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Barack Obama’s first official State of the Union speech is tomorrow at 6pm Pacific. Pondering what to say about it, I’ve become a bit nostalgic for Bush-era SOTUs. We’d all gather around the screen and wait for him to say the word “energy” or, in a few rare cases, “climate.” When he said the U.S. is “addicted to oil” it was news for weeks. It was all so simple then.

Expectations are higher for Obama; therein lies the rub. All of 2009 was a process of downsizing expectations. Now it seems the big news of the speech is going to be a three-year freeze in non-security discretionary spending. When you dig into the details there’s not much to this—it’s actually a two-year freeze, based on 2011 spending levels, which are unusually jacked up. It’s like using a 2005 baseline to say you’re cutting carbon (ahem). So the spending discipline is notional, which is good: It would, after all, be idiotic to substantially cut federal spending during an economic downturn with 10% unemployment.

But who is supposed to be fooled? It won’t make much impact on the deficit; it won’t reduce unemployment. It might win some token praise from Republicans and conservative Democrats, but in exchange for what? Will they lift a finger to help the rest of Obama’s agenda? Most of all, this could not be more demoralizing for a Democratic base that’s already choked down insufficient stimulus, grinding diminution of the clean energy bill, the implosion of health care reform, total regulatory capture by the financial industry,  and a large increase in already stratospheric military spending.

While it may not be much of a substantive concession, Obama’s spending freeze is a high-profile (and panicky looking) affirmation of basic conservative framing: cutting the deficit is an appropriate response to economic downturn; government spending is bloated; there’s enough “wasteful spending” to trim our way to a balanced budget. As Nate Silver says, this is going to make every subsequent initiative more difficult:

Every time the Democrats propose a jobs bill, or a big investment in alternative energy, you’re going to have Krauthammer and Kristol chomping at the bit to go on Fox News and proclaim Obama to be a hypocrite. Pity Robert Gibbs trying to parse his way out of that.

The freeze sends the message that the increased support for clean energy RD&D in the stimulus bill was temporary; there will be no sustained national campaign to invest in a bright green future.

Given that its marquee proposal is a pound of flesh for conservatives in the guise of “focusing on the economy,” what can be expected from Obama’s speech with regard to the clean energy bill now in the Senate?

(As an aside: how inane is it that health care and clean energy bills that reduce the deficit will likely be eclipsed by ... small-fry, purely symbolic gestures at reducing the deficit?)

There’s plenty Obama could do if he wanted to galvanize supporters and signal new commitment to his core objectives. He could threaten to veto any bill that doesn’t contain a hard cap on CO2 emissions. He could state clearly that revenue from a price on carbon should be divided between direct dividends to households and investments in a clean energy future. He could stand foursquare behind the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, with or without a bill. He could call for a substantial and permanent increase in the level of public investment in clean energy R&D and infrastructure. He could remind Congress that it stands in the way of international efforts to deal with an oncoming catastrophe.

Will he do any of those things? I doubt it. My guess is the best to hope for is an explicit mention of the need for a carbon cap alongside energy provisions in the Senate. Maybe this will be oblique, a reference to “comprehensive legislation.” Maybe it will even be explicit. But will Obama seriously lean on the Senate to strengthen the bill? Will he set high expectations or issue a moral call to action? Given the deference he’s shown Congress up to now, it seems unlikely.

One long-shot I’ll be watching for: in his upcoming jobs plan Obama will include a program to retrofit homes for energy efficiency. (“Home Star”—see here and here.) I know lots of work has been going on behind the scenes to shape this program and get it ready for rollout. Perhaps it will be highlighted in the speech;  maybe there will even be a big number attached.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 2008, it’s this: don’t get your hopes up.

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Frank LuntzI finally got around to reading through the latest polling and focus group results from messaging whiz Frank Luntz. Luntz, for those of you who don’t already know, is infamous in green circles as the author of a 1995 memo coaching Republicans on how to win the environmental messaging war. (See Amanda Little’s 2007 interview with Luntz about the memo and more.)

Now he’s been conscripted by the forces of good and light, and his latest results are geared toward helping to find a bipartisan path forward on climate and energy. The full report is here (PDF); a couple of themes pop out.

The first thing to note is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Democrats are incredibly well-positioned to make climate/energy an electoral advantage.

Why? Luntz found—as virtually all polls on the subject have found over the last decade—that substantial majorities believe climate change is happening, human beings are responsible, and something needs to be done about it. That is true across party lines.

It’s worth repeating: the public accepts climate change and wants to address it. That battle is won. All the bloggers and cable TV talkers arguing over the latest scientific pseudo-scandal? They’re only talking to each other. Despite Herculean efforts by greens to educate the public and popularize the issue, most people just aren’t particularly interested in the details of climate change as such. It’s not a top priority.

What the public wants, and what polls well, are forward-looking, no-regrets solutions. The key focus for messaging ought to be on the benefits of action. If the public empowers Democrats to reform energy use via legislation,  performance standards, and public investments,  what will the public receive in exchange?

The benefits the public most prioritizes are energy independence, good health, American jobs, and accountability for businesses and corporations. Any supporter of climate action with access to a microphone, Democrat or sane Republican,  should be hitting those four themes over and over and over and over and over and over again until they have bored the pants off the reporters covering them. And themselves. No one should have any pants.

With those four themes occupying 99% of the messaging,  1% can be divided among: polar bears, ice caps, carbon neutrality,  clean energy tax credits, renewable energy portfolios, and ... God help us all ... “cap-and-trade.”

Health care should have been a warning. Arguably, what’s turned the American public against health care reform is not the substance of the legislation but the endless, contentious, torturous process of creating it. The public hates sausage-making and back-room dealing; they hate vituperative disputes over mechanisms and statistics. They hate politics, really. They just want their leaders to do right by them.

“Cap-and-trade” puts process jargon squarely in the spotlight. Predictably enough, it’s been a disaster. It means nothing to the public,  a blank slate to be filled by competing PR campaigns.  Greenish politicos are stuck explaining policy details many if not most of them don’t understand, while conservatives quickly inscribed the term with well-established narratives— intrusive government,  taxes, socialism, etc.—that resonate with their overall strategy and identity. It was always an unfair fight and it’s only destined to get worse. Allowing cap-and-trade to become the center of the discussion is the greatest green messaging failure of the last decade.

The key for clean energy supporters is to wrest the discussion away from policy mechanisms and IPCC statistics and toward the benefits of climate/energy solutions: energy independence, good health,  American jobs, and accountability for businesses and corporations.

Some have been good about this. Ironically, some of the best messaging came from Waxman and Markey, in the House, way back 400 years ago when this process got underway. But they were never able to enforce any message discipline on their colleagues and the media proved, as usual, utterly resistant to new thoughts. The White House has been good on the jobs and economy messaging but the Senate has been predictably awful, with conservadems from coal and ag states amplifying conservative attacks.

The only thing that can rescue the bill needed to give markets predictable rules of the road,  international partners reassurance that the U.S. is serious, and Dems a victory after the tragicomic implosion of health care reform is a concerted effort to change the narrative. That could begin on Wednesday night, with Obama’s State of the Union speech, but it would only survive if the rest of the Dem caucus and the progressive messaging infrastructure rowed in the same direction.

You know. How that happens.

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Researchers at George Mason University and Yale broke down U.S. public opinion into six different categories [pdf], based on people’s belief in, and concern about, global warming.  For the nickel version, see the graphic below:

Of course, I’m sure there are more than six ways of slicing this pie. It seems likely to me that public opinion lies in a continuum, rather than in six discrete groups.

Still, the authors’ analysis yields some interesting findings. My favorite is this: folks who are convinced that global warming is a hoax—the “Dismissives”—admit they haven’t thought all that much about the issue (see Figure 6 on page 14 of the pdf) yet rank themselves as extremely knowledgeable and well informed (see Figure 7).

That should tell us something: for many climate skeptics, facts don’t matter much. They’ve only given the subject a bit of thought, but are still convinced that they know the answers. I don’t mean to be snarky, but to me this suggests that some “Dismissives” may suffer from some version of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the idea that people are very poor judges of their own incompetence. That probably makes many “Dismissives” unreachable: when facts confront their biases, the facts bounce off and the biases stand firm. (I’m sure that’s true of us all, to some degree or another.)

And here’s another point: press accounts of climate issues often include spokespeople at the poles; reporters balance quotes from the “Alarmed” with quotes from the “Dismissive.”  Yet the “Six Americas” report suggests that the process of “balancing” reporting by providing quotes and perspectives from both sides of the debate gives a skewed representation of public opinion.  The “alarmed” and “concerned” make up about 51 percent of the population, while the “doubtful” and “dismissive” represent 18 percent.  Yet if you look at standard he-said-she-said reporting, you might think that opinion is roughly split down the middle.

I’d be very interested in seeing this analysis applied to actual climate scientists. After all, the question of whether climate change is a real threat can’t be decided by a popularity contest or a public opinion poll; the debate is over facts, not opinions.  Many of the climate scientists I’ve met fall into some sort of category far beyond Alarmed—like “Super-Duper-Mega-Alarmed”—and one has fallen somewhere between Cautious and Doubtful (though certainly not Disengaged).  The closest thing we have to this kind of weighing of the collective opinions of professional climate scientists is the IPCC report—essentially, a survey of the opinions of the super-informed.  And contrary to the scorn of the Dismissives, that report leaves little doubt about where the scientific consensus falls.  From the that report:

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.

I’d think that sort of statement would be hard to dismiss; but apparently, that’s just my opinion.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

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Grist recently discussed the new National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) large wind study [pdf]. This study explores scenarios for supplying 20 percent to 30 percent of total electric energy consumption used by the eastern grid through wind power. (The eastern grid serves about 70 percent of the U.S. population.) Although it was not the main focus of the study, the NREL showed that in large-scale renewable scenarios the cost of transmission is much less than when only a small amount of renewable energy is used. For example, one often sees figure of $1,200 per KW for transmission costs for new wind. But if we look at transmission costs on page 39 of the NREL report, and MW generation cost on page 26 of the study, the results pencil out to around $160 to $200 in transmission and distribution costs per KW of capacity.

Although this is supported by really rigorous technical analysis in the study, some simple common sense combined with some knowledge of how the renewable industry works may help explain this.

Quite often short AC transmission lines are proposed to rescue stranded wind, essentially to bring power from a single wind farm to the grid. In many other cases transmission is suggested to support a handful of renewable generation facilities. In those circumstances, that line will be used at an extremely small percentage of capacity, even compared to normal transmission capacity use. (For very good reasons transmission lines are almost never used at anything close to capacity. Peak transmission is supposed to be for rare peak cases. I think something like 30 percent average capacity usage is not uncommon in long distance transmission.)  Now a transmission system connected to a lot of renewabled in many different places will end up with a somewhat lower capacity utilization than one that is used for fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear energy. But given diverse renewable sources the difference will not be nearly as great as with a renewable monoculture, or even a renewable scenario with limited diversity.

Look at it this way. A new current generation single large wind generator will operate at about 35 percent on average of nameplate capacity. But, that single generator will occasionally reach full nameplate capacity, or at least come very close. In a wind farm with hundreds of turbines this may never happen. When diverse wind farms in different wind areas are connected together, total generation will never come close to matching combined nameplate capacity. Generation will peak at between 60 percent and 75 percent of nameplate capacity. At this point the real cost per peak MW is higher than the nominal cost per MW. But since kWh generated is the same, real capacity utilization is also higher than nominal capacity utilization. So the cost per kWh does not change, but the quality of the power produced is higher. Higher quality power can make better use of transmission capacity.

Power quality improves even more when solar is placed into the mix.

This has implications for high renewable scenarios, 80 percent to 99 percent renewable. Scaling up transmission for such scenarios won’t increase transmission costs per peak MW, and might reduce them. Even if multiplying renewable generation by 3.3X  increases additional transmission by that amount compared to a 30 percent scenario, it won’t increase line miles by 3.3X. Much of whatever additional capacity is needed will be provided by shipping more power along the same route required in the 30 percent scenario. And increasing the capacity of a line is a lot less expensive than increasing the mileage. For one thing there is no additional land required, and even the line itself does not triple in cost when it triples in capacity.

Additionally, tripling generation won’t quite triple transmission requirements. Much additional generation is a substitute for more expensive storage. But if we ever make really massive use of renewables we will need significant storage. Storage will increase energy quality, and thus reduce at least slightly the need for additional transmission.

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If any progress is to be made in the global fight againstclimate change—whether via diplomatic negotiations or cleantechpartnerships—it will only happen through cooperation between the U.S.and China.  But the potential forcollaboration of any kind took a big blow this past week thanks to the Googlefracas.  Reports TheNew York Times:

Beijing and Washington both initially tried to treat the Google case as mainly a commercial dispute. But Mrs. Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom on Thursday, with its cold war undertones, has catapulted the dispute from the realm of technology and cybersecurity to one of fundamental freedoms. China’s strongly worded response suggests that the tensions could spill over into other areas where the administration is eager for Chinese cooperation, including climate change and curtailing Iran’s nuclear program.

The Obama team is trying to tamp down the gloomy analysis, reportsThe Wall Street Journal:

On Friday, the Obama administration reacted to China’s accusation the U.S. was endangering bilateral relations with restraint. Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said he believed the countries’ ties would “continue to grow and strengthen” despite differences on several fronts.

But that’s transparently wishful thinking. 

Add the Google mess to the list of other barriers to climateprogress that emerged this past week, from ScottBrown’s election to LisaMurkowski’s resolution to the IPCC’sadmission that it screwed up climate data to the SupremeCourt’s evisceration of campaign finance limits.

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You hear it all the time, one of the most frequently voiced excuses for Western countries failing to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions: Taking any such action would hand a massive competitive advantage to fast-industrializing China. Yet evidence is piling up that the very opposite is the case. The main challenge from the world’s new industrial superpower is not that it will continue to use the dirty, old technologies of the past, but that it will come to dominate the new, clean, green ones of the future. As developed nations fail to put an adequate price on carbon, and thus to stimulate clean-technology development themselves, they risk handing market supremacy to the rival they most fear. Indeed, it could even be hypothesized that China’s blocking of agreement on rich-country emission targets in Copenhagen was intended to hold back the development of cleantech by its Western rivals.Visitor after distinguished visitor to the world’s most populous country returns home shaken, if not stirred, by the speed and determination with which it is adopting these technologies, especially in renewable energy. David Sandalow, the U.S. assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs—a longtime expert in the field, both in and out of government, who has trekked across the Pacific five times since last summer—says, “China’s investment in clean energy is extraordinary. Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the cleantech sector in the years and decades to come.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote from China earlier this month that he was increasingly convinced that the most important development of recent years would prove to be “not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward.” He, too, warned that unless the United States rapidly caught up, “we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.” Certainly China’s commitment and growth in this area are breathtaking. It already boasts a thousand solar water heater manufacturers providing some 600,000 jobs. One in every 10 homes in the giant country has them installed, making up two-thirds of the entire world’s solar hot water capacity; by 2030, some estimates suggest, half of all the country’s households could have them. Solar electricity is not far behind. In 2005, China produced a relatively tiny 100 megawatts of solar cells. Two years later, it was leading the world with 1,088 MW. This year, it is predicted to exceed 5,000 MW, a third of the world’s total—and it’s expected to go on expanding to reach 10,000 MW in just five years time. Solar thermal power is also on the rise: 2,000 MW of solar thermal power stations are expected to come online over the next decade, with a dramatic increase in the years after that. At the same time, installed wind-power capacity has been doubling annually: China is expected to meet its original 30,000 MW target for 2020 in two years time, and last year it vastly increased the target to an ambitious 100,000 MW. Indeed, the wind-power expansion reveals something of China’s ruthless determination to lead the world in these new low-carbon industries.  In 2003, just before the headlong growth of the industry began, the country heavily restricted imports, requiring its wind farms to source 70 percent of its parts from the domestic market. The restriction was only lifted last year, by which time home production dominated the business. And an even more ominous development seems to be gathering pace. China is responsible for 97 percent of the world’s production of rare earth elements or metals, vital for many cleantech products from wind turbines to hybrid-car batteries, fiber optics to low-energy light bulbs. But over the last seven years, it has reduced the quantity of them available for export by 40 percent, and before long may be using all of its production to feed domestic demand. Other countries—including the United States, South Africa, and Greenland—have significant deposits of rare earth metals, but are years away from properly exploiting them. By increasingly restricting supplies, China could strangle overseas clean industries while boosting its own. The U.S. administration, at least, is alive to the danger of China dominating the cleantech market. Last April, President Obama warned, “The nation that leads the world in 21st-century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the 21st-century global economy.” The tens of billions of dollars in his stimulus package devoted to renewables is an attempt to gain that lead for the United States. In fact, there may be an even more productive course: partnership with China. Whereas China can make things much more cheaply than the United States—and open factories much faster—it is, as yet, still far behind the U.S. in innovation and venture capital. There is an opportunity to come together to benefit both countries—and the world. But seizing that opportunity would require the U.S., as well as other Western countries, to take serious action to raise the price of carbon and spark a wave of new technological innovation, rather than ceding the field to China while falsely professing to be protecting their economies from it.

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Photo courtesy obrien26382 via Flickr The great hope for powering a sustainable world is renewable energy. The great barrier to powering a sustainable world is the cost and complexity of building a new national transmission grid that will transmit the carbon-free electricity generated by remote wind farms and solar power plants to population centers.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report that concluded the United States could obtain 20 percent of its electricity from wind power by 2030. This week the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory issued a study that shows how the eastern half of the U.S. could obtain as much as 30 percent of its electricity from wind by 2024. The study focused on what transmission geeks call the Eastern Interconnection, six linked regional power grids that run from the Great Plains to the Eastern Seaboard and from the Canadian border to the tip of Florida.

“Although significant costs, challenges, and impacts are associated with a 20 percent wind scenario, substantial benefits can be shown to overcome the costs,” the report’s authors wrote. “Such a scenario is unlikely to be realized with a business-as-usual approach, and that a major national commitment to clean, domestic energy sources with desirable environmental attributes would be required.”

Essentially, all we need to do is come up with at least $93 billion for new power lines and infrastructure and get myriad transmission operators and local agencies to cooperate on the design of a new high-voltage grid.

Sounds daunting. But let’s put the numbers in context. The $93 billion is roughly what the U.S. spends in eight months on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Or to use another metric, a little more than what Joe Taxpayer forked over to bail out AIG.

The payback to build a transmission grid, however, is likely to be far more productive.  Such an expansion of transmission capacity (and the resulting increase ) in wind power—and one assumes, other renewable energy—would displace coal-fired power plants, according to the NREL.

It would also solve one of the biggest problems with wind—its intermittency, which plays havoc with keeping electricity flowing smoothly. To greatly simplify, the wind is usually blowing somewhere. By multiplying the number of wind farms that feed into a single transmission grid from a broad swath of the country, transmission operators can rely less on fossil fuel power plants—read coal—as a backup when the wind dies, say, in South Dakota.

That will lower not only the price of renewable energy but utilities’ capital costs, which are, of course, passed on to their customers.

In California, for instance, utilities like PG&E spend billions on natural gas-fired power plants in order to provide emergency power for those few days each year when the grid is overloaded—hot summer afternoons when everyone cranks up their air conditioners at the same time.

“About 10 percent of our generation capacity sits idle for all but 50 hours a year,” Andrew Tang, a senior director at PG&E, tells me. “This industry is predicated on the premise that you always prepare for the worst day. It’s hugely expensive.”

Left unsaid in the NREL report is that the massive expansion of wind power needed to supply 20 to 30 percent of the nation’s electricity would be a green jobs machine.

At the beginning of 2009, according to the report, the U.S. had 25,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed and added another 4,500 megawatts during the first half of that year, despite the recession. To reach the 20 percent target, NREL estimates that 225,000 megawatts of new wind capacity must come online. Add another 105,000 megawatts to hit 30 percent.

The researchers offered different scenarios on how to achieve those goals, relying on varying mixes of wind from the Great Plains, the East and offshore. The 30 percent target relies heavily on developing wind farms off the East Coast, a capital-intensive undertaking that so far has run into huge political problems.

The NREL report, which was prepared by the consulting firm EnerNex, offers a highly technical discussion on how to reconfigure the grid to accommodate all that wind. But the bottom line is that between 8,352 and 11,102 miles of 800-volt direct current transmission lines, as well as thousands of miles of lower-voltage power lines, must be built. All in all, as many as 22,697 miles of new transmission lines would need to be installed, along with all the supporting infrastructure.

But the key takeaway is that NREL has concluded that there are no overriding technological hurdles or insurmountable financial obstacles to be overcome on the way to achieving the 20 percent target. It is basically a political problem—just imagine the NIMBY nightmare all those power lines would create.

Well, a political solution has been offered up by, of all people, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who previously advised President George W. Bush on how to neutralize demands that the government take action on global warming.

Luntz has apparently undergone a climate change conversion. In a poll he released on Thursday, Luntz found that there is broad support among both Republicans and Democrats for climate change legislation when the issue is couched in terms of national security and energy independence.

“National security tops every other reason to support cap-and-trade,” Luntz concluded. “It’s about freeing the U.S. from foreign oil—and opening the door to greater security and prosperity.”

And as green energy advocates press to translate the NREL report into action, it’s worth remembering how a 20th century president managed to persuade Congress to fund a similarly ambitious infrastructure project, the interstate highway system.

Eisenhower did not argue that we needed to spend billions of dollars on a vast road system so we could develop the suburbs or drive coast-to-coast with ease. In the fearful fifties, he said building such a transportation network was all about creating the ability to move troops around the country in a national emergency. In other words, a national security argument secured what would become the driver of American prosperity in the coming decades.

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Last Friday I had the pleasure of visiting Cornell University for the announcement of the school’s new combined heat/power gas plant. The school built the plant as the beginning of its mission to move away from coal - university officials estimate the campus will be entirely off coal in 18 months.This is the latest step Cornell officials have taken in the effort to make the university carbon neutral. Four years ago they built a lake water cooling system that uses cold lake water to cool all of their buildings, a step that dropped the electricity needed for their cooling by 90 percent.  This is on top of aggressive energy efficiency efforts ongoing campus wide. I had the chance to sit down with Cornell officials and chat about their changes, check out the audio here on Cornell’s website.It’s very impressive - Cornell is showing that we can do it (video!), and we can slash our global warming pollution and we can do it quickly.I had two favorite moments at last Friday’s event. First - when Cornell President David Skorton said he looks forward to Cornell’s coal stockpile becoming a symbol of a time gone by; secondly, that the entire event was framed as “Moving Cornell Beyond Coal” on all the placards around the room.On the tour of both the school’s old coal-fired power plant and the new combined heat/power gas plant - it was as if I’d time-traveled. The coal facility was filthy with coal dust and clearly outdated. But the new facility was clean, sparkling and pristine – a sign of the switch to cleaner sources of energy.Cornell University is just another great example of our institutions of higher learning moving beyond coal. Last year we launched our Campuses Beyond Coal Campaign and saw it achieve great success.The campaign’s accomplishments will continue this year, according to Kim Teplitzky, our coal campaign coordinator for the Sierra Student Coalition.“Already we’ve launched efforts at five new schools, including Clemson, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and Michigan State University, and are gearing up to expand the campaign the even further into Iowa, Tennessee, Colorado and several other states,” said Teplitzky.Teplitzky has seen the campaign’s great work first-hand, noting that college students are clamoring for immediate solutions, asking their universities to stop burning coal on campus in the next three years, and becoming leaders in implementing innovative, creative and forward thinking solutions such as using geothermal, designing better buildings and growing local economies with integrated biomass solutions.  University administrators are seeing that they cannot meet their climate goals without getting rid of coal on their campus.“And students aren’t just focused on their own schools,” added Teplitzky. “The campaign is engaging thousands of youth to demand the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and President Obama take action to ensure that coal ash is classified as hazardous waste and that EPA be allowed to do its job protecting the health and safety of communities affected by the dangers of coal nation-wide.”We have the momentum and are looking forward to another year of great successes.

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When I hear folks like Alex Steffen talk about “remaking cities,” my gut reaction is that U.S. cities seem mostly permanent, like they’re already built and we’re stuck with them. (Quick reminder: The world’s cities cause 75 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions, according to several measures.) But then there’s this new slideshow at Slate, in which Camilo Jose Vergara photographs the ruins of urban America. Some of the photos portray the same abandoned landscapes just a few years apart. It’s amazing how quickly built structures decay, and how quickly weeds and rot take root. It’s a reminder that cities—especially the struggling ones—offer constant opportunities for smarter rebuilding and redesigning.

For a more empirical perspective, Architecture 2030 offers a useful rundown:

Courtesy Architecture 2030

Herein lies the hope. By the year 2035, approximately three-quarters (75%) of the built environment will be either new or renovated.

Architecture 2030 founder Ed Mazria notes that these are pre-recession figures. Construction rates are significantly lower at the moment, though renovation rates are probably up. Even with that caveat, our built environments are less permanent than you might assume.

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