cities

The real action on climate change isn’t in Congress or UN meetings.

It’s in places like Chula Vista, Calif., where the city’s offer to provide free energy evaluations identified over 5 million kWh in savings in municipal and private buildings over two years — and saw about 3.8 million kWh of savings implemented.

And Denver, where a decision to replace more than 48,000 traffic light bulbs and pedestrian signals with LEDs is saving more than $800,000 per year in energy, labor and material costs.

And Boston, the first major U.S. city to change its zoning code to require all construction of large private buildings to meet high LEED standards for energy efficiency. By one projection, the first 48 building projects under review could eventually see $4 billion a year in energy savings.

The key selling point in all of these cities — for the mayors and residents alike — is just how much money they can save with innovative energy and resource efficiency steps that limit their impact on climate change at the same time.

If you think IT and sustainability are two totally different worlds, think again.

Most of what is referred to as “smart” these days — smart transportation, the smart grid and smart cities, for example — is made intelligent by processors, sensors and analytical software, and of course the servers that make it all possible. So it’s not surprising to see tech giants like IBM wanting to create a smarter planet, Cisco wanting to craft smart tech solutions for utilities and companies, and plenty of other, smaller companies wanting a piece of the action.

But while the money and hoopla surrounding all things smart can cloud the issue a bit, the point is that infrastructure in this country is sorely in need of an overhaul. In its Smarter Cities Virtual Leader Forum today, IBM recapped what it’s doing to make education, transportation, government, energy and healthcare smarter. It sees cities as systems of systems.

Concerned about the impact of climate change, some state and local governments are aggressively pursuing carbon neutral status and adopting policies and strategies aimed at reducing their carbon footprint. Over the next few months, we will be discussing what it takes to attain this goal and highlighting cities and states that are leading the way.

Six cities always are among the top 10 green U.S. cities no matter who compiles the list: San Francisco, Berkeley, Austin, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

Our Going Carbon Neutral series starts with Austin, the only city so far with the political will to formally commit to this goal and start the journey.

Talk of the smartening up various things — the electrical grid, buildings, transportation and water systems — often wanders quickly into abstract ideas of a super-wired Jetsons-style future.

But at its core, the idea of making the various systems cities rely on smarter is not actually all that new or futuristic. Companies have been using software and sensors to manage their major assets for years, and now cities are getting in on it.

“Typically, the systems in place in cities are siloed solutions — you’ve got the police department, the transit authority, the parks and rec department and so on — so information is not easily shared,” Bill Sawyer, IBM's vice president of Maximo Operations, told SolveClimate.

“By putting in one system on one platform, they can eliminate a lot of inefficiencies.

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For decades, the American dream has been a suburban one: The detached, single-family home; the car (or two) in the driveway; the stereotypical white picket fence.

Now, reversing this pattern might be an important step toward averting climate change, according to a new Congressionally commissioned study by the National Research Council.

The Alternative Minimum Tax doesn't seem like an environmental issue. But it is. The AMT has become a secret tax on cities.

Cities are more energy efficient and contribute to global warming less than suburbs. Any solution to our oil addiction and our excessive dependence on greenhouse gas producing fuels will require more mass transit and denser communities.

We should, in short, be encouraging people to move to cities, not charging them extra to do so.

Yet, families with a professional salary living in high-cost urban areas are likely to discover that they are subject to the AMT, and that under the AMT, state income and property taxes are not deductible. Not only is the cost of taxes higher to live in high-service cities, but the AMT demands also that you pay federal taxes on money you've already paid in state taxes.