China Needs the Straddling Bus More Than We Do
Jonathan just blogged about the very cool concept of the straddling bus, designed to go over automobiles and reportedly being built in China starting next month. His blog coincides with lots of attention focused on the mother of all traffic jams occuring right now outside of Bejing: a 60 mile long, multi-day jam comprised mostly of coal-carrying freight trucks from Inner Mongolia to Tainjin, near Beijing. One trucker said it took him five days to go 350 miles...
CONTINUE READINGToo Cool to Avoid Blogging — The Straddling Bus
Critics of subways often argue, correctly, that they are very, very expensive. They argue much less correctly that they aren't worth it from a cost-benefit perspective. (I'll believe when they add in the subsidies for roads and automobiles, price auto traffic like they do with rail, and stop using tendentious examples to criticize high-speed rail). That said, if you could do mass transit at a much lower cost than rail, you'd have to consider it seriously. In Los A...
CONTINUE READINGThe Environment as a Non-Positional Good
I just finished up Bob Frank's terrific Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, and it contains an interesting (although somewhat depressing) implications concerning political support for the environment. For several years, Frank has been writing about the distinction between "positional" and "non-positional" goods - a distinction that has spawned a large legal literature (a good example is here). The value of positional goods depends largely ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Nano Road to Energy Efficiency
Science Daily reports: Researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered a new way to apply nanostructure coatings to make heat transfer far more efficient, with important potential applications to high tech devices as well as the conventional heating and cooling industry. These coatings can remove heat four times faster than the same materials before they are coated, using inexpensive materials and application procedur...
CONTINUE READINGNinth Circuit upholds steelhead listing
Salmonids present a challenge for Endangered Species Act implementation, because they aren't neatly divided into completely separate reproductive units, the way we expect species to be. Conservation advocates have long argued that behavior should be as important in genetics in deciding which salmonid groups merit protection. The National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have struggled to decide whether they should protect interbreeding fish t...
CONTINUE READINGSmart Meters and Smart Regulation
The poor little smart meter…it keeps catching all kinds of grief when all that it wants to do is save the planet. It is all things to all people. To utilities, regulators, and many environmentalists, it is the doorway to a modern green grid that will teach you to turn down your air conditioner when demand is high, and make it easier to rely on intermittent solar and wind energy. To many utility customers, it is black box that probably doesn’t count kilowatt hours ve...
CONTINUE READINGObama Administration Winning PR War on Oil Spill?
There's no question that the gulf oil spill that began more than three months ago threatened to become Obama's Katrina. Public opinion in June, for example, showed increasing discontent with the President's handling of the disaster; the media criticized him for vacationing in Maine rather than on the Gulf Coast; and the constant stream of video showing an out of control leak kept the disaster front and center in the news. In fact at one point a majority of Americ...
CONTINUE READINGLong Shot Challenges to the Endangerment Finding
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed another legal challenge, this time to EPA's refusal to reconsider its finding that climate change endangers human health or welfare. Although there is a large flurry of these challenges, they seem to be filed more for political reasons and to achieve delay than because of any prospect of success. Although it's never possible to be completely certain how judges will rule, the challenges to the endangerment finding face some sever...
CONTINUE READINGWhat will Obama do about Connecticut v. AEP?
I just got a call from the managing editor of Carbon Control News, which seems to be a pretty informative and useful web-based publication. His question: why hasn't the Tennessee Valley Authority joined the rest of the utilities in asking the Supreme Court to grant certiorari in Connecticut v. AEP, the federal common law public nuisance case concerning greenhouse gas emissions? To me, it seems that the answer is obvious. The Obama Administration wants comprehensive ...
CONTINUE READINGHow About 30/15? Maybe 30/20?
A couple of weeks ago I referenced Mayor Villaraigosa's 30/10 plan, which seeks to take the $30-40 billion of Proposition R money for LA county transit, bond it, and move MTA's transit projects faster. This plan would turn 30 year schedule into a 10 year schedule. Thus, 30/10. Get it? I wondered what all the fuss was -- why does a simple bonding plan require federal involvement? And why is it such a big deal? After a phone call or two, the picture is coming ...
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