Tuesday, 18 Feb 2003

London Bridge Is Clearing Up

Traffic in central London fell by roughly 25 percent Monday, the first day of a congestion-mitigation plan that was the controversial brainchild of Mayor Ken Livingstone. Under the plan, it costs about $8 per car to enter central London from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., with steep penalties for those who don't pay. About 80,000 people ponied up the money yesterday, while the rest took alternate routes or public transportation, leaving quiet roads and no gridlock, even during rush hours. Some of the reduced traffic was the result of the beginning of school holidays, but Livingstone and others still hailed the plan as a success. The money generated by the plan will go toward improving the city's public transportation. Critics of the plan say it unfairly burdens poorer commuters.

Global Village

Over the weekend, millions of people from New York to New Zealand assembled to protest war on Iraq. Yet despite the global nature of the peace movement, there is no global body representing the citizens of the world. (The U.N. represents only government entities.) That's a problem, says writer Elizabeth Sawin in Grist, because the people of the world share one atmosphere and a few oceans, and live in an increasingly interconnected world. Read Sawin's call for a governmental structure that answers to all the people of the world, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Mr. Blackwell's Worst Polluting List

No surprise: Pickup trucks and oversized SUVs scored the lowest on the U.S. EPA's latest ranking of vehicles based on tailpipe emissions. The list graded vehicles on a scale of 0 to 10. Large SUVs like BMW's X5 and General Motors' Hummer H2 earned a 0 and a 2, respectively, while most small and medium SUVs earned between 2s and 5s; cars were more likely to fall in the 6 to 7 range. The SUVs and light trucks on the list emitted anywhere from two to 10 times the pollutants of an average Honda Civic. (Honda's cars ranked high on the scale overall.) Carmakers defended their Brobdingnagian vehicles by noting that even the worst polluters are an improvement over vehicles from years past, but environmentalists say more can and should be done to clean up tailpipe emissions.

Rose-colorado Glasses

Colorado residents overwhelmingly support the use of renewable resources over fossil fuels, according to a new study by the Wells Fargo Public Opinion Research Program of the University of Colorado at Denver. Three out of every four of the survey's respondents said the state should meet its energy demands through boosting efficiency rather than increasing generation, and 82 percent said energy utilities should focus on developing renewable sources such as wind, solar, and hydropower, rather than coal and natural gas. Even more notably, the survey found that support for renewables was consistent across all age groups, political parties, and regions of Colorado. Industry reps, however, challenged the survey's methodology and accuracy; Greg Schnacke of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association said the survey was "designed to push a rosy scenario without any semblance of market reality."

Emissions on the Bus Go ...

Every day, 24 million U.S. children head to school on yellow buses, widely considered the safest way of transporting kids. That may be true in terms of accident rates, but not in terms of health: The vast majority of school buses run on diesel fuel, which can cause or aggravate asthma and other respiratory problems and may lead to the development of lung cancer. Now, the city of Boston is moving to protect its students by retrofitting school buses with new filtration systems that can eliminate 90 percent of diesel emissions. The Boston project is the largest in a New England-wide effort to clean up school buses; it is being paid for out of a $1.4 million fund created by the U.S. EPA with money won in a lawsuit against a Massachusetts waste-handling company. According to EPA estimates, the upgrades will eliminate at least 540 pounds of diesel particulate matter, 2,480 pounds of smog-causing hydrocarbons, and 17,380 pounds of carbon monoxide from the air every year.