Streetsblog, a network of sustainable-transportation-focused websites that you should read regularly, used the occasion of the 10th anniversary of London's congestion pricing system to review its effectiveness. As you probably know, congestion pricing is a tool by which cities limit automobile and other traffic to certain areas by charging a fee for access. In London, that fee is £10, or about $15.

Has it worked? Streetsblog says yes -- or, it did for a bit.

In its first few years, the London charging scheme was heralded as a solid traffic-buster, with 15-20 percent boosts in auto and bus speeds and 30 percent reductions in congestion delays. Most of those gains appear to have disappeared in recent years, however. Transport for London (TfL), which combines the functions of our NYCDOT and MTA and which created and operates the charging system, attributes the fallback in speeds to other changes in the streetscape and traffic management …

The congestion charge also raised millions in revenue, some $435 million in 2008 alone.

Fracking proponents like to use an evocative economic metaphor in talking about their industry: boom. The natural gas boom. Drilling is exploding in North Dakota and Texas and Pennsylvania. Only figuratively so far, but who knows what the future holds.

The Post Carbon Institute, however, suggests in a new report [PDF] that another metaphor would be more apt: a bubble, like the bubbles of methane that seep into water wells and then burst.

PCI presents the argument in its most basic form at ShaleBubble.org:

[T]he so-called shale revolution is nothing more than a bubble, driven by record levels of drilling, speculative lease & flip practices on the part of shale energy companies, fee-driven promotion by the same investment banks that fomented the housing bubble, and by unsustainably low natural gas prices. Geological and economic constraints -- not to mention the very serious environmental and health impacts of drilling -- mean that shale gas and shale oil (tight oil) are far from the solution to our energy woes.

PCI's strongest argument may be on the rapid depletion of drill sites. The case is made using the data in this graph, showing the amount of oil extracted over time from wells in the Bakken formation in Montana and North Dakota.

Morrissey, the lugubrious former lead singer for the Smiths, made an album in 1985 called "Meat is Murder." That was 28 years ago (I KNOW), but he has not since then altered his negative opinion of the consumption of animal flesh. That's why, during the singer's March 1 concert at Los Angeles' Staples Center, the venue's McDonald's will be closed. Yes, Morrissey is a pretty powerful dude.

We don't know if it's the British accent or just his general demeanor, but we do know this: Paul McCartney asked the Staples Center to shut down McDonald's too, and he got nowhere. (So, OK, it's not the British accent.) Former Beatle? Next! Goth hero with pompadour? RIGHT AWAY SIR.

I know Andy Revkin of The New York Times writes posts like this in part to bait people like me. But like Popeye, I yam what I yam. So consider me baited. Self-proclaimed moderates like to lecture anti-Keystone XL activists that they are "distracting" and "counterproductive," without spelling out what the hell that means, yet they seem bewildered when that makes the activists in question angry.

Let's review. This weekend, close to 50,000 people gathered for the biggest rally ever against climate change, a threat Revkin acknowledges is enormous, difficult, and urgent. Revkin and his council of wonks took to Twitter to argue that the rally and the campaign behind it are misdirected, absolutist, confused, and bereft of long-term strategy. They had this familiar conversation as the rally was unfolding.

As a result, Revkin suffered the grievous injury of a frustrated tweet from Wen Stephenson, a journalist who has crossed over to activism. This gave the wounded Revkin the opportunity to write yet another lament on the slings and arrows that face the Reasonable Man. He faced down the scourge of single-minded "my way or the highway environmentalism," y'all, but don't worry, he's got a thick skin. He lived to tell the tale.

This is all for the benefit of an elite audience, mind you, for whom getting yelled at by activists is the sine qua non of seriousness. The only thing that boosts VSP cred more is getting yelled at by activists on Both Sides.

So let's not yell. Instead let's take a calm look at the Reasonable Revkin take on Keystone activism, representative as it is of a certain VSP consensus. In his post, he says it could be "counterproductive" to focus an activist campaign on the pipeline. I want to dwell on that word for a second, because it's crucial to his case.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency which informed us that almost half of all new electricity generating capacity added in the U.S. in 2012 was renewable, has released its data for the month of January. You ready for this?

Here's how January 2013 compares to January 2012 in terms of new capacity:

Notice anything? Let's spell it out directly. Here's how new capacity broke down last January. Brownish sources are fossil fuels. Green are renewable.

And here's this January.

That's right: Every single megawatt of new generating capacity added in the U.S. last month was renewable. Every single one.

Pittsburgh, like many a post-industrial city, is not exactly awash in cash. But it turns out the city is sitting on a goldmine -- a recent audit found that its trees are worth $2.4 million.

Trees are usually thought of as a luxury for a city (you can tell because of how much greener it is in wealthier areas), and luxuries are something Pittsburgh can ill afford. So Pittsburgh, as Nate Seltenrich explains at Next City, decided to actually find out whether its trees were worth the cost of the maintenance they require. In other words, the city decided to measure its trees as it would any asset.

There is an attorney who works for BP (and almost certainly makes good money doing so) who is charged with making the following argument: You're blowing the deadly Deepwater Horizon thing way out of proportion.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

With the start of the civil trial against global oil giant BP only a week away, the company's senior trial lawyer said Monday that he doesn't expect his client to be declared grossly negligent for the 2010 Gulf oil spill, a finding that would result in a four-fold increase in the fines BP would have to pay.

Rupert Bondy, BP's general counsel, also said he's confident the company will pay much less than the maximum $5 billion to $22 billion in Clean Water Act fines often cited by the media.

Why not? In part because Halliburton and Transocean fucked up, too.

When the EPA last year dropped its inquiry into methane seepage from wells fracked by Range Resources, it seemed like an unusual move. Texan Steve Lipsky's water supply was bubbling over with the explosive gas, after all, which seemed like the sort of thing an agency built around protecting the environment should look into. But Range Resources threatened to pull out of a key fracking study, and the EPA backed off.

Because, according to a report from Bloomberg, that's the game the frackers at Range Resources play: bullying, threatening, intimidating.

Critics say the Fort Worth-based company, which pioneered the use of hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale, has taken a hard line with residents, local officials and activists. In one case it threatened a former EPA official with legal action; in another it stopped participating in town hearings to review its own applications to drill, because local officials were asking too many questions and taking too long.

“Range Resources is different from its peers in that it chooses to severely punish its critics,” said Calvin Tillman, the former mayor of Dish, Texas, and an activist who has been subpoenaed and issued legal warnings by Range. “Most companies avoid the perception of the big-bad-bully oil company, while Range Resources embraces it.”

The Bloomberg article outlines some of that bullying. A lawmaker who criticized Range had emails leaked to the local paper. And Steve Lipsky, he with the methane water, was sued.

If you love biking so much that the idea of getting off your bike to do work makes your stomach curl just a little bit, here is your solution. It's called a Kickstand desk, and it lets you hook your bike up to your work surface so you can ride while you do your TPS reports.

Its designers have nothing but the purest of intentions:

We're cyclists. We want to ride, but we have to work. Unless you're riding for work, you're not riding at work.

The New York Times' front-page scoop this morning outlines an understood-but-not-well-articulated threat: hackers supported by the Chinese military, targeting American companies and infrastructure. The article provides a good overview of how a security firm, Mandiant, uncovered the hacking system -- down to the building from which it likely operates -- but the report from Mandiant itself [PDF] provides much more detail.

What jumped out at us were the targets. While Madiant doesn't identify specific companies (many are the firm's clients), it does provide a matrix of targeted industries by year. One of the first compromised, in 2006, was transportation. Energy companies have been accessed multiple times between 2009 and 2012. As the hackers grow more sophisticated, the focus on infrastructure has increased. From the Times:

While [a unit of hackers] has drained terabytes of data from companies like Coca-Cola, increasingly its focus is on companies involved in the critical infrastructure of the United States -- its electrical power grid, gas lines and waterworks. According to the security researchers, one target was a company with remote access to more than 60 percent of oil and gas pipelines in North America.

The Financial Times reported on an attempt to hack natural gas pipelines last May.

A sophisticated cyberattack intended to gain access to US natural gas pipelines has been under way for several months, the Department of Homeland Security has warned, raising fresh concerns about the possibility that vital infrastructure could be vulnerable to computer hackers. …

There was no information about the source or motive for the attack, but industry experts suggested two possibilities: an attempt to gain control of gas pipelines in order to disrupt supplies or an attempt to access information about flows to use in commodities trading.

The original tip-off came from companies that had noticed fake emails sent to staff. The attack uses what is known in computer security jargon as “spear-phishing”: using Facebook or other sources to gather information about a company’s employees, then attempting to trick them into revealing information or clicking on infected links by sending convincing emails purportedly from colleagues.

This is precisely the technique outlined by Madiant in its report.