Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

Green mayors and red queens

Apropos of the recent climate shindig in Montreal, the Seattle P-I reports on the Seattle mayor's decision to roll his own Kyoto by setting CO2 reduction goals for the city.

To me, the thing that's most noteworthy here is the admission that, if greenhouse-gas emissions are really going to fall in a city like Seattle, a lot of the reduction will have to come from the transportation sector. Seattle's electric utility is already climate neutral, at least nominally. So while there's plenty of potential improvements in heating efficiency for buildings and in the city-owned vehicle fleet, the real action is going to be in reducing emissions from private cars and trucks.

All of which makes it a pretty risky commitment by the mayor, given the relatively limited range of policy tools available to city governments. And some of the steps to help Seattle residents use less fuel happen to involve attracting a lot of new residents to Seattle. Which puts the city in a bit of a bind -- like the Red Queen in Alice and Wonderland, the city could wind up working harder and harder just to stay in one place.

Environmental taxes: a good thing

A few days ago the New America Foundation's Fiscal Policy Program came out with a proposal to completely re-engineer (PDF) the federal tax system in the United States. I'm not enough of a tax geek to cast judgment on the specifics, but some of the details look very intriguing. In particular, the idea of "environmental taxes" -- taxing, say, global-warming emissions, or natural-resource consumption, or pollution -- makes loads of sense.

Are gas prices and gas consumption connected?

It may come as a bit of a surprise: Despite rising gas prices over the past few years, total consumption of highway fuels in the U.S. has actually increased rather than fallen. Some have seized on this phenomenon -- prices and consumption rising in tandem -- to suggest that changes in gas prices have no discernible effect on how much gas we actually use.

The idea that gas prices have no effect on consumption doesn't square with economic theory, to put it mildly. And this Excel spreadsheet (courtesy of Charles Komanoff and the ever-informative Todd Litman) sheds some light on what's really going on. Apparently, even as U.S. gas prices have risen, so have population and GDP. And GDP growth tends to push consumption levels up -- in fact, over the short term, gas consumption seems to be far more responsive to changes in GDP than to changes in prices.

Don’t steal this book

This Slate book review (found via Brad Plumer) covering the history of sprawl is so infuriatingly silly, it's hard to know where to begin.

In a nutshell: Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski reviews a book by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Robert Bruegmann that argues -- quite correctly -- that suburbs have been part of urban life for millenia. In ancient Rome, wealthy patricians escaped to exurban villas. Just so, the walled cities of medieval Europe were surrounded by noxious industries such as slaughterhouses, as well as many of the people who worked there. Since cities have always had low-density outskirts, Bruegmann argues, it's simply inaccurate to characterize "suburban sprawl" as entirely an invention of 20th century American car culture.

All that's fair enough -- the suburbs have always been with us, in one form or another. And for good reasons: Some folks prefer not to live in the city, and some cities prefer to locate public nuisances outside of town.

But from this, the article (I'm not sure whether it's Rybczynski or Bruegmann who's responsible) draws conclusions about sprawl that are hard to fathom -- and even harder to square with reality.