Solved, by David Miller, should be a great asset in the fight to rein in Man and his excesses. It is the story of 94 great cities around the world, which have taken it upon themselves to act, while their countries argue over climate change, if it even exists and is an urgent issue. Country level talks are now owned and operated by the fossil fuel industry and so are going precisely nowhere. Meanwhile, cities have made huge, innovative strides over nearly 20 years. They are changing the way people live – for the better – while not only not bankrupting themselves, but saving money while life improves. They are an under-appreciated inspiration. The book reveals an endless selection of terrific examples.

Cities don’t carry all the historic, economic and political baggage of countries, and they are much, much closer to the inhabitants, who make up the majority of people in their countries. And by force of sheer numbers are also the biggest polluters. Yet in city after city, Miller describes plans and actions only the locals would know about, and which are making significant, measurable dents in the problems globally.

It begins with an inventory. Different cities face different issues. An older, built up city might be burdened with terribly inefficient buildings, causing air and water quality issues and huge unnecessary energy consumption. A spread out city might have transportation issues far worse than building issues. And some have waste issues worse than either of those. Once they understand how they fit in the puzzle, they can intelligently place their efforts where they will have the biggest, fastest impact. Just by this process, cities have already left their countries in their fumes.

Some cities own their electric, gas, and/or water utilities, so they can make policy changes quickly. Most of them can implement tax and incentive programs that property owners can rapidly see would be wise to cash in on as soon as possible. Waiting might mean no grants and higher penalties. Acting means higher value for their property, lower utility bills, lower maintenance costs, and happier tenants, who likely have little or no choice about utilities and insulation. (In Tokyo, the world’s largest city, even tenants are required to fill out annual energy data usage forms from their bills, so the prefecture can have a handle on weaknesses and needs.) The programs are turning out to actually make money, as activity thrums, valuations rise, and areas become more rational and attractive.

This is delightful for me personally, as I have been saying for decades we should not look at environmental remediation as an unaffordable money sink, but as a real money-maker. I learned this in the eighties, when everyone was moaning that computers would put us all out of work and there would be nothing left to do. Instead, high tech has opened giant portals to new products and services as economies blossom. So with climate change issues. Dealing with solutions is a win-win. Solved plays right to me on this level.

There are wonderful stories from Toronto, where Miller was mayor, to Austin to Curitiba (Brazil) to Tokyo, and everywhere in between. In Madrid, where the outgoing mayor implanted a Low Emissions Zone, forbidding diesel and older vehicles from polluting the city, the new mayor promised to kill it. Some 200,000 signed a petition to keep the ban going, and when the mayor went ahead regardless and cancelled it, they sued. And won. People are (literally) dying to have their say in beating back pollution and climate change. It is their own countries that are holding them back.

Cities are forcing the replacement of their diesel taxis with electrics, and replacing their own bus fleets as well. They are altering routes and schedules so that a full charge lasts the whole day. Charging stations can be open to the public during the day, and for buses exclusively overnight. They are finding bonus savings in less maintenance as well as the lower fuel charges. In other words, we have been far too carelessly sloppy for too long. Simple observations lead to win-win changes.

Montreal copied and refined the Paris Vélib bike sharing service, calling it BIXI. BIXI has now been copied by numerous other cities around the world. Bikes are suddenly everywhere. The same thing happened to Toronto’s Better Buildings Partnership; it’s gone global, even as far as Sydney and Melbourne.

Congestion charging is finding its way into more and more cities, and despite the same tiresome and selfish lawsuits being filed for loss of privilege, the system is finding acceptance sooner or later. It leads to cleaner air, more and more varied public transit, and income from those willing to pay to continue taking their cars into town.

But Solved is a problem read. First, it turns out that this is the paperback edition of a book published about five years ago. And unfortunately, rather than do the research and update projects, projections and milestones, Miller has simply reprinted the first edition while updating the foreword and the epilogue. Or so it seems (I haven’t read the original). When he begins a sentence with “Last year…”, readers will not know if he means 2023 or 2019. In another example, Miller calls out “electric lighting with its associated waste heat.” But standard lighting is now LED, with zero heat produced. So this must be left over from the 20-teens, because it’s not accurate for 2024. The book also kept paragraphs that refer to “long range plans” up until 2025, which is now just next year. Readers will not know what happened in the interim. It reminds me of turning on the news only to hear: “Now here is yesterday’s weather forecast.”
Now I am suspicious of Miller’s own research too. For example, Paris. While Mayor Anne Hidalgo is good for the environment, her famous transportation accomplishments for Paris were all implemented by her predecessor, Bertrand Delanoë. He was the one who started the free bicycle service Vélib about 15 years ago. It was the first – a breakthrough in environmental thinking. He had a stated plan for Paris to offer people every conceivable means of transport they desired or needed: walking, biking, buses, metro, taxis and even free electric cars just like Vélib. It was a comprehensive and all-inclusive way to keep people moving no matter what distance they were going or what they needed to carry - without owning vehicles of their own. It was brilliant. But he gets no mention in Solved whatsoever. It’s all the wonderful Anne Hidalgo.

Still on France, the central government has not been idle, either. Despite the lack of movement by countries in general, President Emanuel Macron has implemented some pretty impressive policies on his own. Just one: all houses have to be inspected for energy efficiency, and officially rated A to G. Fs and Gs, basically uninsulated energy passthroughs, cannot be rented out. (There are nearly five million of them.) And if sold, cannot be occupied until sufficient upgrades are made to get them to at least a D. The market takes it from there. This changes the whole outlook for the cities as well as the rural areas. It gives them a uniform and very much upscaled base they would have had difficulty achieving alone.

As for the money, I would have liked Solved to at least mention that we have everything backward and upside down, as demonstrated by Miller’s examples. One of the most inspiring quotes comes from Jon Erickson in The Progress Illusion (2022): “Shouldn’t the environment incorporate the economy rather than the economy incorporate the environment?” That kind of thinking is what separates the cities from the international conference goers.

Miller has a very overstuffed writing style. The book is flabby with wordiness. He loves to lay all the groundwork before revealing the one important idea of a paragraph. Readers will soon learn to skim paragraphs in search of the nugget worth reading. If I were editing this book, it would be 35% shorter, and three times as powerful. The material is there.

All throughout the book, starting right in the foreword, Miller uses the term “c40 cities”, but he never tells readers what that means. I certainly did not know. Finally, in the epilogue at the very end, Miller explains that London Mayor Ken Livingstone founded the C40 group of the world’s 40 largest cities in 2005. It is an action (as opposed to debating) group and is now 94 strong. Their experiments and successes go viral among them, and they copy each other constantly, making huge progress where the sluggish and bloated COP conferences go absolutely nowhere. It is not material for an epilogue, where it makes no sense. It is foundational to the whole book and should be in the foreword.

This book was much harder work than it had to be.

David Wineberg