Climate Climate & Energy

Widening roads does not, in fact, reduce emissions

Why is it that stupid ideas get all the air time?

For months, fellow climate geeks have been telling me that road-builders -- and the politicians who love them -- have started to make a startling claim: namely, that widening a congested highway will help curb global warming. By reducing stop-and-go traffic, the argument goes, cars will operate more efficiently and waste less fuel. So if you want to save the climate, you'd better widen that road!

To me, this sounded too dopey to be worth refuting. I mean, sure, over the short term, congestion relief might help a bit. But what about all of the emissions from road building itself -- and, more importantly, from the extra traffic that will inevitably fill those new lanes?

But despite its obvious absurdity (or perhaps because of it) this particular suburban legend seems to be getting a life of its own. Just take a look at what British Columbia's Premier had to say recently about a proposed highway widening project in greater Vancouver, BC:

Campbell ... continued to defend the [highway] project ... saying that it will reduce emissions and make room for rapid-bus services along the highway.

Because I couldn't find anything addressing this issue online (academics have better things to do with their time, apparently), I spent a bit of time running some numbers. You can read the full report here (PDF) if you're a real geek. But in a nutshell: congestion relief may offer some slim GHG benefits over the short term; but these benefits are absolutely dwarfed by the emissions from road construction and, more importantly, by all the extra traffic that fills the expanded roadway.

In fact, it looks to me as if adding a single lane-mile to a congested urban highway will boost CO2 emissions by at least 100,000 tons over 50 years. And that's making some pretty optimistic assumptions about fuel economy improvements.

So now, if anyone out there in Grist-world hears this particular suburban legend, you'll have some numbers you can use to smack it down.

A review of a new doomer cult classic

Some years ago I was alerted to the problem of peak oil by a friend from Bellingham, Wash., way up in the upper left corner of the continental U.S. A nuclear physicist and astronomer, the smartest guy I know, and no doubt someone who uses the serial comma, he had this to say about a new movie called What a Way to Go: Life at the end of empire:

Time to end the phony and historically inaccurate debate

This will, hopefully, be the last post devoted to debunking Shellenberger & Nordhaus.

As noted, S&N spend far more time attacking the environmental community and Al Gore (and even Rachel Carson!) than they do proposing a viable solution. Worse, they don't even attack the real environmental community -- they create a strawman that is mostly a right-wing stereotype of environmentalists.

Now it turns out they support the exact same thing the environmental community -- and energy technologists like me -- have been pushing for many years: an aggressive and intelligent regulatory strategy coupled with a significant increase in the energy R&D budget.

To my great surprise, they have taken up my challenge and endorsed Barack Obama's terrific climate plan. So why are we fighting? Only because S&N keep attacking, keep trying to rewrite history.

S&N claim over and over again that environmentalists don't support increases in clean energy budgets. They even claim I don't support an increase in the budget of the very office I ran at the Energy Department -- and that "'experts' like Romm" shift our analysis "after the political winds changed direction." Silly (and petty).

In this post, I will set the record straight.

Right-wingers will do whatever Gore says not to

I bet it would work:

Better yet, maybe Gore will make a major speech telling people to not stick their tongues in wall sockets in an effort to save electricity. Afterward, expect lots of flickering lights in your neighborhood and fewer right-wing bloggers on the internets.

The horrid misreporting on the case of the British judge and An Inconvenient Truth

There are three things you’re unlikely to learn from the mainstream media about the Case of the Nine Errors, wherein a British judge is said to have taken issue with the accuracy of An Inconvenient Truth. The parent who filed the suit, Stewart Dimmock, is a member of a far-right political group with ties to […]

Nobel Prize is a nice follow up to Oceana Award

We are thrilled to learn that Al Gore just won the Nobel Prize. As David Roberts points out, he certainly deserved it and this is good news for all of us in the environmental community and in the world.

Gore was also presented with Oceana's 2007 Partners Award this past Friday. The former vice president's work on highlighting the challenges climate change presents to our oceans is incredibly important.

Gore was joined by Dr. Daniel Pauly, winner of the 2007 Ted Danson Ocean Hero award. Pauly is one of the world's preeminent fisheries scientists.

Top climate scientist debunks Lomborg in the Washington Post

The Washington Post has at least had the decency to run a rebuttal to the absurd Bjørn Lomborg piece they ran on Sunday (also debunked here and here).

They chose one of the top climate scientists in the country -- Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I count her a friend, having interviewed her for my book and having spent a couple of days in Florida with her giving joint talks -- she on hurricanes and climate (with her colleague Peter Webster), and me on climate solutions.

I recommend anything she writes (here is a great piece on the science and politics of the hurricanes and global warming debate [PDF]). You can read the whole piece debunking Lomborg, "Cooler Heads and Climate Change," here. One point in particular bears repeating:

EPA will develop industry regulations for carbon sequestration

Setting aside questions of technical challenges and commercial viability, the U.S. EPA has announced that it will develop industry regulations for carbon sequestration by power plants. By next summer, expect exciting new regulations to “ensure there is a consistent and effective permit system under the Safe Drinking Water Act” for injecting captured carbon dioxide deep […]

Al Gore and the IPCC jointly win peace prize

Photo: Stephen Lovekin/WireImage Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Here’s the press release. Here is […]

Canada’s version of liquid coal

Canada has about as much recoverable oil in its tar sands as Saudi Arabia has conventional oil. They should leave most of it in the ground.

Tar sands are pretty much the heavy gunk they sound like, and making liquid fuels from them requires huge amounts of energy for steam injection and refining. Canada is currently producing about one million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands, and that is projected to triple over the next two decades.

The tar sands are doubly dirty. On the one hand, the energy-intensive conversion of the tar sands directly generates two to four times the amount of greenhouse gases per barrel of final product as the production of conventional oil. On the other hand, Canada's increasing use of natural gas to exploit the tar sands is one reason that its exports of natural gas to U.S. are projected to shrink in the coming years.

So instead of selling clean-burning natural gas to this country, which we could use to stop the growth of carbon-intensive coal generation, Canada will provide us with a more carbon-intensive oil product to burn in our cars. That's lose-lose.