Seattle

I sense a theme

Here’s the forecast for Seattle (see if you can detect a theme): Sunday, Feb 18 Colder with a little rain Monday, Feb 19 Rain at times Tuesday, Feb 20 Breezy with rain Wednesday, Feb 21 Cloudy with a shower possible Thursday, Feb 22 A couple of showers possible Friday, Feb 23 Rain possible in the […]

Small is beautiful.

Here is a fun article from The Green Wombat retelling the "solar-to-hydrogen" car story for the millionth time. I read stories like this in Popular Mechanics decades ago. The article talks about using solar panels to store sunlight as hydrogen to burn in internal-combustion-powered cars. Australia has a lot of sunlight and summers can be hot. It would be far more efficient to use that sunlight to power swamp coolers to air-condition homes than to throw 90% of that solar energy away converting it to hydrogen and then burning it in a 30% efficient internal combustion engine. Passing hydrogen through a fuel cell to power an electric car or light a home would also be a lot more efficient.

State Supreme Court rules utility cannot offset emissions

Just when US federal climate policy looks like a possibility, Seattle's prospects take a turn for the worse. The Washington Supreme Court just ruled that Seattle City Light -- the first (and only?) major utility in the nation to achieve climate neutrality -- can no longer use ratepayer money to buy emissions offsets.

Luckily, I think this problem can be fixed fairly easily. But before I get to fixing things, I have a small rant to get off my chest.

According to the court's reasoning, offsets are not sufficiently related to the utility's core business of generating electricity. I'll leave the legal parsing to be debated by the lawyers, but I will make two remarks.

First, almost all of City Light's power comes from hydroelectricity, which in turn comes from dams that rely on rivers that are fed by snowmelt. And -- I think you know where I'm going here -- climate change is very bad for snowpack. It's like this: no snow, no electricity.

So here's a simplified version. Global warming reduces the city's access to electricity. So the utility zeros out its contribution to global warming. But then the courts say that the activity is not sufficiently related to supplying electricity.

That noise you just heard was my head exploding.

Of course there are heaps of other sources of climate-changing emissions too. But City Light can't very well do anything at all about those. All it can do is bring its own contributions to zero and thereby create a national (and even international) model of sustainable power generation. In fact, its leadership was probably much more important than its emissions cuts. But no more.

The rant continues after the jump.

Not every ‘environmental’ action makes sense

I spotted a freshly remodeled house in my neighborhood the other day. It had a large array of shiny new PV solar panels on the roof. Wouldn't it be great to be able to afford such things? Wouldn't it feel great to watch your electric meter spinning backwards?

You don't see many solar panels in Seattle. It piqued my curiosity, so I found a solar cost calculator to find what it would cost to replace my electricity use with panels. The answer is about $160,000 dollars (taking about half a century to break even).

Report casts doubt

A new report questions whether the 358 U.S. cities that pledged to meet Kyoto's targets will be successful. That's a fine question, but it's perhaps easy to misconstrue as an implicit criticism that the promises were meaningless.

There is every reason to think that the cities can meet the targets. (And, heck, the pledge is only 18 months old!) Portland, in fact, is already well on its way.

What the report should serve to highlight is this:

Is required green development smart public policy?

Here's a potentially good idea about which I'm rather ambivalent: rules requiring in-city developers to include robust landscaping features such as green roofs and vegetation-covered walls. It's easy on the eyes, but it may not be smart public policy.

To begin with, it's unclear how much burden Seattle's cutting-edge new rules would impose; and it's unclear how much benefit they'd achieve. But if most developers are skeptical -- and they are, at least according to this article -- then policymakers should listen very carefully.

Burdening developers with additional layers of regulatory complexity, especially here in regulation-heavy Seattle, may not be such a hot idea. Those regulations tend to reduce the viability of further in-city development or raise the cost. Either is bad.

No, I haven't been reading Milton Friedman over the holidays. It's just that when it comes to urban development, I'm not sure that we need a lot of elaborate new policies and procedures. In some case, we simply need less red tape.

Here's why ...

An interview with Seattle biodiesel distributor Dan Freeman

Dan Freeman. As a kid, Dan Freeman experimented with using alcohol to run lawnmowers and minibikes. (Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for that parent-son conversation.) These days, he runs Dr. Dan’s Alternative Fuel Werks, a Seattle-based biodiesel retail and distribution company with customers ranging from school districts to organic farmers to […]

Gloom and doom with a sense of precipitation

Does your blog proprietor seem sluggish and grumpy today? Perhaps it's because his home city, Seattle -- or as it's known around the house these days, "f**king Seattle" -- is in the midst of its rainiest November ever.

Outside my home office window, it is dark as night. The wind is blowing. The air is frigid. And if I'm not hallucinating, I think it just started hailing.

Kill me.

Update [2006-11-21 14:1:18 by David Roberts]: Oh, hey, speaking of darkness, does anybody out there know what's up with those full-spectrum lamps? Supposedly they make your body squirt happy chemicals? Anybody got one? Do they work or is it a scam? Know where I can find a cheap one? I have a feeling it's going to be a long, dark winter.

This climate hero may be more of a Forrest Gump

I've been waiting for someone to write this article.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels is rightfully lauded for kicking off the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which now has 326 mayors committed to helping their cities meet Kyoto emissions targets. It's a BFD, and Nickels will earn a small place in history for it.

Still. It's always been my sense that the initiative was cooked up by clever and persuasive staffers in the mayor's office, and that Nickels was, in Forrest Gumpian fashion, in the right place at the right time. I don't think he's really taken a concern about global-warming emissions to heart.