Articles by Adam Stein

A breathless appraisal of Lance’s new bicycle mecca and mission

Lance Armstrong will soon unveil his 18,000-square-foot Austin-based bike shop, Mellow Johnny's (named after the Tour de France's yellow jersey -- or "maillot jaune"). The goal of the shop is to promote bike culture and bike commuting:

"This city is exploding downtown. Are all these people in high rises going to drive everywhere? We have to promote (bike) commuting..."

Showers and a locker room will allow commuters who don't have facilities at their offices to ride downtown, store their bikes at the shop, bathe and catch a ride on a pedicab or walk the rest of the way to work.

Armstrong's advocacy could move mountains. Cycling has always been a trend-driven sport. As far back as the 1800s, manufacturers promoted their technological innovations by sponsoring racers. In the U.S., bike sales boomed in the early '70s (reaching a high they've never quite touched again) due to a sudden craze for road bikes.

Have you been naughty with your light bulbs? You need some good old command and control.

The so-called incandescent light bulb ban (not actually a ban) included as part of the recent energy bill has prompted a low-level but consistent set of complaints that deserve further consideration, because they betray a fair amount of confusion about which policy tools to break out for which issues.

On the right, the reaction to the new lighting efficiency standard has ranged from hysterical whining to hysterical snark. But even on the left, it's fairly common to run across the high-minded opinion that finicky legislation like the lighting efficiency standard only wastes time and stirs up needless recrimination. Instead we should set a price on carbon, and let the market sort out the rest.

It's an excellent theory, one that I subscribe to under most circumstances, but sometimes command and control really is just the thing. The math on light bulbs is pretty easy to run. Follow along if you're interested, or just skip the next two paragraphs.

The next U.S. president will favor a carbon cap. What effect this has on the race is anyone’s guess.

Now that John McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, the shape of the debate over climate change takes on different contours. Hillary and Obama are offering substantively similar climate plans, so there's no need to wait for the Democratic contest to be decided before we start gaming out a few scenarios.

1) Will climate change take on more or less prominence as an issue in the general election?

Argument for less: with everyone preaching from the same book, the media sees no hay to make. This suits the candidates fine. McCain knows the topic alienates conservatives. Hillbama knows their policy position makes them look liberal and McCain look independent/centrist. Under different circumstances, the Dem could have tried to portray the Republican as reactionary, but no longer. Everyone changes the subject to war and the economy.

With all the upbeat talk about an environmental labor boom, is rhetoric running away from reality?

Someone help me puzzle this out:

Proposition 1: A shift to renewable energy and energy efficiency will result in a boom in green-collar jobs -- good service-industry work that can't be outsourced. This proposition is attractive because it holds forth the promise of a grand alliance between greens and the labor movement. See, e.g., Tom Friedman and everyone who posts on Grist.

Proposition 2: The optimism over green-collar jobs is a classic example of the make-work bias, a widespread economic fallacy that mistakes amount of work for wealth creation. The actual effect of greenhouse-gas reductions on labor markets is unclear, so environmentalists should stick to environmental policy. See, e.g., various environmental economists.

I don't have a clever opinion here, although I will say that the case for a positive labor impact from energy efficiency measures seems decently solid. Efficiency is, after all, an unambiguously good thing for the economy as a whole. If it costs us less to get the same amount of stuff, we're all richer. Certainly this is a nice thing for consumers, and because energy industries tend not to be labor-intensive, we can expect that wealth creation at the expense of energy producers will be a net benefit for employment as well. I think.

The impact of renewable energy, on the other hand, is more difficult to suss out. More to the point, it's not clear that anyone has sussed it out. Discuss.