In most cities, the automobile has ruled unchallenged for decades.  Now – in the age of global warming – the humble bicycle is increasingly seen as a cheap, healthy and green alternative for getting around.  In Part One of our series “Europe and Us: Growing a Green Future,” KPLU environment reporter Liam Moriarty looks at how bikes are challenging the fossil-fueled Goliath.

A Paris commuter on a Velib bike.

In most cities, the automobile has ruled unchallenged for decades. Now – in the age of global warming – the humble bicycle is increasingly seen as a cheap, healthy and green alternative for getting around. I wanted to see how bikes are challenging the fossil-fueled Goliath. My first stop was Paris.

Mid-morning, I stand at a five-way intersection near the Gare du Nord, Paris’ northern rail station. Cars, trucks, taxis and motor scooters jockey for position. Commuters on bicycles cruise along green-painted bike paths. A lot of them are riding bikes from Paris’s public bike-sharing system, called Velib. I ask a few how they like Velib.

Paris’ Velib public bike sharing program is very popular.

One guy in his twenties is a big fan.
“Yes, a lot, because when the weather’s nice it’s much better than the subway and you can get a little workout, as well.”

A woman dressed for office work says, “I like to bike, a little bit for health, and also for the pleasure of cycling in Paris and above all to avoid the subway.”

Another fellow picks up on my English-accented French switches to English.
“Yeah, it works very well, yes, to go across the city very easily. I go to work with it, actually.”

There are 20-thousand Velib bikes in Paris. For a small subscription fee you can check out and drop off bikes at over a thousand computerized stations scattered through the city,

Fabian Kuster, with a folding bike outside the offices of the European Cycling Federation in Brussels.

There are problems. Some of the bikes need repair, and vandalism has been a big headache. Still, the program is immensely popular, and it’s been imitated in Brussels, Barcelona and other European cities.

Matthieu Fierling helps oversee the Velib program.

“Velib is one little, little, little part of a very big policy made by the City of Paris that consists in the reduction of the number of individual cars in Paris.”

The city is also building more bike lanes and adding subways, buses and trams.

Cycling is still a small part of the transportation picture in Paris. But Fierling says having all those cyclists on the streets is putting bikes into the public consciousness.

European bikeways even have their own traffic lights, like this one in Brussels

“Before Velib, the bike was used by ecologic people,” he says. “But now, the image of the bike changed radically.

Certainly, the many Parisians I saw tooling around on Velib bikes weren’t limited to the Birkenstock crowd. And delegations from dozens of cities around the world have come to Paris to see if something like Velib might work for them.

But European cycling advocates say if you’re serious about bikes as transportation, you have to do a lot more.

Fabian Kuster, with the European Cycling Federation in Brussels, says, “You need dedicated space for cyclists, so it’s safe and fun to cycle, not only for the fit 20s or 30s, but also for kids and also for elder people.”

A Velib rider in north Paris.

He points to Amsterdam, where 25 percent of all trips are taken by bike, and Copenhagen, where it’s over half. In those and other European cities, cyclists have extensive systems of bikeways protected from car traffic. They have bike-only streets and downtown districts where cars are banned. Kuster says that – if you want bikes to be a major way of getting around – you have to not only encourage cycling: you also have to discourage driving.

“You need to redistribute space,” he says. “You need to take away space for car use and give it to public transport, cycling, and walking.”

There’s only one bike left in this Velib station.

In the Pacific Northwest, Seattle and Portland consistently rank among the most bike-friendly American cities. Portland has the edge. They got serious about bicycle transportation 10 years before Seattle did. And Portland’s six percent cycling share – twice Seattle’s three percent — would seem to support the notion that if you build it, they will come.

Roger Geller, the bicycle coordinator for the City of Portland, says, “What you’ve got to build is a dense network of bike infrastructure that is supremely comfortable for the average person.”

Broken and vandalized Velib bikes are a problem.

With that in mind, Portland is testing the so-called “green boxes” you see in Europe. They allow cyclists to go to the front of the line at a red light, avoiding the collisions that happen when drivers turn right while cyclists in bike lanes go straight. These and other changes make it more comfortable to ride, so more folks do. And that leads to changes in public priorities.

“Business owners are asking us to remove on-street parking in front of their businesses in order to put in on-street bike parking,” Geller says. “To do that five or ten years ago would have been unheard of.”

A crowded bike rack outside the rail station in Dusseldorf

In Seattle, too, bike use is growing. The city is increasing the number of bike lanes, and posting more signs and road markings to make drivers and cyclists aware of each other. That’s a far cry from the hard infrastructure in Europe’s most bike-friendly cities. But taking space away from cars and giving it to bikes is contentious — – and expensive — and public attitudes change slowly.

Meanwhile, if Paris’ Velib system sounds good to you, you might get a chance to check out bike sharing here at home. Recently, several bike-share  companies came to Seattle and Portland to show off their stuff. Pearson Cummings  — with King County’s parks department — says the county is just starting to look at whether public bike-sharing might work in here.

Bikes are an everyday means of transportation in many European cities

“It’s gonna have to take into account hills,” he says. “It’s going to have to take into account weather. And so any system we bring into Seattle is really gonna have to be unique to this region.”

Of course, hills and weather are challenges to most any bike-sharing system, but in other cities they seem to find ways to make it work. In Paris, people will ride Velib bikes down the hill from the Montmarte district, but not back up. So every night, workers have to truck hundreds of bikes up the hill to be ready for the next morning’s commute. And in Montreal, when the icy winter arrives, the whole system gets picked up and packed away till spring.

Sung Jin Kim is a pedicab driver in Cologne, Germany.

I stumbled across this video and got a big kick out of it. This town in Norway has come up with an innovative way to help cyclists handle a huge hill. Maybe we could get something like this on Queen Anne Avenue here in Seattle!

Solar hot water collectors and a “green roof” are among the energy-saving features of this apartment complex in Dusseldorf.

In Dusseldorf, Germany, I get a tour of an energy-efficient apartment complex. My tour guide is Andreas Gries. He works for a government agency that helps develop a wide range of energy projects. Gries shows me how these apartments are highly insulated, with a super-efficient ventilation system.

Between the two he says, “it reduces the demand for heat energy considerably – basically, by about 50 percent, compared to what’s currently required by law.”

This building is one of 50 so-called “solar communities” the agency is helping build. The government – working with private investors – subsidizes these developments to boost energy conservation, reduce greenhouse gases – and to build markets for German energy technology companies.

Manfred Franck and Andreas Gries represent the public-private partnership that built this “solar community” project in Dusseldorf.

Gries takes me out on a balcony overlooking solar panels that cover a south-facing roof. The panels provide more than half the hot water used to heat the apartments. Looking up at Dusseldorf’s partly-cloudy skies, he concedes solar may seem better suited to a sunnier climate.

“But in Germany, the conditions are good enough to use such systems” he says. “And so many investors and many families do it.”

Faced with a mandate from the European Union to cut greenhouse gas emissions, European governments are using a number of tools to encourage solar and other renewable energy sources.

In her office in Brussels, Belgium, Dorte Fouquet points out one of those tools: requiring minimum levels of clean power.

“By 2020, Europe has to reach 20 percent of the overall energy consumption from renewables,” she says.

Dorte Fouquet is director of the European Renewable Energy Federation in Brussels.

Fouquet heads the European Renewable Energies Federation, a group that represents small renewable energy businesses. She says another important tool used in Europe is what’s called a “feed-in tariff.” It guarantees that anyone who generates renewable energy – from commercial wind farms to households with solar panels – is paid a premium price for feeding that juice into the electrical grid. Fouquet says that domestic solar power very affordable.

“I pay this, I install it on my house, and from day one I get per kilowatt hour – let’s say 42 cents — paid to me, and by that I can pay back my financing,” she says.

Like the European Union, states in the Pacific Northwest have laws that require utilities to get a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. And in Washington, we also have something that acts very much like a feed-in tariff. Mike Nelson, director of Washington State University’s Northwest Solar Center, explains.

Mike Nelson heads WSU’s Northwest Solar Center in Shoreline.

“You’re paid for every kilowatt hour you generate,” he says, “whether you use it yourself or not. It’s like baking bread, getting paid for having baked the bread, and getting to eat it also.”

Washington has a tax credit that starts out paying you 15 cents per kilowatt hour for the electricity from your rooftop solar panels. That’s about twice what utilities charge for the power they sell you. And if your solar equipment is made in Washington, you could get nearly four times that. Nelson says the bonus for “made-in Washington” equipment is meant to help jump-start local solar manufacturing industries.

“If I buy a solar module from China, 70 percent of that purchase flows out of the country,” he says. “If I buy a solar module built in Arlington, that’s using silicon produced in Moses Lake, all of the money trolls over in our own economy.”

That’s a key difference between Washington and the E.U.: the European feed-in tariffs don’t have a similar “made in Europe” clause. So a lot of the solar equipment used in Europe is made in China or other places that produce lower-priced goods

On the other hand, our tax credit doesn’t apply to industrial-scale renewable energy. Matt Steuerwalt notes that the largest solar projects in the world are all in Spain and Germany. He says the lack of a feed-in tariff is a major reason no large-scale solar projects have been built in the Pacific Northwest.

Steuerwalt represents the Teanaway Solar Reserve, a 400-acre solar power plant being proposed about 80 miles southeast of Seattle. It’s projected to generate enough juice to power 45 thousand homes. Steuerwalt says other state and federal incentives – plus a strong regional interest in technology and the environment – have convinced his group this is a good time to build large-scale solar in Washington. But he says a European-style feed-in tariff – with its guaranteed premium price — would give renewables across the board a big boost.

“I think it would make a lot of other projects attractive, to get financing for projects and to bring big, utility-scale projects, like solar projects, on line in this state.”

That could happen. There are plans in Olympia to create an incentive very like a feed-in tariff, that would apply to large-scale projects, too.

All in all, the Northwest is well-positioned to become a major clean energy hub. Approaches that work in Europe may not all work here. But there is a political consensus that the region’s economic edge – not to mention its green reputation – rides on staying at the forefront of an emerging clean energy economy.

It used to be that when a company sold you a widget, they got your money, you got the widget, and that was the end of it. Now – as concern about the volume and toxicity of our waste increases — that way of doing business is changing. In Europe – and in the Pacific Northwest — more businesses are being required to take responsibility for their products in new ways, as KPLU environment reporter Liam Moriarty tells us in Part Three of our series “Europe and Us: Growing a Green Future.”

These computer components will be ground up and recycled.

My look at the shifting landscape of recycling and toxic chemicals first takes me to a huge industrial building in South Seattle. There, forklift-loads of TVs and computer monitors are being heaved onto conveyor belts. Workers are taking screw guns and hammers to the discarded electronics, disassembling them down to their component parts.

Craig Lorch is co-owner here at Total Reclaim. His company is one of several certified to recycle electronic waste under Washington’s new e-waste law. Among other things, the law requires that these old machines – and their toxic chemicals – don’t end up being dumped overseas, where they can poison humans and the environment.

Craig Lorch is co-owner of Total Reclaim in Seattle.

Recycling old electronics has been happening for years. But Washington’s e-waste law is something new.

“It’s a producer responsibility law,” explains John Friedrich, with the Washington Materials Management and Financing Authority. “It takes the burden of this off of the taxpayer.”

Friedrick runs the state-wide recycling program paid for by electronics manufacturers. The program started last January, and it’s on track to collect 40 million pounds of cast-off e-junk this year, at a cost to producers of $10 million. It requires electronics companies to cover the end-of-life costs of the products they sell. That concept – called extended producer responsibility – is a new one in the U.S. When Washington’s e-waste law was passed three years ago, it was the first in the nation to put full responsibility on manufacturers. But this isn’t a new idea in Europe …

Brussels, Belgium is sort of like the Washington, D-C of Europe. As the seat of the European Union, it’s the place where the 27 nations that make up the E.U. hash out their common policies. In his office at the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment, Klaus Koegler explains to me a keystone of E.U. environmental policy — what’s called the “Polluter Pays” principle.

Klaus Koegler, deals with recycling for the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment

“That simply means that whoever causes damage to the environment is responsible also in financial terms to repair it or to minimize it right from the beginning.”

Koegler says that gives regulators a firm footing for a range of laws that extend producer responsibility. One example: cars sold in the
E.U. are required to be 85% recyclable by weight. That creates an incentive for automakers to make recycling their cars as easy and cheap as possible. And a product that’s easy and cheap to recycle is likely to be easier on the planet.

This European push to expand producer responsibilities is also happening with industrial chemicals. Bjorn Hansen keeps an eye on chemicals at the Directorate General for the Environment. He points around his office …

Bjorn Hansen helps regulate chemicals for the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment.

“Just us sitting here,” he says, “ you’re probably exposed to chemicals which come from the office furniture, which have been used to color the textiles, which had been used to create the foam, the glue under the carpet where we’re sitting … You name it, you’re exposed.”

The question, Hansen says, is whether all this exposure to chemical compounds is harming our health or the environment. The answer?

“We by far do not know what chemicals are out there, what the effects of those chemicals are and what the risks are associated with those chemicals.”

That uncertainty led to a new law known by its acronym, REACH. REACH requires that tens of thousands of chemicals used in everyday products in the E.U. be studied. If a substance can’t be safely used, manufacturers will have to find a substitute, or stop using it. REACH has, at its core, a radical shift: it’s no longer up to the government to prove a chemical is unsafe. The burden of proof is on industry to demonstrate safety, and by doing so, it assumes financial liability for that safety. Even for industries accustomed to tougher European regulations, when REACH was first proposed, it was alarming.

Lena Perenius — with CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council – says there was quite violent opposition in the beginning.

Lena Perenius and Franco Bisegna with CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council

“In the E.U we already had a very comprehensive set of regulations for insuring safe use of chemicals,” she says. “The industry saw that this was putting an unreasonable burden on the companies.”

Still, the measure had strong public support. After several contentious rounds of negotiations, Perenius says the industry feels it got key concessions that’ll make the far-reaching law workable.

It’s hard to imagine the chemical industry in the U.S. accepting a law like REACH. But in the Northwest, a number of measures have brought chemicals under tighter control. For example, Washington was the first state to create a list of toxins that can accumulate in people’s bodies – such as mercury and lead — and to begin to phase them out.

Even though Europe has taken bolder steps in holding industry accountable, in the U.S., the Pacific Northwest has been at the forefront. And that means a changing relationship between you and the companies that make the products you buy.

By Liam Moriarty

For several decades, passengers have been zipping between European cities on sleek, comfortable trains that go upwards of 150 miles an hour. Now, the vision of fast, frequent train travel is taking hold in the Pacific Northwest. So, KPLU’s Liam Moriarty decided to take a ride and see what all the fuss was about.

Thalys trains in the Gare du Nord in Paris

Starting at the Gare du Midi, the train station in Brussels, I took a morning train to Paris. I travelled on Thalys, the Belgian fast train. We covered the 162 miles from Brussels to Paris in about an hour and 15 minutes. It’s about the same distance between Seattle and Portland. That train ride takes about 3 and a half hours.

If you’ve never been outside the US you’ve never ridden on a train like the Thalys, or the TGV in France or the ICE in Germany. We don’t have anything like them in the states. If you haven’t ridden one of these trains before, the first thing you notice is that they’re very smooth, they’re very quiet and they’re very fast …

Thalys high speed train in Cologne, Germany.

Japan was the first country to build a high-speed rail system. Then, starting in the 1970s, Europe got on board. Now, much of Europe – from Italy to Spain to the Netherlands – has fast trains hurtling passengers across the countryside.

As high speed rail has spread across Europe, it’s replaced air travel for many trips. In fact, with trains scheduled almost hourly between Brussels and Paris, you can’t get a flight between those cities anymore.

In the U.S., passenger rail has long taken a back seat to highways and airlines. But in the Pacific Northwest, the vision is taking hold of fast trains whizzing the length of the Cascade Corridor connecting Portland and Vancouver, B.C.

The rail station in Cologne, Germany

In Portland, several dozen public officials, consultants and passenger rail enthusiasts gather for a conference. Oregon congressman Peter DeFazio tells the audience the future is bright for high speed rail in the Northwest.

“And I look forward to the day when you can get to Seattle from here in an hour and ten minutes” he says. “(That’s) how long it’d take the train that they’re running between Barcelona and Madrid to get to Seattle. We have that potential.”

Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson sees a high speed rail link as helping knit together a greater Cascadia region.

“We have a great affinity with our cities to the south, Seattle and Portland,” he says, “and certainly would prefer to have more connection through rail and high speed rail. To be able to jump on a train and be in Seattle or Portland in a couple of hours would be a remarkable breakthrough.”

The Amtrak Cascades train heads north from Edmonds, Washington.

This conference was organized by the Cascadia Center, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes innovative approaches to transportation. Director Bruce Agnew says state lawmakers, port commissioners and business leaders are lining up behind passenger rail.

“ I think this is the hottest new issue in transportation.”

Agnew says one reason this is getting traction now is the growing recognition of the urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He says that for distances between 300 and 500 miles, studies show that it’s more energy-efficient to move freight and people by rail rather than by individual car or by truck.

And Agnew says, rail’s green advantages can be multiplied by connecting inter-city trains to local light rail, transit buses and bicycle facilities.

Bruce Agnew heads the Cascadia Center for Regional Development.

“So you make these rail stations in the metropolitan areas hubs, for mobility” he says, “for people to be able to take the train to a city and then not have to have a car to get around the city and the metropolitan area.”

Another reason this is so hot right now is that the Obama Administration has earmarked $8 billion in stimulus money for states to develop high speed rail. After decades of neglect, this federal shot of adrenaline is making rail officials across the country jump to attention. Washington is asking for a large chunk of that cash, nearly $900 million. But Kirk Fredrickson – with the Washington State Department of Transportation – cautions not to expect European-style fast trains anytime soon.

“I just know if that’s going to be realistic here in the next couple of decades here in the Pacific Northwest,” he says. “because of our terrain and the geography, and the cost.”

In Europe, high speed trains run on special track in dedicated rights of way. No one’s calculated just what that would cost along the Cascade Corridor, but it would easily run into the billions. Washington’s plans are more modest: to improve speed and frequency on the existing Amtrak Cascades line between Vancouver and Eugene by upgrading track, unclogging bottlenecks and buying more trains. Kirk Fredrickson says that incremental approach will make taking the train more accessible to more people.

“When you add a couple of round trips, again, that gives people on opportunity to take the train more often every day, so they can make that travel choice,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘Well, the train that was here at noon is gone now, but they’ll be another one at two o’clock, so let’s plan for that.’ It gives people more transportation options.”

And Fredrickson says that will build a constituency for further  investment in passenger rail… It appears to be working; over the past decade and a half, ridership on the Amtrak Cascades has grown steadily. Last year, more than three-quarters of a million people rode, up nearly 15 percent from just the previous year.

Since the mid-90s, Washington has put nearly a billion dollars of state money into the Amtrak Cascades line, building infrastructure — and ridership– a bit at a time. State officials hope that our willingness to spend our own money will persuade the feds to fund our next step toward making fast, convenient rail travel between Northwest cities a reality.

Zipping through the French countryside: the view out the window of the Thalys train from Brussels to Paris.

Climate scientists tell us we’ve got to cut way back on the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, and fast. Trouble is, just about everything we do creates carbon dioxide. And slashing greenhouse gas emissions is hard. That’s because our industries and transportation are all powered by fossil fuels. For several years, Europe has been trying to use market forces to curb carbon emissions. Now, the U.S. is weighing that approach, too.

Alan Durning is executive director at the Sightline Institute, a sustainability-oriented think tank in Seattle

To get a handle on this whole carbon cap and trade business, I turned to Alan Durning. Alan heads the Sightline Institute. That’s a think tank in Seattle that does things like track energy consumption and analyze climate policy. Alan lives and breathes this stuff, but I want to see if we can simplify this a bit, so I ask him if we can find a kitchen-table metaphor. We settle … on marshmallows.

ALAN: We’re consuming too many marshmallows and we’re all getting overweight, so we’re gonna start cutting down on the quantity of marshmallows. Once a week when Dad goes grocery shopping, we’re gonna check in the bag and see how many marshmallows there are. So we say, OK, this year we’re gonna have 100 marshmallows a week and next years it’s gonna go down to 98 and we’re gonna gradually reduce. And then we’ll give people marshmallow coupons. And you turn in a coupon whenever you eat a marshmallow. And the number of coupons you get will diminish over time, the same way as the marshmallow supply diminishes. And if you don’t need your marshmallow coupons, you can sell ‘em.

LIAM: So, I’m only allowed to have 95 marshmallows this year, but I really want more than that. So I’m gonna have to check around the family and maybe my kid sister, she figures, “OK, I’ve developed a real thing for fresh fruit, so I’ll tell you what; I’ll sell you my marshmallow coupons. That way I have money to buy the fresh fruit so I don’t have to eat the marshmallows anymore.” And then I’m able to keep my marshmallow habit going.

ALAN: That’s right. That way we insure that there is actually a reduction in the marshmallow consumption, and collectively we will lose the number of pounds that we need to lose.

Now, here Alan points out a flaw in our analogy: unlike marshmallows, nobody really wants carbon emissions …

“People want the consequences of using energy. Right? They want hot showers and cold beer. But they don’t care about the barrel of oil,” he says. “And if they can get the energy from sunlight or the blowing winds or water running down hill, that’s fine, they don’t care.

And that’s the point of cap and trade: to wean ourselves off dirty fuels by making them scarcer and more expensive, so new, cleaner fuels are more attractive.

Vicky Pollard monitors international climate change negotiations for the European Commission in Brussels.

Europe was the first to do carbon cap and trade, four years ago. And things got off to a rough start. They set the cap on emissions too high and way overestimated the number of allowances – or, to use our analogy, marshmallow coupons – that companies would need. Vicki Pollard, with the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment in Brussels, says it was simple supply and demand.

“It means the price of those allowances crashes,” she says. “They don’t have much value, and so the price went down to almost zero.

Pollard says the whole system got knocked out of kilter, and for the first two years, European carbon emissions actually went up.

Sanjeev Kumar, with the World Wildlife Fund in Brussels, says that — in a weird way – that was a good thing.

Jason Anderson and Sanjeev Kumar follow climate change policy at the European headquarters of the World Wildlife Fund in Brussels

“What’s helpful in European politics,” he says, “is that if you fail, it’s good to fail spectacularly, because that means you can change a lot.”

Kumar says that after the collapse of Phase One, a lot was changed. Now, with most of the major wrinkles ironed out, Europe’s on track to meet its current emissions target.

The business community still has concerns about their bottom line. Folker Franz is with BusinessEurope, sort of the European version of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He says companies worry about the additional cost of carbon emissions putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

Folker Franz represents BusinessEurope on environmental affairs in Brussels.

“If you produce one ton of steel, you emit roughly one ton of CO2,” he says. “So any ton of steel produced in the E.U. is right now some 17 dollars more expensive than outside the European Union. And that makes a difference.”

Still, Franz says, European businesses accept the need to take prompt action on climate change. And the next phase of the trading system has a tighter cap, more stringent reporting requirements and enforcement with teeth.

A few years ago, with the Bush administration dragging its feet on climate change, a group of western states and Canadian provinces – including Washington — started working on a regional cap and trade market. It’s called the Western Climate Initiative. But, now, that’s on the back burner as the action has moved to the other Washington.

Several months ago, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a cap and trade bill in many ways modeled after the E.U. system. Now, the Senate is tacking its version. The European Commission’s Vicki Pollard will be following the discussion closely.

World Wide Fund members protest against the construction of new coal plants in Europe, at a demonstration in Brussels last year. (AP Photo)

“Clearly, the Senate debate is very, very important and everybody’s going to be watching it,” she says. “Not just us in Europe but also the Indians, the Chinese and others.

Folker Franz with BusinessEurope will be watching, too. He says the stakes are very high.

“Because let’s be realistic,” he says. “If the US does not take decisive action, if the US does not put in place a cap and trade scheme, then Japan will not do it, probably even Australia will not do it, let alone China.”

In December, the world will meet in Copenhagen, to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto climate treaty, which the U.S. never ratified. How the climate bill will fare in the Senate and what the President will be able to bring to Copenhagen are both far from certain. But the Europeans I spoke to seem pleased just to see the U.S. finally taking climate change seriously. And – if the federal efforts fall flat – look for the Western Climate Initiative to get put back on the front burner. Liam Moriarty, KPLU News.

Closing Press Briefing, Bonn Climate Change Talks – August 2009
Source: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Briefing the media on the last day of the informal consultations in Bonn, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer says there’s great need for increasing momentum at a high political level for a strong result in Copenhagen, including the G8 and Major Economies Forum. However, a concerted response to climate change was essential to meet the concerns of developing countries.

Mr. de Boer stressed that “a climate deal in Copenhagen this year is an unequivocal requirement to stop climate change from slipping out of control.

KPLU environment reporter Liam Moriarty

I’ve long been interested in how Europeans look at things differently than we do here in the States. And as KPLU’s environment reporter, I’ve seen how the European Union has gotten out in front on key environmental issues such as global climate change. So when I had the chance to apply for an EU fellowship to go to Brussels and get a close-up look, I jumped on it.

I got to ride bikes in Paris and visit solar apartments in Germany and zip through the Belgian countryside on high-speed trains and much more. I spoke with folks from EU technocrats to people on the street.

“Europe and Us: Growing a Green Future” came out of that trip and a lot of reporting before and since. I learned so much and came to see the many ways in which Europeans, and we in the Pacific Northwest, are dealing with the important issues of how we live on this planet in a way that leaves it green and prosperous for our grandchildren. I hope you enjoy it.

If you’d like to join the conversation about these topics, I’d love to hear your comments.