Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

Cheap forests and carbon sinks

Holy cow:

A recently formed company ... has purchased 440,000 acres of timber land in southern Oregon for $108 million, officials said. [Emphasis added.]

Just in case you were wondering how much land that is: the sale covers nearly 700 square miles, an area well over half the size of the state of Rhode Island. Of course, Rhode Island is tiny, as states go. But it seems like a lot of land, and at a bargain basement price, to boot. At $245 per acre, even I could afford to become a real estate mogul. Heck, some houses cost more than $108 million.

Silliness aside, this sale makes me wonder whether a carbon trading system -- where polluters have to pay for emissions reductions or sequestration -- might create huge opportunities for ecosystem restoration.

Green power programs at utilities remain teensy

From last week, good news about Portland General Electric:

PGE [has moved to] the head of the pack nationally in terms of demand for green energy. Under its green-power program, Oregon's largest utility sells more kilowatts of renewable power to its residential customers than any other utility in the country, regardless of size. [Emphasis added]

Wow. PGE is nowhere near the nation's largest utility. Still, it leads the nation "green energy" signups -- people who opt to pay a bit extra on their home utility bills to support wind, solar, small hydro, or similar climate-friendly energy sources. Seems like PGE, and its customers, deserve a pat on on the back.

But wait, there's more! (Or perhaps less ...)

The boring green-building stuff is the best

Moises Velasquez-Manoff of the Christian Science Monitor gets this exactly right:

Tolls reduce driving, but maybe not enough

On most days, my wife and I commute together by car. And since my kids started a new, out-of-the-way school, our commute has gone from a fairly straightforward 15 minute trip -- mostly in the carpool lanes -- to a congested daily slog that, depending on traffic, can last over 45 minutes.

We definitely pay for our longer commute in higher bills for gas and repairs. But we don't have to pay for the road space -- we drive on the "freeway," after all.

But stuck in rush hour gridlock, among all the other drivers parked on I-5, it strikes me that the term "freeway" is a misnomer. In fact, we do pay a toll to drive on the freeway, especially during rush hour. It's just that we pay with our time, not our money.

Perhaps it doesn't have to be that way.