by Clark Williams-Derry
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Barking up the wrong tree
Dogs Vs. SUVs 0
Posted 3 weeks, 2 days ago
Editor’s note: Clark will be on NW Cable News tomorrow morning (Nov 3) around 8:30 to talk more about this issue. You may have seen the meme circulating around the internet: some researchers from Australia are claiming that owning a dog has as much impact on the planet as owning an SUV. I’ll let New Scientist summarize their case:
[A] medium-sized dog…consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food…So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares…
Meanwhile, an SUV…driven a… Read More
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The hidden cost of coal 1
Posted 4 weeks, 1 day ago Based on Clark Williams-Derry's awesome powers of multiplication, and a quick trip to the U.S. Energy Information Administration website, these numbers suggest that the "hidden" costs of coal fired power in 2005 were roughly twice as high as the cost of the coal itself. Read More -
Sugar Crash
Of car crashes and Snickers bars 0
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago How many Snickers bars does it take to power a car crash? The answer shows that when it comes to energy, our common sense is just plain dumb. Read More -
Still too reliant on coal
Coal the culprit in rising emissions intensity 2
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago I wrote last week about a curious fact: even though total CO2 emissions from the US electric power sector have dropped during the recession, the emissions intensity of the US power supply -- that is, the amount of carbon per megawatt hour produced -- actually inched upwards. The decline in total emissions is good news in the short term. Yet the increase in emissions intensity is worrisome: if we're going to keep emissions low once theeconomy picks up again, emissions intensity has to… Read More
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Carbon goes the wrong way
Power plant performance down in 2008 6
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago Even though total carbon emissions from power plants fell in 2008, the carbon intensity of the power sector -- that is, the amount of CO2 released per megawatt-hour of power produced -- increased last year. Read More -
Driving downhill
“Peak” gas in 2007? 1
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago Exxon is betting that U.S. driving has peaked for good. Read More -
Cap-and-Cashback: Regional fairness
Climate policy can be fair to families all across the country 0
Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago As regular readers know, we've done a bit of cheerleading for the "cap and dividend" concept, which is also called "Cap-and-Cashback," since it would hand cash receipts from government-run carbon auctions right back to consumers. Cap-and-Cashback strikes me as a fundamentally fair climate policy, since it protects low- and middle-income families from the effects of rising energy prices.Yet some people criticize cap-and-dividend as being unfair, because they think it could benefit some regions of the country at the expense of others. I've even seen this issue described as a "fatal flaw" in Cap-and-Cashback. Strong words, indeed. The… Read More
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Miles and miles
Despite lower gas prices, driving is still down—but perhaps not for long 1
Posted 9 months ago I keep looking for signs that the collapse in gas prices has started to have an impact on how much people drive. In a normal economy, you'd expect that as gas got cheaper, people would drive a bit more -- the reverse of the trend we saw last summer, when gas prices were reaching record highs and people were cutting way back on car travel.But this simply isn't a "normal" economy. Just as gas prices fell, family incomes started taking a beating too. So, sure, it costs a lot less to fill a tank now than it did last… Read More
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Cap and trade works!
European climate program reduces emissions 14
Posted 9 months agoA few years back, Europe's cap-and-trade system, called the ETS, was taking a beating in the press. Some of the criticism was legit: the program really did make some silly missteps in the early years.
The biggest bungles were tied up with how the ETS handed out emissions permits. First, they decided to give them out for free -- which, as Sightline has discussed ad nauseum, was a recipe for windfall profits for the firms that got free permits. And second, for lack of reliable emissions data,… Read More
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Going postal
Mail delivery cutbacks could trim vehicle emissions 11
Posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago
Apparently, the U.S. Postal Service is considering cutting back on one day of mail delivery per week. Personally, I suppose I'm fine with this, since I get very little time-sensitive mail. But I imagine that there are some folks who'd see this as a real hardship -- yet another little blow, at a time when there are plenty of big ones to absorb.
Regardless, someone just emailed me to ask how the service cutbacks might affect global warming.
Sadly, I've got no time for a real answer. But Google gives me just enough… Read More
