Daily Score Blog

The days when emissions levels and energy policies in China and India were held up as excuses by the rest of the world's economic leaders for doing nothing about climate and energy seem to be over--almost. (Some reasons why the China argument doesn’t pan out, here, here, and here – and here are some compelling reasons why climate solutions can be a boon to the economy rather than a strain.)

Today, in global talks, in the Senate, on the street, you still hear a murmur here and there about "not doing anything until India and China sign on." And this previously pervasive attitude, however obsolete, may already be coming back to bite the long-industrialized nations of the West. Indeed, the big honchos in the West may find themselves borrowing and begging for new technologies that China has been busy perfecting all along.

Or maybe we'll just be sulking about the fact that China's economy is happily unhitched from the fossil fuel rollercoaster long before ours...

Could it be that China is winning the clean energy race? Here are some tidbits gathered by MicCheck Radio and Sightline that make the case:

Puget Sound is in the big leagues with the EPA approving the state's "Action Agenda" for recovering Washington's inland sea. The approval "signifies the agency’s full commitment to helping carry out the Agenda to protect and restore Puget Sound," stated an agency press release from Wednesday.

With the EPA's blessing, the effort could get up to $20 million this year in federal funding for work to restore the Sound to health.

The 204-page Action Agenda, which was released in December by the state's Puget Sound Partnership and Gov. Chris Gregoire, is a "blueprint for recovery." It includes:

• Fixing and improving sewage and septic systems
• Increasing the use of development techniques that capture rainwater on site so that it doesn't flow as polluted runoff into the Sound
• Shoreline restoration work
  

This isn't the only pot of money coming to the Sound. The Northwest Straits Commission, a nonprofit working on Puget Sound projects, is getting $4.6 million of federal stimulus money to remove lost fishing nets that drown thousands of birds, fish, and marine mammals each year.

The money was awarded in June by the NOAA Fisheries Service to the Northwest Straits Marine Conservation Foundation. The commission's director, Ginny Broadhurst, said the 18 months of support could result in the removal of 90 percent of the abandoned nets in the Sound.

Steeple photo courtesy of Flickr user joiseyshowaa under the Creative Commons license.

Ripples, and sometimes waves, of the economic tsunami continue to roil through cities across the United States. One product of the downturn is stalled real estate projects. Many shelved projects have left vacant lots, derelict buildings, or parking lots where housing or office space was planned. The need to put these spaces back into use has motivated some great thinking about how to integrate open space and farming into the urban landscape. Interestingly, this is not a new problem. Philadelphia has been working on projects to convert “brown space” to “green space” for years. Philadelphia’s voids were created by migration from the cities to outlying urban areas, not a specific downturn. In 2005 they held an international design competition called Urban Voids.  The point is, Philly has paved the way—er, broken new ground—for other cities to follow. And the best ideas about what to do with vacant property have to do with food.

You can review some of the design contest entries here. For the most part these ideas are at the edge of feasibility, but that’s the point of design competitions: to push the limits of what conventional wisdom says is possible.