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Our car-less family vacation in Vancouver, BC, was a big success. Here’s a full report, for those of you who shared your own car-lessvacation stories and are interested in such things. For the rest of you, you might want to skim the travelogue to find the five lessons I draw. The only nail-biter (if you can call it that) was the very first leg of the trip, which resembled the...

An interesting contrast. The NW Current is reporting that, even with rising prices for fossil fuels, biomass electricity projects—using, say, wood waste or sewage solids—are having trouble penciling out. Between capital and fuel costs, it’s still cheaper to generate electricity from fossil fuels than from biomass. Meanwhile, energy-efficiency programs are wildly successful, oversubscribed—and in Oregon, cost about 1.3 cents per kilowatt hour saved, which is a massive bargain. Says Energy...

Random factoid from a recent New Yorker article (not online, unfortunately) on, among other topics, the international shipping business: For a pair of shoes made in China and sold in this country for fifty dollars, only about seventy-five cents of the retail cost derives from transportation. And the main costs in international shipping come from friction in the pipeline, particularly at the points of ship loading and unloading. [Emphasis added.]...

Individuals and institutions can take simple steps to create compact, complete communities that enable residents to get around without a car and encourage physical activity and connections among neighbors.

According to the Vancouver Sun, hybrids are now cheaper than conventional cars. Perhaps surprisingly, this seems like a big deal to me. Even though hybrids are (obviously) more fuel efficient than comparable conventional cars, they’re not necessarily cheaper: the fuel savings may not offset the higher purchase price. But higher gas prices are changing the equation. A year ago, the British Columbia Automobile Association assumed that gas prices would remain...

Summer is upon us, unofficially at least. And to usher in the driving season, here’s Carbonfund.org, a new way to offset your personal carbon emissions from driving—as well as from flying, and heating, cooling, and powering your house. Here’s how it works: Carbonfund.org invests in energy efficiency, in solar and wind power, and in tree-planting projects. And those projects either offset electricity that would have been generated from fossil fuels...

I don’t know yet what to think about Seattle’s proposal to spend $1.8 billion over 20 years on transportation improvements.  (Also see press coverage here and here.) Call me agnostic, until I understand the plan a bit better.  Still, at first blush, there’s certainly some stuff here to like.  I’ll start with parking taxes. About 20 percent of the proposed money (at least in the first full year of implementation)...

Earlier in the week, I mentioned that energy spending per capita—money spent to fuel our cars and trucks, plus to heat, cool, and power our homes and workplaces—topped $2,200 per person in the Northwest states last year. For any energy geeks who really care, there’s a breakdown in the chart below. On average, people spent over $1,000 on gasoline alone. Once again, I think it’s important to emphasize two points....

This is promising: at a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, Oregon senator Gordon Smith floated the idea of vehicle “feebates” to boost fuel efficiency. Bully for him!! With gas prices as high as they are, and the security costs for ensuring North America’s petroleum supplies (think, say, of the cost of America’s military involvement in Iraq) feebates are an idea that deserves a serious airing. The basic idea of feebates...

A typical American family like mine—with three kids, three drivers, and a middle-class income—drives their three vehicles a total of about 100 miles a day. That’s 36,000 miles a year. (This is a higher number than I would have believed but it’s from a giant dataset maintained by the US Department of Transportation, so I’ll trust it for now.) Before my family started its experiment in car-less living in February,...