Taking Tulsa’s temperature

Local efforts are needed in light of new climate change report

In a move that is sure to engender lots of political and legal opposition, President Obama is moving to impose new carbon emission standards on the 600 or more coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

The move is one that will spark lots of statewide and regional tumult, although the president’s action is tightly tethered to a Supreme Court ruling from a couple of years ago that grants him and the Environmental Protection Agency authority to impose new constraints on power plant operations. PSO will surely be one of the players in the transition and will almost surely have to make changes to some of its operations in the region. Much international attention will be focused on Obama’s actions and industry reactions to a dramatic move — one of the few remaining climate change gambits the president can execute in the face of widespread Republican opposition to climate legislation.

The action comes in the wake of a new study, a dramatic piece called the National Climate Assessment, which was released about a month ago. It’s an analysis that suggests that climate change is very real and is manifesting in tangible ways all across the country. The work was drafted by selected members of the business community, professionals from the weather and climate establishment, the federal government and a whole array of academics in the earth sciences, computational climatology, and a slew of related fields.

“Ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct,” the report stated. “The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants, which is killing some creatures or stunting their growth. … Organic matter frozen in Arctic soils since before civilization began is now melting, allowing it to decay into greenhouse gases that will cause further warming.”

So what can be done locally about climate change—apart from trying to do more walking, less driving and checking on possibly wayward relatives and pets in what might be a historically hot summer? As it happens, climate change, like all other critical social and political phenomena, has a local, incredibly important front end. That front end, for Tulsans, has an everyday, in-your-face reality that has nothing to do with Antarctic melting or cute polar bears.

Our best local economic and development future demands a massive reduction in the use of fossil fuels and an aggressive move to the housing, transport and denser development modes outlined in Tulsa’s new comprehensive physical plan. Absent a decisive embrace of alternative energy sources, including geothermal, electric/CNG vehicles, solar, wind and advanced biofuels, there is nothing to look forward to but mounting average temperatures, weird precipitation and volatility. Tulsa’s role in this essential, planet-spanning transformation could be a game-changing one if we can summon the political will and the imagination to make the journey; and there is an array of other, more specific things, we need to look at:

• PSO’s daily electrical allocation for Green Country is apparently a little less than 5,000 megawatts, and we will almost certainly be asked to conserve power later this season. So we need to make more effective use of power, to use stout conservation tactics and supplement conventional power with alternatives despite the Legislature’s and Gov. Mary Fallin’s annoying imposition of a “sun tax,” a tariff on people who would like to provide alternative power to the local grid. Furthermore, we need a regional “smart grid” strategy, the only path to recapturing some of the 40-50 percent of power that is wasted in our ancient grid architecture. 
• City Hall needs to explore analogous next-step technologies to manage Tulsa’s water production and distribution systems as summer gets under way. Last year’s voluntary water rationing is a signpost here: We are near peak water production. We’ll need savvier, climate-wise management of these systems and a green upgrade strategy.
• We should actively employ the fabulous scientific talent at the OU National Weather Center in Norman, a world-class shop in climate analysis and some of the alternative energy tech we’ll need. OU could help us craft a robust, hyper-local climate model, providing deep insight into how climate change could  reshape land use, the transportation grid, agriculture in the region, water use, and production efforts.
• We must use our new supercomputing capacity at City Hall to work with OU and other area weather researchers to fully model the consequences of climate change for Green Country. A supercomputer is a transformational asset, essential for modeling mid-run climate scenarios for T-Town and anticipating climate-related community development, planning, and infrastructure work. An array of drainage/hydrological practices, lawn- and plant-maintenance tactics, industrial water usage changes, and even some air pollution and related matters must be carefully analyzed in light of the rapid changes outlined in the latest climate assessment document.
• Our long review of Tulsa’s zoning and subdivision regulations (the first in many decades, and still in progress), is a peerless opportunity to rethink multi-family housing design, the active use of cost-saving construction systems and accelerated local adoption of new energy/green practices. Perhaps the city could strike up one or more green construction demo projects with the local apartment owners association, the Community Action Project, the Tulsa Housing Authority, some talent from our city planning unit, and some consulting help from Shawn Schaefer’s wonderfully proactive OU Tulsa/Urban Design Studio. Tulsa’s citizen-based PlaniTulsa planning blueprint makes explicit provisions for demonstration projects of this kind—prototype buildings/developments and other novel efforts. In combination, this kind of effort could bring down Tulsa’s energy footprint, mitigate the warming effect of our core and the midtown area and help to mitigate air pollution levels.
• Lastly, we should revisit our social support system for helping elderly people and the poor to cope with dramatically higher summer temperatures—work ably anticipated last year by Tulsa’s Community Service Council weather coalition project.

Climate change, brothers and sisters, isn’t just about polar bears and rising sea levels in remote villages in distant parts of Asia. It’s not just about the special difficulties the American coasts will confront as the crisis unfolds. It’s also about you, your family, your neighbors, and the entire city we call home.