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Bike routes need names

I recently bicycled from Seattle to Bellevue, Washington, across Lake Washington on the I-90 floating bridge. This trip is not complicated. Once you're on the wide, well-shielded bike lane, you'd think that getting to Bellevue would be assured. You'd be wrong. First, you have to get across Mercer Island.

On the island, the bike route leaves the freeway and vanishes into a labyrinth of branching paths. They're beautiful bikeways, no doubt: wide, separated from traffic, well-graded, gracefully curved for smooth cornering -- a pleasure to ride. But they're almost entirely unmarked. Where there are signs at all, they only say "Bike Route." (All of them are bike routes. Duh!) Imagine traveling in a city without street signs -- or with ones that only say "Car Route." Next time you see a sign like the one above that says "Bike Route," remember, it's a symptom of Car-head. (Photo by orangejack via Flickr.)

Everglades still polluted, says EPA analysis

Pollution in the Everglades remains significant despite billions of dollars spent on cleaning and restoring the park over the last decade, according to new analysis from the U.S. EPA. On the bright side, erosion has stabilized and mercury levels in the tiny mosquitofish have dropped; on the, um, not-bright side, mercury levels still accumulate in […]

On kids, zucchini, and an experiment with pizza soup

A few weeks ago, when I made zucchini blueberry bread with my friends’ kids, it was revealed that one of them didn’t care much for zucchini in its non-dessert incarnations, seeing as how it was a vegetable and all. So I challenged myself to invent some kid-friendly zucchini dishes to see if I could get […]

Lieberman expresses openness to auction all carbon permits

A cap-and-trade system begins by placing a cap on carbon emissions and distributing permits (permission to emit a certain amount of CO2) equal to the capped amount. The notion is that permits will be bought and sold, allowing market forces to determine where emission reductions can be made fastest and easiest. The question is how […]

New book praising biofuels has an unexpected author

There are combinations that are just too weird: chocolate cake and grape juice (to steal from an old Dick Van Dyke show), or hearing the Rolling Stones' music used to market chastity belts and abstinence pledges. Or like seeing the Worldwatch Institute's name on a book praising biofuels ... the very fuels Les Brown, WWI's founder, is crusading against.

The gist of the book seems to be, "We need a completely different kind of biofuels than we have or are likely to ever see, but if that better, fairer system came along, it might be good for the poor." In other words, the Les-Brown-less WWI is now providing cover for people who don't give two burps about the poor, but sho' do love them some subsidies. And for people who will be throwing this book around the way Bush threw around Colin Powell's notorious UN speech on Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction."

New membrane technology for capturing CO2

Well, here's hoping ...

A guide to buying non-plastic baby products

Worried sick about plastic — or even feeling a teeny bit queasy? Here are a few alternatives for common baby items, and resources for where to buy ’em. (And don’t forget, you could always make your own.) Squeaky clean and PVC-free. Photo: iStockphoto Bathtubs Non-plastic baby tubs seem to be hard to find; probably the […]

On electricity deregulation

In The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi advises that "It is good to know karate. It is good not to know karate. It is not good to know a little karate." With the price caps now coming off in the few states that partially deregulated their electricity grids, there is a rising backlash against competitive markets, with some of that backlash even coming from normally pro-market groups like The Cato Institute. This backlashers generally argue that partial deregulation has taught us that deregulation doesn't work in the electric sector. But we ought to remember Mr. Miyagi's advice, lest we draw the wrong lessons from our little bit of karate.

This subject deserves more discussion on Grist, as evidenced by some of the debate which followed my last post. Let's take a closer look.

Groups petition federal agencies to regulate air fresheners

Environmental groups petitioned the U.S. EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission yesterday to regulate air fresheners, which can aggravate asthma and often contain chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde, as well as other compounds linked to developmental problems in kids. The eco-groups want companies to list all the ingredients in air fresheners and conduct […]

Ontario has higher capacity for renewable energy projects than the government estimates

The Toronto Star has been doing some excellent work on the environment and energy issues in Ontario lately -- I pointed to some not too long ago. Many of those stories come from the Roberts-endorsed Tyler Hamilton.

Yesterday, Hamilton had an excellent piece in the front of the business section. It's on the alternatives to nuclear construction that the province is ignoring; it tallies up all the missed opportunities. The conclusion is that Ontario could build ten times as much renewable energy as the government currently estimates, more than enough to displace the planned and allegedly necessary nuclear reactors.