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Tucsonans are starting to hop aboard a sustainability bandwagon, but it's going to be a slow ride.

More people here are driving less, riding buses more, using the sun to power light bulbs, and storing water in outdoor tanks — activities that can reduce carbon dioxide emissions tied to global warming or help people adapt to warming's effects.

Examples in the Tucson area:

● Solar energy purchases are rising. Three companies report annual sales increases of 35 to 100 percent for rooftop photovoltaic panels to replace electricity from Tucson Electric Power's grid.

● To help people cope with current and future droughts — which some scientists say are linked to global warming — local companies report growing sales of home cisterns to harvest and store water for use on shrubs and gardens.

● Sun Tran bus ridership has risen 7.6 percent this fiscal year compared with the same period a year ago.

● A typical commuter's miles driven to work dropped 6 percent a week from 2005 to '07, after many years of increases, says a workers' survey by Pima Association of Governments.

● In five years, the number of Tucson-area service stations selling ethanol-based fuels has risen from one to eight. The number selling biodiesel fuels has risen from one to three.

● Tucson residents now recycle 21 percent of their garbage, up from 9 percent in 2002 when the city introduced its blue barrel recycling program.

But there's still a long road ahead for Tucson to be totally sustainable, if these statistics are any indication:

● There are still only a few hundred photovoltaic solar electric systems on Tucson-area rooftops.

● As of 2006, barely 3 percent of all daily trips to work here were by bus, a figure that's been static for 20 years.

● Electricity use has risen 8 percent in the average Tucson household in the past five years.

● More homeowners are switching from swamp coolers to energy-intensive air conditioners. They're buying larger and larger homes that use more power and a host of modern, energy-guzzling appliances.

● Vehicle miles traveled in Pima County rose 42 percent to 22 million miles from 1996 to 2005.

"There is a good deal of climate change already in the pipeline" stemming from greenhouse gases emitted over the decades, says Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. "That means the West will continue to warm and get drier, even if we tackle the problem right now."

"The globe needs to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050," says Overpeck, a top expert in international climate change. "To do that requires that we begin quickly and aggressively now."

Tucson's efforts may be limited so far, but all gains are useful, says the city's administrator for sustainable development, David Schaller, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official.

They counter a common perception that nothing is improving in these areas "because it's not feasible: No one buys solar because it is too expensive, and no one is riding the bus because it's not practical," Schaller says.

"These signs of progress give people the courage to know they are not the first and only ones to take the next steps themselves," he says.

But he also compares the struggle to cut greenhouse gas emissions to a baseball game in which one team is down 10-0 early in the game.

"You don't have as many opportunities remaining as if you had started working earlier," says Schaller.

Buildings represent the single biggest opportunity for reducing carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In Arizona's ranking of the most effective global warming fixes, efficiency scores second, after renewable energy.

But it's a tough goal. First, there are a lot of inefficient homes — nearly 200,000 built in Pima County before 1980 when designers didn't have energy use in mind.

Second, it can cost big money to weatherstrip and caulk homes, seal air conditioning ducts, double the windowpanes and insulate walls and attics. A homeowner can then save 40-50 percent on electric bills, but it takes years for the savings to match the upfront costs.

In Berkeley, Calif., home sellers must take 10 efficiency steps: insulated ceilings, hot water heaters and water pipes, replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent varieties, weatherstripping exterior doors and installing dampers to block heat-draining airflow through chimneys. Bigger-ticket items aren't on the list.

When David Schaller, administrator of Tucson's Sustainable Development Program, went to Home Depot to price Berkeley's requirements for his home of less than 2,000 square feet, he came up with $830 plus tax for equipment and parts.

"It's very difficult to get an average cost. The work really needs to be customized to the home," Schaller said.

Catalina Foothills homeowner Diana Will learned this after starting to remodel her four-bedroom house last September. It cost her $38K to insulate the walls plus add efficient light bulbs, air conditioning, outdoor lighting, fireplace insulation and window glass.

There is some movement on the efficiency front in Arizona:

• The state's Climate Change Advisory Group urged the state to set a goal to save 5 percent of electricity use by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020.

• A bill now moving through the Legislature would require school districts to reduce energy use 20 percent by 2020.

• Tucson Electric Power has asked for authority to negotiate with companies to lower the price on highly efficient light bulbs, which are expensive at $3 to $5 each. It's also proposed rebates of $50-$150 for customers investing in high-efficiency air conditioners or heat pumps.

— Tony Davis

Come August, "cap and trade" could become more than a slogan.

"Cap and Trade" is a program in which the state would limit the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions from utilities and other industries. The companies could swap with one another the rights to emit CO2 as long as the total emitted statewide didn't exceed the cap.

Or, they could buy emission rights from the state at auction.

Officials of seven Western states including Arizona agreed in February 2007 to establish a cap and trade program. Details are due by August. Then, individual states would draw up rules to meet the goal.

Potential sticking points:

• Environmentalists want cars and trucks covered; transportation is Arizona's biggest source of CO2 emissions. The industry group Western States Petroleum Association disagrees on the best way to do so.

• The Sierra Club and Environment Arizona favor a system of auctioning the CO2 credits to companies, with the money going for energy efficiency or renewable energy for low- and middle-income people. The petroleum association says that takes money the companies could invest in carbon-cleanup technologies.

• To Arizona Environmental Quality Chief Steve Owens, one challenge is to design a program that will reduce "leakage," in which utilities sell power to states not in the program. Arizona, for instance, exports power to other states while California imports power, so some plants California gets power from wouldn't be part of the cap and trade system.

— Tony Davis

Students in driver education classes at Amphitheater Public Schools hone their skills in cars fueled with clean-burning compressed natural gas.

"The cars are Honda Civics with internal combustion engines — but the delivery system for fuel has been changed from unleaded gasoline to natural gas," says Marc Lappitt, director of transportation for Amphitheater Schools.

"It's 99 percent cleaner than using unleaded gas. There are almost no tailpipe emissions. . . . But if you drove one, you would not be able to tell the difference."

Lappitt says the cars fueled with natural gas get about 30 miles per gallon — slightly below the government rating of 32 miles per gallon when unleaded gas is used in the Civics.

"But we more than make up for it in cost per gallon," he says. "The price, when we dispense the natural gas here, is about $1.50 a gallon. On the (public) market, it's $2.20 or $2.25. So this is a great alternative."

Lappitt says use of the clean-running cars is also viewed as a teaching tool.

"These are 15- and 16-year-olds who will be making buying decisions based on their experience with the car," he says. "They are the generation that will be making decisions about the types of fuels used."

These journalists worked on this three-day special report:

Doug Kreutz has worked as an environmental writer and news reporter at newspapers in Tucson and Denver. His current assignment at the Star focuses on feature topics, regional travel and outdoor recreation.

• Contact Doug Kreutz at 573-4192 or dkreutz@azstarnet.com.

Star environmental reporter Tony Davis has covered environmental issues since 1981, for newspapers in Tucson, Albuquerque and the Pacific Northwest. He has worked at the Star since 1997.

• Contact Tony Davis at 806-7746 or tdavis@azstarnet.com.

Photojournalist Dean Knuth has worked at the Star four years. He has documented global warming effects in Arizona for more than a year; see a slide show on StarNet at www.azstarnet.com/ special/globalwarming.

• Contact Dean Knuth at 573-4155 or dknuth@azstarnet.com.

Editing and design

The stories were edited by Norma Coile and copy-edited by Jim Maish and Mark Stewart; the photos were edited by Rick Wiley. The pages were designed by Bryan Blumer.

Switching from gasoline to fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel or compressed natural gas is one way to reduce pollution from vehicle use — and thereby possibly inhibit warming.

"We need to conserve, and we need to diversify the fuels we use," says Colleen Crowninshield, clean cities manager for the Pima Association of Governments. "One option is ethanol 85," grain alcohol made from corn or other agricultural products mixed with 15 percent gasoline.

"Biodiesel (also plant-based) is a fabulous alterative to diesel," she adds, "and the cleanest internal combustion engines run on natural gas."

Crowninshield, who uses ethanol 85 in her own vehicle, says she gets somewhat poorer fuel economy than with gasoline — but pays lower prices at the pump.

"I get a 10 to 12 percent reduction in fuel economy, but right now I pay about $2.69 a gallon," she says.

Ethanol made from corn has come under considerable criticism on grounds that the amount of energy needed to produce it offsets the benefits — and that converting land for biofuel crops results in major carbon emissions.

"Ethanol made from corn is not the best alternative," Crowninshield acknowledges, "but I keep promoting ethanol 85 even if it's from corn because the need to change our fuel-use habits is huge."

She adds that "second-generation" ethanols — such as cellulosic ethanol and algae-based ethanol — produce better yields and require less water than the corn-based product.

If mass transit is to help curb greenhouse gas emissions, how much expansion will the Sun Tran system need and how much would that cost? How much does Arizona need to invest in a better transit system?

Today, no answers exist, says a regional transportation planner, Cheri Campbell.

What's known is that vehicles are the state's biggest source of carbon-dioxide emissions — 41 percent of the total.

If the state can get clean car standards and increase transit use, "then we can certainly go a long way" toward reducing emissions, says Steve Owens, director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and chair of the State Climate Change Advisory Group.

Reducing the total number of vehicle miles traveled is a more difficult step. That's not because you can't change people's driving habits, but because the population is growing so fast that "you take two steps forward and one step back," Owens says.

Some signs of movement:

• Arizona just released a $42 billion transportation proposal that sets aside 18 percent of the money for a Phoenix-Tucson commuter rail line and inner-city transit. The plan would increase the sales tax by one cent.

• By fall, the Pima Association of Governments will release a study identifying routes, costs and financing tools for new high-capacity transit corridors for rail or exclusive bus lanes. The corridors would connect places such as shopping malls, hospitals and Downtown.

• By December, Tucson hopes to get more than $70 million in federal money to defray the cost of a $145 million modern streetcar line running from University Medical Center through Downtown to the West Side. The line could be running by 2011 and serve 4,000 daily riders, city officials say.

• Pima County is trying to promote higher-density, transit-friendly development in a Southwest Side area near Ryan Field that would include two major new developments.

The problem is that revenue sources for transportation projects are tied to car travel. "What do we tax? We tax gas. We tax license plates. We don't have a good source of revenue for transit," said Ben Goff, the county's deputy transportation director.

As for the cost of a decent transit system, "I wouldn't even want to try to guess. It's just too unknown," he says.

Human beings produce an endless array of stuff to ease and enhance everyday life. Getting repeated use out of the materials making up that stuff can conserve energy — and perhaps help slow global warming.

One method of stuff management: recycling.

Tucsonans do a pretty good job of recycling things such as newspapers, but we've got plenty of room for improvement when it comes to some other materials, city officials say.

Don Gibson, recycling coordinator for Tucson, says a recent study found, for example, that more than 18,000 tons of newspapers were collected for recycling during the study period while only 4,000 tons did not end up in recycling bins.

Meanwhile, the "mixed paper" category — including paperboard, file folders and frozen food containers — showed less encouraging numbers.

"We captured (collected for recycling) 3,814 tons of mixed paper, but an estimated 10,302 tons ended up going to landfills," Gibson says.

Another recycling weak point: National statistics indicate that the number of single-serving drink bottles made of PET-type plastic is "growing and growing and growing," Gibson says. "Yet the recovery rate (for recycling) is only slightly climbing."

The take-home message: "If we want to get better, we need to concentrate on getting all the single-serve PET bottles we can — and all the mixed paper we can," Gibson says. "This includes things like a Cheerios box or the thing in the center of a roll of paper towels."

For information on recycling in Tucson, call 791-5000.