Ben Adler | Vox

Donald Trump once backed urgent climate action. Wait, what?

2016-06-09T14:38:13-04:00

Originally published on Grist.

As negotiators headed to Copenhagen in December 2009 to forge a global climate pact, concerned US business leaders and liberal luminaries took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for aggressive climate action. In an open letter to President Barack Obama and the US Congress, they declared: “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

One of the signatories of that letter: Donald Trump.

Also signed by Trump’s three adult children, the letter called for passage of US climate legislation, investment in the clean energy economy, and leadership to inspire the rest of the world to join the fight against climate change.

“We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today,” the letter tells the president and Congress. “Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.”

In every conceivable way, the letter contradicts Trump’s current stance on climate policy. On the campaign trail, Trump has said he is “not a big believer in man-made climate change.” Last fall, after Obama described climate change as a major threat to the United States and the world, Trump said that was “one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics — in the history of politics as I know it.”

The 2009 ad also argues that a shift to clean energy “will spur economic growth” and “create new energy jobs.” But these days, Trump contends that US action to limit greenhouse gas emissions would put the country at a competitive disadvantage. In 2012, he went so far as to claim: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

The Copenhagen conference that inspired the open letter was part of the same two-decade-long UN negotiating process that led to a global climate deal in Paris last year. But whereas in 2009 Trump supported the process via the ad, now he wants to sabotage it, promising recently to “cancel” the Paris accord.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Trump’s signature on the ad, which ran in the Times on December 6, 2009, stands out on a list dominated by liberal media and business figures, including the founder of Patagonia, the cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s, the president of CREDO Mobile, the executive producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, actors Kate Hudson and Adrian Grenier, media heavyweights Martha Stewart and Graydon Carter, and New Age author Deepak Chopra.

None of the signers that Grist interviewed this week could recall who had organized the letter or knew who had asked Trump to sign. The website of the group listed on the ad, businessleaders4environmentalchange.us, is now defunct, and no information was available on who had registered it.

Beyond the Times ad, Trump has supported climate causes and expressed concern about global warming at least twice before. In 2014, Trump sent a $5,000 check to Protect Our Winters, a climate advocacy nonprofit for skiers and snowboarders, after a Celebrity Apprentice contestant requested his support.

The second time was when climate change hit The Trump Organization’s bottom line: His golf course in Ireland is threatened by coastal erosion, so the company recently applied for a permit to build a seawall to protect the property from “global warming and its effects.”

Other than that, Trump has been fairly consistent in his views on climate change — or consistent for Trump. Two months after signing the open letter, he told members of the Trump National Golf Club that Al Gore should be stripped of his Nobel Prize because that winter had been cold. “Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less,” he said. “It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan, and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.”

Now that sounds more like the Republican nominee.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Why the words “loss and damage” are causing such a fuss at the Paris climate talks

2019-03-05T15:01:19-05:00

Friends of the Earth International / Luka Tomac via Grist" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15610600/grist-loss-damage-c-flickr-foei.0.1496054585.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />

Originally published on Grist.

PARIS — There’s a big sticking point in the negotiations over a global climate deal, and it centers on this little phrase: “loss and damage.” The concept has become hugely important to developing countries and climate justice advocates at the COP21 talks — and a big headache for developed countries.

The conversation around climate aid — money and assistance that goes from rich countries to poorer ones for climate change–related programs — has traditionally focused on two areas: mitigation, which means cutting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions by doing things like building up renewable energy capacity and halting deforestation; and adaptation, which means preparing for future climate changes by taking steps such as building better drainage systems to deal with higher seas and more severe storms and shifting to heartier crops that can withstand higher temperatures and lower rainfalls.

But now developing countries are pushing for assistance in a third area: loss and damage. This refers to irreparable losses (loss of lives, species, or land taken over by rising seas) and recoverable damages (damaged buildings, roads, power lines) — basically, what happens when mitigation and adaptation fall short and climate disaster strikes. At this point, no matter how much we cut emissions or how much we prepare for coming changes, there will still be significant loss and damage from climate change.

Already, the devastating effects of rising sea levels, hotter temperatures, and extreme weather events are growing rapidly. Small Pacific island nations are experiencing regular flooding, which submerges roads, batters houses and seawalls, and sends populations fleeing. In nations like Bangladesh, farms are ruined by the infiltration of salt water.

And so developing countries, environmental activists, and humanitarian aid organizations are advocating in Paris right now for loss-and-damage provisions to be included in the agreement.

Climate change effects aren’t limited to developing countries, of course, but they’re a far bigger problem for developing countries than for rich ones. That’s partly for geographic reasons: Many poorer nations are in hot desert or tropical regions, where the effects of warming can be particularly acute. Mostly it’s because they lack the wealth and technical capacity to cope with loss and damage on their own.

And the grim irony is that these problems are not of their own making: It is the rich countries, which reaped the benefits of fossil fuel–powered growth, that are causing climate change and are best able to shoulder its costs.

To draw attention to the issue, on Friday morning, ACT Alliance, a coalition of 137 churches and affiliated organizations aiding the poor in more than 100 countries, staged what it candidly referred to as a “loss and damage ‘Die-In’ campaign stunt” at the COP21 conference venue outside Paris. Eight employees of the alliance’s member groups from throughout the Global South lay on the ground to symbolize those killed by extreme weather, while 15 of their colleagues stood behind them holding photos from storm- and flood-ravaged places, chanting, “Leave no one behind! Climate justice now!”

The “die-in.”

“Many of our members are from Bangladesh, the Philippines, Central America, many parts of Africa that are experiencing extreme impacts of climate change already,” said Alison Doig, a climate change and sustainable development expert at Christian Aid, part of ACT Alliance. “We work on sustainable agriculture; we work on health issues. We were brought into the climate movement because our programs around the world are affected by climate change.”

Will loss and damage make it into the final climate agreement?

At the COP19 climate conference in 2013, in Warsaw, Poland, negotiators agreed to review the loss-and-damage issue for three years, known as the “Warsaw International Mechanism.” Now advocates want that to become a permanent part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching frame for all COPs and agreements.

Developed countries, however, have been reluctant to accept loss-and-damage provisions in the deal being hammered out in Paris, since the phrase and concept “loss and damage” evoke legal liability. Rich countries adamantly do not want even the specter of admitting liability and compensation obligations for the effects of climate change. And how would it even be determined which disasters or impacts are related to the changing climate? Scientists cannot directly attribute any given hurricane or drought to higher greenhouse gas levels, only the increased frequency and severity of such events.

Imagine the political reaction in the US if President Obama signed an agreement putting the nation on the hook for climate-related losses all over the world. Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry said to Rolling Stone about loss and damage, “We’re not against it. We’re in favor of framing it in a way that doesn’t create a legal remedy, because Congress will never buy into an agreement that has something like that … the impact of it would be to kill the deal.”

But developing countries are just as clear that leaving loss and damage out entirely is a deal breaker for them. “We do not foresee an outcome in Paris without loss and damage,” Pa Ousman Jarju, chair of the Least Developed Countries group of 48 nations, said to reporters on Thursday. “That is a red line for us.”

And not just any loss-and-damage language will do. Developing countries want loss and damage to have its own section in the text, rather than being lumped in with mitigation and adaptation as a third form of climate finance. The reason is that rich countries would rather give money to, say, renewable energy programs, which benefit everyone by lowering emissions and lessening warming, and can also create business opportunities for developed-world companies. There’s no payback for rich countries that provide loss-and-damage funding; it’s just the right thing to do. Developing countries realize this means that if loss and damage is just the least appealing of three climate-finance options for developed countries, the money and effort will never materialize.

Activists and developing countries aren’t insisting on legal liability, though. The loss-and-damage text proposed in the draft agreement says nothing about liability.

Some losses, such as the emptying out of a community or the forced abandonment of a way of life, can’t even be easily measured monetarily. “Some of the communities I work with, they have lost their home because of river erosion,” said Farah Kabir, country director for Bangladesh at ActionAid, an anti-poverty organization, at a press conference in Paris last week. “How do you compensate them for the loss of the graveyard of their mother or father? The loss of their culture? They cannot practice their religious rituals. Can you give them back the graveyard of their parents?”

You cannot, of course. That’s why activists say what they want from rich countries isn’t mainly money but rather coping capacity. That can mean anything from welcoming climate refugees to lending expertise to developing countries. “It’s about planning that reduces suffering,” says Keya Chatterjee, executive director of the US Climate Action Network, in an interview with Grist. “If there has to be migration, it can be very painful or less painful.”

Some spending could also be deployed without admitting liability. Forking over compensation for flood damage after the fact, if done under a loss-and-damage system, might imply that you’re accepting responsibility for the flood and are responsible for the full damages. Instead, rich countries can subsidize risk or flood insurance for home or business owners in low-lying developing countries who face unaffordably rising premiums.

And so the US is softening its opposition to loss-and-damage language, provided it steers clear of even a hint of liability. “Loss and damage has been one of the big crunch issues between my country the US and small island states, but there’s possibly room opening up,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, at a press conference in Paris last week. Last Tuesday, Obama met in Paris with the Alliance of Small Island States negotiating group. The same day, he announced that the US will contribute $30 million to help pay for climate risk insurance in developing countries.

Although the US initially wanted language that alluded to the concept without the phrase “loss and damage” because it evokes liability, it now appears that American negotiators might be willing to accept the phrase as long as it is offset by a phrase that specifically rejects liability. “We are in favor of support, technical and financial support, going to countries with loss and damage,” said Todd Stern, the lead US climate negotiator, last week at a press conference in Paris. “There’s one thing that we don’t accept, and we won’t accept in this agreement, which is the notion that there should be liability and compensation for loss and damage. Virtually all developed countries [agree].”

“Coming in, we knew loss and damage would be a difficult issue,” said Tonya Rawe, senior policy adviser with CARE USA, a global anti-poverty organization, at a press event. “We’re glad to see the issue is live. Even the US Park Service is having to grapple with loss and damage as they’re looking at loss of parks and monuments within the US itself. Everyone has to deal with loss and damage.” Referring to the section on loss and damage that made it into the updated draft of the potential agreement released last week, Rawe said, “If you read the text you will not see the words ‘compensation’ or ‘legal liability.’ It’s about solidarity and the support and assistance developing countries need to cope with the impacts.” Rawe told Grist that an example of non-monetary assistance could be “setting up solidarity groups, so that people who have lost their community when being forced to relocate can rebuild that.”

That may not satisfy developing countries, though. “Right now, the big friction is on loss and damage,” says Abhishek Pratap, an analyst with Greenpeace International based in New Delhi. “The way the liability and compensation language has been removed is creating a lot of heartburn. India is talking very strongly on climate justice, and their climate justice argument is very much attached with loss and damage.” India and other poor, low-lying countries from South Asia to Africa want money for the catastrophes they have already suffered in recent years. “They are now referencing the Chennai flood very strongly,” says Pratap, referring to the heavy rains that recently killed hundreds in the Indian city. “Many countries’ economies are suffering because of the historic climate impact and this [current agreement text] language doesn’t talk about that. The moment you remove compensation and liability, those who lost in Chennai will not get anything.”

Somehow, the developing and developed countries will have to come to terms on this. Most likely, say close observers, it will happen at the 11th hour in bilateral negotiations between the US and India.

A reason loss and damage has emerged as such a big issue now is that past UN agreements have failed to keep climate change in check. Global greenhouse gas emissions have kept rising. Developed countries have not produced all of the climate finance that they promised at the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009. That means many more climate-related disasters will be coming. Loss and damage rises in urgency for developing nations in inverse proportion to how much is being done to fight and prepare for climate change — and thus far, not nearly enough is being done. Loss-and-damage language should be included in the Paris agreement, but even better would be to minimize its importance by taking tougher action to fight climate change and prevent the worst impacts from happening.

It would be in the interests of both rich and poor countries to find a compromise they can live with. As Kabir pointed out, “The amount of finances needed for loss and damage, if we don’t act now, is going to multiply.”

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

The inside story of the campaign that killed Keystone XL

2019-03-05T11:46:18-05:00

Originally published on Grist.

Everyone is talking about President Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, but he’s not actually the hero of the story. The Keystone decision is the culmination of a startlingly successful grassroots activist campaign that defied the odds and convinced the Obama administration to change course against building a major piece of fossil fuel infrastructure. Here’s how it came together, as recounted by a few of the key players.

No one expected Obama to be swayed by a campaign against KXL

Pipeline company TransCanada first submitted its application to build Keystone XL (KXL) in 2008, and it was expected to quietly cruise to State Department approval even if Obama won the White House. In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, in a comment that has since become infamous, “we are inclined to” approve it. A previous Keystone pipeline (without “XL” in its name), which goes from Alberta to Illinois, had overcome resistance from environmentalists and indigenous communities in both the US and Canada and been completed in 2010.

The climate movement was still in its early stages at that time, years away from organizing rallies that would bring out 40,000 people in DC in 2013 and nearly 400,000 in New York in 2014. Public acceptance of climate science, following the recession and the birth of the Tea Party, was at a nadir in 2010. No one expected that Obama, who had clearly articulated an “all of the above” energy strategy, was likely to be swayed by a campaign against KXL — not even the activists themselves.

And yet, uphill though the struggle would be, some organizers thought the issue had real appeal. It was tangible and easy to understand in a way that power plant regulation is not. And it would not require cooperation from Congress — it was ultimately up to Obama and Obama alone. All they needed to do was convince the president to take their side.

The first activists: ranchers, Native Americans, and wonks

In 2011, when 350.org, the climate action group that would become widely identified with the anti-KXL campaign, glommed onto the issue, there were two groups of activists already working on it: locals from affected communities along the proposed pipeline route, such as ranchers, farmers, and Native Americans, and environmental wonks in Washington, DC.

“Many stories about the campaign put the start date in mid-2011,” says Kenny Bruno, the campaign coordinator at Corporate Ethics International. “But a couple dozen people from environmental groups and tribal nations met in November 2008, two months after the application by TransCanada, and decided to prioritize stopping KXL as a way of fighting the reckless and rapid expansion of the tar sands in Canada. There had been a cry for help from Alberta, where small First Nations and a couple of watchdog groups were seeing this massive expansion of the dirtiest project on earth. And almost no one on earth had heard of it.”

Jane Kleeb.

Jane Kleeb, the founder of Bold Nebraska, a progressive advocacy organization, first became aware of the issue in 2010. “A friend asked if I’d heard about the pipeline that would go through the Sandhills, not because I’m an environmentalist but because Scott’s family homesteaded and still ranches there,” she says, referring to her husband. At the time, Kleeb was a general progressive activist; she had focused on turning out the youth vote in the 2008 election.

“I didn’t know what tar sands was,” says Kleeb. “I went to the first State Department hearing in May 2010 in York, Nebraska, because I was curious. About 100 farmers and ranchers there took the mic and were opposed. The only one who spoke for it was a union guy from Arkansas because his union got construction jobs on Keystone 1.” Kleeb decided to get involved in organizing the Nebraska opposition: “I saw this as an opportunity for Bold to really be a voice for rural Nebraska.”

For locals along the proposed pipeline route, the issue had enormous personal significance. Even people whose land was only near the route rather than directly under it faced the danger of land and water contamination from oil spills. This was true of farmers and ranchers in Nebraska and of Native communities in both the US and Canada.

Clayton Thomas-Müller.

Clayton Thomas-Müller has been an anti-Keystone leader among First Nations, as Canadian Native American tribes are called. “I was probably the first pipeline campaigner,” he says. Currently the indigenous climate campaigner at 350.org, Thomas-Müller previously ran the anti–tar sands campaign for the Indigenous Environmental Network, based in Ottawa, Ontario.

First Nations had been devastated by the effects of tar sands oil extraction and transportation in Alberta and had already been fighting against pipelines for a decade when KXL started to emerge as a big issue in 2010. Having unsuccessfully tried to stop the first Keystone project, Thomas-Müller was well acquainted with the approval process for a pipeline that goes between the US and Canada and knew the mechanisms that could be used to stop it. He also knew that US tribes could be organized to push on those levers. “I analyzed what it would take to win Keystone XL,” says Thomas-Müller. “I saw that the Ogallala Aquifer was threatened, and that was a major wedge with the environmental community, but it also would depend on tribal pushback.”

So Thomas-Müller and his colleagues started getting tribal councils to pass resolutions opposing Keystone XL. And they took their demands directly to Obama in 2011. “The No. 1 action that we were able to organize during the early years was to organize the tribal chairmen attending the White House tribal leaders summit,” says Thomas-Müller. “Every year Obama has dinner with representatives from every tribal region in the White House. So we found out who the Northern Plains rep was, Rodney Bordeaux of Rosebud [Sioux tribe]. We gave him a declaration opposing Keystone XL that we’d been organizing in Native communities, and he gave it to Obama. There were thousands of signatories.”

Policy experts focus on the inside game

Susan Casey-Lefkowitz.

Meanwhile, in offices in DC, environmental policy experts were looking at the new pipelines being proposed and built to carry bitumen extracted from the tar sands, the world’s dirtiest oil, and they were worried. “Back in 2005 I was working with partners in Alberta on other energy issues, and I kept hearing about tar sands,” recalls Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “[Its development] was seen by local activists as a source of regret. It was ramping up, and it had a lot of support in the Canadian government and the Bush administration. There was a sense that little could be done to stop tar sands expansion. Groups in the US were not focused on it at all, but groups in Alberta were very concerned. So I started working with NRDC on what it would mean if tar sands oil were extracted. So we mapped out the infrastructure, pipelines and refineries, where tar sands oil would touch down in the US. We fought first on Keystone [1] and lost, we fought Alberta Clipper [a pipeline from Alberta to Wisconsin] and lost. The different groups working on fighting tar sands expansion agreed to focus together like a laser on Keystone XL.”

That initial coalition consisted of a few national environmental organizations including NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the National Wildlife Federation; First Nations and Native American activist groups such as Idle No More; and Bold Nebraska and local landowner groups.

While the grassroots activists organized from outside DC, policy experts such as Casey-Lefkowitz focused on the inside game, lobbying the government and conducting the research and analysis that armed activists with data-driven arguments. The experts in federal policy also helped guide the local activists and the grassroots climate activists — many of whom had never been to DC or lobbied for anything before — through the political process.

“I gave comments on the EIS [environmental impact statement] draft,” says Casey-Lefkowitz, “and we brought environmental experts and indigenous groups down from Canada to talk about impacts of tar sands expansion. We talked about the Enbridge pipeline spill [near] Kalamazoo, Michigan, of 1 million gallons of mostly tar sands oil.” The Enbridge spill was an alarming window into the potential future for communities along the KXL pipeline route. “It spilled in the river and has been very, very hard to clean up,” says Casey-Lefkowitz. “The nature of tar sands made it harder for operators to tell there was a leak. The bitumen sinks to the bottom in the river after a leak, and cleaning it up creates new oil plumes floating downstream.”

The pipeline becomes a climate issue

Jim Hansen" />

In 2011, in what would become a crucial turning point, renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen argued in an essay that fully developing the tar sands would mean “game over” for the climate. This was part of a growing recognition at the time that to keep global warming below 2 degrees C, we would need to leave most remaining fossil fuels underground — especially the tar sands oil that is unusually carbon-intensive to extract. That meant the fight over KXL was not just about the risks of local pollution but about the whole planet, and thus the realm of potential activists who could join the fight was huge. It also meant that for those who were already working to stop climate change, there was now a very tangible issue to organize around.

And so a band of little-known activists, without the backing of any billionaires or corporations, set out to convince the White House to reject TransCanada’s proposal on the grounds that it would worsen climate change as well as endanger the local environment.

Jamie Henn at a protest in front of the White House in August 2011, before being arrested.

“We’d been looking for an issue to deepen resistance [to fossil fuel development], and Keystone XL emerged as the best place to take a stand, in part because it requires a presidential permit,” says Jamie Henn, a co-founder of 350.org and the group’s strategy and communications director. “It’s not Congress’s decision — it was Obama’s alone to make. It was a unique fight, an obvious test, something people could really wrap their heads around.”

When 350.org got involved, it filled the gap between local grassroots activists and national environmental organizations. The organization reached out to the local activists and asked if it would be helpful for the group to raise the temperature on Obama, and the answer was yes.

Two weeks of civil disobedience at the White House

Police arrest protesters demonstrating in front of the White House on August 24, 2011, in Washington, DC. More than 50 demonstrators protesting against the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to Texas were arrested.

When 350 launched the first major anti-KXL actions in Washington, DC, in 2011, most reporters hadn’t heard of Keystone XL. That’s one reason the group made the counterintuitive decision to stage the first protest during the last two weeks in August — normally a dead time in the muggy capital. “Congress was on break, so we were the only story in town,” says Henn. “Admittedly, most reporters were on vacation. The first few days I did press, and we were ignored by everything but Democracy Now. It was a new issue for reporters.” But not for long.

Each day during that two-week stretch, activists would sit down in front of the White House fence, in a public right of way that the police only allow you to occupy for five minutes. The police would come and warn the protesters to leave or face arrest, and they would stay and get arrested — 1,253 of them in total. Though far smaller than the number who might come to a large rally in Washington, DC, it was a large number for such an intense act of civil disobedience. The spectacle in such a high-profile location drew media attention. “We saw how it began to break through,” says Henn. “People hadn’t seen something like this done before on climate.”

Kleeb brought a contingent of Nebraskans to DC for that August protest. “We were doing work in [Nebraska], and Bill McKibben, who I didn’t know of because I didn’t come from that world, sent a letter out with Naomi Klein,” she says. “It was simple, beautiful, and strong, calling on people to come to DC and get arrested, so we could start to get the president’s attention on this issue. For some of our farmers and ranchers, it was their first time flying, let alone in DC. It was the first time for all these Nebraskans doing civil disobedience, getting arrested.”

So 350 took lessons from other activists more experienced in civil disobedience. “We deliberately connected [KXL] to civil rights,” says Henn. “Dan Choi showed up on the first day and said this is the type of action that can push the administration.” Choi is the former Army lieutenant and Iraq War vet who came out as gay and campaigned through similar high-profile acts of civil disobedience for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“We learned from civil rights and LGBT groups who were beginning to make headway pressuring the administration. Environmentalists were probably the last ones to learn that to make progress on this administration, you had to push them hard.”

The right takes up the pro-pipeline cause

A potential setback, followed by the first temporary victory, came shortly thereafter. In November 2011, the State Department issued an environmental impact statement (EIS) that was very favorable toward the proposal. “Everybody was telling us, ‘There’s no way you’re going to win,’ so we figured we’d go back to DC, and we had 15,000 people surround the White House,” says Henn.

Meanwhile 350.org linked up with groups that had larger email lists, like the Sierra Club, MoveOn, and Avaaz.org, and managed to bring out an impressively large number of people. The demonstration proved that environmental activists cared deeply about the issue. Meanwhile, the EPA pointed out analytical flaws in State’s EIS. Those two events together had their desired effect on the administration, which delayed the decision on KXL, saying it needed to look at possible alternative routes.

That success brought blowback. After the national media portrayed the left as having some success stalling the approval of Keystone, the right took up the pro-pipeline cause. “Once that delay happened, it was sealed that Keystone XL was going to be this national fight,” says Henn. “Suddenly there were reporters on the beat, and anything said about the pipeline was a headline on Fox News. Congress pushed the administration to make a decision, and the administration pushed back and said it needed [a more thorough] review.”

In February 2012, 350.org mobilized its troops for a 24-hour, 800,000-message call-in to the Senate. On the other side, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney promised in April 2012, “I will build that pipeline if I have to myself.”

TransCanada reacted to the controversy by splitting the Keystone XL project in two. It decided to build the southern leg from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf Coast separately because that part wouldn’t cross an international border and therefore didn’t require approval from the State Department or the White House.

Obama — who was then running for reelection and emphasizing his commitment to boosting oil production — let State keep analyzing the northern leg of KXL. But in March 2012, he went to Cushing and said he was going to expedite permitting for the southern leg. Climate activists still remember the betrayal with bitterness. “It was Obama’s worst speech on climate ever,” says Henn.

Obama signals a change

US President Barack Obama, flanked by US Secretary of State John Kerry, announces his decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, at the White House November 6, 2015 in Washington, DC. President Obama cited concerns about the impact on the environment, saying it would not serve the interests of the United States.

But the following summer, after he was safely reelected, Obama shifted the terms of the debate again, this time in the climate movement’s favor. In a speech at Georgetown University, Obama laid out a climate test for KXL. He won’t approve it, he said, if it would “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”

“That was a turning point, because Obama helped cement something we’d been saying all along: You can’t approve this if it’s going to hurt the climate,” Henn recalls. “That said to us, okay, we’re on our turf here. It isn’t a debate about jobs, about the American economy, about energy independence — it’s about climate change. That’s a debate we can win.”

Says Bruno, “Prior to that, most elite opinion held that a piece of infrastructure was not a core climate issue, and that tar sands would ‘come out of the ground anyway.’ The Georgetown speech meant we had won the argument about whether infrastructure locking in high-carbon investments was important. Evaluating KXL on its climate impact was all we could have asked for, and the president promised that would happen. That night, I felt we had won the campaign.”

Fighting over the pipeline's impact on climate

But they still had to convince the administration that KXL would, in fact, exacerbate climate change by encouraging oil extraction from the tar sands. If the State Department found that the tar sands would be exploited anyway, then Obama would have cover to okay the pipeline. Even though the president started pointing out how minuscule any economic benefit from KXL would be, he was still uncertain of the climate impact.

So things looked pretty grim in January 2014, when the State Department issued its revised EIS. The statement, strongly contested by environmental activists, argued that the tar sands would be developed whether or not KXL was built. So the pipeline, State concluded, would have no impact on climate change. The activists pushed back with studies showing that the cost of transporting tar sands oil without KXL would be prohibitive. They were publicly insistent that they would win the argument, but some were privately discouraged.

The "cowboys and Indians" protest grabs the White House's attention

Still, they pushed forward. In April 2014, the entire anti-KXL coalition came together for a week of events on the National Mall — between the White House and the Capitol — called “Reject and Protect.” The theme was “cowboys and Indians,” after the ranchers and Native Americans who both joined in. The Native American groups put up tepees where visitors could stop in and be educated about the issue. The week culminated in a rally and march with real-life cowboys and Indians riding horses. “That was the first time the White House acknowledged our work,” Kleeb wryly remembers. “I got an email from the White House saying, ‘Okay, you’ve got our attention.’ They literally said that.”

The cowboy and Indian alliance was not just cobbled together for that event. It had grown out of a Native American summit about a year earlier. “I was at an event at the casino on the Rosebud reservation [in South Dakota] in early 2013,” Kleeb recalls. “It was a community forum where everyone was sharing information. One of the elders talked about the cowboy and Indian alliance that stopped uranium mining in the ’80s. So I went to tribal leaders and said we should revive the cowboy and Indian alliance and do events along the pipeline route. We did a concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young, and ‘Reject and Protect’ on the Mall.”

The collaboration between historical antagonists, both icons of the American West, gave the opposition to KXL a broader national political appeal. “Those faces are not the image you usually have of the environmental movement,” says Kleeb. “We were helping the White House understand that there was political space [to] reject it.”

And so they did. As First Nations and other groups stalled plans to build other pipelines in Canada to move tar sands oil east or west, and as oil prices dropped to a point where it would be uneconomical to extract tar sands oil if it needed to be shipped by rail, the argument that KXL would have no climate impact grew steadily weaker. While Obama continued to play his cards close to the vest, it began to look like he would eventually reject KXL. By late 2014 and early 2015 he was speaking very skeptically about the project, explaining how it wouldn’t lower US gasoline prices and calling tar sands oil “extraordinarily dirty.”

"I would say Republicans did us a favor by banging the drum so loudly"

The last gasp of the pro-KXL crowd came this past winter when the new Republican Congress made passing a bill that would require KXL approval their first act. Obama vetoed it. “We started to feel confident when Obama rejected the bill in Congress this February 24,” says Henn.

Polarization works both ways: Just as environmental opposition inspired Republicans’ obsession with building Keystone, so did Republican efforts to take away the president’s authority spur Obama to push back. “Once Congress really took the reins on this, it’s John Boehner’s pipeline as much TransCanada’s,” says Henn. “That might have changed the political calculus for the White House: ‘We can’t do this without looking like we’re doing Boehner a favor.’ I would say Republicans did us a favor by banging the drum so loudly.”

“What really made it the most famous pipeline never built was the GOP, which seized on it thinking it was a weak point for the president,” says Bruno. “In my view, their obsession backfired because it alerted the president that something didn’t add up — it just wasn’t that important a project in terms of jobs, energy security, etc. Eventually he saw through the hype.”

A win against the fossil fuel economy

A Keystone-style victory won’t necessarily be easy to replicate in other anti–fossil fuel fights. Some battles won’t attract unlikely allies like ranchers and farmers, and many issues aren’t so easy to explain to potential supporters and don’t lend themselves to simple slogans on protest signs.

Still, this fight shows that activists can take on the fossil fuel economy and win. “When we were starting against Keystone XL, we were told over and over again, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t win, why are you doing it?’” says Casey-Lefkowitz. “Sometimes you tackle those fights like Keystone XL and the world around you changes, and it catches up to where you are.”

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

What America can learn from Germany’s high-speed trains

2019-03-05T06:30:21-05:00

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Originally published on Grist.

Riding the high-speed train between Berlin and Hamburg, Germany’s two largest cities, is a radically different experience from riding its American counterpart, Amtrak’s Acela, which connects major East Coast cities. Germany’s InterCity Express (ICE) ride is as smooth as a Mercedes on the Autobahn. The conductor comes around politely offering to bring you coffee. The bathroom doors open electronically with the push of a button for disability access. There’s no perennial stopping and starting of the train, no grumpy barking conductor, no herky-jerky rolling of the bathroom doors, none of Amtrak’s chronically late arrivals. And on German trains, the wifi actually works.

At €45 each way, roughly $50, it isn’t cheap. But it’s cheaper than Amtrak. Berlin to Hamburg is 179 miles, which is about the same distance as New York to Baltimore. The regional Amtrak for that trip, booked about two weeks in advance, costs $77 each way and takes 40 minutes longer than the German trip. The Acela is $150 and still takes 20 minutes longer.

California is the only place in the US where high-speed rail (HSR) plans are really moving forward, albeit not that quickly or smoothly. The state is currently building a 520-mile high-speed line from San Francisco to LA, which will eventually extend north to Sacramento and south to San Diego.

What California could learn from Germany

The German Marshall Fund put out a report in June on the lessons California could draw from the well-developed HSR systems in Germany and France. Most of the different points it lays out boil down to one essential, overarching approach: Make HSR central to a larger transportation system that includes other alternatives to driving and is focused around smart growth. Successful high-speed rail requires more than just laying tracks between cities and buying fancy new rail cars.

Specifically, the report warns against putting stops in sparsely populated areas, because that slows trains down. Put them only in the center of major cities, recommends report author Eric Eidlin, as Germany has done. The ICE train, for example, makes no stops during the two-hour journey between Berlin and Hamburg. France, on the other hand, has dispersed train stations around the urban periphery, and the result, Eidlin notes, has been less efficient connections to other modes of transport. “California should carefully consider the economic development and access challenges that French cities such as Aix-en-Provence and Avignon have experienced with exurban and peripheral stations,” Eidlin writes. “Thankfully, California has made the wise decision of siting most HSR stations in central cities. However, one notable exception to this is the proposed Kings/Tulare station east of Hanford, which would be located in an exurban location.” Also, the Milbrae and Burbank station locations will be in less accessible areas.

If building an HSR station in a suburb or smaller city is absolutely necessary, the groundwork should be laid with a new mass transit hub around it. Eidlin also recommends that wherever stations are built, cities should encourage new housing, retail, and office development. One big advantage of trains over planes is that they get you right into the city center instead of to an airport out on the periphery. California should capitalize on that advantage by making the areas around HSR stations even more dense, developed, and connected. “The California HSR line could be a boon for a number of smaller cities located in California’s Central Valley with untapped economic development potential, including Fresno and Bakersfield,” Eidlin writes. “With careful economic development and land use planning in these Central Valley cities in anticipation of HSR, they stand to benefit greatly from being better connected to the state’s major economic poles.”

The challenge of American suburban sprawl

Los Angeles. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

One difference between German and American train travel is what you see out the window. On Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor route, you can spend seven hours traveling from Boston to Washington, DC, without ever passing a farm. Each city’s suburbs bleed into the next. When leaving Berlin, on the other hand, in less than half an hour you’re whisked from the capital’s center to cornfields and cow pastures. This reflects not just the train’s speed but the absence of sprawl in Germany. The suburbs — a handful of detached houses with pitched roofs, many featuring solar panels — whiz by in a few minutes. Despite, or perhaps ironically because of, Europe’s greater density, you are far closer to the countryside when in a major city. There is no equivalent to the US’s unending hellscape of highways, strip malls, fast food drive-thrus, and auto body shops. Europeans’ cities were more built up before the car, and they didn’t then tear their cities apart to accommodate cars and facilitate sprawl, as we did. The US is so vast that we could pave everything within 200 miles of New York City and still have more than enough land for our corn and cows. But if Europeans wanted to preserve rural areas, they would have to use urban space more efficiently, and so they have. A much greater share of the typical European metro area’s population is concentrated in its inner city. So you get dense, transit-rich cities with countryside in between.

You cannot build a high-speed rail line to nowhere and expect it to attract enough passengers to be economically feasible. Many US cities, by sprawling over everywhere, are in a sense nowhere. Or, in Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase about Oakland in the 1930s, “There is no there there.” West Coast cities in particular sprawl outward in so many different directions, with so little mass transit, that arriving at a downtown station won’t make it easy for you to get to your ultimate destination unless you rent a car upon arrival. LA and San Diego do not have the extensive subway systems of Hamburg or Berlin.

For high-speed rail to fulfill its potential, it must be one component of a low-carbon society. LA and San Diego need to become more like Berlin and Hamburg — and San Francisco and New York. That means being denser, with walkable and bikeable streets, public transit systems, and regional commuter rail lines to the suburbs. That would allow people to arrive in town on the train and hop on a bus or subway, or hail an affordable taxi, to get to their final destination and then get around while they are in town. LA is working on that, and other California towns and cities should too. Or, as Eidlin puts it in his report, “In order for HSR to deliver on its promise to 38 million Californians and investors, the project must be designed as the backbone of a comprehensive system for sustainable passenger mobility in California.”

Making trips by high-speed rail results in much lower carbon emissions than driving a car or flying. But another great thing about rail is that it works together with local transit systems to eliminate car trips once you’ve reached your destination city. California’s San Francisco-to-LA line is due to be completed in 2028, which is, unfortunately, still a long time off — but that gives cities along the route plenty of time to build up the neighborhoods and transit around their stations. If they do, it will be more than just good for the environment — it will be good for their economies too.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Many American cities are smaller than they used to be, so why do they feel so full?

2019-03-05T01:14:38-05:00

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DC actually has more housing units than ever. | Shutterstock

Originally published on Grist.

Everyone is so familiar with the cliches of resurgent older cities on the East Coast that you can probably recite them by heart: decrepit or abandoned buildings replaced by gleaming condominiums, lines coming out the door of the hot new artisanal restaurant in what used to be a boarded-up storefront, yuppies whizzing by on bicycles.

People are supposedly moving back to cities — at least the high-profile, knowledge-economy ones. But even some of the hottest older cities, despite high housing prices and strong economies, are still well below their peak populations. They are growing expensive rather than big.

That’s a boon to the real-estate industry, but not for the environment. We’re watching the demographics of cities change without getting the carbon-emissions-reducing benefits that the back-to-the-cities movement promised. Here’s why.

Denser housing is greener housing

Living in densely populated areas generally produces less carbon dioxide than being more spread out. (Shutterstock)

Urban population density matters greatly for climate change: People who live in densely populated areas burn way less carbon as they go about their lives. Older cities tend to be denser than newer ones, so getting residents back into older cities is a key environmental challenge.

To get them back, though, seems to require more than just a strong economy and attractive lifestyle. It turns out that social changes mean cities need to create far more housing units than they had in the mid-20th century if they are to keep housing relatively affordable and increase their populations to their former peaks.

DC is growing, but still has fewer residents than in 1950

President Harry S. Truman throws the first baseball pitch at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC on April 18, 1950. (Photo by FPG/Getty Images)

Consider Washington, DC, where the peak US Census count was 802,178 residents in 1950. Given that it’s the capital of a country with twice as many people as in 1950, you wouldn’t expect Washington to have shrunk, would you? Well, it has, and it hasn’t fully bounced back. Suburban sprawl and white flight — spurred by the devastating riots of the 1960s and dramatic spikes in crime through the 1980s — caused the population to dwindle to 572,059 in 2000.

In the new millennium, DC has experienced a remarkable resurgence. The regional economy is strong, thanks to steady government spending and growth in related sectors such as technology, defense contracting, lobbying and advocacy, and media. An increasing fashion for urban living among millennials, and wise public investments such as expanding Metrorail lines, have brought hordes of young professionals to the city. DC’s population has grown as a result: In 2010 it was 601,723, and last year it was up to 658,893. If the city keeps adding 15,000 people per year for the next 10 years, it will return to its peak.

But could it grow faster? Could it end up even larger? That would be good news for the climate. DC’s suburbs have sprawled outward far faster than the city has grown. As Washingtonian magazine observes, “The Fastest-Growing Suburbs of Washington Are In Counties You’ve Never Heard Of.” Places like Stafford, Virginia, 42 miles from DC, are being turned into exurbs. The resultant gas-guzzling long commutes create a lot more climate pollution.

It would also be good news for DC’s financially stretched residents. The high demand of young professionals for housing in DC has driven up prices dramatically. Zillow rates the DC real-estate market “very hot.” Median home sale prices rose 5.7 percent last year to $485,250.

DC faces growing rents and growing inequality

(Shutterstock)

Instead of just getting more populous and diverse, the “Chocolate City” has lost almost as many black residents as it has gained white ones. Between 2000 and 2010, the Washington Post reports, “The black population dropped by more than 39,000 over the decade, down to 301,000 of the city’s 601,700 residents. At the same time, the non-Hispanic white population skyrocketed by more than 50,000 to 209,000 residents, almost a third higher than a decade earlier.” In 2011, the city lost its black majority. According to US News, “From 2000 to 2010, [DC] was the only place – other than states with natural gas resources and fracking – that saw its residents’ earnings increase.”

This reflects, unfortunately, not improvement in conditions for DC’s long-time residents, but their displacement and growing inequality. The average white resident of DC earns more than twice as much as the average Latino resident. Average rents in DC are growing faster than average incomes for rich and poor alike, and even the well-heeled newcomers are feeling the pinch.

DC has more housing units than ever, but fewer people per unit

Hey, look, honey! You can see how we’ve decreased housing density by moving into this very spacious apartment! (Shutterstock)

DC doesn’t suffer from a shrinking stock of housing. In fact, it has the most dwelling units in its history — it just has fewer people in each home. This is a byproduct of social changes, some of which are clearly positive: People feel free to marry later, have fewer children, and divorce when a marriage isn’t working, and they are less likely to live with extended families. The result is smaller households. This is especially true in cities, which have become disproportionately where childless and unmarried people live.

It’s also a reflection of mass affluence. Middle-class Americans have simply become accustomed to more private space and comfort than previous generations. Kitchens and bedrooms are bigger, bathrooms and closets are both bigger and more plentiful, and kids are less often expected to share a room. According to the blog Greater Greater Washington, “The 1950 census found 14.1 percent of the District’s 224,142 occupied housing units to be ‘overcrowded’ (with over 1 person per room). By 2011, that figure had fallen by 2/3, to 4.7 percent … In 1950, 3.2 people occupied each dwelling unit [in DC] In 2007-2011, the number of persons per household had fallen to 2.13.”

For example, a working class two-parent, two-child household is less likely to squeeze into a one or two bedroom apartment in the city. They’ll decamp for a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, leaving that apartment to one or two unmarried young people. A typical row house that once housed a large extended family or a passel of boarders may now shelter just a childless yuppie couple.

What that means is that DC will need more housing units than it had in 1950 if it is to equal its population from then. And that’s how DC’s housing affordability crisis is also a result of policies that constrain the construction of new housing in DC.

Prohibition on tall buildings (and other policies) hamper DC

Washington, DC skyline with the Capitol building — pretty darn short. (Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)

The most egregious in DC is the Height Act, a law passed by Congress limiting the height of DC buildings. Opening up DC for taller buildings would allow for more residents to live in 21st century comfort.

More than just the Height Act stands in the way of density in DC, though. Consider 14th St, NW. Once blighted, it has boomed in recent years as the surrounding neighborhoods of Logan Circle, U Street, and Columbia Heights have experienced rapid gentrification and skyrocketing home prices. Where once empty lots and one-story buildings stood, apartment buildings of around six stories with high-end ground-floor retail have sprouted. But why only six stories? The apartments in these buildings are not cheap. A one-bedroom condo might go for $600,000. But look at the zoning code, which only allows buildings to be 65 or 90 feet tall through most of that corridor. (That’s roughly five to nine floors.) Absent those arbitrary height restrictions, developers might build taller buildings with more units for slightly lower average prices.

DC has other zoning restrictions that limit development of new housing units. There are minimum size requirements that may challenge the ability to build micro-units, and minimum parking requirements that drive up the cost of building. DC is trying to amend its zoning code to allow “mother-in-law” units to be added to single-family homes. But that, like reducing parking requirements, incurs the wrath of entitled homeowners who want to protect their parking and perceived quality of life above all else.

DC is typical of American cities in all these particulars, and it is more lenient than its — or any city’s — suburbs, which set vast areas aside for only detached single family housing with off-street parking, no matter how expensive they become. But more than most cities or suburbs, DC has extremely high housing prices that suggest a lot of unmet demand.

Boston's problems are quite similar: fewer people, bigger units

Boston doesn’t have the same height restrictions as DC, but still struggles with many of the same housing problems. (Shutterstock)

The wax and wane of DC’s population is almost identical to that of Boston. At its peak in the 1950 Census, Boston had 801,444 residents. That dropped to 562,994 in 1980. The decline has reversed and Boston’s population has slowly crept back up, standing at 645,966 in 2013. The Boston Globe reports, “During the 1960s, the city actually lost housing units, and that decade was followed by 30 years of negligible construction in houses and apartments. Families changed, too. The average household size shrank, as Bostonians had fewer kids and saw more people living alone; from 3.2 in 1960, there are now just 2.3 people per household in Boston.”

Like DC, Boston has seen a steady loss of working class families and an increase in childless white-collar workers. In the 2010 Census, DC tied with Atlanta for the highest proportion of single-person households, fully 44 percent. Boston, meanwhile, is the youngest city in the nation, with 35 percent of its adults being under the age of 35. As Anthony Flint, a longtime Boston Globe reporter and now a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts, puts it, referring to two of Boston’s gentrifying neighborhoods and the city’s trademark three-story buildings: “If a young professional couple moves into a triple-decker in South Boston or Jamaica Plain and turns it into a roomy single-family, the Census count drops accordingly.”

Boston, like DC, has experienced a construction boom in neighborhoods near its downtown. And it does not share DC’s blanket prohibition on tall buildings. High-rises are shooting up in areas like Boston’s Back Bay and downtown. But home prices are still rising.

That’s because Boston, like DC, has a strong economy and attractive, dense, historical housing stock. The Globe notes, “In recent years, new residents have been lured by the labor market; metropolitan Boston’s job market is stronger than in most major American cities, and stronger than just about anywhere else in New England … the Boston area’s unemployment rate is consistently below the national average.”

It’s hard to move to Boston for a job when the city’s average home sales price this year passed $600,000. Like DC, Boston’s inner-ring, transit-accessible suburbs are also expensive. “Cost of housing is a factor in the region’s growth,” says Armando Carbonell, chair of the Lincoln Institute’s department of Planning and Urban Form. “If it were less expensive to live in the region, there would be more people living in it.”

Boston has added 20,000 housing units since the turn of the century. That’s impressive, but it’s not enough to offset the trend towards fewer people in bigger units. “The number of housing units in Boston increased by more than 8 percent between 2000 and 2010, while the population grew by 4.8 percent, so there was a larger increase in housing units than population,” notes Carbonell. “People are occupying more square feet per person.”

Zoning and tax solutions for higher housing density

Taxing land instead of buildings could encourage the development of taller housing (Shutterstock)

More housing development would do more than increase density and reduce carbon emissions. It would reduce the obscene, and growing, rent burden in these cities. In 2000, 35 percent of Washingtonians and 42 percent of Bostonians were paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent. By 2011, that share had spiked to 49 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

Changing zoning codes to allow taller buildings is hard. Local opposition can be fierce. If you already own a home in a neighborhood, constraining demand to boost prices is in your financial interest. New construction will bring nothing but temporary dust and noise followed by permanent traffic and competition for on-street parking. But neighborhood homeowners must make this sacrifice for the greater good. If nothing else, it will help their children afford to stay in the city where they raised them.

High-cost cities may have to reform not just their zoning codes but the process of approving developments, in order to reduce community veto points. They could also switch from taxing the value of buildings to taxing the value of the land it sits on. That would push owners of short buildings or empty lots to develop a taller building or sell it to someone who will. As a recent op-ed in The Baltimore Sun advocating a land value tax (LVT) in that city noted, “Environmentalists favor LVT because it curbs urban sprawl and makes green-field development less attractive. It encourages development and revitalization of what’s already here.”

Turn increased demand into more inhabitants, not just richer ones

Despite rising prices in some neighborhoods in DC, others have low demand that create situations that look somewhat like this. (Photo by Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images)

As other older cities attract more young people, they will face the same conundrum. In some ways, they already do. DC’s problem is actually a lot like that of Detroit, only on a different scale: There are two very different cities within each. In certain neighborhoods that have become trendy, high demand bids up housing prices, empty lots get filled in, and the population grows. In other neighborhoods, demand remains low and abandonment continues. DC’s trendy areas are much bigger than Detroit’s. But large swaths of DC’s eastern half remain not only impoverished but pocked with vacant properties.

The optimistic environmentalist would hope that eventually prices in the desirable corners of DC will push prices to the point where previously undesirable neighborhoods with empty lots get developed because there is enough demand. “In New York, places that were unimaginable, parts of Brooklyn, are now unaffordable,” says Carbonell. “Rising demand is going to get people to rethink neighborhoods, and to ask, ‘Where are there opportunities with under-used housing stock or empty land?’”

But in New York, especially Brooklyn, that rising demand has increased housing prices and displaced low-income residents. New York’s population is at an all-time high, but it still only grows about 2 percent per year, because it, too, struggles with building enough supply to keep up with demand. Any city that wants to protect its residents, and help the environment, will need to figure out how to build enough housing to turn increased demand into more inhabitants — rather than just richer ones.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

How smartphone apps could help carpooling go mainstream

2019-03-04T17:53:15-05:00

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A better way to get to work? | Shutterstock

Originally published on Grist.

Why are companies that enable you to order a cab with a smartphone labeled “ride-sharing” and lumped into the “sharing economy”? They are nothing of the sort, really. You don’t share a ride with an Uber driver any more than you share a cup of coffee with your barista.

From an environmental perspective, this difference is more than just semantic. Every actual shared cab ride — when two people going the same direction are passengers in the same car — means one less car trip and one half the carbon emissions.

And now a number of companies are working on apps that create real shared rides, in all the different kinds of configurations users might want. Soon you might be able to use one app to carpool to and from work, another to find a ride out to a bar along a route with no bus service, and yet another to share a taxi home.

The last example is the easiest and best developed, as it’s a simple variation on the so-called “ride-sharing” that has already proliferated. Late last year, Uber and Lyft launched services, called UberPool and Lyft Line, for finding someone to share your cab and split your bill in a handful of cities such as New York, LA, and San Francisco.

As the Today show reports, “In San Francisco, 50 percent of all Lyft rides are now taken with Lyft Line, according to the company, and the service is most popular in hip neighborhoods like the Mission, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and West Hollywood in Los Angeles.” In December, Sidecar expanded its Sidecar Shared Rides service from San Francisco to Washington, DC, and Boston.

True ride-sharing has been slow to catch on in the US

But some people are uncomfortable with the prospect of riding with random strangers. And Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar rides can be relatively pricey, so even sharing the cost isn’t cheap. That’s why new apps are cropping up to provide opportunities to share rides with people who have a common affiliation, and at lower prices.

I’ve been waiting a long time for real ride-sharing to finally take off. I first learned about the concept years ago from my friend Jon McKinney, who has been working on it for eight years. “In 2007, when I was traveling through Korea, I noticed it would be a regular habit of cab drivers to pick up other riders,” says McKinney. “These guys are doing an ad hoc kind of cab-sharing.” Then, one night shortly after his return to New York, he was going home to Brooklyn from a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and he was struggling to hail a taxi.

Thinking to himself that many of these cabs were occupied by people headed in his same direction, some of whom would gladly split the ride with him to save money, McKinney wondered if there could be a way to set that up. Smartphones had just become widespread, and McKinney reasoned that a smartphone app could solve the problem. (This was before services like Uber came along.)

So McKinney founded CabCorner in 2009 to help people not just hail cars through their phones but also match up to share rides with other passengers. The big hurdle was that in order to match people to share a ride, the program must have a large number of people using it. Otherwise, users are unlikely to find someone else who is going from the same area to the same area at the same time.

But apps are trying to make ride-sharing easier (and safer)

In the last few years the premise of hailing a ride via smartphone has become widely accepted. That means there are far more potential ride-sharers out there, which in turn means it’s more plausible that a service could get the density of users it needs to successfully make a lot of matches.

More fundamentally, it means customers have the confidence — born of positive experience with services like Uber, Sidecar, and Lyft — that they can use a smartphone app to set up a ride that is reliable and safe. That’s a precondition to going a step further and finding a passenger to share the back seat with.

The challenge for some potential users is that riding with strangers sounds like it might be unpleasant or sketchy. Some people actually like the opportunity to meet other young, tech-savvy passengers. In fact, since Lyft Line lets users see a picture of a potential ride sharer, Today reports that some people are using it like a dating service. But one person’s new world of fun possibilities is another person’s avalanche of unwanted advances. Even aside from serious concerns, like sexual harassment or assault, there’s just the possibility that you’ll get stuck with someone droning on about their coding skills in a voice like Ben Stein’s.

CabCorner’s approach to overcoming that obstacle is to focus on groups where potential riders have something in common. “Organizing by affinity group is a much lower barrier than sharing rides with strangers,” says Eric Goldwyn, a Columbia University doctoral candidate in urban planning who serves as the company’s director of policy and planning (and is also a friend of mine). “There are some studies that show people are very skeptical of sharing with strangers.” Goldwyn is doing his dissertation on “dollar vans,” the informal buses that serve New York’s immigrant communities. “What I see in dollar-van research is that an affinity group is how you ease people into sharing.”

CabCorner is currently focusing on the natural affinity group of college students. It launched a website specific to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in February 2013 and facilitated about 40 shared rides that spring semester. Ridership petered out in the fall, but the company has just relaunched there under the name CabEasy with plans to expand to more campuses in this coming fall.

Based on the same affinity-group principle, a company called HOVee launched a private beta app in the Bay Area in January that matches riders for carpooling. Typically, the main impediments to carpooling tend to be concerns about whether you and your fellow riders will be on the same schedule and having to make awkward conversation with strangers. HOVee, which is focused specifically on commuting, tries to solve that with an algorithm that matches you based not just on your schedule but on your profession. It promises to match you with colleagues from your same company or a similar one, and in so doing, turn a drawback of carpooling — chatting with strangers — into a networking opportunity.

The future of ride-sharing: Fewer people buying cars?

Other players are working on filling the void between cheap fixed-route buses and expensive taxis. Ford is trying to develop a minibus service, called the Dynamic Social Shuttle, that is optimized for this middle ground of four to 10 passengers. The idea is that riders could request a ride via an app, and the system would distribute them into efficient routes that pick up everyone where they are and drop them off within a five-minute walk of where they are going. “The end result is a service faster than the bus but cheaper than UberX,” says Becky Reeves, a spokesperson for the company. Ford will initially roll out the experiment in London; it intends to have some test vehicles on the ground later this year.

Ford is aware that the market is shifting as millennials show less desire to own cars and drive, so it’s aiming to transition itself from a car company to a company that provides mobility solutions. “We are trying to think of the city as a customer: What does the city need and how can Ford provide it?” says John Abernethy, the project’s lead researcher.

Of course, some people would rather get a cab that takes them all the way to their destination. And some people would find carpooling with a colleague even more annoying than carpooling with a stranger they’ll never have to see again. Others would rather carpool only if it’s acceptable to put on their headphones and drop any pretense of the ride being a social occasion.

But it’s okay if the Dynamic Social Shuttle and HOVee aren’t for everyone. As these and other services grow and proliferate, there will be some for carpooling with colleagues and others for carpooling with strangers, some for people who want to share a cab only with other students, and some that offer lower prices in exchange for sharing a ride with more people.

Younger Americans show a greater willingness than older ones to trade the privacy of their own car for cost-savings, but mass transit still can’t take them everywhere they want to go. Many metro areas have inadequate public transit systems, and many jobs are located in inaccessible suburban office parks. So there’s an opportunity for real ride-sharing to help people get around and put a dent in carbon emissions. And if these services catch on, millennials might be even less likely to buy a car than they already are.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.