Craig Miller / KQED

As business and public entities face more pressure to lower their carbon footprints, an entire industry has sprouted to quantify and verify their progress. The whole enterprise can be tricky business, as San Francisco officials are finding out.

Props to The Bay Citizen for looking beyond the claims and doing its own analysis. As John Upton writes in Citizen:

“…some energy experts and environmentalists have raised questions about the city’s calculations. Although San Francisco has taken significant steps to shrink its carbon footprint, these critics said, the numbers are misleading, and the end result is not nearly as green as the city claims.”

Specifically, TBC looked into the claim that the City and County of San Francisco has cut its carbon emissions by 12% since 1990, driven mostly by the shutdown of two gas-fired power plants in the city. The article features a graph that shows its own tracking of greenhouse gas emissions clocking in well below the City’s estimates.

San Francisco was given high ratings recently in at least one independent study, for its “political leadership and commitment” to climate planning.

Andrew Whalley

By Jon Brooks

As more warnings go out to coastal communities about rising sea levels, local planners are starting to sharpen their pencils. Hence the Ocean Beach Master Plan. The San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR) is facilitating a coordinated effort among multiple agencies to create a “sustainable long-range plan” for San Francisco’s shoreline. Why do we need a plan? Because erosion of the beach and anticipated rising sea levels may necessitate major changes in the infrastructure that serves the area.

In September, economist Philip King of San Francisco State University unveiled a study aimed at putting estimated price tags on potential economic losses from sea level rise, a study in which San Francisco’s Ocean Beach emerged as a major potential loser.

Last week, KQED’s Molly Samuel talked about the Master Plan with Tom Prete, the editor and publisher-in-chief of KQED News associate, The Ocean Beach Bulletin. (Note: Mr. Prete did some work for SPUR previously.)

Edited transcript:

What led up to this plan?

In large part this is a project that goes back many years through multiple permutations of task forces and projects under several different mayors.

There have been people who are concerned that no single agency is responsible for Ocean Beach. The belief is that too many agencies are responsible for too many things and they don’t always talk to each other or pull in the same direction.

So a lot of people who care about Ocean Beach have been trying to get everyone on the same page and create a way forward, something everyone can live with even if they don’t get everything they want.

Explain what agencies are involved with Ocean Beach.

The beach itself is part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), from the O’Shaughnessy Seawall in the north, opposite the beach chalet that you walk up to to get to the Cliff House. Everything to the west, the sand side, is GGNRA, down to the wet sand of the beach. On the other side of that seawall is the parking, which is city property. So the city manages and is responsible for the parking lot, but if you go down those steps, you’re on federal property. Those are the two main agencies.

The CPUC has a great deal of infrastructure that is at or near the beach. There’s a major sewage transport tunnel that lies under the Great Highway, which feeds the oceanside water pollution control plant at the south end of Ocean Beach. That’s city property that is operated by the SF Public Utilities Commission, but the responsibility for maintaining infrastructure like the road and the oceanside water pollution control plant is all done by the SF Dept of Public Works.

In addition there are responsibilities that overlap. The state Dept of Fish and Game, for instance, enforces fishing regulations.

What are some concerns being addressed in the Master Plan?

One of the big challenges Ocean Beach is facing is what will happen if sea levels rise, as it appears they’re going to do. We’re seeing some erosion, especially on the south end of Ocean Beach, that could be attributable simply to singular storms. Those have caused some major problems, including the closure for several months of the southern extension of the Great Highway.

But in addition to those singular events, there is the likelihood that the sea level is going to rise, and when we get large storm surges, they’re going to have a greater impact than they have now. So the question is what is the impact going to be on the beach. Are we going to have a nice sandy beach, or in order to protect some of these things like the Great Highway and the sewer transport tunnel and the water pollution control plant, are we going to have to install large seawalls or something like that?

Does the plan put forward some suggestions on this?

It does. One of the important ideas presented under the draft recommendation for the Ocean Beach master plan would be to reroute that southern extension of the Great Highway that was closed, around the backside of the zoo so that it no longer passes to the west of the water pollution plant, but instead goes around the other side and connects with Sloat Boulevard. So southbound traffic on the Great Highway would no longer go past Sloat and around the water plant to Skyway Blvd around Lake Merced, but instead would turn east on Sloat and meet up with Lake Merced Boulevard to west of the zoo. (Interview continues after the graphic.)

These are big infrastructure suggestions. How do people feel in the neighborhoods around there feel about them?

That’s a really good question. I think in spite of the fact that potentially there will be some major changes, a lot of people aren’t paying a lot of attention to the plan, or if they are it’s not coming through in terms of the voicing of opinions. That in part is due to the scope and scale of the Ocean Beach Master Plan. It’s so large, it encompasses the beach from north to south and plans for several decades, and it’s hard for people to get their minds around .

But I have heard from some readers who are concerned about the Great Highway in particular. I got email from a reader who wondered that if there’s ever a need for emergency transportation out of SF, where are the residents of Richmond and Sunset going to go? How do they get out of the city if they’re not going north over the Golden Gate bridge or east across the city. If they need to go south, how do they get there? The surface roads we have there are not designed to handle a great pulse of traffic like that. the Great Highway is in this reader’s opinion a necessary artery out of the city for those residents.

But one of the questions is: can we maintain the Great Highway there no matter what we do? Is the ocean going to make a decision for us if we don’t make one through the master plan now?

It seems like the sand dunes already make a decision about that with great regularity…

Exactly. The Great Highway is closed frequently for the removal of sand. One thing I often hear out here is people questioning the wisdom of creating a highway out here in the first place. At the time it was built, this part of the city was largely sand dunes still. I find a lot of people in particular are perplexed that anyone would think to build a four-lane road on top of sand dunes. They are not surprised when the road is overtopped by blowing sand or it’s closed when too much sand is on the road. They kind of shake their head and wonder why the road is there in the first place…

SPUR’s plan kind of acknowledges that and moves the traffic from the Great Highway southbound lanes and puts two lanes, bidirectional traffic, on the east side of those, where we have northbound lanes now. it acknowledges we have a lot of blowing sand, and that we need to blunt the impact of major storm events.

So, what is SPUR’s function?

SPUR is a convener and a coordinator for the master plan. The reason they’re there, according to SPUR, is that they have a lot of contacts in the agencies. They know the players already, work with city agencies, and they are a non-partisan organization. They do advocate for some things but they’re not directly an interested party in Ocean Beach. T

What are next steps?

SPUR is in the process of gathering public input on their draft proposals. They are going to take that public input into account to see if they are on the right track. They will come back with a revision later on with the goal of having a completed plan in Feb, 2012.

This post originally appeared on KQED’s NewsFix blog.

Los Angeles tops a new ranking (PDF) of the 25 U.S. cities with the most energy efficient buildings, released by the Environmental Protection Agency.  With 293 Energy Star-rated buildings encompassing 76 million square feet of space, Los Angeles saves $93.9 million and reduces emissions equal that from electricity use by 34,800 homes, according to the EPA.

Washington, D.C. was ranked second, and San Francisco third.  Two other California cities made the top 25: Sacramento (16th) and San Diego (17th).  According to EPA data, San Francisco has 173 Energy Star buildings (including Hotel Nikko and One Embarcadero Center) that save an estimated $69.4 million in energy costs and reduce emissions equivalent to 24,700 homes. Sacramento and San Diego have 61 and 58, respectively.

As of the end of last year, 9,000 commercial buildings had been awarded Energy Star designation since 1999, representing a combined savings in utility costs of $1.6 billion and a reduction in GHG emissions equal to that of one million homes, according to the EPA.

Buildings that qualify for Energy Star are those that score in the top 25%, based on the EPA’s National Energy Performance Rating System, which compares energy use among facilities of similar types on a scale of 1-100.

Environmental groups declared December 6th the Global Day of Action, selected, as it has been for the last three years, to coincide with the United Nations climate talks. This year’s talks are currently taking place in Poznan, Poland.

Organized by Greenpeace, the crowd in San Francisco held up a 50 x 30 ft “postcard” that read: “Dear World Leaders, We are ready to save the climate! Yes we can!” against the backdrop of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

A helicopter flew overhead at 1 p.m., taking photos of the banner and the crowd. Ben Smith, Greenpeace’s National Organizer for Global Warming, said that the group plans to send the photos to delegates at the talks in Poznan (it’s gotta be cheaper than sending the postcard) as a symbol that despite the last eight years of inaction, Americans are serious about finding solutions for climate change.

“We are at a really significant point in history now, after eight years of the Bush Administration denying global warming and dismantling the UN process for stopping it,” said Smith. “The door has swung wide open, and we have the opportunity to solve the problem.”

Boston, Chicago, San Diego, Palm Beach, and several other cities across the country held similar demonstrations, said Anna Wagner, Greenpeace Global Warming Senior Organizer.

“We are trying to put pressure on our leaders to pass strong science-based solutions to global warming,” said Wagner. “The United States is key to stopping global warming, and we are sending a message to the Obama Administration that this is a number one priority for Americans.”

Many environmentalists are optimistic about Obama’s plans to invest billions in alternative energy and to place mandatory caps on greenhouse gases across the country similar to those already mandated in California. As we have reported here, Obama recently said in his video address to the Governors’ Climate Summit that he will work for “a new era of global cooperation on climate change.”

But some are raising questions about whether Obama’s plans go far enough. A recent article in Time Magazine cites a November 12th International Energy Agency (IAE) report projecting that a $26 trillion investment in power-supply needs will be needed to address a 45 percent increase in the demand for energy between 2006 and 2030, if no new government policies are enacted.

It appears that Obama will promote new policies that may mitigate this scenario but the challenge may be greater than it was a few months ago. With half a million jobs lost last month and regular gasoline at $1.69 a gallon in San Francisco, large scale investment in new low-carbon industries might be a harder sell.