Calthorpe bashes Al Gore and ‘Enviros’ technology focus

In a recent interview with Dan McCue, of Renewable Energy Magazine, Peter Calthorpe calls out the environmental movement for missing the boat on climate change and community renewal.

“The Enviros seem to think that the answer is some technology that you can apply to the problem of climate change.” Calthorpe says, “Al Gore’s new book, ‘Our Choice,’ is just a laundry list of technologies. The Enviro mindset is all supply side … and it is nothing about how we live.”

Calthorpe goes on to explain that “it is not just about carbon and energy, it’s about what’s affordable, what’s a healthy lifestyle, what’s a socially-robust lifestyle.” Calthorpe calls for lifestyle changes as a prerequisite to successful technological transitions, a position that has long been shunned by technological optimists as politically unfeasible, even un-American.

But Calthorpe thinks that America is ripe for change, calling a move toward building smaller homes “easy” because “they actually fit who we are now. We are smaller households.”  By the same token he says suburban retrofits with dense mixed-use transit-oriented development can be easily accomplished by rezoning commercial strips on suburban arterials and retrofitting the arterials to be transit served complete streets. ““Nobody is in love with strip commercial zones near their house. They are not going to fight over changing that.“

While I’m not so sure it’s going to be “easy,” Calthorpe is heading in the right direction when he says “we have to first find ways to conserve energy – in the way we live, the kinds of buildings we build and the way we move around. And then, when we’ve reduced that demand dramatically, then we can talk about the right mix of renewables.”