Okay, I know it’s been a while. Maybe I should call these “January Green Links.” Anyway, here’s the best stuff I’ve seen this month. A warning: many of them have to do with transportation planning.

• Governor Patrick’s New Transportation Plan Positive Move For Cycling In Massachusetts – Boston Biker. A large chunk of plan funds is  going to public transit and biking/pedestrian infrastructure.
• “The way forward” to transportation reform in MA – Planning 101. Check out this dollar-by-dollar breakdown of the plan.
• Somerville planners outline walkable city vision – Wicked Local Somerville. Somerville imagines how the new Green Line stops will alter neighborhoods.
• New maps show travel times on the T – Planning 101. Hmm… Does it really take less time to get to Lechmere from Park Street than to Harvard?
• The Best Open Data Releases of 2012 – Atlantic Cities. Hubway’s data visualization challenge makes the Atlantic’s list of best open data releases.
• The Best Bike-Sharing Program in the United States – Slate. Nope, not Boston’s. Washington’s.
• The Roads Not Taken – Architecture Boston. An entire issue devoted to the inner-belt highway that Boston rejected in 1972!
• The 32 most alarming charts from the government’s climate change report – Grist. Best- and worst-case scenarios. Read this if you want to be really depressed.
• Worms Produce Another Kind of Gold for Growers – New York Times. The microorganisms in vermicompost make it better than synthetic fertilizers.
• About That Overpopulation Problem – Slate. Has world population growth actually slowed in recent years?

That’s all until next month. 🙂 But if you come across anything interesting, send it my way.

Cambridge residents have always been able to drop off food scraps at the DPW or the Whole Foods on Prospect Street. Now we can also take them to the Cambridge Winter Farmers Market. The market is running Saturdays from 10:00 to 2:00 through April 30 at the Cambridge Community Center, 5 Callender Street, and the compost toters are on the Howard Street side of the building. They have a combination lock on them; the code is 480. Even if you have a compost bin, this is a good place to get rid of the meat, cheese, etc. that you can’t compost yourself. Find out more on the DPW website. 

Thanks to Local in Season, I discovered a great timesaver for lazy cooks like me: Chef Set Meals. Ana Sortun, the chef at acclaimed Cambridge restaurant Oleanna, created these to be healthy, quick meal starters.

Mmm… quinoa with crushed pistachio and za’atar spice…

They’re based on her philosophy that Middle Eastern foods use spices to make a meal flavorful, rather than fat or salt. (She elaborates on this in her book, Spice.) Each box has a whole grain pack (like couscous, quinoa, or barley), an aromatic pack (like za’atar spices, oregano, or spearmint), and a garnish pack (like chopped nuts or dried herbs). You finish it off by adding vegetables and protein (like meat, beans, or cheese). It’s super easy, and it kind of teaches you about cooking. For instance, instructions for the couscous tell you to make the broth and couscous separately and then place the couscous on top of the broth rather than stirring it in, which did make it less squishy and more delicious. And the spice mixtures make very simple meals (just quinoa, beans, and peas, in one case) delicious.

Each two-serving meal is designed to be 500 calories per serving and take just 20 minutes to make. Vegetarian instructions, though not printed on the box, are available online. Yeah, I’m going to have at least one of these in my cupboard at all times, for “emergencies.”

This semester, I had to do a literature review for my Foundations of Public Policy class, so I chose a topic that I’m particularly interested in after working on Berklee’s STARS report: voluntary environmental standards. I wondered if they actually worked. My conclusion, after much research, was: kinda.

Voluntary environmental programs are indeed more flexible and lower cost than mandatory regulations, but they’re only modestly effective, especially if few resources are put into their preparation, negotiation, and enforcement. ISO 14001 seems to be an exception, with its combination of modest standards and strict enforcement leading to overall greater effectiveness. The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concludes that a “first best” approach would be to replace the “command and control” policies by economic instruments (such as pollution taxes or tradable permits) where possible. A “second-best” option would be to improve the flexibility of pre-existing “command-and-control” regulations and, if a voluntary approach is decided on, to first set targets based on industry-wide projections and back them up with credible threats. Voluntary environmental programs are “weak tools used when political opposition makes environmental taxes infeasible” or implementation slow, since they’re often quicker to realize than stricter mandatory regulations. They shouldn’t be an alternative to such regulations, but a complement to them to increase compliance as part of policy mixes.

Want to read the whole paper? Enjoy!

We’ve had some great visitors in my classes this semester, but a standout has been Brad Swing, Director of Energy Policy for the City of Boston. He was there to talk about the city’s new Greenovate Boston program. Mullen Advertising created the umbrella branding for the city’s environmental efforts, encompassing such activities as public transit, recycling, energy efficiency, and water savings. The city would like the branding to be applied not just to public efforts, but to environmental efforts by the private sector, too. It all points toward a single goal: decreasing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020.

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A part of this is Renew Boston, a network of energy efficiency providers that reaches out to customers through community-based social marketing and person-to-person marketing, and MassSave, offering a variety of services, incentives, trainings, and information promoting energy efficiency—here in Boston run by Conservation Services Group.

Swing said that Greenovate Boston was made possible by Massachusetts’s Green Communities Act of 2008 and a federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant that was funded by the stimulus program in 2009.

It seems to be working. This year Massachusetts was rated the #1 state in the nation for energy efficiency programs, according to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. We even edged out California!

Check out Brad’s slideshow about all the things that Greenovate encompasses.