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The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

From Alex Steffen

Cities are responsible for the vast majority of the creation of the economy. They're also places into which we pour the vast majority of resources, the vast majority of energy and the places where a huge percentage of the decisions about how systems are built and how products designed, etc., happen.

From Alex Steffen

Carbon zero simply means that the emissions you are releasing either are zero or balance out to zero.

From Alex Steffen

Deep walkability describes a city that is built in such a way that you can move from one area to another on foot, on bicycle, on transit and have an experience that remains a pleasant one, that you feel you are welcome not just in the neighborhood but moving between neighborhoods.

From Alex Steffen

For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.

From Alex Steffen

We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face.

From Alex Steffen

The idea that we are going to be able to take our entire society as it currently works and simply change the source of energy and make it sustainable is not actually congruent with reality.

From Alex Steffen

There are plenty of people out there talking about how difficult it is for some of us to just deal with all the stuff we already have, from packed closets that need organizers to storage spaces to maintenance costs, etc. Lots of people are reevaluating whether or not they need giant garages full of stuff and finding that they don't.

From Alex Steffen

We unfortunately already live on a planet where the climate has changed and will continue to change no matter what we do now. We're playing a game of making the problem less bad rather than preventing it.

From Alex Steffen

Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.

From Alex Steffen

Alex Steffen

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