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Beyond the Pail

Dealing with big-city garbage is big business for small towns As landfills top off and shut down near big U.S....

Grist staff Uncategorized July 13, 2005

G8 Climate Fast A group of activists is parked outside the White House, in the midst of a three-day fast meant to urge President Bush to join the rest of the G8 countries in committing to efforts to battle global warming. You can read more about the fast, and find out how to get involved, here.

We asked Billy Parish, coordinator of Energy Action, and Monica Brown, organizer for the Road to Detroit, to send us word of how it's going. Their dispatch is below.

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While President Bush is in Scotland stalling yet another international agreement on global warming, dozens of us from all over the country have gathered directly across from the White House to partake in a three-day fast to stop the madness. Our crowd of youth, environmental, and religious leaders is stranded on a small solar-powered platform along with any and all baggage, chairs, and banners, lest we provoke the fury of metro police, the SWAT team, or national park enthusiasts.

While doing backbends to comply with D.C. demonstration regulations -- keeping tents away from the "drip-line" of nearby saplings and chopping off the ".orgs" from all our signs -- we also happen to be giving up food in an effort to prevent the starvation and death of millions: the inevitable result of droughts and floods caused by global warming.

David Roberts Uncategorized July 8, 2005

Amanda Lumry, children’s book author, answers questions

Amanda Lumry. What work do you do? I am an author and photographer for the Adventures of Riley children’s book...

Grist staff Uncategorized August 23, 2005

Friedman drives home the geo-green point.

Last Thursday, Tom Friedman again returned to his geo-green pulpit. Citing the Set America Free coalition, Friedman asserts that the solutions to our foreign oil addiction (and 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline) are "already here."

Sounding remarkably similar to a Max Boot column in the LA Times (mentioned here on Gristmill in March), Friedman advocates the two-pronged approach of electric plug-in vehicles and flex-fuel vehicles. These powers combined result in 500 mpg.

My reaction: Flex-fuel? Great. Shifting our massive fleet of cars and trucks to run off of electricity? Maybe not so great. After all, don't we get over 50% of our electricity from carbon-intense coal?

My resulting back of the envelope calculations are below the fold.

Andy Brett Uncategorized June 20, 2005

G8 Expectations

Bush gets the watered-down G8 climate statement he wanted President Bush got exactly what he wanted on climate change during...

Grist staff Politics July 11, 2005

Umbra on oil subsidies

Dear Umbra, Grist keeps mentioning that the U.S. government gives large subsidies to oil companies, but doesn’t go further into...

Ask Umbra® Technology August 3, 2005

Get your (hybrid) motor runnin’

The New York Times reports this morning on the 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid. Two points of note:

The Times cites Consumer Reports, which found actual on-the-road efficiency to be just 25 mpg for the Accord hybrid.
The E.P.A. figures show a larger benefit for the hybrid, but the agency's fuel economy figures are considered by many to be inaccurate because they do not reflect the way cars are actually driven.
The EPA figures are 29/37 mpg city/highway for an automatic transmission Accord hybrid. That's about a 15 percent jump in fuel efficiency if you drive like the EPA thinks you should. There are a number of habits many people have that needlessly hamper fuel efficiency (flooring it from light to light is an egregious example). Installing an mpg meter in your car lets you know when you are getting the best mileage and what behaviors detract from optimal fuel efficiency, rewarding the driver with flashing lights and colors, to which the human brain seems to respond.
One hybrid owner was quoted as saying:
I wasn't prepared to give up anything to 'go green' - not performance, amenities, or space.
Maybe it's because I just read Suburban Nation, but this sounds similar to the concept of "induced traffic." The idea there is that building more roads or lanes on a highway, rather than easing and speeding traffic flow, leads to more traffic: Drivers will flock to the faster-moving roads until they become just as congested as before.
In the same way, making cars more efficient, rather than leading people to buy new cars with similar performance but higher gas mileage, could lead people to buy new cars with higher performance but similar gas mileage. So the end result will be the same overall level of fuel use, but roads packed with high performance cars. If the quoted driver is indicative of public sentiment, new hybrids could have a neutral environmental impact at best.