Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

Oregon joins Washington and California with emissions limits

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski just tipped over the last clean car domino on the West Coast: He's directed his Department of Ecology to draft regulations for adopting California's clean-car standards.

This is a major step. Washington State had opted for California's standards, provided that Oregon adopted them too. Because Canada has adopted similar standards, Oregon's move has created a clean-car corridor stretching from San Diego through northern British Columbia. Together, between California, Canada, and the northwest and northeastern states that have followed their lead, about 40 percent of the North American new-car market will soon be cleaner and, if all goes well, more fuel efficient to boot. (There's a pretty good chronology of all the political action on the car standards here, if you scroll down through the posts.)

PBDEs may pass PCBs as biggest chemical threat

Dumb headline (unless you're a Fantastic Four fan), but a serious subject. A new chemical analysis, being released today by California EPA scientists at an international scientific conference in Toronto, shows that 30 percent of Northwest moms tested had higher levels of the toxic flame retardants PBDEs in their bodies than of well-known chemical threats PCBs. This study is a follow-up to the PBDE study of Northwest women Northwest Environment Watch did last year.

The study provides pretty unambiguous evidence that PBDEs have emerged as a major toxic menace. And it suggests that, if recent trends continue, PBDEs could soon overtake PCBs as the most dominant "organohalogen" pollutant in people's bodies.

And an interesting -- and probably significant -- side note to the study was that there was no correlation between PCB and PBDE levels. This suggests that the two classes of compounds may get into people's bodies through different pathways. At this point, the principle source of PCB contamination in people is food, particularly fish. For PBDEs, nobody is sure; but a recent exposure modeling study from Canada suggests that ordinary housedust, containing minute quantities of PBDEs sloughed off from furniture and the like, may be the principle route of exposure in people. (More here.)

City cores are, if anything, safer than the ‘burbs.

This article in Sunday's Washington Post, penned by New America Foundation fellow Joel Kotkin, is definitely thought provoking. In the wake of terrorist attacks in London and New York, Kotkin argues that the single most important challenge facing modern cities is providing basic security to their citizens. To wit ...

While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security -- and addressing it in the most aggressive manner -- that they will be able to survive and thrive in this new century, in which they already face the challenge of a telecommunications revolution that is undermining their traditional monopoly on information and culture, and draining their populations.

Wiith memories of 9/11 still fresh, perhaps it's natural that people should question whether cities are really safe. Terrorism is, quite obviously, a serious problem; and central cities have proven to be ready targets.

Still, I think that the article's emphasis on terrorism per se reveals an interesting and broader cultural bias about risk. There are certain kinds of risks that our culture fears more than others. Some hazards -- say, the threat of random violence, whether by ordinary criminals or by terrorists -- seem intolerable, and society demands a concerted effort to put a stop to them. Others -- say, traffic accidents -- we generally shrug off, and accept as part of the unavoidable background of modern life.

But sometimes the "unavoidable" risks are far more hazardous, and every bit as avoidable, as the ones on which we focus our attention.

Vancouver city politicians take risky moves to fight climate change.

If you want an example of what sets greater Vancouver, B.C., apart from cities south of the U.S.-Canadian border, look no farther than this Vancouver Sun headline:

Council votes to turn two of six lanes on Burrard Bridge into dedicated bike lanes.

Just for context -- the Burrard Bridge is one of just a few main access points into downtown Vancouver, and carries a significant amount of car traffic into downtown from some of the western neighborhoods. Vancouver tried a similar experiment in the mid-1990s, but it ended after just a week or so because of a public outcry over congestion. The same thing may well happen again.

So politically, this is a risky move. Which makes it all the more impressive: Vancouver city leaders are actually willing to take concrete and potentially unpopular steps to reduce the city's global warming emissions and promote biking and walking -- steps that seem completely outside the realm of political possibility in, say, Seattle or Portland. Even Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, who has won national recognition for organizing hundreds of the nation's mayors to speak up on global warming, has dedicated considerable political capital to rebuilding the Alaskan Way Viaduct -- a massively expensive project that will, in all likelihood, increase Seattle's global warming emissions.

But there's no such mismatch between rhetoric and reality in Vancouver city politics. According to city councillor Fred Bass:

"I became a city councillor because of global warming," Bass said after the vote. "And it seems to me that what we have here is a very feasible way of testing out whether we can mobilize people to walk and cycle and for people to leave their cars behind."

Definitely an experiment worth keeping an eye on.