The NY Times story has one of the true glass-is-half-full headlines of our times:

But these days, you take good news where you can find it, and the rest of the story is certainly a pleasant surprise:

General Motors, whose very survival was in doubt this year, is showing signs of life after its brief tour through bankruptcy this summer.G.M. said Monday that while it was still losing money, it had stabilized enough that it could take an important symbolic step and begin returning some of the $50 billion that the federal government provided to help give it a second chance.

The Obama administration said it was “encouraged” by G.M.’s initial performance since emerging from bankruptcy in July.

Others who had supported a G.M. bailout, despite widespread skepticism that the company’s problems were too big and numerous to fix, said G.M. had taken a big step toward a lasting recovery.

“The company is on its way to fulfilling its promise to American taxpayers,” said Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan.

If GM can survive and thrive, it will certainly be one of the great corporate turnarounds of all time — and vindication for the taxpayer-funded bailout.

The company has a very long road ahead, though, and it will have to navigate a future that will increasingly favor more fuel efficient cars, as well as smaller cars and alternative fuel vehicles, particularly those with electric drives, because of a combination of peak oil, Obama’s deal to raise fuel economy standards, and growing domestic and global concern about global warming:

So GM will have to be nimble and profitable in a car market that will become less and less like the one of the last few decades.  Still, GM appears to be turning around even in these tough times:

G.M.’s results showed a healthier balance sheet, ample cash, and factory production much more in line with consumer demand — improvements it owes largely to the bankruptcy process, the helping hand of the federal government and a modest increase in car sales.

Even with that help, the nation’s largest automaker still lost nearly $1.2 billion in the third quarter.

But G.M.’s managers and directors have also made some fast decisions to help the company. They have shaken up the company’s famously bureaucratic culture. And they have used aggressive marketing, including a 60-day money-back guarantee, and some well-received new products, like the Cadillac SRX crossover, to bring shoppers back to showrooms.

As a result, even though G.M. has shed four of its brands, it has managed to hold onto roughly a fifth of the overall car market in the United States. The company is also generating cash now, rather than bleeding it.

That is why the company is in a position to begin paying back $6.7 billion in federal loans as soon as next month. “We think it’s important that we show the taxpayer we can repay this investment,” G.M.’s chief executive, Fritz Henderson, said Monday.

G.M. is still faring poorly compared to its cross-town rival, the Ford Motor Company, which earned a $1-billion profit in the third quarter without the benefit of any government assistance.

So here’s the question of the day:  Will GM make it and pay back all of the taxpayers’ loans?

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Maryland county draws a “car-free blueprint for growth”

Would You Like Carbon Insurance With That Latte?

Random Monday thoughts inspired by a throwaway line from Mark Bittman

Montgomery County redefined the way it will grow in the next two decades when lawmakers endorsed a plan Tuesday that encourages development where residents can easily live a car-free lifestyle.

The County Council, after weeks of intense debate over the county’s growth policy, unanimously agreed to give developers discounts to build dense developments near transit stations as long as they also construct bike paths and walkways, put shops and other amenities nearby, and use environmentally friendly construction methods.

I don’t do a lot of local area reporting, but this front page (!) Washington Post story, “Montgomery draws a car-free blueprint for growth,” seemed newsworthy.  The picture above is of the Rockville Pike corridor, and anyone who has driven around Rockville knows it is as car-centric as anywhere in America.

The county is working to change that:

Most suburban growth plans — including Montgomery’s, until Tuesday — discourage development in congested areas, including those near public transit, and encourage construction in more sparsely populated communities, on the theory that new developments should arise where traffic is still tolerable.

But Montgomery’s new plan takes a different tack, one that smart-growth advocates say is long overdue. With the population nearing 1 million, the Washington suburb is substantially larger than the big city to its south but is still managing growth as if everyone can hop in a car and quickly get where they want to go.

The county’s growth policy is revisited every two years. The new plan could boost efforts to redevelop the jumbled White Flint area along Rockville Pike and provide new impetus to build a “science city” spearheaded by Johns Hopkins University west of Interstate 270 near Gaithersburg….

The council also endorsed a plan from County Council member Roger Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda), whose district is likely to be the epicenter of much of the urban-style growth, to use development fees to improve a transit system that commuters say is increasingly inadequate….

Planners predict that 200,000 people are likely to move to the county in the next 20 years, bumping the population to more than 1 million. To find a way to house the expected newcomers and get them to and from work, the Planning Board had recommended that developers get discounts and rewards if they are willing to idle their properties for a few years and to build denser development and taller buildings, up to 300 feet in some areas, near the county’s Metro stations.

The Planning Board has also tried to make improving transit an ironclad condition of much new development.

When the board approved the proposed science city in July, members were adamant that it could not be built unless the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway bus or rail system is funded and built. Funding transit, however, is up to federal, state and local lawmakers, all of whom are struggling with massive budget shortfalls, so the Planning Board can advocate for but not create it.

As the price of oil returns to and then exceeds its previous records, funding for bus or rail systems will become a bigger and bigger priority state and federal level, so it is important for local planners to start designing for that.

And while I’m not certain the phrase “car-free” is a fully accurate description of what Montgomery County is pursuing, they deserve kudos for this smart growth plan.

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Winning the clean energy race: a new strategy for American leadership

You might not hear that exact question any time soon, but don’t be surprised if companies start shifting carbon risk from their balance sheets to someone else’s, using the time-honored marketplace tool of insurance. And when that happens, expect the price of products to reflect the new reality.

China, India, and other emerging economies argue that we became prosperous using up the atmosphere and must now bear a disproportionate share of the burden to fix the problem, at least in the first few years of any new global deal. One proposal floating around before the global climate talks in Copenhagen next month is for developed countries, like the US and EU, to buy insurance for climate change-related impacts that are likely to occur to developing nations. Flood insurance for low-lying areas of Indonesia, for example. That might be a way, some argue, to deal with the rich/poor nation divide that threatens to undermine any new global deal.

Insurance premiums may be cheaper than other forms of “compensation” or aid, but like any cost borne by governments or companies, it will be passed on to taxpayers or consumers. There is also a growing movement to be more transparent about such costs, adding them as surcharges. California is flirting with car insurance paid at the gas pump, so you’re actually paying based on how much of highway system you use - - and how much carbon you pump into the air - - and are reminded each time you fill up. A carbon insurance premium could easily be included in such a gas pump surcharge so drivers pay the true cost of operating their vehicles in terms of all relevant risks, including their fair share of creating both fender benders and climate change collisions.

Allstate, State Farm, and Progressive are considering the idea and already lower rates for customers who drive less than average annual mileage. Because such discounts today are based on the honor system, doing real carbon or mileage-based insurance would require technology on the car to verify the driver’s habits. That’s where innovative companies like MileMeter (at milemeter.com) come in, a company already doing this in Texas. Research by the Brookings Institution concluded that such verified pay-as-you-go insurance would incentivize motorists to combine shopping trips and otherwise cut back on fuel consumption, saving about $270 a year per car and cutting oil consumption by 4%.

Indeed there are already profits being made by insurance companies in the carbon field. Chartis Insurance and AIG both provide insurance on carbon offset projects, essentially guaranteeing that the carbon-reducing project is completed so the buyer of offset credits will actually get the benefits purchased. As the carbon market heads towards the trillion-dollar range in the next five or 6 years, insuring that marketplace will also rapidly increase in value.

Swiss Re has been insuring agricultural crops against potential losses from climate change-related impacts like drought and new pest infestations. Knowing the science behind the climate change predictions, this is clearly another valuable growth area for the insurance industry.

Although I don’t know if any company has insured a coffee crop against climate change risks just yet, given the high value of the morning brew you can bet that this commodity will soon have carbon insurance percolating around somewhere. Which should put your mind at ease about always being able to get your daily dose of caffeine - - even if that latte costs a few pennies more for the insurance.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Yes, he occasionally gets on my nerves. But when the great Mark Bittman says stuff like this, all is forgiven (if not forgotten):

I am the least impressive cook you will ever see. I am completely without knife skills, I screw things up all the time. When I'm in the kitchen I'm not obsessively trying to create the perfect dish; I'm trying to put dinner on the table. Comparing yourself to the people who cook on television is like comparing yourself to Andre Agassi. If you can drive you can cook.

If you can drive, you can cook. Yes!

But the converse isn't necessarily true. I cook pretty well (though, like Bittman, I'm not very impressive to watch in the kitchen). But I'm a horrible driver. I can manage a sharp knife on a cutting board (though with no special skill); but operating heavy machinery at high speeds among other rashly licensed incompetents just stresses me out. In other words, driving well is infinitely harder than cooking a decent meal. I much prefer to get around by my own two feet--and  leave long-distance transport to professionals, preferably train operators. In this country, we cede cooking to the pros (from burger flippers to celebrity chefs) and generally take care of our own transportation, in privatized little pods that cavalierly (and inefficiently) burn a titanically potent energy source.

Has anyone noticed that our preferred transportation mode is rather dangerous? In a typical year, there are more than 2 million car crashes in the United States, resulting in more than 40,000 deaths. If similar carnage occurred in the kitchen, the authorities would long since have banned home cooking.

So, um ... down with driving, and up with home cooking! And, uh, up with trains and down with highways! Damn it!

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So how did Cash for Clunkers work out from an environmental standpoint? You don’t want to know.

The $3 billion federal program was kinda sorta supposed to send inefficient, high-polluting, belchy vehicles to an early grave. Instead it put a lot of new large, inefficient vehicles on the road, according to an AP investigation of new government records.

The most common deals swapped old Ford or Chevrolet pickup trucks for new pickups that got “only marginally better gas mileage,” the analysis found. Old Ford F-150 for new Ford F-150 was the most common exchange. Buyers were 17 times more likely to purchase an F-150 (rated at 16 miles per gallon) than a hybrid Toyota Prius.

At least 15 owners of large pickups cashed them in for new Hummer H3 SUVs that get only 16 mpg. Excuse me, but why did the government even send claims forms to Hummer dealerships? Government officials are "investigating" out how these deals squeaked through, the AP reports.

About 1 in 7 of all deals went for vehicles that got 20 mpg or worse. If you think about it, though, 20 mpg really isn’t such a bad rate ... for 1979.

There were plenty of signals before the one-month summer program began that it was a poor method for cutting pollution (note our roundup of early warnings). There’s also a lively debate on whether it made sense as economic stimulus.

"If we're looking for the environmental story here, we're going to be disappointed," Jeremy Anwyl, of analyst firm Edmunds.com, told the AP. "It might have started out from the perspective of improving the environment, but it got detoured as a way to stimulate the economy."

That pretty much nails it.

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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 modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

It's just the sort of counter-intuitive claim that gets lots of attention on the brave new internet era.  So interesting!  So science-y!  So Twitter-able!

And yet, so false!  Once you sniff around the numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that those researchers are barking up the wrong tree.

Let's get one thing out of the way:  I'm not a dog owner.  Much to my kids' dismay, I don't even want a pet.  Nor do I own an SUV.  So, in theory, I...er...don't have a dog in this fight.  Still, this claim struck me as so wrong that it made the hair on my neck stand up.  And I'd hate to have someone catch scent of this meme and conclude that buying an SUV is no big deal -- "It's not like I'm buying a dog or anything" -- if the real numbers don't support that conclusion.  (That's the risk of bad information: it can lead us to make choices that are in stark conflict with our values.)

So let's paws for a moment, and see if this sleeping dog is actually a lie.

First, let's look at that SUV.  The calculations behind the internet meme say that it's driven about 6,200 miles per year (10,000 km).  And yet, according to the US Department of Energy, a real SUV in the US is driven an average of 13,700 miles annually.  Already, the internet meme is off by a factor of roughly 2.2.  I haven't checked whether the 10,000 km figure is reasonable for Australia -- but it for the US, their mileage assumptions certainly skews the numbers in favor of SUVs, and against dogs.

And then there's the total energy estimates.  The pet-pessimists estimate that an SUV (in their calculations, a 4.6 liter Toyota Land Cruiser driven about 6,200 miles) consumes 55.1 gigajoules of energy in both fuel and amortized manufacturing energy every year.  That, too, is low.  A Land Cruiser gets about 15.25 mpg in combined city/highway driving -- meaning that if it's driven 10,000 km, it consumes about 407 gallons of gas, or 53.6 gigajoules worth of energy.  But once I add in the energy used to produce that gas, along with what's likely a low-ball estimate of the "embodied" energy from vehicle manufacturing, I get get about 74.9 gigajoules -- 44 percent more than the authors estimate.  Yet again, they've low-balled the impacts of the SUV in a way that makes dogs look worse by comparison.  (Here, I'm drawing from the data collection and calculations I did for our CO2-by-transportation-mode charts. And I'm looking only at energy, not at the additional climate and pollution impacts of emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks.)

So even before you start to look at dogs, the authors have underestimated the environmental impacts of SUVs by a factor of at least 3.  And that's not including the indirect impacts of SUVs -- the parking spaces we build for them; the roads and bridges they drive on; the impacts of insurance and licensing operations; etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Then there's flip side:  the authors' claims about the impact of feeding pets.  The anti-doggists estimate it takes .84 hectares -- or about 2.1 acres of cropland -- to meet a a pooch's food needs for a year.  There are a little over 70 million dogs in the US (the Humane Society says 74.8 million, the veterinarians say 72.1 million, and the pet food industry says 66.3 million, for an average of 71.1 dogs).  So by the authors' estimates it must take about 150 million acres of US farmland to feed our dogs.  In all, there are 440 million acres of cropland in the US -- suggesting that the equivalent of one-third of all US cropland is devoted to producing dog food.

We use the equivalent of a third of all US cropland to feed dogs?  That's barking mad!

To see why it's wrong, you can look from the bottom up, at the foods that dogs eat.  Or you can look from the top down, at the aggregate sales of dog food vs. the entire agricultural economy.  I'll do both.

First from the bottom up:  what, exactly, do dogs eat?  The anti-pet-ites seem do a good job of calculating dogs' calorie requirements.  Canines wolf down a lot of food:  a mid-sized dog consumes roughly 30 calories per pound of body weight per day.  (Smaller dogs eat as many as 40 calories per pound of body weight, while larger dogs eat as few as 20 calories per pound.  Call it the yapping-to-napping spread.)  I couldn't find the average weight of dogs in the US, but the median dog breed listed here has an adult weight of 47 pounds.  If that's representative of US dogs, then the average dog will eat 1,410 calories today, give or take -- which, as I read it, is roughly what the authors' figures imply.

So the real problem with the authors' calculations isn't with their estimates of how much each pet eats.  It's with this statement:

[A] medium-sized dog...consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily

Strike that: most dogs DO NOT eat meat and cereals.  With a few exceptions, they eat "meat" and "cereals."  The "meat," in particular, tends to be byproducts -- things that people in the US simply won't eat, even in hot dogs. Here's one description of the ingredients in pet food:

Even the cereals dogs eat are often deemed unfit for human consumption. I'm not trying to gross you out here, or encourage you to feed choice cuts to your pooch.  Instead, I think it's probably a good thing that dogs eat things that humans won't -- since otherwise they really would be eating people food, which really would increase their environmental impact.  But since most dogs get their calories and protein from the waste products of people food, the idea that the environmental impact of dog food is additional to the impact of human food is simply wrong. 

Of course, that's not to say that dog food has no environmental impact.  Dog food, and meat byproducts generally, provide some financial contribution to the meat industry, and hence to the overall planetary impact of meat production.  Dog food also also requires energy for processing, packaging, and transportation.

Yet when you look at pet food from a macro-economic perspective -- that is, from the top down, rather than the bottom up  -- dog food is little more than a rounding error.  Total retail food sales in the US topped $1.1 trillion in the US in 2008 (see table 36 from the USDA's Agricultural Outlook statistics.)  But according to the pet food industry, retail dog food sales totaled just $11 billion in 2008.  By that measure, dog food represents about one percent of the total food economy. 

Looking more narrowly at the economics of meat byproducts, I found these USDA estimates of meat "price spreads", which show that meat byproducts are worth somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of the total value of livestock, depending on the year and the kind of animal.  And obviously, dog food is only one of many uses of those byproducts -- there's also food for other pets, and a variety of industrial uses as well. So based on the economics, there's just no way to attribute much of the impact of agriculture on our dogs.

In short, whether you go by the macro-economics, or by the actual constituent parts of dog food, there's simply no principled way to say that the dog food has the same impact as human food.  I'd be very surprised if ANY principled life-cycle assessment found that dog food has more than a small fraction of the overall environmental impact of US agriculture. My guess is that dog food accounts for a maximum of 5 percent of all US crop production, and possibly as little as 1 percent.  That's a far cry from the one-third that the authors imply.

Of course, dogs have indirect environmental impacts, just as SUVs do:  veterinarians, energy for heating and cooling, the food calories that humans use while walking their dogs, etc.  I won't even try to tally them up, because there's no real point.  Just looking at the numbers so far -- combining the underestimates of SUV impacts with the overestimates of dog food impacts -- the anti-doggites are off by a factor of at least 18, and probably more.

But because I'm doggedly persistent, I'll mention one final issue.  The authors of the original meme estimate that:

One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year

I haven't looked at the original book, so I have no real idea what this means.  A well-located solar power installation can produce roughly 10 times that much energy per acre per year.  Perhaps it's got something to do with biofuels -- maybe the net annual production of corn ethanol per hectare, after accounting for the energy for fertilizer, tractor fuel, and distilling.  Yet having run the numbers before, I've concluded that there's absolutely no way run the US SUV fleet -- roughly the size of our dog population -- on corn ethanol alone.  There's just not enough cropland in the country to do it. But obviously, we power our fleet of dogs (and cats and people and horses, etc.--and even some cars) fairly easily with the cropland we've got.

Let's be clear -- I'm not claiming that we should ignore the environmental impact of dogs.  That's one of reasons that I, personally, am reluctant to own one!  But I think that making an empirical claim without doing solid research does a grave disservice to public discourse.  Being wrong can have consequences -- including, potentially, encouraging people to make the wrong choices, even if their heart is in exactly the right place.

So I say to the folks who made the original claim:  Bad Researchers!  Fur Shame!!!  And to the rest of you: let's consider the "dogs are worse than SUVs" meme debunked:  buried in the back yard, put to sleep, and whatever other bad dog pun comes to mind.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mil, distributed under a Creative Commons license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/danw/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

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Would You Like Carbon Insurance With That Latte?

It’s not just the ads showing a baby-boomer couple sitting in matching bathtubs on a beach at sunset where you can find performance anxiety these days. Try looking in the hardware aisle and at the gas station.

Rather than ban inefficient incandescent light bulbs, for example, California lawmakers set an efficiency performance standard -- which was adopted by the feds -- so in 2012, you won’t be able to buy energy-wasting bulbs. That spurred Phillips to develop and market their “Halogena Energy Saver” incandescent bulb that is 30 percent more efficient than conventional versions. The performance standard approach -- instead of government picking winners and losers -- clearly worked for both environmentally minded policy makers and bottom-line minded businesses.

The stealth performance standard that will hit another part of daily life -- your car -- relates to gasoline and diesel fuel. California adopted a “low carbon fuels standard” that says the carbon content of fuels sold in the state must decline 10 percent by 2020. Fuel sellers can achieve that by slashing emissions from refineries ahead of other carbon regulations; by blending petroleum with lower carbon-content fuels like sustainable biofuels; by selling non-carbon fuels like hydrogen; or anything else that reduces the carbon content of the total portfolio of fuels sold.

Senator Barack Obama embraced making this a national standard almost two years ago and many lawmakers of both parties like this technology-neutral, competition-enhancing approach to reducing carbon. Chevron, Toyota, and several others also have endorsed this approach, because it allows them to find the cheapest ways to comply with the policy goal and perhaps to develop solutions they can market to others. Nothing like a good profit motive to accelerate public policy.

Of course this spells trouble for companies that are hoping to market fuels made from high carbon-footprint sources like the Canadian tar sands. Given that it takes up to four times as much energy to extract and refine that gunk into anything useful, it’s a sure bet the resulting products won’t find much of a market if fuel sellers are trying to lower the carbon content of their products. An online investor news service has a list of stocks that are exposed, at least in part, to this significant/growing liability -- may be a good list to keep handy of stocks to avoid.

Based on the successes of the performance standards approach so far, academics and policy makers around the world are looking for more ways to use them, instead of prescriptive bans or mandates. At least in some human endeavors, it seems performance anxiety can be a good thing.

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Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

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A Penny Saved Is…

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

As a frequent cyclist, I've inevitably been in my share of collisions and accidents. Most bike experts recommend replacing your helmet after any crash, even if the damage isn't visible. Obviously the two most important qualities of a bike helmet are lightweight-ness and strength. That is best achieved by petroleum-based, non-biodegradable substances. Can you recommend how to avoid hurting the environment with these disposable Styrofoam helmets (other than being a more careful cyclist)?

Julia A.
Washington, D.C.

A. Dearest Julia,

Small eco-price to pay for an intact head.Please continue to wear your helmet and replace it after each crash. Cut the straps of your old helmet and write "crashed" on it with a permanent marker, then throw it in the garbage. Biking safely is an ecologically correct practice, even if it occasionally results in a small amount of waste. Two, three, four helmets a year is a small ecological price to pay when we consider the benefits of cycling (though for your body's sake I hope you don't go through this many).

Let us remember that biking is emissions-free transportation. Whether you are commuting by bike or simply taking a brief trip to the store every week, you are ecologically ahead of almost every form of transport save walking. If your bike is simply an exercise device, you are keeping yourself fit and providing inspiration for other would-be cyclists.

Secondly, a lightweight helmet made out of plastic is a fairly innocuous object on the environmental scale. As we have learned over the years, plastic is evil due to the raw materials (petroleum) from which it is made and the eons that will pass ere it degrades. On the bright side, helmets are light, and hence do not require overly much fuel on their trip to the bike store or the landfill -- which would be a concern were they made of gold. Some companies are tinkering with eco-friendly helmets, but I think you should not lose your head over this issue. You could always save your used helmets for some kind of trash sculpture.

Julia, a hospital visit has the potential for much more ecological impact than does your discarded helmet. Your fitness level keeps you (hopefully) from general ill health, and hence reduces the need for greenhouse-gas emitting trips to the doctor. More important, of course, the helmet protects you from serious head injury and/or death, both of which are far more environmentally costly than a piddling nine-ounce helmet. Let's say you were not wearing a helmet and bonked your head in a crash. First the ambulance or a friend's car has to transport you to (and from) the hospital, emitting Earth-damaging gases en route. Then perhaps you have to get a CAT scan or MRI, neither of which would be solar powered. What if you have a bleeding abrasion that requires multiple washings and several sets of bloody sheets and piles of gauze? Maybe they bring you a hospital meal which certainly includes terrible not-shade-grown coffee and some kind of mystery meat from a confined animal feeding operation. In a worst-case scenario, you could scrape off your nose and require years of plastic surgery -- certainly not ecologically OK, and sadly a real-life example.

Wear a bike helmet without worrying too much about the environmental consequences. Umbra, also known as Safety Pup, has spoken.

Cautionarily,
Umbra

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Traffic is the answer!richardmasoner via flickrMeant to mention these two pieces last week, but things fell apart, as they say. (Do “they” say that, or is it just me?)

Both relate to the connection between cars and public transportation, and both are a bit counterintuitive.

The first, an op-ed by David Owen in the Wall Street Journal, posits that traffic jams are a boon to public transportation because they piss drivers off and “turn [them] into subway riders or pedestrians”—and that congestion pricing is counterproductive because it makes driving a more pleasant (albeit expensive) experience:

Advocates of congestion-fighting strategies usually argue that traffic jams waste gasoline. That’s true, but the energy waste and carbon output attributable to idling cars is smaller than that attributable to the overall transportation network. There’s nothing green about fighting congestion if, by distributing traffic more efficiently, it results in an overall increase in traffic volume and extra miles driven by vehicles avoiding the fee areas.

I suspect squadrons of transit thinkers have plenty to say about this, but my quick reaction is this: never has a traffic jam made me want to go hop on a subway. When a traffic jam breaks, all I want to do is drive fast, and far, and reclaim the road. And I’m a fan and user of public transportation. I hope there are indeed people out there who think, “By gosh, this road sure is prone to traffic jams. I think I’ll walk next time.” But something tells me it’s not happening as often as Owen would like to think.

Or is it? Because the other piece is about parking garages in transit-oriented developments, and how more garages are being built—and in a sustainable way—so that people can drive to the train.

Parking garages have become key to the success of transit lines, developments that emphasize transit, and suburban town centers — all popular with environmental groups and others who support reduced dependence on the automobile.

Without abundant parking near transit stations in suburban areas, people won’t bother to hop on subways and trains, says Martin Stein, president of the 1,200-member National Parking Association, which is meeting near Washington, D.C., this week.

“The perception of convenience is very important,” Stein says.

So to sum up: Traffic jams are necessary to convert people to public transportation. And then cars and parking garages are necessary to make transit convenient. Partly that sounds like common sense, and partly it sounds like—well, we are just the teensiest bit addicted.

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Cast your vote for the best climate journalism

For years now, many members of Congress have insisted that cutting carbon emissions was difficult, if not impossible. It is not. During the two years since 2007, carbon emissions have dropped 9 percent. While part of this drop is from the recession, part of it is also from efficiency gains and from replacing coal with natural gas, wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The U.S. has ended a century of rising carbon emissions and has now entered a new energy era, one of declining emissions. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.

For a country where oil and coal use have been growing for more than a century, the fall since 2007 is startling. In 2008, oil use dropped 5 percent, coal 1 percent, and carbon emissions by 3 percent. Estimates for 2009, based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) data for the first nine months, show oil use down by another 5 percent. Coal is set to fall by 10 percent. Carbon emissions from burning all fossil fuels dropped 9 percent over the two years.

Beyond the cuts already made, there are further massive reductions in the policy pipeline. Prominent among them are stronger automobile fuel-economy standards, higher appliance efficiency standards, and financial incentives supporting the large-scale development of wind, solar, and geothermal energy. (See the data.)

Efforts to reduce fossil fuel use are under way at every level of government -- national, state, and city -- as well as in corporations, utilities, and universities. And millions of climate-conscious, cost-cutting Americans are altering their lifestyles to reduce energy use.

For its part, the federal government -- the largest U.S. energy consumer, with some 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles -- announced in early October 2009 that it is setting its own carbon-cutting goals. These include reducing vehicle fleet fuel use 30 percent by 2020, recycling at least 50 percent of waste by 2015, and buying environmentally responsible products.

Electricity use is falling partly because of gains in efficiency. The potential for further cuts is evident in the wide variation in energy efficiency among states. The Rocky Mountain Institute calculates that if the 40 least-efficient states were to reach the electrical efficiency of the 10 most-efficient ones, national electricity use would be reduced by one-third. This would allow the equivalent of 62 percent of the country's 617 coal-fired power plants to be closed.

Actions are being taken to realize this potential. For several years DOE failed to write the regulations needed to implement appliance efficiency legislation that Congress had already passed. Within days of taking office, President Obama instructed the agency to write the regulations needed to realize these potentially vast efficiency gains as soon as possible.

The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescent bulbs to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with motion sensors to turn lights off in unoccupied spaces, can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent. Los Angeles, for example, is replacing its 140,000 street lights with LEDs -- and cutting electricity and maintenance costs by $10 million per year.

The carbon-cutting movement is gaining momentum on many fronts. In July, the Sierra Club -- coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign -- announced the 100th cancellation of a proposed plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants. Despite the coal industry's $45 million annual budget to promote "clean coal," utilities are giving up on coal and starting to close plants. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with 11 coal plants (average age 47 years) and a court order to install over $1 billion worth of pollution controls, is considering closing its plant near Rogersville, Tennessee, along with the six oldest units out of eight in its Stevenson, Ala., plant.

TVA is not alone. Altogether, some 22 coal-fired power plants in 12 states are being replaced by wind farms, natural gas plants, wood chip plants, or efficiency gains. Many more are likely to close as public pressure to clean up the air and to cut carbon emissions intensifies. Shifting from coal to natural gas cuts carbon emissions by roughly half. Shifting to wind, solar, and geothermal energy drops them to zero.

State governments are getting behind renewables big time. Thirty-four states have adopted renewable portfolio standards to produce a larger share of their electricity from renewable sources over the next decade or so. Among the more populous states, the renewable standard is 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Illinois, and 33 percent in California.

While coal plants are closing, wind farms are multiplying. In 2008, a total of 102 wind farms came online, providing more than 8,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Forty-nine wind farms were completed in the first half of 2009 and 57 more are under construction. More important, some 300,000 megawatts of wind projects (think 300 coal plants) are awaiting access to the grid.

U.S. solar cell installations are growing at 40 percent a year. With new incentives, this rapid growth in rooftop installations on homes, shopping malls, and factories should continue. In addition, some 15 large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity are planned in California, Arizona, and Nevada. A new heat-storage technology that enables the plants to continue generating power for up to six hours past sundown helps explain this boom.

For many years, U.S. geothermal energy was confined largely to the huge Geysers project north of San Francisco, with 850 megawatts of generating capacity. Now the United States, with 132 geothermal power plants under development, is experiencing a geothermal renaissance.

After their century-long love-affair with the car, Americans are turning to mass transit. There is hardly a U.S. city that is not either building new light rail, subways, or express bus lines or upgrading and expanding existing ones.

As motorists turn to public transit, and also to bicycles, the U.S. car fleet is shrinking. The estimated scrappage of 14 million cars in 2009 will exceed new sales of 10 million by 4 million, shrinking the fleet 2 percent in one year. This shrinkage will likely continue for a few years.

Oil use and imports are both declining. This will continue as the new fuel economy standards raise the fuel efficiency of new cars 42 percent and light trucks 25 percent by 2016. And since 42 percent of the diesel fuel burned in the rail freight sector is used to haul coal, falling coal use means falling diesel fuel use.

But the big gains in fuel efficiency will come with the shift to plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. Not only are electric motors three times more efficient than gasoline engines, but they also enable cars to run on wind power at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 75 cents a gallon. Almost every major car maker will soon be selling plug-in hybrids, electric cars, or both.

In this new energy era carbon emissions are declining and they will likely continue to do so because of policies already on the books. We are headed in the right direction. We do not yet know how much we can cut carbon emissions because we are just beginning to make a serious effort. Whether we can move fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change remains to be seen.

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MaassPhoto courtesy Erinn Hartman/KnopfNew York Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Maass spent eight years following the flow of oil around the world, from fields in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Azerbaijan to corporate boardrooms. His new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, uses stories from these locales to show why the lucrative resource tends to be very bad for the people who live above it.

We spoke recently about his reporting on this resource curse, and about a strategy he proposes for environmental activists—sourcing gasoline to show buyers the violence their gas money supports.

Q. You call oil “black oxygen.” Unpack that phrase a little.

A.Oil makes our cars move. It makes the planes fly. It’s in our clothes. It’s in our food because it’s in fertilizers. It’s in chemicals. It is just absolutely everywhere in modern existence. It also is everywhere in terms of politics. It’s a major preoccupation of the governments that need it, and it’s the major preoccupation of the governments that have it.

Beyond that, it is a major factor in terms of pollution that occurs in the world today. Even when oil and natural gas are operating the way they are supposed to be, they still cause a lot of damage to the earth. Burning them puts a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. We all know where that’s leading us.

In my book I describe oil not only as black oxygen but also as like gravity, because it’s invisible in a way. From the moment it comes out of the ground until the moment it goes into our gas tank, we do not see it. Yet, like gravity, it influences everything we do.

Q. What makes the oil industry so much more harmful than others?

A.It’s an extractive industry. As with all extractive industries, the word itself tells you quite a lot: you’re gouging into the earth to get something, and that’s never a gentle process.

Second, unlike many other natural resources, oil is really concentrated and really valuable. Whoever owns a certain oilfield--and it usually ends up being a government or a royal family--has an extraordinary amount of concentrated money at their disposal. It’s not a resource like fertile land that is spread over many, many thousands of acres owned by many, many people. It’s not like manufacturing industries where there a lot of workers and a lot of owners and there are products that come out. This is really, really concentrated power. The cliché is that absolute power corrupts and corrupts absolutely. Oil can have a very similar effect because the possessor of oil possesses a country’s destiny.

Q. Does it matter where I buy my gas, or are all oil companies equally harmful? And what about state-owned oil companies like Brazil’s Petrobas?

A.I’ve looked at that question a lot. The more you look at it, there’s something objectionable about pretty much all the oil we consume. If the oil comes from Nigeria, there’s a war being fought over oil in Nigeria. If the oil comes from Ecuador, there’s a tremendous amount of environmental damage that’s coming from that oil. Ironically, most of Ecuador’s oil that goes to the United States goes to California, one of the most environmentally conscious states in the country. If the oil comes from Saudi Arabia, the income from it has gone to feed a lot of Islamic extremism.

Even if the oil is from Canada--which is actually the largest supplier of oil to the United States--a fair amount of Canadian oil comes from tar sands. There you have to cook the earth by using other forms of energy--natural gas, for example--and a lot of water. Canada is a great country politically, and there’s no corruption really associated with the Canadian oil. But there is an environmental toll.

Q. Your book focuses social and human-rights costs of oil extraction. How did climate change play into your reporting with political leaders, executives, and workers?

A.The climate argument has been made really well and continues to be made really well. But I was most interested in writing about the social costs of oil, meaning human rights, violence, and poverty.
So when I went to Nigeria, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, etc., I focused on how people’s lives been affected by the oil that they export.

And honestly, the environmental issues for them are not the same ones they are for us. When I went to the Niger Delta I had to get permission and an aide from the warlord, because if I didn’t have his protection I’d be kidnapped in an instant. We took a canoe up the creeks and it was a terrible situation with wells dripping oil into the water, with flares all over the place, with fighting going on. I spent the night in one totally destitute village. It has no running water or electricity, it has no healthcare, nothing.

Right across from the creek is a multi-billion dollar Shell natural gas processing facility, with massive flares. In the west, flaring is very tightly regulated. In Nigeria, it’s supposed to be but it’s not. At this particular Soku facility, which is actually shut down at the moment due to fighting, there are massive flares going off 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Huge, huge flares. This is consistent throughout the Niger Delta.

One of the reasons flaring is restricted in the United States and elsewhere is not simply because it emits a lot of greenhouse gases, but because it’s incredibly harmful to human health. The toxins and the chemicals that are emitted in flaring are tremendous. So for these villagers in the Niger Delta, the climate issue for them wasn’t that in 20 or 30 years the world temperatures will have increased by another degree and weather patterns will have changed slightly. The climate issue for them is that they were breathing toxic chemicals as a result of this flare that was 40 yards across the creek.

Q. A few years ago the Chicago Tribune published an impressive piece of reporting (Paul Salopek’s “A tank of gas, a world of trouble”) in which a reporter traced gasoline from a suburban gas station back into all the places it came from. What did you make of that?

A. What he did was fantastic. There’s myth that’s perpetrated by the oil industry, and accepted by pretty much everyone, that it’s impossible to trace the oil that you put into your tank. Shell or Exxon say their oil comes from a lot of different sources, it’s mixed together, and it’s just not tracked down to the local level. They say it’s impossible to do. Paul Salopek said, “Let me check into that.” He found out that it is possible to source gasoline that you put into your tank and find out where it actually comes from. He really blew the lid off this myth.

This knowledge needs to get out. When you don’t know the origin of the product you’re buying, you can’t possibly care about the human-rights abuses or the pollution at the point of origin. That goes for tennis shoes as well as oil. By sourcing it, there is a lever that environmental activist groups can use to make people aware on a very local level of what is in their gas tank and what the price is beyond the $2.50 or $3.00 that they are forking over per gallon. It’s a lever that I don’t think environmental activist groups are fully aware of. Who knows where it will get them, but it could be useful.

Q. Is sourcing gasoline still really difficult to do?

A. Salopek had to get some proprietary data in order to get the information. But he’s just one reporter. If he can do it then an environmental group could too, I would think.

Q. What about solutions to the oil problem—do you have any?

A. I do, but none that are original. There are lots of plans and a lot technology that make a lot of sense. The real problem for us isn’t solutions--the problem is embracing the solutions. The political leadership of this country, perhaps spurred on by the citizenry, needs to actually take the steps of investing in conservation, in efficiency, in renewable energy … the list goes on.

The main problem is motivating people, and motivating political leadership. Not just the White House, which seems quite motivated, but all of the interest groups that it has to deal with. All of the regional interest groups it has to deal with. That’s the problem area.

I don’t have an answer for getting from here to there. In writing the book I hoped to make people understand oil more, and therefore support the kinds of changes necessary to get us to a post-oil future.

The size of each country on this map reflects the relative size of its oil reserves. The colors reflect different level of oil consumption (per country, not per capita).

Click to enlarge.

Courtesy Aaron Pava of CivicActions

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The action at the Talladega Superspeedway.At dawn on a hazy autumn morning, the rising sun spilled over the steel grandstands of the Talladega Superspeedway like foam from a cracked can of Bud. This image likely came to mind because I was lying beneath a tarp in a scrubby Alabama meadow carpeted with empty beer cans -- an area known as Talladega's Family Parking Field C. The 2.66-mile Talladega racetrack, located about 50 miles east of Birmingham, is the world's second-largest car-racing venue, with a mile-long grandstand built to accommodate more than 140,000 fans. Around my L.L. Bean tent were some 40,000 parked vehicles, most of them flatbeds, SUVs, Winnebagos, and camper vans filled with groggy pilgrims rising to greet a day that would bring them the nation's biggest semiannual NASCAR racing event.

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing claims to hold "17 of the top 20 most-attended U.S. sporting events." I had come to see what may rank among the world's most lavish displays of fuel consumption: 40 hot rods, each getting about 5 miles per gallon, hurtling around a strip of asphalt in an infinite loop. This was my first visit to a NASCAR event, and I admit I came with a certain lack of regard for its premise: burning huge amounts of fuel and rubber for the sole purpose of driving around in circles. The ritual seemed careless to me at a time of war in the Middle East, unchecked global warming, and soaring energy prices. But hours later I would leave Talladega with a less skeptical take on the NASCAR phenomenon and a better understanding not just of carburetors and checkered flags but of who we are as a nation -- a thrill-seeking, speed-loving, self-propelled, forward-charging culture.

Talladega is NASCAR's XXL, Big Gulp–sized speedway -- the most treacherous and most exciting. Its long straightaways and unusually wide track allow for cars to build up to and sustain speeds of more than 200 mph and to run three or four abreast. Racers don't brake for turns at Talladega the way they do at smaller tracks; instead they mash their gas pedals to the floor. These conditions raise fans' expectations for the "big one" -- a massive, harrowing multicar wreck.

NASCAR grew out of the 1930s Prohibition era in America's Deep South, when rural bootleggers rigged standard-looking cars with high-powered engines to outrun the law. The forefathers of NASCAR, wrote historian Neal Thompson, were "a bunch of motherless, dirt-poor southern teens driving with the devil in jacked-up Fords full of corn whiskey -- the best means of escape a southern boy could wish for."

*

Field C, which a week earlier had housed only wildflowers and Alabama Longleaf pines, was now a sprawling tribal village with makeshift neighborhoods and orderly avenues.

Families had been dwelling there for days before the race, many erecting well-appointed encampments with awnings trimmed in Christmas lights, lawn chairs, picnic tables, movie projectors, grills, and coolers stocked with cold American beer. Hoisted above the camps were Confederate flags and tributes to the denizens' favorite racers.

I had awoken to the ambient stench of beer-soaked crabgrass, cigarette butts, fire pits, and the charbroiled remains of last night's cookouts. I groped for soap and toothpaste and made my way to a public trailer marked "$5 Showers." En route, I caught sight of my neighbor shuffling out of his tent wearing nothing but his briefs. He nodded hello, and as he leaned over a propane stove to flip his pancakes, I saw the numeral 8 shaven expertly into his thicket of back hair -- a brash, intimate, and wholehearted display of fan loyalty. This tribute to Dale Earnhardt Jr. (whose number has since changed to 88) was a single-digit poem about America's devotion to speed.

Little and her NASCAR-savvy guide in front of the grandstands.At 1:00 p.m. -- just after the national anthem blared over the loudspeakers and a squadron of B-1 bombers buzzed overhead -- the green flag dropped. In seconds the chorus of twelve-cylinder combustion engines was echoing through the grandstands with a collective shriek as though the universe was being torn in two. Speed rumbled through the ground and into my bones, and my heart knocked against my rib cage. The air filled with the acrid odor of burnt rubber, hot asphalt, and spilled fuel.

For an up-close, under-the-hood look at the action, I made my way into the pit -- the restricted area in the center of the track where the cars are fueled and tuned between laps.

Each of the drivers has a pit crew of more than a dozen mechanics responsible for gassing the cars, changing the tires, cooling the engines, and assessing track and vehicle conditions throughout the race. The mechanics were outfitted in helmets and matching Crayola-colored jumpsuits -- cherry red, royal blue, canary yellow. Their polished metal tools--wrenches, jacks, pressurized gas pumps shaped like giant baby bottles--glinted in the sunlight.

Between pit stops, as mechanics lounged on spare tires and casually dragged on cigarettes, I pressed them for some answers about NASCAR's fuel consumption. The cars get anywhere from 4 to 7 miles per gallon, which means that in a 500-mile race such as this one, averaging 5 mpg, each car would consume roughly 100 gallons of fuel. Multiply that by 43 cars per race, and each event as a whole consumes approximately 4,375 gallons of gasoline (assuming all cars finish). With about 96 U.S. NASCAR races per year spread out across several divisions, that totals over 1 million gallons (factoring practice rounds and adjusting for some shorter races).

You also have to factor in the tires for every race. Several gallons of oil go into the production of a synthetic rubber tire. One car competing in a NASCAR event burns through 40 to 80 tires per race. Additionally, each team has a convoy of 18-wheelers that hauls its race cars across the country from track to track, cumulatively traveling hundreds of thousands of miles per year. Fully loaded, these trucks get around 4.5 miles per gallon, which means that millions of gallons are consumed in just getting the cars to the races.

These numbers are small when compared to the volume of fuel that goes into America's military endeavors or our daily commutes, let alone our total oil demand. What's fascinating about this particular form of fuel consumption is that its purpose is sheer entertainment. This is gas consumption as an art form.

Drivers and crews pause before the race to say the Pledge of Allegiance.Looking up at the grandstands, I was struck by the appearance of the crowd. For all the wealth of competing logos and gear available to them, by far the stand-out choice among the Talladega fans was patriotic garb: the grandstands looked like a pointillist painting in red, white, and blue. I approached one bystander, a 63-year-old account manager at a North Carolina carpet company who had been coming to NASCAR races since they were held on dirt tracks in the 1950s, and asked him about this apparent connection between stock car racing and patriotism. "Those fellas are fast, proud, fearless go-getters with rebel hearts," he said, nodding toward the track. "That about sums up the American spirit, don't it?"

I'd take it a bit further to say that no consumer product more wholly embodies the American ethos than the automobile -- "the heartbeat of America," as Chevrolet famously dubbed it. The word derives from the Greek root auto, "self," and the Latin mobile, "moving"--words that could be said to define the American dream: we each propel ourselves toward the life and destiny of our own choosing. In these individual pursuits, we also directly consume on average 1.5 gallons of gasoline per person per day. This fuel consumption -- roughly quadruple that of the average European -- is due in part to the great distances traveled in our sprawled-out, auto-dependent lifestyles, but also to the fact that we have some of the lowest fuel economy standards of any industrial nation -- lower even than those of our up-and-coming rival China. All of which contributes to a habit of domestic consumption that far exceeds our ability to produce domestic oil.  

Our penchant for long-distance driving is not surprising in a geographically expansive country that now has nearly 4 million miles of heavily subsidized, well-maintained roadways, low gas taxes, and a hobbled rail system -- a country in which driving has become, on the whole, significantly more convenient than public transit. Even in the summer of 2008, when gas prices hit record highs, some three-quarters of Americans vacationed in cars. According to the Department of Transportation, the average American driver travels between 30 and 40 miles per day or nearly 14,000 miles a year -- the distance around the equator every 1.8 years.

Packing up my sagging tent in Field C at Talladega, I struck up a conversation with an amiable family from Missouri camped out nearby. The four boys, aged 12 to 19, and their parents had driven 600 miles from home in an RV they'd named "Bigfoot." It's a voyage they make every year because, as one of the kids told me, "Getting here is half the fun."  

I asked how much their fuel bills -- in a Winnebago that gets 8 mpg -- had been affected by rising gas prices. The father, a tall, bearded man in his fifties cooking a hot dog on a fork over his smoldering fire pit, answered, "It'll cost you. But we adapt -- cutting back on the restaurant stops, maybe going direct instead of taking the scenic route." But, he conceded, if oil prices keep going up, eventually Bigfoot may not be able to make the journey.

As I surveyed the sea of campers and Winnebagos in Field C, I wondered what would happen to this scene if oil stopped flowing tomorrow. The answer, simply, is that NASCAR would go with it, along with a piece of the American identity and a slice of the American dream.

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I've been hearing about carbon offsets for awhile and even have purchased some for my car emissions through Terrapass. But I just got an email from my local power company saying that I can pay to offset my own carbon emissions at the low rate of just $8 per month. Is this a good idea? I hear such conflicting stories about the "greening" of coal power plants. How do I know what they are doing with the money?

Mary B.
Winston-Salem, N.C.

A. Dearest Mary,

Is your power company partying in the tropics thanks to you?If a utility is offering carbon offsets or "green power" to their customers, details are usually available on the utility's web site. A customer must then wade through the self-congratulatory text on the site and determine whether or not the utility is actually taking Acapulco vacations with their $8 a month.

Don't put too much emphasis on this being a power company issue, though -- carbon offsets are a puzzle no matter how and where you buy them. There are a variety of "certifiers" and ratings for offsets, and some generally accepted ideas about what makes an offset project acceptable, but as of yet no overarching body with one stamp of approval.

Offsets themselves are an interesting and contentious issue, as you may have seen in these pages. (Check out our recent special series on offsets for a taste.) I got a bit harrumphy about offsets this past weekend, as I drove past a car with a boasting bumpersticker. Not that I could throw any stones (though we did have five people in the car, hooray). I ranted for a while, but am now prepared to offer a calm assessment of how we might all view offsets: Purchasing an individual carbon offset from a company, which then supports renewable energy development, is great. It is a wonderful chance to financially support projects that would not otherwise be able to get up and running. It does not erase whatever emissions we are emitting. So driving around in an SUV with a "My emissions are compensated for" kind of bumpersticker is ... is ... is -- ooh! I'm getting agitated again. Let's just say I think it misleads the uninformed.

If we think of our offset purchases as a charitable contribution to renewable energy development, then the question about whether we purchase them gets a little clearer. Without worrying too much about the financial logistics of green power credits (though they are clearly explained here by moi) we can simply ask: Will my money help create new, long-term projects that otherwise would not have happened (also called "additionality"), and are these projects approved and vetted by somebody? There are other questions, too (a good introduction can be found at CORE) but these are the basics. The answer should be yes.

In North Carolina you have an unusual opportunity to support renewable power generation in your very own state. NC GreenPower is your statewide non-profit green power program, supported and created by your state government, power companies, and fellow citizens. Utilities can offer offsets to consumers such as yourself, then pass the fees over to NC GreenPower, which then uses about a quarter of the money for administration and gives the rest as production incentives to renewable power producers. The idea is to slowly build up North Carolina's renewable energy capacity through what amounts to a small grant system. I found all this out by following the trail from Duke Energy. It all looks legitimate. And if you hate your power company and their coalish ways, you can support NC GreenPower directly.

Locally,
Umbra

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Q. Dear Umbra,

My daughter's Girl Scout troop wants to start an anti-idling campaign at her school. We need help justifying why a car should be turned off for more than 30 seconds. Although they have found that it saves gas and wear and tear on the engine and other parts, very few people believe that 30 seconds is long enough. Most believe that their starter, in particular, will need to be replaced, thereby reducing the gas savings. Can you point us to definitive information about idling and when and why to turn off your engine? Thanks.

Kew100
Brentwood, Tenn.

A. Dearest Kew,

Stop idling (and stop worrying about your starter).madame.furie via flickrIsn't a car made to last through tens of thousands of stops and starts? You don't find these same pro-idling people assiduously avoiding frequent car trips in order to lengthen the overall life of their car. I'm missing some piece of the logic train wherein the engine knows that the driver maybe could have chosen to leave it running, and it takes revenge by breaking down sooner.

In my own personal car experience, the failure of starters is more closely linked to car manufacturer than to age or anti-idling. But personal experience is not definitive information, so instead I am going to point you to bossy federal agencies and a helpful nationwide anti-idling campaign.

First, let us reflect on why we are anti-idling. Idling a passenger car is almost always unnecessary, it wastes gas, and it produces myriad air pollutants (as detailed in one of my previous columns). Schoolchildren's mouths are closer to both engine and tailpipe (by virtue of their height, not because they are licking engines), so these polluting emissions enter their sensitive young bodies with ease. Larger diesel engines, such as would be found in a school bus or delivery truck, have the same issues, only diesel fuel is dirtier than gasoline. Most idling emissions research has been done on these diesel engines, and there are idling regulations now in many states (some include all engines, not just diesel). Tennessee does not appear to have anti-idling regulations.

One helpful resource for you might be Earth Day Network's No Idling Campaign. It's based on a Georgia No Idling campaign, is aimed at schoolchildren, and includes toolkits, data collection charts, and lesson plans. In terms of the "definitive information": Here is a serious refutation of the starter damage myth from the California Energy Commission; some data and resources on school bus idling from the EPA (including curriculum materials); and a short EPA sheet that references the 30-second rule. Another way to look at it is that no reputable source recommends idling.

If you commence your campaign and still have trouble with families worried about the imminent failure of their car, it might be effective to find a reputable local mechanic or car dealer who will vouch for the durability of the starter. The federal government is simply not persuasive enough in some situations -- too far away, too easily linked to a disliked leader. A community expert might be just the person you need. Best of luck.

Alternatorly,
Umbra

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I have an old and dying Cash for Clunker-eligible SUV with well over 210,000 miles on it ... My problem is I find the VOC offgassing of new cars intolerable. Is there any way to offgas a new car before I drive it so that I am not inhaling that not so healthy "new-car" smell?

Alli K.
Spokane, Wash.

A. Dearest Alli,

Take a deep breath ... outside the car.Either you or I or both of us are a little behind the times, as the Cash for Clunkers program ran out of money and ended on August 24. A new program called the Dealership Funded Cash for Clunkers Program is trying to pick up where the federal program left off. But the dealership funded program has no mileage requirements, and the used cars will not be destroyed. It seems more like a "let's keep this car sales thing going" project than a mileage improvement program. (The mascot is either a frog or Gollum -- you decide.)

If and when you do buy a new car instead of a used one, you will need to deal with some amount of offgassing fumes. Car interiors are constructed from metals, plastics, adhesives, cloth, and sometimes leather. A few tests have indicated that the new car smell in some part consists of unpleasant and unhealthy chemicals wandering out of these interior materials, including toluene and xylenes. Then, of course, there are the ones that have no odor and simply give us a special feeling inside, like phthalates. The dust settling on our dashboard also contains dubious matter.

Hence it is probably best if we all give new cars a daily airing for the first few months. Keep your windows down when you drive, and leave them open a crack when your car is parked, if that's practical. When you use the vents, choose fresh air rather than recirculated. Other suggestions beyond good ventilation include using solar reflectors and avoiding parking in the sun, since exposure to UV rays hastens the breakdown of these chemicals. (Of course, if hastening is your goal, I suppose you could park in the sun intentionally, bake your car, then leave your windows open and not drive for the six months or so it takes for new-car fumes to dissipate -- but this seems a bit deranged.) Some people also swear by using charcoal to absorb the odor.

The easiest solution would be to buy a used car whose fumes were inhaled by a previous owner, or to own no car -- you could make every day car-free day! If you do buy new, you might investigate companies that have made a commitment to using fewer toxic chemicals in their auto interiors. Volvo has made a name for itself in this area. Honda is also a leader. To find more information on the interior threats of your car of choice, visit HealthyStuff.org -- but please, please remember that the most important factor in your car purchase should be fuel efficiency.

Derangedly,
Umbra

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

I think you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks parking spaces are prettier and more fun to relax in than public parks. Which is one reason you may see people parallel parking themselves instead of their cars on pavement for PARK(ing) Day 2009, which is September 18. Across the world artists and citizens are adorning urban parking spots with flowers, benches, turf, tents -- heck, maybe even a ball pit -- to transform them into one-day public parks the size of a car (or a couple of them, if it's a parking lot).

Originally dreamed up by Rebar, a Bay Area art and design studio, back in 2005, "PARK(ing) Day is about re-imagining the possibilities of the metropolitan landscape," according to the studio's Matthew Passmore.

Take a gander at the many and varied PARKs set up for this event in the slideshow below and then let us know in the comments which PARK you'd most like to park yourself for a picnic.

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Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

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The following is an interview with Jason Burnett, who worked in the EPA under President GW Bush. In it, we discuss efforts by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Burnett quit the EPA in protest in June 2008, alleging interference from the Office of the Vice President.

The interview is meant as a supplement to the story, "Everything you always wanted to know about EPA greenhouse gas regulations, but were afraid to ask."

What was your job at EPA?

I was brought in to lead the response to the Mass v. EPA Supreme Court case, and to develop the first federal GHG regulations.

Did you work on both the endangerment finding and the rules?

Traditionally, EPA has collapsed both of those into one rulemaking -- they have, in the preamble to the rule, the discussion about endangerment. That's the sequencing we were planning to have. We were, at least initially, on a very fast clock. There was political desire to get everything done by the end of the administration's time [in office].

So you felt like you could get the rules out the door fairly quickly?

There was a pretty large, impressive team put on this, up to 100 people.

There's no question there was a change of course -- for an understandable, if not justifiable, reason: Congress was in the process of passing the Energy Independence & Security Act (EISA), which did much of what we were planning on doing through regulations.

There was never a strong desire -- I daresay, in many quarters outside of EPA, any desire -- to move on to the stationary sources, but the way the CAA works, after you touch the mobile sources you automatically and immediately have to deal with stationary sources. From the political perspective at the White House, it was an unfortunate side effect -- worth doing only because it advanced the goal of increasing fuel economy of cars and trucks and creating more volume for renewable and alternative fuels. After passage of the EISA, there was another way of accomplishing those same goals, and they didn't then need to deal with the stationary source ramifications, -- namely, the PSD/NSR challenge.

Did the Bush administration ever really think they could get out of it, or were they just kicking the can down the road?

There were some people who thought they could make an argument, which ultimately would lose. And other people who said, "we don't want to make superfluous legal arguments, we'll just figure some other way of delaying." Fortunately for the integrity of our court system, they did the latter, basically by saying, "this is really complicated and interconnected, and would benefit from public input, and therefore we're going to go out and talk about all the complications and interconnections."

How do you think the Obama EPA's rules will differ from what your team came up with?

I think they'll be different in two fundamental ways. One is, they're going to be more aggressive. Two, they're going to deal with the California waiver, because the Obama admin has now granted it, whereas the Bush administration denied it. Whether the California program is in force will affect how you design the federal program. So EPA need to make at least those two adjustments.

I'm not surprised we still haven't seen the proposed rule. They probably could have pushed it a little faster, but they probably wanted to give Congress time to work through legislation. Virtually everyone believes that legislation will be better.

I keep hearing that. Is it true?

It entirely depends on how good the legislation is. It would be very easy to improve upon what the CAA would do. I have at times pushed for very narrow CAA fix. You could address the most problematic or challenging parts of the CAA in a very surgical way. At the other extreme is to pass the comprehensive, 1000-plus page bill.

How could the CAA be made more suited to the challenge of regulating CO2?

EPA certainly has discretion, and I'm confident it's being quite aggressive in pursuing ways of making GHGs fit within the CAA. But that will be challenged in court. Pretty much regardless of what they propose, there will be legal vulnerabilities. Trying to make GHGs fit within the CAA, you're going to have to be fairly creative in how you interpret certain terms and how you sequence the program.

Can lawsuits stop the regulations?

They may not delay the effectiveness of the regulations but they may make it pretty messy. Parts of the regulations may be passed back to EPA -- either left in force and passed back to EPA to rectify legal deficiencies, or taken off the books and passed back to EPA.

Exhibit A in the challenges of the CAA is the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) / New Source Review (NSR) program. EPA has a proposed rule over at OMB for review on how to work through PSD -- I haven't seen it. I'm sure EPA's trying to deal with the volume thresholds in the CAA, which say that a "significant" source of pollution emits either 100 tons or 250 tons, depending on the type of source.

The Supreme Court gave the definition of pollutant such broad range, but the volume thresholds are weirdly specific. How could Congress know how many tons of some future pollutant would be significant?

The original ICTA petition and later the Commonwealth of Mass were smart to focus on Section 202 of the CAA, which works quite well for regulating GHGs. In fact most of Title II, the mobile sources title, works quite well. There wasn't much attention paid in that case to the other dominoes that would fall upon issuing a S202 regulation. Also, there was the view that if this is what a plain reading indicates, what Congress had in mind -- you're going to regulate sources that emit 100 tons -- then you've got to find a way to make it work. And if GHGs meet the definition of air pollutants, they meet the definition of air pollutants, no matter how inconvenient that may be for the regulators and the regulated community.

Conservative advocacy group CEI says that EPA either obeys the thresholds and destroys the economy or, unilaterally and illegally, changes them.

That is something we foresaw years ago. It's a legal question.

There is a huge advantage to Congress raising that threshold. It would be a one-sentence amendment: For the purposes of greenhouse gases, the CAA threshold shall be 25,000 tons. That would solve a large fraction of the challenges.

I wouldn't be surprised if the court put EPA on some kind of schedule, where they are allowed to start out with a higher threshold, but over time that threshold had to move down to 250 or 100 tons. I hope EPA is successful in defending its proposal to lower the thresholds There are very good policy reasons not to try to apply PSD to the very smallest sources.

CEI is wants to turn this into a regulatory nightmare, so they can then stand back and say, I told you so, EPA ruins everything they touch.

Explain PSD. Why is it such a problem?

PSD applies to either new or major modifications -- it requires any new or modified facility to install Best Available Control Technology (BACT). For other pollutants, there's a long history of determining what BACT is. So we understand for a petroleum refinery, BACT today is a low-NOX burner, for instance. But right now we don't have any precedent for what constitutes BACT for greenhouse gases. So that's one problem, but it's one we can get around. EPA can start establishing this precedent.

The NSR program has been hugely contentious as it applies to regular pollutants, because there's this question as to what constitutes a major modification. That issue would come back with a vengeance when greenhouse gases come into play. A very small modification can increase GHG emissions by 100 tons. Take a coal-fired power plant that is emitting several million tons of CO2 a year -- if they increase their operations by, say, 20 minutes over the coarse of a year, that emits a huge amount of CO2, more than 100 tons, certainly. If you do something that increases your emissions a fraction of 1%, that arguably could trigger PSD and require you to install BACT. The scare story is that that will cause facility managers for any large source of pollution to really just freeze up and not make any modifications at all.

What kind of modification would entail 25,000 tons?

It's in the eye of the beholder whether it's big or small. If you think of something emitting 2.5 million tons a year, then 25,000 tons is 1%. Doesn't seem all that large. On the other hand, from the perspective of the environment, 25,000 is in and of itself a large source. The challenge we're dealing with is, these large emitters just emit so, so much CO2.

There have been pollution control exemptions. So if you're going in and making a modification for the purposes of pollution control, that in itself doesn't trigger NSR for all the other pollutants. It's a mechanism to reduce that perverse incentive -- the incentive to do nothing at all.

There's no question that will be litigated.

Say more about the BACT problem. Could IGCC be BACT for a new coal-fired plant?

The question will be, what constitutes BACT for a new coal-fired power plant? Is it carbon capture and storage (CCS) or something else?

In fact, environmental groups have petitioned EPA to find that IGCC is BACT. One of the counter-arguments will be, the baseline analysis of BACT does not include modifying the source. So if you if you propose a coal-fired power plant, BACT can't tell you to build a gas-fired plant. The argument that industry will likely make is, if I'm coming in proposing a pulverized coal plant, BACT shouldn't switch types of sources over to IGCC.

The whole issue of what constitutes BACT will itself be litigated. There will be people arguing that CCS is not commercially available and therefore can't constitute BACT. Others will argue that IGCC is modifying the source and therefore can't be considered BACT. We've yet to really even start that debate in earnest -- it will be an ongoing area of employment for lawyers.

Also, BACT is supposed to be a case-by-case review, where you're looking at the best technology at that point in time. Even if we decide today that something doesn't yet meet the threshold, someone will argue tomorrow, well, now we do.

Can a cap-and-trade system for GHGs be set up under the CAA?

I may have as much experience as anybody in that question: My first assignment when I came to EPA was to develop a cap-and-trade system under Section 111 and 111d of the CAA.

Sec. 111 is new source performance standards (NSPS), but 111d applies to existing sources. I've been of the view that if you are going to move forward with the CAA, the way to do it is to cover stationary sources -- as much as you decide, largely as a policy matter, you want to -- under 111 and 111d. Whether or not you put in place a cap-and-trade system depends on how much legal risk you want to take.

When I was at EPA we developed a cap-and-trade system under 111d. It was the mercury emissions rule, much-maligned by environmentalists because they were worried about hotspots. But no one's concerned about hotspots for CO2.

You dust off the legal argument EPA made for using 111d for a cap-and-trade system, and you search and replace mercury with CO2. You'd put both environmental groups and industry in an awkward position. Environmental groups would want to support the rule, presumably. Industry would not want to but they're already on record saying EPA has authority to issue a cap-and-trade system under 111 -- they wanted to have that for mercury.

It would be, in some ways, a more cumbersome cap-and-trade system than what Congress, at least in theory, could do. 111d is fundamentally a partnership between EPA and the states; EPA can't set a national program, period, whether it's cap-and-trade or some other program. Rather, EPA sets out the overall goals and tells the states to figure out how to regulate to meet those goals. The way it would presumably work is, EPA would strongly encourage states to opt in to the national cap-and-trade system -- or whatever it develops. But there's no requirement for states to do that.

Would the US regional cap-and-trade systems qualify under that kind of program?

I think that's exactly what would happen. EPA would set emission reduction criteria for existing sources and states would be in charge of designing programs to meet those, and the states that already have cap-and-trade programs, like the RGGI states or the Western states, would either be able to argue that their program already meets the EPA requirement, or would have to modify their program in some relatively minor ways to fit the EPA program. But what it would do is force all the other states to develop something, or essentially opt in to the federal program.

The threat of EPA regs was supposed to drive conservatives and business to the table. It doesn't really seem to be happening.

Not to the degree I might have expected. Part of the issue is that groups like the Chamber of Commerce are positioning themselves as, Just Say No. They're going to Just Say No up to the bitter end. Then they're going to complain about the regulations EPA moves forward with, even though any rational person looking forward can see that this is a natural outgrowth of their strategy.

The US Chamber is doing a disservice to their own members, for two reasons: one, many of their members stand to do quite well in a carbon-constrained world; two, they are pretending they can say no to both, when in fact the choice is one or the other.

Is there anything conservatives or business could do to stop the EPA going forward, or put roadblocks in the way?

I don't think so, because there was a lot of work in the previous administration to figure out what that road block could be, and they didn't come up with it. And that was when they had a receptive administration.

This is after we had completed our work and then it was rejected. Then, all attention was paid to, how do we relieve EPA of its obligation to respond to this? CEI and the Chamber were putting a huge amount of effort into figuring out legal theories, because if they'd come up with a plausible legal theory, it would have been forced on EPA. No theory came forward that was even plausible, and I heard a lot of theories. None passed the laugh test. If there is one out there I think it would have been discovered during that process.

More and more you're going to see the Chamber and EEI and CEI trying to figure out either how to make this a real big mess that will then cause political backlash, or at least dragging in smaller businesses that realize their industry is going to be regulated and just want others to be in the boat with them.

Do you think EPA can do it?

What EPA will face is a very large challenge and some inefficiencies, but they'll make it work. It won't be what anyone would design if starting with a blank sheet of paper, but it won't cause the US economy to come to a grinding halt.

There will be cases where there's clearly unnecessary regulatory red tape, and those will be well-publicized by the Chamber and their allies, but by and large EPA has a lot of tools it can use and a lot of creative people that can come up with systems for getting around the big problems.

One of the problems people have been talking about is, this is going to require a mom-and-pop business to get a PSD permit. Well, one, EPA may successfully raise the threshold to 25K tons. Two, even if the program is applied to sources that emit 250 tons, EPA may be able to figure out a very simple way for people to comply -- for example, instead of needing a formal permit application, you send in a post card that says, for instance, if you're building a new building, you've used an Energy Star label HVAC. Some people would complain because they didn't want to use an Energy Star system -- but that's hardly regulatory red tape, it's just a regulatory burden some businesses don't want to face. It may make good policy sense to move small businesses toward using more Energy Star equipment.

What do you think of the progressive push to preserve EPA authority in the climate bill.?

It's my general understanding that EPA authority is preserved in certain areas, modified in others, eliminated in others. It's preserved by and large in the mobile source sections and eliminated in the case of the PSD nightmare scenario. Those are reasonable decisions.

Environmental groups need to be careful what they ask for. You have to make sure you're not going to create the sorts of problems that the US Chamber and CEI are looking for. You don't want to play into their hands. You don't want to create a political backlash 5, 10, 20 years from now. Presumably you want this legislation to be in force for a long, long time rather than only being in force when you have the votes on Capitol Hill.

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Jay Leno's electric slide began long before the "Green Car Challenge."Photo: Alan Light via FlickrOn his new show, which launched Monday night, Jay Leno will flaunt to the world his crush on electric cars.

Leno's show will feature the "Green Car Challenge," wherein celeb guests race against each other in specially built Ford electric cars for the best lap times on a specially built race track. The first guest in the hot seat will be Drew Barrymore (an obvious guest to kick things off, since we all know she likes riding in cars with boys), when she appears on the show Friday, Sept. 18.

Ford is pumped about this primetime opportunity to plug its Focus BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle), which is due out in 2011, and is eager to show that unlike some Detroit automakers, it didn't kill the electric car. Instead, Ford wants the public to know how fun! fun! fun! it is to drive electric cars and dispel any myths that they'll leave you and your family stranded in a bad part of town at night far, far away from any recharging stations. These all-electric cars, unlike hybrids, will be totally reliant on lithium-ion batteries and will be able to zoom around for 100 miles on a single charge.

No word yet on whether NASCAR driver and all-around-badass-green Leilani Munter will be invited by Leno for an electrifying spin around the track this season.

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This week’s verse was contributed by the White House as it worked on plans for a farmers market. Check out more climate poems from Grist.

First we thought cars were the fix, so Congress made a bet:
Give people cash and they will trade their clunking old Corvette.
And boy, they did! In drives—uh, droves—till we ran out of dough.
Now sliiiightly more efficient rides are always on the go.

If we can’t change the climate with a 2 m.p.g. bribe
Perhaps there is another way we can convert this tribe.
They still love dirty coal and oil and gas and even nukes,
But maybe they will see the light if we start selling cukes!

stuartpilbrow via flickr

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Photo: billadayThe "Cash for Clunkers" program has been so successful that it will have to be wrapped up earlier than expected, the Obama administration announced on Thursday. Folks looking to turn in their fuel-hogging old cars will need to get their deals finalized by this Monday, Aug. 24, at 8 p.m. EST in order to cash in.

The program was supposed to run through Labor Day, as it received a $2 billion extension earlier this month after exhausting its initial allocation. But the Department of Transportation said on Thursday that overwhelming demand has forced the program to end early to ensure that there are enough funds to make good on already-promised rebates.

While the program's green credentials are at best dubious, it's obviously been popular. An Obama administration official speaking to reporters on background called the program an "overwhelming, overnight success," arguing that it has been good for car buyers, who get more efficient vehicles, as well as for automakers and car dealers.

So far, the program has received more than 457,000 applications for rebates of $3,500 or $4,500, valued altogether at $1.9 billion. A total of $3 billion was allotted for the scheme.

“This program has been a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump-starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a statement. “At the same time, we’ve been able to take old, polluting cars off the road and help consumers purchase fuel-efficient vehicles.”

One of the challenges thus far, according to the administration, has been making sure that applications for rebates are complete. They estimate that only 40 percent of applications have been processed, largely due to inadequate or missing information. While they encouraged dealers to submit complete applications by Monday's deadline, they said there will be opportunities to rectify flawed applications.

The official called Cash for Clunkers "one of the most successful stimulus programs in the history of our country," but said the administration had not considered seeking another extension of the program.

Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) have introduced legislation that would make a clunkers-like program permanent, rewarding citizens who buy fuel-efficient vehicles with a tax break.

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