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A Virginia suburb goes through those awkward teenage years

Via this morning's Washington Post, Tysons Corner, Virginia, is going through those awkward teenage years: not quite a city, but trying to grow out of teeny-bopper suburb status. Tysons Corner planners are running into difficulties making the area around Route 7 more pedestrian friendly.

Just outside the DC beltway, Tysons Corner drivers have gotten used to all that "green time" and don't want pedestrians stopping up the road for the thirty seconds (it's a big road) it takes them to walk across.

As the planners are quickly finding out, though:

When it comes to building cities, [Gerrit Knaap, director of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland] said, "it is better to get things right the first time. It's much more difficult to retrofit."

Washington Post: Exploring Inroads for Tysons Foot Traffic
Google Maps: Aerial photo of Tysons Corner

How to talk to an economist.

When academics get together, it can be pretty entertaining to watch. Sometimes the better part of a meeting or conference is spent hashing out perceived differences only to realize that they have been talking about the same thing using different words. This leaves only the continental breakfast the next morning for some real progress to be made.

The idea of ecosystem valuation is just one example. The folks over at the aptly-named website Ecosystem Valuation have put together some great resources for understanding just what economists are talking about when they tell me I assign passive use value to the Arctic Refuge.

Piltz interview

Recently, former government climate science guy Rick Piltz blew the whistle on now-former White House official Philip Cooney, who was watering down scientific climate-change reports. Perhaps you heard something about it? Environmental Science & Technology has an interview with Piltz. Interesting stuff. This bit is amusing: In a letter about your resignation, you wrote that […]

From now on, those that would do nothing about global warming will have to lie about it.

Flagging this very interesting post from Pascal Riche about (what Riche sees as) a leftward drift in the American public, Matt Yglesias makes a point that I think too few progressives -- and too few environmentalists -- sufficiently appreciate: all the administration's deceptions, however irritating, are a pretty clear indication that the game is up.

Liberals have a habit of screaming ourselves blue in the face about the President's lying ways, which is appropriate, but it's worth taking a certain amount of satisfaction in the fact that he bothers to lie about this stuff.

Consider the environment. Neither the "clean skies" initiative nor the "healthy forests" initiatives are good ways of cleaning the air or securing the health of our forests. But by naming his initiatives thus, Bush has, in fact, surrendered an important part of the political terrain. The discourse has essentially shifted to a point where we take it for granted that federal regulations should be making the skies clean and the forests healthy. Instead of a debate about whether to undertake environment-friendly initiative we are -- ostensibly at least -- arguing over which party will, in fact, bring us clean skies and healthy forests.

And it's like that more-or-less across the board.

This is especially worth remembering in light of the fact that the Senate just passed an amendment to the energy bill that would explicitly address climate change.

The amendment (from Sen. Chuck Hagel -- see interview here) is pretty weak, certainly light years from what we'll ultimately need.

But the terrain has now shifted. The U.S. Senate is no longer debating about whether, as Sen. Inhofe says, global warming is a "hoax." It's debating what to do about it.

From this point on, if you're an elected U.S. government official and you want to do nothing about global warming -- or roll back global warming regulations -- you will have to lie about it.

New nuclear support in the McCain-Lieberman amendment may have cost it support.

Four votes.

Sens. Boxer, Dayton, Feingold, and Harkin, all supporters of the Climate Stewardship Act in the last Congress, voted against the legislation this afternoon when Sens. McCain and Lieberman offered it as an amendment to the energy bill. The amendment included new subsidies for the construction of nuclear power plants -- which Sen. Boxer, at least, has publicly opposed.

The amendment was defeated 38-60, a decline in support from the better-than-expected 43 votes it garnered in 2003.

Market mechanisms are the last best hope for many of the world’s most threatened animals.

In a few days, I will be off for a week of exploring/fact-finding in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh. While I normally don't consider my personal travels to be newsworthy, I share this with Gristmill readers because Chhattisgarh is a classic example of why environmental governance in countries like India is so difficult -- and why government statistics about the environment in developing countries can rarely be relied on.

Chhattisgarh is one of the forgotten parts of India. Despite representing almost 1/10th of India's landmass and containing 22 million people, it might as well be in another universe -- not just from the perspective of the outside world (crack open your 1,000-page Lonely Planet or Rough Guide to India and you will be lucky to find even a page or two on Chhattisgarh) but to India's own government. Even the hyperactive newspapers in major metros rarely mention news from or post reporters in Chhattisgarh, which is India's most forested state (officially), with 44% forest cover, and has perhaps India's richest overall bounty of natural resources. The state is also home to a 32% tribal population, a community suffering some of the most extreme poverty and with among the lowest literacy rates in India, barely 20% in many areas.

Getting to the bottom of climate-change lingo

Remember when you first heard about that big hole in the ozone? Remember how they called it “the ozone hole”? Man, life was good then. Raise your hand if you’re sure … what you’re talking about. Now everyone’s talking about global warming. Or, actually, climate change. Or … uh … anthropogenic forcing? What we’ve got, […]

Hey, Drillers, Leave Our State Alone

Oil and gas inventory may come soon to a coastline near you The Senate effectively approved an inventory of oil and gas reserves in U.S. coastal waters yesterday, a move that could help open the door for offshore drilling to begin after a decades-long moratorium expires in 2012. The 52-44 vote defeated an amendment sponsored […]

A View to a Killing

Silicon Valley investors putting big bucks into clean-tech start-ups Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are seeing green in clean energy — and we’re talking gobs of profit, not the whole planet-saving thing. Investor interest in clean-energy tech firms has jumped in the past year, fueled in part by escalating global demand for electricity and the rising […]

Stickin’ It to the Mandatory

Senate passes weak climate amendment Greens were struck with a severe case of mixed feelings yesterday, as the Senate passed an energy-bill amendment to address global warming (yay!) but passed over a different, tougher amendment (boo!). The latter, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), would have imposed mandatory controls on industrial greenhouse-gas emissions (though it […]