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Royaling for a Fight

Oil and gas companies set to receive $7 billion taxpayer windfall To supplement their already record-breaking profits, oil companies are set to receive around $7 billion in royalty relief over the next five years — possibly up to $35 billion, depending on the outcome of an ongoing lawsuit — and the feds claim they are […]

Incentives should reward fuel efficiency, not hybrids per se

Hybrid cars are good for us, right? So policymakers should provide incentives -- things like tax breaks, access to HOV lanes, and free parking for hybrid drivers.

Well, not so fast, says a great article in today's Washington Post. There's growing reason to believe that those incentives for hybrids will make things worse -- actually generating more gasoline use, not less. That's because many of the incentives confuse the means for the end.

Reducing fuel use (and attendant GHG emissions, air pollution, etc.) is the goal; getting drivers into hybrids is simply one instrument in pursuit of that goal.

But one of the more popular incentives to boost fuel efficiency has been to encourage hybrid ownership by offering hybrid drivers access to HOV lanes, even when the drivers are alone. And as the article rightly points out:

An incentive -- whether it's access to a carpool lane or cut-rate financing -- still aims to put another car on the road, and that undermines efforts to encourage carpooling.

Giving over HOV lanes to hybrids is probably counterproductive. In Virginia, where allowing hybrids in HOV lanes was pioneered, officials are worried that solo drivers in hybrids are clogging the high-capacity lanes and thereby discouraging carpools (because carpooling is no longer any faster than driving alone). In fact, 25 percent of all Virginia HOV lane users are hybrid drivers. And despite their hype, hybrids are not so fuel efficient that they can offset the fuel efficiency of an ordinary car with two or three riders. So the fuel efficiency of Virginia hybrids may become illusory as the vehicle fleet actually consumes more gas because drivers give up carpooling.

Same goes for other popular incentives: tax breaks and free or reduced-price parking. These incentives encourage people to drive by making it cheaper.

And if some incentives are wrong-headed, it's because they seem to miss the reason why hybrids are good in the first place. If we want to reduce fuel use, it's hard to see why hybrids deserve special tax breaks not afforded to buyers of other fuel-efficient, gas-powered cars (some of which are actually more efficient than certain hybrids). What's so special about hybrids?

Could a Western wildfire be the country’s next Katrina?

At the end of summer in southern Oregon’s Cascade foothills, when trees and brush have turned tinder dry and thunderstorms regularly roll overhead, Millie Chatterton and her neighbors start thinking about the lightning strike that could touch off disaster. The Biscuit burns in 2002. Photo: USFWS. Chatterton can’t forget the afternoon in 1987 when she […]

Forests may prevent more CO2 emissions than the equivalent acreage of biofuels

The latest proposal to include airlines in European emissions trading schemes will have predictable results:

"If the idea of emissions trading is to make energy intensive activities more expensive, then there will be some impact on ticket prices," said Andy Kershaw, Climate Change Manager at BA.

For obvious reasons, consumers will always end up footing the bill when businesses pay the true cost of protecting the environment. That reality is not hard for most of us environmentalists to understand. It costs to protect the environment.

What green looks like to the world’s emerging economies

Give a child a hammer, they say, and everything is seen as a nail — or at least in need of a good pounding. Likewise, give an environmentalist a brush loaded with green paint, and she or he may set to turning everything one verdant hue. Pretty, perhaps, but problems can arise when well-off painters […]

Greens need a vision of the future that they can agree on

Imagine for a moment that you are not an environmentalist. You have basically positive feelings toward environmental protection, but haven't much looked into the specifics. You're vaguely aware that global warming is out there, and it's bad; you're vaguely aware that we import too much oil from the Middle East, and that's bad; you're vaguely aware that Bush is not very good on the environment, and that's bad, though not a big deal compared to, say, terrorism.

Imagine, in short, that you are like most U.S. citizens.

Now, say you hear the State of the Union speech (or see headlines about it the next day). Bush acknowledges that America is addicted to oil and proposes funding for some alternative energy programs. Not huge money, but at least he's addressing the issue. The environmentalists got what they wanted, right? But noooo ... there they are on TV, in the newspapers, denouncing his speech, denouncing his programs, complaining about ethanol, complaining about nuclear, complaining about hydrogen, and on and on.

Obviously nothing will satisfy these people, right? Nothing except halting economic growth completely and turning out all the lights. Shivering in the dark.

Dick, hunting

The internet is chockablock with entertaining coverage of Cheney's hunting mishap -- The Daily Show's segments on the matter deserve some kind of award -- so I won't presume to add to the flurry. For my part, I think James Wolcott's post sums it up pretty well.

EcoLogical Home Ideas debuts.

Welcome, welcome to Dig This, the cleverly-titled weekly column on digs -- or, for those of you not up on the lingo, houses. Or, eco-stuff for houses. Or, eco-stuff vaguely related to houses. We'll see how it goes. I'm not above making obscure connections.

Today's (very digs-related) spotlight: the brand spankin' new magazine ecoLogical Home Ideas. You can check out the site, but I currently hold in my hands -- well, my lap, since I'm typing -- a glossy copy of the premier issue. I know, you've grown so accustomed to Grist that you've forgotten they made magazines out of paper. Me too.

The magazine shown on the ecoLogical Home Ideas website doesn't have the same cover as the actual hard copy, so consider this a sneak preview. Lucky you! The biggest headline on the actual copy is "If Money Were No Object."

But Kermit Said …

Japan rules, U.S. drools in new list of greenest vehicles An annual list of the world’s greenest cars placed the top American car at an impressive, uh, No. 10, while Japanese cars took all of the top five spots. (But American cars dominated the Totally Un-Gay Testostero-Manly Mean Machine list!) The American Council for an […]

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Dependence on Foreign Energy Sources?

Austria embraces renewable energy Austria is yodeling up a new tree: the biofuels tree (oh, what are you, the metaphor police?). Like other hip countries, Austria is giving renewable energy a big bear hug — nearly 70 percent of its domestic power production came from renewables in 2003. Taking advantage of what is readily available […]