Articles by Maywa Montenegro

Big Applers breathe easy

Starting in 2008, every new yellow taxi purchased by the city of New York will be a hybrid vehicle, according to an announcement yesterday by Mayor Bloomberg. By 2012, the entire fleet -- some 13,000 cabs -- will have been replaced with a mixture of Toyota Priuses, Highlander Hybrids, Lexus RX 400h's, and Ford Escapes.

Thirteen thousand may sound like a drop in the ocean, given that 232 million cars are currently registered in the U.S. alone. Still, cabs are a great target for greening, both because of their high public profile and because of their disproportionately large carbon expenditure. New York City never sleeps, and neither do its taxis, ever spewing their emissions, even while they mostly idle in traffic.

Bloomberg certainly is the consummate businessman, as you can see in this Today Show clip -- adept at rubbing shoulders with corporate execs from Yahoo!(which donated 10 hybrid vehicles to one of the major cab fleet operators) to the American Lung Association. One gets rolling advertisements, the other gets less asthma ... and we all get slightly cleaner Big Apple air.

The former: Not good for the latter

How climate change will disproportionately affect the world's poor is a message making the rounds of late, after the publication of the second IPCC report earlier this year. How climate change policies, such as carbon taxes, will either help or hurt the poor is also a topic we've been discussing of late.

Now researchers at the University of Minnesota have assessed the impact of an increased dependence on biofuels on the developing world ... and the outlook isn't good.

In short, conflating food and energy lands us in a quagmire in which corn (and ethanol) prices are still tethered to oil:

Friedman in the NYT Magazine

What's red white and blue, and green all over? The cover of this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine. In "The Greening of Geopolitics," Thomas Friedman applies his trademark econo-politico-historical analysis to the state of the global environment, and he is nothing if not comprehensive. From China, Schwarzenegger, and Wal-Mart, to Islamic fundamentalism and oil prices, Friedman traces the connections. Enviros won't learn much about global warming they didn't already know; on the other hand, how greening America could ultimately result in democracy in Saudi Arabia and better schools in Qatar is a point not often made in activist circles. Particularly encouraging are Friedman's call for regulations at the national level to encourage green innovation (free hand of the market won't do this by itself) and his call for a 2008 candidate with a rock-solid plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Oh yeah, and the art is pretty too.

An insider’s view

Over at a great new website called Terry (part of the Science Creative Quarterly), Sarah Burch has a great post elucidating the inner workings of this beast we call the IPCC. It's worth a read for anyone bemoaning the inaccuracy, slothfulness, or inefficiency of this oft-cited but little understood organization.

The title alone speaks volumes: "IPCC FAQ PART I (BURCH REMIX) (OR TAMING THE LEVIATHAN: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE INTERGOVENMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE)"