Climate Cities
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Avego makes ride-sharing a normal reality
The thing about energy-driven collapse is that it’s uneven — it’s not like the calendar flips back and we all return to having the things we had in the past. Rather, we’re going to have this huge overhang of technology from the peak period of affluence and abundance. Sometimes that’s going to be bad (buildings […]
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Greenbuild ends on a note of cautious optimism
When he took the stage for the closing session of this year’s Greenbuild, amid flashing lights and a thumping rock anthem, USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi got right to the point: “When people say green building is over, tell them there were 29,752 people at Greenbuild. That doesn’t sound like we’re at the end of the […]
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This year’s Greenbuild is buzzing
In her column this week, Lisa Selin Davis wrote about the optimism of those in the green building movement. Today I saw it in the flesh. It was astonishing, the sight of more than 800 companies and organizations packed into Boston’s Convention & Exhibition Center for this year’s Greenbuild. Big guys like Honda and DuPont […]
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Bay Area is now a Better Place ™
Thursday, Better Place announced a commitment to build a network of electric car charging stations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. I counted 18 TV cameras. People are hungry for change.
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In a word, no
Late last year, I began to get the sense that green building fatigue was setting in. On my end, I sighed when a press release announcing a new LEED building landed in my inbox; that fact, alone, no longer seemed like news. But all over the country, the housing bubble was beginning to burst. I […]
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Sad sentences can say so much
“The Federal Highway Administration has approved Utah’s plan for a Mountain View freeway — if the state can afford it.” — “Freeway gets greenlight from the feds,” Salt Lake Tribune
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The whopper of a conference starts today
This year’s Greenbuild Expo kicks off today, and I’m … not there. But I will be later this week! It looks to be both inspiring and overwhelming — check out the official program for an eye-blurring good time. In advance of the event, the U.S. Green Building Council put out the word that it expects […]
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To save themselves, the Big Three should become ‘transportmakers’
Irony of ironies, the one set of products that could save GM is the one that GM destroyed — the electric trolley systems of America. According to the well-known research of Bradford Snell, GM killed the electric trolley, because in 1922 they decided that the only way to increase car sales was to eliminate the […]
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Why bail out the car companies when they bailed out on us?
I have a new Salon article, “Is Detroit worth saving?” It is built around this piece, but I have expanded on the sad story of the Big Three Medium Two walking away from the development of hybrid gas-electric vehicles in the 1990s. I’ve been asked why I think they gave up on hybrids. The answer, […]
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Tolls reduce congestion, but they price people off the roadway
Brilliant. That’s the word that kept crossing my mind as I read this clearly written report [PDF] about the Puget Sound Regional Council’s study on using road tolls to fight congestion. The study found that a well-designed, comprehensive system of congestion-busting tolls could make a major dent in traffic backups in the Puget Sound. It […]
