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“A bicycle is a toy. A car is a weapon of mass destruction.” — Critical Mass participant

So Todd thinks people don't understand the Critical Mass movement, at least not the NYT Magazine and the NYPD.

If you agree, here's your chance to give Critical Mass some television exposure, to help set the record straight. Head over to Current TV and greenlight the four minute video short titled Critical Mass, which was produced by James Barff. If enough people give it the thumbs up, maybe Current TV producers will decide to air it. (Hey, they produced their own report on climate change in Alaska, so there's hope.)

Granted, Current TV has a limited reach, but it would be better than nothing. Right?

Maybe

This is less of a big deal than I had thought at first, but it's still worth noting: new research (full PDF here) suggests that sprawl may be linked to higher home prices.

The authors looked at housing prices in 452 urban areas across the U.S., along with measures of a couple dozen factors that can influence housing prices -- including urban form, but also education levels, weather, demographics, recent population influx, the size of homes, and employment factors, among others. Controlling for other variables, cities that have a higher share of total housing in their "central areas" (as defined by the U.S. census) tend to have slightly lower median home prices, and fewer very-expensive homes, than cities that are more sprawling and decentralized.

This, of course, runs counter to the intuition -- and the much-touted arguments from the anti-smart growth set -- that housing is cheaper in spread-out, poorly bounded metro areas.

That said, as careful as this research seems to be, there's good reason not to read too much into it.

NYT comes out for the gas tax

It's hard to decide whether to love or hate the New York Times these days. It's reaping a much-deserved whirlwind over its bungling of WMD coverage, Judy Miller, and matters Plame. But then, their lead editorial today -- arguing in favor of a federal gas tax -- is right square on the money. You won't find a more compact, solid summary of the problem than this, the first paragraph:

There's no serious disagreement that two major crises of our time are terrorism and global warming. And there's no disputing that America's oil consumption fosters both. Oil profits that flow to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries finance both terrorist acts and the spread of dangerously fanatical forms of Islam. The burning of fossil fuels creates greenhouse emissions that provoke climate change. All the while, oil dependency increases the likelihood of further military entanglements, and threatens the economy with inflation, high interest rates and risky foreign indebtedness. Until now, the government has failed to connect our crises and our consumption in a coherent way. That dereliction of duty has led to policies that are counterproductive, such as tax incentives to buy gas guzzlers and an overemphasis on increasing domestic oil supply, although even all-out drilling would not be enough to slake our oil thirst and would require a reversal of longstanding environmental protections.

Of course, any gas-tax proposal faces two difficulties:

Boy Vey!

Air pollution may cut number of boy births Looking to score, fellas? The secret may be moving to a highly polluted area. Turns out air pollution may skew the ratio of female to male births in favor of the former, by altering the proportion of sperm that carry an X vs. a Y chromosome. A […]

With This Ring I Thee Bled

Gold mining’s toll on environment mounts as supply grows scarcer That one-ounce gold ring you’re wearing? Think of it as 30 tons of rock mined, moved, and saturated with diluted cyanide. Gold mining wreaks enormous environmental destruction, almost all of it in service of the voracious global market for gold jewelry. And as good gold […]

Ironweed: Films for the curious

Do you like movies, but are dissatisfied with the selection from the likes of Blockbuster and Netflix? Then perhaps Ironweed might interest you:

Ironweed is more than a monthly film club...

...it's a growing movement of people like you championing independent filmmakers who tell engaging, important, human stories.

Extraordinary films are produced each year that never get beyond film festivals in coastal cities and high mountain ski resorts. With you as our partner, Ironweed scours the festival scene and brings the best new films to your home each month. As a subscriber, your membership fees help support filmmakers and our non-profit partners.

Act Now Productions, which was founded by Adam Werbach and has been producing and distributing socially-conscious media since 1997, is the organization behind Ironweed.

The first DVD should be available sometime in November and will include a documentary about immigrants traveling from Nicaragua to America and two video shorts (one on NYC watering holes and the other on Iraqis and the future of their country).

Coming soon to Ironweed, and what might be particularly of interest to enviros, is Power Trip, "the tragicomic film that follows an American company that buys the energy system in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and then sends two bungling Americans to make the Georgians pay for power." You can watch the trailer for Power Trip here.

Accidental invention points to end of light bulbs

Regular readers of Treehugger know that they go all ga-ga over LED lighting. So I was surprised not to find a post about this:

An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb. The miniature breakthrough adds to a growing trend that is likely to eventually make Thomas Edison's bright invention obsolete.

Read the short article over at LiveScience.com to learn about the science behind the accident. On why this is of interest to enviros:

LEDs produce twice as much light as a regular 60 watt bulb and burn for over 50,000 hours. The Department of Energy estimates LED lighting could reduce U.S. energy consumption for lighting by 29 percent by 2025. LEDs don't emit heat, so they're also more energy efficient. And they're much harder to break.

SUVs are about perceived safety, not actual safety

Just noted: this abstract from an article (pdf) in the journal Crime, Media, and Culture:

Driven to extremes: Fear of crime and the rise of the sport utility vehicle in the United States

During the mid-1980s, the sport utility vehicle (SUV) emerged as one of the most popular automobiles in the United States, a trend that continued throughout the 1990s ... Situating the SUV in the context of fear of crime and risk management during the 1980s and 1990s, it is suggested that the SUV's popularity reflects American attitudes toward crime, random violence, and the importance of defended personal space. While consumer attraction to the SUV is typically attributed to two key features -- safety and interior space -- these pragmatic justifications may be viewed as euphemistic. Safety is not road safety but personal safety. Space is not interior cargo space but social space, including the privileged ability to traverse inhospitable terrain to remove oneself from society. (Emphasis added.)

This seems somewhat right to me. SUVs aren't particularly safe vehicles to drive. But they feel safe, at least to some drivers. And that mostly has to do with being large and imposing -- or, essentially, with being perceived as a menace. Managing other people's perceptions might be important if the threat is strangers who mean to do you harm. But it's irrelevant -- or, more accurately, dangerous -- if the threat is flipping upside down at 60 mph.

Which makes me wonder if there's any way to convince people that being safe is actually more important than feeling safe. Sometimes I doubt it.

Warming oceans and Hurricane Wilma

In Environmental Science & Technology, Paul Thacker interviews Judith Curry, climatologist and coauthor of a recent paper in Science on the connection between warming oceans and hurricanes. In her work she found -- as did two similar papers published in peer-reviewed journals recently -- that hurricane intensity is increasing, and it's linked to increasing ocean temperatures, and this is true across the globe. She says:

... you can't use hurricanes to prove that there is global warming. What you can do is show an unambiguous link between the increase in hurricane intensity and the warming sea surface temperatures. And if you look for why the sea surface temperatures are warming since the 1970s, you don't have any explanation other than greenhouse warming.

In totally unrelated news, Hurricane Wilma is the most powerful storm in Atlantic history -- it went from fairly mild to the strongest effing storm ever in 18 hours, blowing away the previous record for speed of intensification.

... Keith Blackwell, hurricane researcher at the University of South Alabama's Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile ... said Wilma's rapid intensification was caused by the warm waters of the northwest Caribbean, which have spawned other extremely powerful storms.

...

"There are so many astounding things about this season," Blackwell said.

Wacky.

Cameron, how do you do it?

Looks like Cameron Diaz has had a busy week (but don't all celebs?). After winning an Environmental Media Award for her show Trippin', she surprised a class at Stanford University when she helped lead a lecture on environmentally friendly design with enviro celebrity William McDonough.

Her appearance is part of mtvU's "Stand-In: Who's Coming To Your Class?" which will be premiering on mtvU Uber on Nov. 1st.

What is mtvU Uber you ask? Like Current TV and Participate.net, members of the mtvU community can help shape news and other content by submitting videos online:

"With today's announcement, we are handing over an entire channel online to college students and everyone who wants new music," said Stephen Friedman, GM, mtvU. "mtvU Uber gives them the power to create and program their own channel, and will remain in perpetual beta mode as they experiment and pioneer the digital future."

If you thought Cameron Diaz leading a class on eco-friendly design sounds a little odd, just imagine Marilyn Manson teaching little Johnny and Suzie Arts in Society!