Utah Clean Air sponsors ICAST
Utah Clean Air has awarded a UCAIR Grant to ICAST for reducing emissions in Utah’s Affordable Housing properties. ICAST will maximize the effectiveness of UCAIR’s mission through collaboration with organizations working to improve Utah’s air quality.
Read the full blog post here.
European Investment Bank President Says: “To Put it Mildly, Gas is Over"
Europe needs to acknowledge that its future is no longer with fossil fuels, said the President of the European Investment Bank (EIB). “To put it mildly, gas is over,” Dr. Werner Hoyer said at a press conference on the EIB’s annual results. The EU aims to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and is expected to adopt a new carbon reduction target of -55% for 2030. However, gas has remained a grey area, with the European Commission saying it will still be needed to help coal-reliant EU member states transition away from fossil fuels.
Gas already has limited support under the EIB’s climate roadmap. Only power plants emitting less than 250 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour are currently eligible for support under the bank’s rules and the EIB intends to pursue its decarbonization policy by phasing out all funding for fossil fuels before the end of the year.
For the full story, click here.
2020 Retrospectives
While the COVID crisis restricted ICAST’s growth in 2020 to only 25%, we did add another 23 staff members and served an additional 3,000 households. ICAST managed to meet and exceed our program goals with Rocky Mountain Power and Ameren-Missouri.
More details can be found in our 2020 Annual Report here.
Make Way for the ‘One-Minute City’
While the “15-minute city” model promotes neighborhood-level urban planning, Sweden is pursuing a hyper- local twist: a scheme to redesign every street in the nation. As Feargus O’Sullivan reports, one of the hottest ideas in urban planning has been the “15-minute city” - a vision for a decentralized urban area that allows residents to meet their daily needs within a quarter-hour walk or bike from their homes.
Now Sweden is pursuing a hyperlocal variation, on a national scale, what it calls the “one-minute city.” It’s an order of magnitude smaller than other recent think-local planning concepts. Sweden’s project operates at the single street level, paying attention to the space outside every front door. Called Street Moves, the initiative allows local communities to become co-architects of their own streets’ layouts
For the full story, click here.