference, but that the overall situation has continued to decline and that at accelerating rates. Fortunately there is something that can be done about it. Read, listen and watch on!
(Click here for full PPT presentation. 9 Mo.)
| Why the (machine) translations are important | |
When it comes to actually implementing these measures and projects, the actual work is done not by international organizations -- but by local people and groups. And while English may work reasonably well at the international level, when you go into a city in very many parts of the world you will find that there are many highly intelligent and well placed people who are not able to read comfortably and absorb long pages of materials written in English, without at least a bit of help. Which is exactly what the machine translations that are placed on every page of this site and intended to provide.
For more background on how this works, we invite you to click here.
| Site organization (Work in progress) | |
To get the ball rolling, I propose to start with the rough first draft site you see here today, and then as useful and with all your guidance and support morph it in the coming weeks into a nicely laid out, time-economical private web site that each of you can easily access and use when you are traveling anywhere in the world, and from which you will be able to have easy access to key support materials, document libraries, videos, PowerPoint and other presentations, one-click direct access to each of us via Skype, etc. Judging from my own experience in these sprawling international projects there are times when additional support like this can come in very handy when I am traveling -- and I know that your team is going to do a lot of that.
Here's the current state of play in these pages in brief:
Top menu: The top menu is intended as our one-click guide to bring the visitor swiftly into the key areas for our collaborative work under this project. We propose it as a handy way to get started, taking it from left to right and spending just enough time with each page to get a feel for where that part of the argument is leading. After which we invite you to turn to the . ..
Left menu:The left menu provides full one-click access to all aspects of this project and of the New Mobility Agenda, including the various discussion groups, video libraries, news, and the dozen-plus specialized programs. We invite you to work your way down it from top to bottom. with the emphasis on the top two sections which are those that directly address this project. Going through the materials on the New Mobility Agenda on the other hand will take some time, but if you have the patience for it, it's a huge resource.
Mission Statement: This page
Challenge: Here we try to take a few steps back from the issues and whatever we may know about the programs already underway, and think through the basic issues, premises and choices. The idea is to "get uncomfortable" pulling in as many of the eventual contradictions, and as much of the possible bad news, before we start to dig into the strategic issues and targeting, as a precursor to actual actions. The idea here, as in much of the site, is to avoid to the extent possible the old and all too familiar Ready! Fire! Aim. scenario.
Philosophy Unless you have worked out your basic philosophic underpinnings on this very challenging, many-layered subject, you can be sure that you will get lots of things wrong. To check out your own thoughts on this, we offer you ours right here.
Strategy: What is it in fact that we want to accomplish? And what do we intend to do, step by step, to make it work?
Actions, measures, tools: These are some of the very long list of transforming actions, events, measures, policies, targets, you may want to think about for your city - and for this program. Best choices here will get you on your way, but remember this! They are only part of a greater whole, and for that your strategic framework needs to be sound and always kept to the fore. A good project is one thing - a Clinton Cities initiative with potential scale CO2 reductions for the entire metropolitan area as a whole is quite another.
(These are very different levels of ambition, and it is our view this distinction is likely to emerge as one of the key guiding lights of much of what is expected to follow. We need to keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of cities out there that need to be making major changes, and more than four hundred with more than one million inhabitants. That's the other half of our challenge.)
International Advisory Council: You are going to need many skilled and diverse reference points to make this work; so when you are looking for counsel and help, this list will be your good friend to get you started.
Supporting Events: We are just starting to roll on this, but check out the latest calendar and you may find something that might be useful to you. Stay tuned. (And to the extent possible we are trying to make these Zero CO2 events.)
Idea Factory: When you click this link on the top menu, you will be taken to the latest discussion in the New Mobility's "Idea Factory" specifically about the Clinton Initiative. Beyond this, if you click the internal Home link there you will be taken to our group toolkit which is organized into: (1) a message archive, (2) a backup library for documents to be shared with the group, (3) a library of links to key sites and sources, (4) a photo library, and (5) a group Calendar. As part of the package you can also each time you chose to copy messages to all those who are registered to come in here (i.e., who have been approved for the group), simply by adding NewMobilityCafe@yahoogroups.com to your cc list each time. This turns out to be handy and gives you an easy way to pick messages out from the archives here, especially useful when you are on the road.
Quick Translation Help When you click the 'quick translate' links on any page here you will be sped to a rough machine translation of the text into the indicated language. After some seconds this language version will appear in its own window. To learn more about the limitations and the potential of these rough translations, click here.
| What needs to be fixed to make all this website work more effectively | |
"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree,
I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax".
- Abraham Lincoln
It would be very nice indeed if this were a well-honed compact site with ready answers up front -- but it's a big and complicated world out there and this site and the program behind it reflects all this complexity, at times for sure in rather frustrating ways. We shall need to come to grips with all this and find ways to make this information more accessible, and indeed if we get a little help from our friends we should be able to take a pretty good whack at it. Here are a couple of the background points that you may wish to bear in mind, even as you try to make use of what you find here.
This apparently compact website that sits there so docilely on your computer monitor has been laid out with great care to facilitate your access and use. Thus as you stare at it, you will see some twenty main links that are intended to help you dig into the key issue areas. Nice start, but even as it stands here today if you start to click into it you will become aware that it provides quite a large number of links to other useful sites, information sources and programs, both within the related programs of the New Mobility Agenda and in the many programs and sites that provide valuable related information and background on these issues. In fact as it stands today there are close to 350 such direct references already incorporated into the site. Oof! And then as you start to fan out and explore those in turn you will soon become aware that there are tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of sites and pages, at least some of which, actually at least hundreds of which, are clearly relevant to our work at hand. Hmm. How do we deal with that?
Well, for now we have to say with some difficulty, but we are at least off to a start here, and we are aware that as time and resources become available we intend to carry out a far-reaching software rewrite (and edit) that will render the entire structure more transparent and easy to use. Until such time however, please be assured that we shall continue to work on this end of our task within the immediate limits, which we believe render the whole thing at least useable, and particularly for those with the level of interest, time and patience to explore and find. If there is a lot of complexity to be dealt with here, imagine how simple it looks by comparison to the issues it is trying to address -- that is hundreds of thousands of cities with billions of people who all together are, who have to be our target if we are to achieve the major improvements which the Clinton Initiative is all about.
We do have a fairly good Search engine here, that properly use can help you to find what you are looking for. Click here for current background on how this works.
A final shortcoming of the site and support program as it stands is that thus far it leans a bit overly on one finite and manifestly imperfect person, Eric Britton, who functions as a sort of de facto Editor in Chief here. There are of course many contributions by many people and groups in these pages, but in time it will probably be useful to find ways to bring in more active participants. In the meantime, having one person leading the way at least has served to guarantee continuity on our target topics, and one would like to think a certain level of integrity. Without which none of this make any sense of course.
So if you have ideas, energy, talent or resources that you would like to offer, all you need to do is click the Contact link up to and you will find a willing soul ready to listen closely to what you have to say.
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