Latest Articles

They affect consumers the same either way, and upstream is simpler and more transparent

In his post on conservatives and carbon taxes, David said:

First, we have to remember all the places the price signal created by an upstream tax can be diluted or stymied on the way to consumers -- i.e., those who can change their behavior in response to prices. Not every industry or business will pass an increase in operating costs directly on to the next link in the chain. Information failures and split incentives abound. Price signals that begin strong, catholic, and clear become fragmented and faint downstream. For all the hype, an upstream carbon price will deliver fairly little incentive to where the carbon is used.

There are two problems with this: It is overstated, and it places blame in the wrong place, i.e., the fact that the tax is levied upstream.

The Kheel-Komanoff Plan: A congestion toll to liberate New York

Back in 1993, I took a scalpel to the "AUTO-FREE NEW YORK" sticker on my bike, excising the first "R" so that "AUTO-FREE" became "AUTO-FEE." After years of battling motor vehicles, first as an urban cyclist and later as president of the bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, I became convinced that it made more sense to charge for cars' use of roads than to try to eliminate them. "Don't ban cars, bill them!" Discourage vehicle use by internalizing the harms from driving in the price to drive, and invest the revenues in mass transit and other alternatives.

Since then, cities like London, Stockholm, and Milan have demonstrated the power of road pricing to reduce driving and cut travel times, pollution damages, crash costs, and the like. But even those gains pale beside the profusion of benefits for New York City promised by a new plan I've developed with Ted Kheel:

• Enough revenue to finance an average 60 percent cut in transit fares;
• A 15 percent-or-greater improvement in traffic speeds in gridlocked Manhattan;
• Yogi Berra made real: greater usage of less-crowded buses and subways;
• More car-free spaces, and fewer cars, in the heart of the city.

The Kheel-Komanoff Plan (so named to distinguish it from the "pure" Kheel Plan approach, with 100 percent-free transit) delivers all this with just four measures:

Tim DeChristopher and Utah stand up to Big Oil

I've never been big on rules.

Neither, apparently, is Tim DeChristopher. He's the young activist who just completely derailed the Bush administration's plans to sell more of our public lands to the oil companies.

He sat in the lease sale in Salt Lake City on Dec. 19 and "bought" 22,500 acres of public lands right out from under the suits from Chevron and Exxon.

One small problem -- Tim doesn't actually have the money. It almost doesn't matter, though, because he's monkeywrenched the process so thoroughly that they won't be able to conduct another sale until after the Obama administration takes over -- and thus hopefully never.

Tim needs to raise $45,000 by this Friday, Jan. 9, in order to avoid fraud charges and put the sale out of reach to the Bush administration and their oily friends. He's already raised almost half.

I, for one, will be supporting Tim DeChristoper, Bidder 70, with a tax-deductible contribution via the Center for Water Advocacy in Moab, Utah.

He deserves thanks for reminding all of us that direct action still gets the goods!

An open reply to James Hansen's open letter

Dear Dr. Hansen:

An old engineer's dictum says "fast, cheap, good: pick two." Unfortunately, and I'm sure completely contrary to your intention, your solution to global warming favors "cheap" over fast.

Energy efficiency, renewable energies, and a "smart grid" deserve first priority in our effort to reduce carbon emissions. With a rising carbon price, renewable energy can perhaps handle all of our needs. However, most experts believe that making such presumption probably would leave us in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants worldwide. Such a result would be disastrous for the planet, humanity, and nature.

Fourth generation nuclear power (4th GNP) and coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at present are the best candidates to provide large baseload nearly carbon-free power (in case renewable energies cannot do the entire job).

OK, this begs the question of why depending on efficiency, carbon negative forestry and agriculture, and renewables would leave us "in 25 years with still a large contingent of coal-fired power plants worldwide."

We certainly have the physical capacity to build wind and solar generators that could provide all our power. Archer and Jacobson, perhaps the world's leading experts on wind potential, estimate that wind energy at 80 meters in commercially developable sites alone could could supply [PDF] five times the world's current energy demand. Note the emphasis: That is not five times world's current electricity consumption, but five times total world energy consumption, including cars and factories and non-electric heating¹. Similarly, solar thermal power plants of the type already running in U.S. deserts² can provide the world's entire energy needs [PDF] from less than 1 percent of total desert land³. Those are only two possibilities, albeit the ones with the biggest potential with today's technology.

Obama's campaign ag adviser mounts a weak defense of industrial food

Will Obama lead food and ag policy in new directions?

He raised hope late in the campaign season, when he indicated he had read -- and understood -- Michael Pollan's "Farmer in Chief" essay.

Since then, things have turned more dour. Obama made a boldly conventional pick for USDA chief -- a corn-belt ex-governor with ties to the GMO and biofuel industries. And now the chief adviser to this campaign on agricultural issues, Marshall Matz, has come out with a Chicago Tribune op-ed advocating a business-as-usual approach to ag policy. Matz co-wrote the piece with Democratic Party eminence grise (and farm-state politician) George McGovern.

Chinese power production plunges

On DotEarth, Andy Revkin brings us this amazing graph:

(Credit: Richard K. Morse, Stanford University. Data from China's National Bureau of Statistics)

Says Revkin:

Researchers at Stanford University who closely track China's power sector, coal use, and carbon dioxide emissions have done an initial rough projection and foresee China possibly emitting somewhere between 1.9 and 2.6 billion tons less carbon dioxide from 2008 to 2010 than it would have under "business as usual" if current bearish trends for the global economy hold up.

Will the McMansion ever die?

"The McMansion has almost become embarrassing to some people. They're listening not just to their wallet but their conscience."

-- Illinois builder Scott Van Duzor on the slowing of the McMansion trend (forgive us if we're skeptical -- we've heard this one before)

'Anti-science syndrome' plagues the right-wing as well as blogosphere

Note: Watts Up With That, one of the web's most anti-scientific blogs, is a finalist for the Weblog award "Best Science Blog." Even more farcically, early voting suggests Watts has a chance of winning (see here). Since the fine science blog Pharyngula is doing well in the voting, I'd now suggest voting for it.

 

In this post I'm going to present the general diagnosis for "anti-science syndrome" (ASS). Like most syndromes, ASS is a collection of symptoms that individually may not be serious, but taken together can be quite dangerous -- at least it can be dangerous to the health and well-being of humanity if enough people actually believe the victims.

One tell-tale symptom of ASS is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.

The other key symptoms involve the repetition of long-debunked denier talking points, commonly without links to supporting material. Such repetition, which can border on the pathological, is a clear warning sign.

Scientists who kept restating and republishing things that had been widely debunked in the scientific literature for many, many years would quickly be diagnosed with ASS. Such people on the web are apparently heroes -- at least to the right wing and/or easily duped.

If you suspect someone of ASS, look for the repeated use of the following phrases:

What's the point of the industrial food system if it no longer provides affordable food?

Vermont's expansion of the food stamp program is an important story, one that demonstrates an increasing shift in our society's relationship to its food. Vermont's policy change on food stamps is likely to be mirrored by other states, and this represents both a fundamental shift in the reality of American need and also, I think, the final stake in the heart of the industrial food system.

From the Times Argus:

Schwarzenegger set to steamroll environmental regs with budget plan

California is in a heap of trouble. A $42 billion heap, to be exact. I've never had to figure out how to fix a $42 billion deficit, and I don't envy Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or his legislative sparring partners. But it's worth noting some environmental skullduggery that seems to be creeping into the negotiations. (OK, it's more straightforward than skullduggerous, but that's just too fun to say.)

First, there's a push in Schwarzenegger's proposed budget to exempt several transportation projects from environmental review. Or, to put it more plainly, "Just let us build our highways, you girly men." Supporters of the California Environmental Quality Act (traditionally known as "Democrats") are not happy.