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Sundance getaway converts mayors into climate activists

Salt Lake City played host to mayors getting up to speed on climate issues. City leaders from around the U.S. were treated to a rare bird’s-eye view of the environment earlier this week at the Sundance Summit, a three-day mayors’ retreat on climate change hosted by Robert Redford in Salt Lake City and at his […]

Is local government corruption required to get mass transit moving?

Robert Farley speculates that more corruption in local government might be just the trick in getting mass transit projects built, using as his example the endlessly stalled Seattle monorail. Matt Yglesias links approvingly and says:

The problem with this, of course, is that insofar as corruption is driving your infrastructure investment, you wind up paying a certain "corruption premium" on your investments -- i.e., they're suboptimally efficient.

Nevertheless, it turns out to be the case that America significantly underinvests in public infrastructure from a purely economic point of view under the status quo. Thus, the corruption premium might very well be a price worth paying to rectify structural underinvestment in the infrastructure sector. What's more, public capital is good for social equality above and beyond its economic benefits. ... Realistically speaking, you never get public infrastructure under ideal conditions -- the only alternative is too little infrastructure, and that's worse.

I don't really have anything to say about this. I just find it amusing.

(As a Seattleite, I would break some knees myself at this point to get the #%$! monorail going.)

French constitution gets a dash of green

A landmark achievement. Photo: David Roussel “vecko.” Ahhh, the French. Toujours inexplicable. They chain smoke. They drink enough espresso before noon to cause lockjaw. And they jam their veins with butter, cheese, and beef. But despite how reckless they seem, their leaders recently made a stand for public health, granting every citizen the right to […]

Get a free (Terra)Pass for $79.95

For you all SUV drivers who fear the "eco-terrorists" mentioned here, and must continue to drive said SUVs, there is some potentially good news: TerraPass decals.

In Washington, DC, eco-vandals smear SUV door handles with dog crap. In Santa Cruz, California, protestors tag more than 60 gas-guzzlers with anti-oil graffiti. In Los Angeles, a Caltech grad student is sentenced to eight years in prison for trashing more than 120 SUVs around the city. It's almost enough to make you feel bad for SUV drivers. After all, some of them are green, too - just not as hardcore about it.

Now they have TerraPass, a clever eco-capitalism experiment. Launched by a group of Wharton Business School classmates, the startup sells a decal that drivers can slap on their windshields. The sticker price - $79.95 for SUVs, less for greener cars - gets invested in renewable energy projects and credits. The credits are traded through local brokers on the new Chicago Climate Exchange.

To purchase your decal, or to learn more, do not pass Go and head directly to the TerraPass website.

(Via Wired)

[editor's note, by Chris Schults] And to read Grist's piece on the aforementioned Chicago Climate Exchange go here.

Necessary evil, or just evil?

The other day Clark expressed some ambivalence about cost-benefit analyses in the realm of environmental policy.

It so happens Dan Phaneuf at the Environmental Economics blog has some thoughts on that very matter.

For my part, I think Phaneuf -- whose comments are generally quite sensible -- underplays the risks of CBA. He acknowledges:

The Toxic Avoider

EPA failing to get health data on scads of potentially harmful chemicals The U.S. EPA hasn’t collected data on the potential risks of tens of thousands of toxic substances, putting the public at risk, says a new report from the Government Accountability Office. Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, which regulates industrial chemicals, the […]

Lend Me Your Gears

Car sharing slowly but surely taking off in cities worldwide Car sharing is gradually gaining ground around the globe, and the future looks bright for a concept once derided as a green fever dream. About 300,000 people worldwide now participate in car sharing; it’s taken off especially well in European nations like Germany, the Netherlands, […]

Bad for the Fish, Good for the Grist Swim Team

Warmer waters put wildlife under deadly stress along Pacific Coast Freaky environmental anomalies along the Pacific Coast from central California to British Columbia may devastate the region’s wildlife, scientists say. Ocean temperatures in the area are 2 to 5 degrees higher than usual this summer; no one’s sure why, but scientists suspect a lack of […]

Sewage in the kitchen?

Well, perhaps just the methane from the sewage, to cook our food.

This vision, swinging dramatically across the olfactory spectrum, is part of sustainability architect William McDonough's plan for seven new Chinese cities. The Chinese government has taken McDonough's book Cradle to Cradle on as policy for what he calls the "Next City." Read more at BBC.

Mayors meet at that other Sundance for greener cities

Mayors from over 45 cities met this week in Sundance -- Sundance, Utah, that is -- to brainstorm on ways to make their cities greener and build on the momentum created by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' recent initiative to cut cities' greenhouse emissions, which he discussed with Amanda Griscom Little in Grist.

The Sundance Summit gathered mayors from some of the "usual suspects" (Seattle, Burlington, Berkeley) as well as some not-so-usual suspects (Des Moines, D.C., Pittsburgh, and two cities in Texas). The Summit featured talks by Al Gore, a representative from the Chicago Climate Exchange, and an attorney from the NRDC.

From the Seattle PI article:

"All of our major big boxes have to do green roofs," [Chicago Mayor] Daley said at actor Robert Redford's Sundance mountain resort just east of Provo. "When big boxes come to see us, we change their architecture. ... Everything's a planned development."

Making big boxes change their architecture? Imagine!

If these initiatives take root, and if I'm reading Dave's Sustainablog post correctly, this is an example of ecological "handprint" as opposed to footprint. It's also probably closer to the order of 1 percent reduction of "insult to the earth" rather than .000000000000167 percent.