Yes. (Consider energy use as a function of climate for city planning purposes.) Joel, Justin and Yi make good points below. I have never built a city before, but Planetary Overlord Bishop would also consider climate change impacts on agriculture, freshwater resources, extreme weather events, and (as Justin mentioned) availability of renewable resources (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean etc.). Then there?s things like access to transportation, walkability, ?sense of place?. Hopefully one of my minions would speak up before I did something like this.

Yes, climate change is happening, it is not natural, and we are causing it primarily by burning our once-in-a-civilization supply of fossil fuels as fast as we possibly can. The fundamentals of the greenhouse effect have been known since the 19th century, and temperatures have been rising just as we?d expect them to based on our emissions and other impacts. Following a sharp temperature spike to the hottest year on record in 1998 (caused by the strongest El Nino event ever recorded), global temperatures have remained high and have even continued to increase. We just had the highest May, June and August average temperatures, and 2014 is on track to set another record high for global temperature (breaking the 2010 record). It has been nearly 30 years since we had a month that was below the 20th century average temperature for that month.

There is nothing political about the science. But our ideological biases get in the way when we consider solutions. We have to reduce fossil fuel use (not energy in general) and the only way to accomplish that is by government legislation. There are those that oppose the size and scope of governments, especially interference with the free market, and also those that sincerely believe that humans cannot possibly impact the planet (for religious reasons mostly). And plenty of people make their livelihoods and a lot of money off of fossil fuels. So these biases understandably make it hard to find common ground with those whose biases include wanting to accelerate the transition to renewables, wanting to address wealth disparity, and general opposition to fossil fuels due to their other harmful impacts. Because of the implications of ?What do we do??, the science gets muddied by a combination of deliberate distortions and willful ignorance, happily perpetuated by ?think tanks?, news organizations and powerful individuals that attempt to spin the science to match their preferred narrative. Add countless blogs by non-scientists, a 24-hr news cycle that only pays lip-service to climate change, always maintaining false balance by presenting ?the other side?, and editorials that masquerade as science presented without accountability, and it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a quagmire of analysis paralysis.

Only when we recognize our own biases and acknowledge the reality of climate change as documented by the wealth of scientific evidence, does it make sense to discuss solutions. How do we rapidly reduce fossil fuel use, promote energy efficiency and renewables, decrease the energy use intensities of manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and (yes) the building stock, while reducing the impact of rising prices? And how do we do this in a way that gets all countries to follow suit, while minimizing the role of governments, respecting personal choice and freedoms, and letting market forces determine the most economically efficient paths toward a low-carbon future? The simple, elegant solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax in the form of Carbon-Fee-&-Dividend. You tax fossil fuels at the source, and distribute all collected fees to everyone equally, to spend as they please. We can avoid the worst effects of climate change without destroying the economy.

Guess I embellished my one-word answer a little bit.

Regards,
Bill

William Bishop, PE, POIT (Planetary Overlord in Training) | Pathfinder Engineers & Architects LLP
Senior Energy Engineer

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134 South Fitzhugh Street Rochester, NY 14608

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[http://png-5.findicons.com/files/icons/977/rrze/720/globe.png]Carbon Fee and Dividend - simple, effective, and market-based.