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It runs together several distinct things

There's been a nice, coherent-if-incipient debate on cap-and-trade on this blog lately, which I've alas been too busy to reply to. But I wanted to throw in just one small thought: it just might be time to ditch the whole notion. It conflates at least three things together, and as they are all quite different, the "trading debate" as we know it is both confusing and confused.

Is your town?

What if cities had no sidewalks and everyone walked on the road? Or, for urban recreation, they walked on a few scenic trails? What if the occasional street had a three-foot-wide "walking lane" painted on the asphalt, between the moving cars and the parked ones?

Well, for starters, no one would walk much. A hardy few might brave the streets, but most would stop at "walk?! in traffic?!"

Fortunately, this car-head vision is fiction for most pedestrians, but it's not far from nonfiction for bicyclists. Regular bikers are those too brave or foolish to be dissuaded by the prospect of playing chicken with two-ton behemoths. Other, less-ardent cyclists stick to bike paths; they ride for exercise, not transportation. Bike lanes, in communities where they exist, are simply painted beside the horsepower lanes.

People react reasonably: "bike?! in traffic?!" And they don't. "It's not safe" is what the overwhelming majority say when asked why they bike so little. (As it turns out, it's safer than most assume -- on which, more another day.)

So what would cities look like if we provided the infrastructure for safe cycling? What does "bike friendly" actually look like?

Friday music blogging: Dolorean

You know what’s nice on a sleepy Friday afternoon? A love song. Here’s one of my favorite love songs of the last decade: “Dying In Time,” by Dolorean. (They have a fantastic new album called You Can’t Win, but this is from their last one, Violence in Snowy Fields.)

The ethics of climate change

It's probably rude to point to this RealClimate post on a recent meeting at the University of Washington on Ethics and Climate Change, since it mentions me. But it's really Paul Baer, EcoEquity's Research Director, that attended, and who got top billing as the author of the "influential" (and out of press) book Dead Heat.

The real issue here, as far as we're concerned, is the notion of "developmental equity," which we are trying to develop and defend as a normative and politically salient alternative to "equal per capita emissions rights."

Anyway, this is worth a quick read. The comments are many, and besides, authors Eric Steig and Gavin Schmidt prove the worth of the philosophical approach by defining an "Easterbrook fallacy."

I knew there had to be a name for it.

Do gas prices affect behavior or not?

Despite record-setting gas prices, U.S. drivers haven't changed their gas-guzzling habits, says AP. Not only are we consuming as much as we always have, new vehicle sales seem to be tilting even more in favor of trucks than cars.

But wait, USA Today disagrees. They say that drivers are, in fact, starting to cut back on how much they drive -- a clear sign that higher gas prices are starting to bite.

Who's right? Who cares! Either way, the consumer response to massive increases in gas prices over the last five years has been teensy-tiny.

FOX airs ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ after Murdoch’s green speech

Last night, about a week after Rupert Murdoch announced News Corp. is going green, FOX aired The Day After Tomorrow. I'm not sure this is the best start, but it is something, right?

‘Close your eyes’

Don’t miss Tom Engelhardt’s elegiac graduation speech. I cringe to think what I might have to tell a graduating class in 10 or 20 years.

Biden recites conventional wisdom on ethanol

You won’t see it in a more pure form than this: (thanks LL)

A new report says regulations are needed

A while back I mentioned a McKinsey Global Institute report showing that efficiency is the fastest, cheapest way to cut global GHG emissions. Now McKinsey’s got a new report out, making a heretical claim: even though homeowners could vastly improve energy efficiency and save tons of money over the long term with current technologies, there […]

Once we blow through the carbon sinks, it’s down the drain for us

Another sign that the economists' central myth, their creation story in a sense -- that there is a replacement for anything scarce and the replacement appears whenever the price of the depeleting resource gets high enough -- is the most dangerous fantasy in the world:

Alas, there are no replacement carbon sinks, and we seemed to have filled ours up. Now we learn that, after you're through in the sinks, you head down the drain.