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links for 2008-05-13
Tough guv says: keep Cali cool
Schwarzenegger pushes forward with plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Regulating greenhouse gases is good for the economy. That was the message California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave to Republican legislators, who pressed him last week to delay implementing the state’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32). The governor said cutting jobs at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) — the agency charged with enforcing the law — would be a short-sighted way to save money in the state budget. “AB 32 is stimulating the economy by creating new opportunities,” said Lisa Page, a spokeswoman for the governor. Schwarzenegger’s firm stance is a sign that he wants to leave a strong environmental legacy when he concludes his second term in 2011. He could have scored some points with his party and with powerful segments of the California business community by agreeing to delay the greenhouse gas rules. But instead the governor stayed on the green path. Meanwhile, CARB is methodically moving forward with the scoping plan for AB 32, a draft of which is due in late June and a final version by the end of this year. More specific rules are to be developed in 2009. The first provisions of the law will start to bite in 2010. After listening to a public hearing on AB 32 in Sacramento last Friday, I continue to be impressed with the thorough state process and the smart agency staff involved. These civil servants are blazing new trails on how to cost-effectively reduce carbon emissions. When the rules are announced, no significant constituencies will be able to claim that they weren’t consulted. New leadership in the state legislature will be key to sustaining support for the law. Here are some encouraging developments:
All good to see in a state that took a chance on a “green” (read: inexperienced) actor/politician who now may be the “greenest” (read: enviro) governor in the land.
National bike month! National bike month!
A simple, inspiring — and real-world — vision for greener transportation.It’s national bike month, don’t you know. Get ready for tons and tons of bike blogging! There’s nothing more powerful than the so-called demonstration effect, which is why I continue to be so enamored with the Copenhagen Bicycle Culture Blog, a site that tirelessly and cheerfully celebrates the seemingly trivial aspects of mass bicycle culture in Denmark. Hopefully the pictures below will put a smile on your face. If they do, go read Alex Steffen’s essay “My Other Car is a Bright Green City” and consider what you can do to bring us closer to that vision. (Click any image to see the original post.)  A bike passenger enjoys Denmark’s liberal outdoor drinking laws while getting towed through Copenhagen.
Here’s a simple idea that never occurred to me: every taxi in Denmark has a rack for hauling up to two bikes. It costs about $2 per bike, at the present horrendous exchange rate.
Think you need an SUV to haul loads? Think again. Cargo bikes are serious business in Denmark. Think you need a minivan to haul the kids to school? This slightly hypnotic video suggests otherwise.
Three easy ways to lower gas prices
Conservation and efficiency are our only energy quick fixes.We’re all about practical solutions here at TerraPass. While politicians pander, consumers complain and gas prices soar, you — yes, you! — can personally play a role in getting those fuel costs under control real quick. How? Glad you asked… Drive less This tip is shamelessly ripped off from the Environmental Economics blog, so I’ll just quote in full:
You might be thinking that this advice is little help to those protesting truck drivers, who need to drive to earn a living. Ah, but that’s the beauty of the “Drive Less” campaign. When demand slackens, the price of gas drops for everyone. Drive less for the environment, for your wallet, and for your trucker brethren. (I once came across a great stat on how much gas prices would drop if everyone shaved just a few miles from their weekly travels. Alas, I can’t find it anywhere. If anyone knows the figure, please post it in comments.) Slow down Maybe you can’t drive less. But surely you can drive more slowly. According to the Congressional Budget Office, drivers appear to slow down when gas prices rise. The effect is so small that it’s almost certainly unconscious, but it is nevertheless a rational response to high fuel prices. Easing off the accelerator can boost your car’s fuel efficiency 10% or more, depending on conditions. So get over to the right lane, turn on cruise control, and enjoy the scenery. Update: Pete reminds me to shill for our very cool ScanGauge II real-time mpg computer. This little number makes Sunday driving fun. Join the trucker protest Truckers demanding that Congress put caps on gas prices have the wrong policy prescription, but there is at least one simple solution at politicians’ disposal: raise the weight limit on trucks. The U.S. has one of the lowest freight weight limits among developed countries. In Canada, trucks can haul up to 138,000 lbs. When they hit the U.S. border, they have to slim down to 80,000 lbs. Lower weight limits mean more trucks on the road, which increases not only carbon emissions but also deadly traffic accidents. One study suggested that a 7% increase in the weight limit could shave off 8 billion miles of driving annually. Like so many efficiency measures, this one seems like a freebie. It’s not, actually. Infrastructure would have to be improved to handle the heavier loads. But it’s still a quick-ish fix. Bonus tip: inflate your tires This is just a no-brainer — make sure your tires are properly inflated. Then throw on some of our jazzy LED tire alerts to make sure they stay that way. Image by Flickr user iboy_daniel.
Gas tax Rorschach
Voters smell a rat, while pundits project their hopes and fears onto trivial issue.This is weird. Contrary to the expectations of everyone on the universe, the media has covered the gas tax holiday in a fairly substantive way. As a result, a slender majority of voters actually oppose the idea. Particularly on such an emotional issue, it’s somewhat remarkable and encouraging to see voters narrowly favoring the non-demagogic position.
Commentators, on the other hand, have been far less restrained, wildly over-interpreting the issue at every step. A few blogger types have suggested that the gas tax pander permanently destroys the credibility of Hillary Clinton (and, presumably, John McCain) on the issue of climate change. There’s simply no way, the logic goes, that someone who cares about carbon emissions could ever come out in support of such a plan. This is plainly nonsense. Although the gas tax pander is deeply disappointing, the political calculation behind it is obvious. It in no way completely invalidates Clinton’s solid climate plan. Others have suggested that voters’ failure to respond to the pander reflects a newfound maturity on the part of the electorate: American’s are finally ready to get serious about enacting a hefty carbon tax. There’s clearly a heavy dose of wishful thinking going on here. The gas tax holiday created a fairly unique media event. It provided a sharp point of contrast between two members of the same political party locked in a high-profile contest. Moreover, both the simplicity and the sheer badness of the gas tax holiday idea allowed journalists to explain the underlying economics, rather than covering the issue as a he-said/she-said shouting match. It’s certainly nice that, under these unusual conditions, roughly half of voters see the gas tax proposal for what it is . But climate change policy is a lot more complicated. There’s been dramatic movement on the issue over the past two years, but we’ve still got some distance to go. Image by New York Times.
Business leaders issue call for sacrifice
Campaign suggests global warming may require drastic changes to the way Americans live.In case you were wondering, I’m going to keep beating this drum. Incidentally, the problem with the “wartime sacrifice” meme isn’t just that it’s politically toxic. It also happens to be wrong on the merits. This ad came out a while ago, by the way. It’s really tame compared to what we will see.
Flying high: TRX and TerraPass
TerraPass will soon be working with the best air travel carbon data in the troposphere.
We’re very excited about the release of this report and the praise for TRX, because we’ve recently agreed to a limited exclusive deal with them to use the data in the TerraPass flight calculator (it will be a part of a new release of our new calculator in the next few weeks). The TRX data will allow TerraPass customers to calculate:
As the SEI paper notes, the TRX data “enables travelers to choose the most efficient carrier ahead of time”. So, before booking a trip, you’ll soon be able to pop over to TerraPass and decide whether to fly American or United will result in a lower carbon footprint. Now that’s pretty cool. Thomas K. Tomosky, Ph.D., Application Manager, TRX Travel Analytics, one of the designers and developers of the calculator, told us:
Can’t say things better than that! Watch this space for news of the calculator coming live later in May.
Like a holiday, except awful in every way
McCain and Clinton push stinky gas tax proposal.Kevin Drum has made me feel guilty about not covering the “gas-tax holiday” flap in greater detail. There’s an actual substantive policy issue here that sheds lights on the differences between the presidential candidates, so let’s give it a full airing. Americans, you may have noticed, are freaking out about gasoline prices, which are rising due to various structural issues that are unlikely to go away anytime soon. That’s a difficult issue for a politician to avoid in an election year, so John McCain proposed suspending the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents per gallon, during the summer driving season, as a sop to drivers. This is an unbelievably bad idea. It’s so bad, in fact, that intrepid journalists have been unable to find a single expert, from any part of the political spectrum, willing to speak up in its favor. The best take-down of the proposal comes from Tom Friedman, who notes that the policy amounts to borrowing money from China (in the form of an increased deficit) and shipping it to Saudi Arabia (by boosting oil purchases). A much longer take-down comes from Jonathan Alter at Newsweek. To summarize:
The plan was such a howler that Hillary Clinton decided to do the obvious thing: announce that she too supports a gas-tax holiday, thus making Obama the sole presidential candidate to opt out of this shameless pander. In fact, he’s now running an ad on the issue. Of course, Obama isn’t spotless. He is running for president, after all, and his ad features mini-panders, such as a promise to investigate “price gouging” by oil companies. But this is minor stuff compared to the gas-tax holiday. Good for Obama. Contextual note 1: years ago, in a crass ploy to appeal to voters alarmed by gas prices that had reached $1.50 a gallon, a presidential contender proposed releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. I speak, of course, of Al Gore during the 2000 election. Politicians do this stuff during elections because it gets votes. McCain and Clinton will probably both reap a benefit from the issue, and Obama, sadly, will not. Contextual note 2: Tim Kaine, the Democratic governor of Virginia, just proposed a gas tax increase to cover a budget shortfall. So some politicians do get it. Of course, Tim Kaine isn’t up for re-election, and he never will be: term limits mean this will be his last stint as governor. Still, good for Tim Kaine. Image by Flickr user MReece.
A further note on sacrifice
Those pushing sacrifice the hardest are the ones who care least about climate change.The discussion thread on sacrifice is interesting, and makes me realize that I glossed two fairly important points that need to be made more explicit. Point 1: the people arguing that climate change will require sacrifice are generally the same ones arguing that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change. I am not, of course, referring to the readers of this blog. But please be aware that the rhetoric of the debate over global warming has shifted dramatically. Before, global warming was a hoax, the science was uncertain, etc. Now that that argument has been lost, global warming is too expensive to fix, the proposed solutions will be ruinous to our economy and our way of life, etc. There has been a steady drumbeat of this over the past few months, and it’s going to get worse — a lot worse — as we get closer to passing some actual legislation. That’s the funny thing about these calls for sacrifice. They rarely seem to come from people working hardest to address the crisis. Environmental Defense Fund, for example, recently put together an excellent report citing the absolute urgency of addressing global warming, and putting the cost to Americans at “pennies a day.” EDF isn’t calling for sacrifice. They calling for good laws that will put us on a path to clean energy. Addressing climate change will not threaten our prosperity, full stop. The people claiming it will are the same ones arguing for inaction. Don’t be fooled. More importantly, when you hear this untruth passed along as conventional wisdom, speak up. Study after study suggests the economic impact of climate change legislation will be minimal. Point 1a: did I mention we’re in a recession? There’s a reason opponents of climate change legislation push the sacrifice idea. It’s because they know it will scare the hell of out of already scared voters. Point 2: conservation and “sacrifice” aren’t the same thing. Curtailing demand for energy is one of the best levers we have — especially in the near term — for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Conservation certainly won’t get us all the way to where we need to be, but it can buy us a lot of time. Best of all, conservation is the proverbial lunch we’re paid to eat. Many energy-saving practices pay for themselves in short order. There’s a lot more to be said on this topic, which I’ll save for a future post. There’s also a very boring semantic debate to be had on the difference between conservation and sacrifice and where exactly one bleeds into the other. But let’s skip it, screw in some CFLs, and start lobbying our representatives for meaningful change.
Sacrifice is for suckers (an occasional series)
Dr. Carbon Cap says: this will only hurt a little.I see the pundits are still lobbing up chinstrokers about how addressing climate change is going to require huge, painful sacrifice from all Americans. This all sounds very serious, and the only quibble I have is that it’s probably not true. “Going green” in a carbon-constrained economy won’t feel like sacrifice to most people. It will feel like shopping. Meaning, it will feel like all the consumption decisions we make every day, but tilted imperceptibly by the price ramifications of a carbon cap. Studies just keep piling up suggesting that the overall economic effect of climate change legislation will be fairly small. The most recent one was from the environmental radicals at the IMF. So why all the sacrifice talk? Maybe because it’s just plain hard to imagine what a decades-long economic transformation will look like. We tend to extrapolate crudely from where we are now. If you want to cut your individual carbon footprint 80% today, you might have to sell your car, give up flying, move into a smaller house, and start foraging for food. But that’s not how this will go down. Fully decarbonizing will take decades at least. The process will be unpredictable, creating winners, losers, opportunities, and benefits. Come with me now to Strained Analogy Land. Imagine going back in time to meet your hippie forebear… Future you: I need you to do me a favor. Retro you: Lay it on me. FY: I need you to build a worldwide network of devices that subsumes what you presently think of as the postal service, the telephone network, television, and a large chunk of the U.S. retail economy. I’m envisioning a gadget-y thing that will, for example, let you listen to any song ever recorded, search the text of any book or newspaper, talk to anyone in the world, file your taxes, buy stuff, look up recipes, what have you. RY: Sounds complicated. FY: You’ll have a few decades. RY: The book thing alone will take that long. FY: You’d be surprised. RY: Ask NASA to do it. They just put a man on the moon! FY: The government will lend a hand with R&D and a congenial policy environment. More importantly, you can count on assistance from several billion technologically clueless consumers and a large number of rapacious, profit-minded corporations. RY: We’re doomed. Even if this were technically possible, which it’s not, it sounds insanely expensive. FY: We’ll all chip in. I did some rough math. Counting all the computers and bandwidth I’ve ever consumed, I’d guess I’ve personally contributed about $25,000 over the years to developing the infrastructure of the “new economy.” RY: That covers a lot of cookbooks! This gadget is for the super-rich! FY: Hardly. I don’t even own a Mac. My employers paid most of the 25 grand. Actually, wait, I think I left out a few things. I bought a ton of stuff on Amazon. And I’ve got a data plan for my cell phone. Does that count? I’m not sure. It’s hard to disentangle exactly what should be apportioned to the “new economy.” RY: You keep using that term. Forget it. The old economy suits me fine. FY: No problem. You can opt out. I should warn you, though. I’m going to tax your time. RY: You’re going to what? FY: Tax your time. Every year, I’m going to remove three minutes from your day. RY: Take five. I’m not busy. FY: You’ll see. Right now you don’t even know what a spreadsheet is. In a few years, you’ll go nuts if a web page takes ten seconds to load. You’ll be bereft if your cell phone hits a dead spot. You’ll feverishly refresh your favorite environmental blogs. RY: I don’t want any part of this. FY: Wait ‘til you see the iPhone. It’s awesome! Really, though, you can opt out. You just won’t want to. Your time is valuable to you, and it will become ever more so. To maximize its value, you’ll start making choices. And bit by bit, the Electromofied Librariphone will be built. The point is that fairly dramatic infrastructural changes don’t feel very bad to most people while they’re happening. While the changes can confer lumpy costs and benefits to society, the notion that we’re all going to suffer just totally misunderstands how this sort of thing goes down. Obviously my dumb little parable is oversimplified and glib, but certainly not any more so than calls for “wartime sacrifice.”
Bike valet at the Ritz
Four star service adds to the appeal of low-carbon commuting.As I biked towards the front driveway of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco last week, I saw a line of fancy cars (BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, etc.) waiting for valet parking. I zipped past the queue and handed my bicycle to one of the valets. He gave me a claim check. Assured that my bike would be safe in a locked room, I walked to my business meeting at the hotel. And when I returned an hour later, it took only a minute to get my bike ready to roll. My experience at the Ritz gave a new boost to my passion for bike commuting. Small but important bike-friendly services can make a huge difference in one’s quest to cut down on driving a car. In the Bay Area, our public transit systems are well-equipped with features that support cyclists. BART, Muni, and Caltrain all have programs to accommodate bikes. In fact, 7% of Caltrain riders bring bikes on board — the highest percentage of any U.S. public transit system. Caltrain has entire train cars designated for bikes (capacity: 32) and a pedal-power camaraderie among the riders. Passengers on these special cars love to chat about the route they take to and from the train, and what prompted them to become bike commuters. One guy told me recently that he hated driving his car in rush-hour traffic. Another fellow said his car required too many repairs, so he decided to leave it at home in favor of the bike. Another cyclist — notably middle-aged and dressed for the office — said the best thing about biking to work is that “I feel like I’m 12 years old!” I know that feeling. Along with the environmental benefits and the regular exercise, it’s what has kept me biking to TerraPass (Berkeley to San Francisco and return) every workday for almost an entire year now. Rain or shine. I don’t expect to visit the Ritz very often, but I’m glad to know that the hotel has a place to store my bike.
Truckers rally to demand…something
More misguided calls for price controls on gasoline.I can’t even really count the ways this doesn’t make any sense:
Silly season is well under way, with politicians of all stripes promising meaningless action on gas prices. It’s depressing. It’s also why passing climate change legislation remains so damned hard. Remember: low gas prices or the environment. Choose one. There are, of course, distributive effects to higher gas prices. In this case, those effects are hitting one particular group of people hard, and naturally we should be sympathetic to their plight. But that sympathy doesn’t extend to supporting disastrous energy policies. Image by Jahi Chikwendiu, Washington Post.
Election update: McCain on climate
A candidate’s surrogate lays out a carbon “philosophy.”Climate change hasn’t made much of an appearance in the recent election coverage, because…Americans don’t care about climate change. Nevertheless, top McCain advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin had a nice long chat recently with David Roberts regarding carbon policy. Read the whole thing. McCain hasn’t yet put forth a climate change proposal (which is, itself, disappointing), but he has outlined elements of a climate change “philosophy.” A couple of quick thoughts on the interview:
And that’s your election climate change update. Look forward to another installment in late October, when this topic next crops us as an election issue…
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In a report released today [