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Well, it looks like it’s going to be a light blogging week, as Clark and I are traveling to Portland for a batch of meetings related to the Western Climate Initiative. So, on the off chance that you’ll miss us, I thought I’d share some of what we’re working on with WCI. Our biggest obsession right now is transportation fuels. Namely, we believe it’s critically important that transportation fuels be...

At least in Seattle, according to the city’s vaunted Green Ribbon Commission report. As I’ve been yammeringonabout for the last couple of days, 12 mpg is needlessly bad. For each taxi boosted to just 22 mpg—the average vehicle on the road, roughly—the climate would be spared about 570 gallons of gas and more than 7 tons of carbon-dioxide.* It’d be like taking a car off the road for good. It’d...

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to pull together some data on how airplane travel affects global warming, as part of a broader project on transportation and climate change. My stunningly obvious conclusion: it’s complicated. Worse, different calculation methods yield wildly different results. Take, for instance, this brilliant chart (below) from the Stockholm Environment Institute, comparing many of the major online emissions calculators. Emissions are represented by the...

Americans have a history of joining together in times of crisis. At our most trying moments, the terminology of war has been the rallying cry. So, it’s understandable that when he’s talking about global warming, John Edwards often implores Americans to be patriotic about something other than war. And when Al Gore accepted his Nobel Prize this week he said, “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and...

France is supercharging vehicle efficiency—not by doling out big R & D subsidies for cars that never make it to market, but by instituting a system of efficiency feebates. In a nutshell—the French ministry of ecology has announced a program that would require purchasers of new gas guzzlers (luxury Mercedes, for example) to pay an extra fee for the privilege. And that money is rebated to people who buy super-efficient...

A fact sheet on cap and trade, carbon taxes, and other exciting ways to slash our greenhouse gas emissions.

When it comes to climate, we’ve been watchingCaliforniaforawhile and wondering why the climate buzz is particularly loud in Cali. Does citizen concern spur lawmakers into action or does state action spur buzz among citizens? Or both? Nowadays it’s definitely both. Californians are ahead of the curve when it comes to opinions about both threats from climate pollution and potential opportunities; they’re savvy about policy options, and regional impacts. According to...

Update:Read the sequel to this post, where Alan reconsiders plug-ins. The weekend before Halloween, my car-less family got a loaner plug-in hybrid electric car to try. You see, the City of Seattle and some other local public agencies are testing the conversion of some existing hybrids to plug-ins to accelerate the spread of these near-zero-emissions vehicles. As a favor and, perhaps, for some publicity (this post), the city’s program manager...

Update:Today’s Seattle P-I has my op-ed on this issue, and with a good headline too: “Transportation forever linked to climate change.” In the Seattle metro region, voters just sank an $18 billion transportation mega-proposal that would have built more than 180 lanes miles of highway and 50 miles of light rail. But so far, the mainstream press has missed one of the most important stories of the year. The real story isn’t...

Numbers are current as of 5:50 a.m. on 11/7/07. Some early election results this morning. These numbers will change  a bit, of course, as mailed ballots continue to trickle in… In property rights: Oregon’s Measure 49, the partial antidote to Measure 37, was passing easily by 61 to 39. In transportation: Puget Sound’s Proposition 1—the roads and transit propsal—looked headed for defeat by a margin of  44 to 56. (Full results here.)...