This Advertising Age article discussing the massive decline in driving among young Americans is a bit old now. But it's both fascinating enough, and aggravating enough, to be worth some attention.  The basic facts are the fascinating part: Young people simply don't drive as much as they used to. Between 1978 and 2008, for example, the share of 17-year-olds with a valid a driver's license fell by a third. Likewise, the share of total miles logged by 20-somethings fell from 20.7 percent in 1995, to just 13.7 percent in 2008. All the evidence points in the same direction: younger people are …

As happens with stock charts, this one is likely to be out of date even before I get this post published.  But here's Google Finance's chart comparing the stock price of British Petroleum (in red), an energy-stock index fund (in blue) and an S&P 500 index fund (in yellow). Since the oil spill in the Gulf in late April, BP's stock has tanked.  Meanwhile, the broader stock market has inched downward; and the energy mutual fund, dominated by big oil and gas companies, has done only a wee bit worse than the broader market. But remember, BP (in red) is …

Researchers at George Mason University and Yale broke down U.S. public opinion into six different categories [pdf], based on people's belief in, and concern about, global warming.  For the nickel version, see the graphic below: Of course, I'm sure there are more than six ways of slicing this pie. It seems likely to me that public opinion lies in a continuum, rather than in six discrete groups. Still, the authors' analysis yields some interesting findings. My favorite is this: folks who are convinced that global warming is a hoax -- the "Dismissives" -- admit they haven't thought all that much …

NASA climate scientist James Hansen has a new book out about climate policy, with excerpts in this month's issue of The Nation. And in my view, he's got a pretty good policy idea: tax carbon, and use the revenue to give out rebates in equal, per capita shares to every U.S. citizen. It's a twofer -- the carbon tax helps drive down emissions, and the rebate makes sure that it's fair to middle- and lower-income folks who'd otherwise bear the brunt of the tax. If I were the globe's climate czar, Hansen's tax-and-dividend plan is one of the top 5 …

Eric's take on Jim Hansen's opposition to cap and trade is exactly right.  Hansen is a renowned NASA climate scientist.  But on climate policy, he's just lost in space.  Now, I'm not going to call Hansen's support for carbon taxes misguided.  Remember, we LIKE carbon taxes. We've given BC's pathbreaking carbon tax lots of sloppy wet kisses over the years. Instead, what's misguided is Hansen's belief that cap and trade is fundamentally different from carbon taxes.  That's just wrong.  As Paul Krugman points out, carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are like two peas in a pod. The both put a price …

Editor's note: Clark will be on NW Cable News tomorrow morning (Nov 3) around 8:30 to talk more about this issue. You may have seen the meme circulating around the internet:  some researchers from Australia are claiming that owning a dog has as much impact on the planet as owning an SUV.  I'll let New Scientist summarize their case: [A] medium-sized dog...consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food...So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares... Meanwhile, an SUV...driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 …

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog. Last week, Dave Roberts blogged about a recent -- and very important -- study by the National Research Council on the enormous hidden costs of energy consumption. I'm surprised that the study hasn't gotten more press coverage.  It's fact-rich, sober, and completely non-ideological -- and, at the same time, it's an incredibly damning indictment of the nation's energy system.  The report looks at a variety of "external" costs of energy -- that is, the costs that energy consumers themselves don't pay, but pass on to the public at large.  The costs …

As my high school physics teacher once explained to me, energy comes in all sorts of different forms:  heat, light, motion, electricity, and even the "potential" energy in chemical bonds and bowling balls perched on top of a downward sloping ramp.  And yet, somehow, all of those different forms of energy were really all the same thing.  Energy is energy, no matter what form it takes. Photo: Eddie~S With me so far?  Good.  So let's do a thought experiment. Picture, for a second, a big ol' SUV -- say, a Lincoln Navigator -- speeding along at over 70 miles per …

I wrote last week about a curious fact:  even though total CO2 emissions from the US electric power sector have dropped during the recession, the emissions intensity of the US power supply -- that is, the amount of carbon per megawatt hour produced -- actually inched upwards.  The decline in total emissions is good news in the short term.  Yet the increase in emissions intensity is worrisome: if we're going to keep emissions low once the economy picks up again, emissions intensity has to keep declining -- even if the economy is stumbling. Climate Data Due Diligence, rides to the …

Here's an interesting followup to last week's post about about the uncertain links between recession and long-term climate change: Shakeb Afsah at Climate Data Due Diligence wrote to tell us that even though total carbon emissions from power plants fell in 2008, the carbon intensity of the power sector -- that is, the amount of CO2 released per megawatt-hour of power produced -- increased last year. In the chart to the right, the yellow line at the top shows the tons of CO2 released per megawatt-hour of electricity produced by the nation's power plants. And just as the recession kicked …