Pollution from coal is not only unhealthy for the environment -- it also hurts the human body and contributes to four of the five leading causes of death in the U.S.: heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic respiratory disease.

So concludes a new assessment of coal's health effects from Physicians for Social Responsibility. Titled "Coal's Assault on Human Health," the report examines the cumulative harm that coal pollution inflicts on the respiratory, cardiovascular and nervous systems. It also considers coal's contribution to global warming and the health implications of that.

"Detrimental health effects are associated with every aspect of coal's life cycle, including mining, hauling, preparation at the power plant, combustion, and the disposal of post-combustion wastes," the introduction states.

The report examines that entire life cycle, from the high fatal injury rate and chronic health problems suffered by coal miners, to the dust and water pollution that mining inflicts on nearby communities, to how the health-damaging chemicals used in washing coal make their way into water supplies. It also accounts for the enormous amount of pollution emitted by the trucks and trains that haul coal, and the threat presented by the more than 500 coal ash dumps sites across the United States.

It finds that the burning phase of coal's life-cycle takes the greatest toll of all on human health:

Coal combustion releases a combination of toxic chemicals into the environment and contributes significantly to global warming. Coal combustion releases sulfur dioxide, particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides, mercury, and dozens of other substances known to be hazardous to human health. Coal combustion contributes to smog through the release of oxides of nitrogen, which react with volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight to produce ground-level ozone, the primary ingredient in smog.

The report's findings have important implications for the public health future of the United States in general -- and the South in particular. According to the Sierra Club's database on proposed new coal plants, there are a total of 55 active coal plant projects underway in the U.S., and almost half of those -- 27 in all -- are slated for Southern states*:

* 2 in Arkansas (Hempstead and Plum Point II);
* 1 in Florida (Seminole);
* 2 in Georgia (Longleaf and Washington County Power Station);
* 8 in Kentucky (Black Stallion, Cash Creek, Coal Synthetics, Estill County Energy Partners, NewGas Energy Center, Smith, Spurlock, Trimble);
* 2 in Louisiana (Big Cajun I and Big Cajun II Unit 4);
* 1 in Mississippi (Mississippi Power Kemper IGCC);
* 1 in North Carolina (Cliffside);
* 7 in Texas (Coleto Creek, Diamond Alternative Energy, Las Brisas, Limestone III, Sandy Creek, Tenaska and White Stallion);
* 2 in Virginia (Dominion and Old Dominion Electric Cooperative); and
* 1 in West Virginia (TransGas Development's Coal-to-Liquid Plant).

These plants should not be built, according to PSR. In fact, the report's policy recommendations call for no new construction of coal-fired power plants so as to avoid increasing health-endangering emissions of carbon dioxide and toxic air pollutants.

The report also calls for cutting carbon dioxide emissions "as deeply and as swiftly as possible" through legislation establishing hard caps on global warming pollution and through the Clean Air Act. And it urges the U.S. to develop its capacity to generate electricity from clean, safe and renewable sources so existing coal-fired plants can be phased out without a net loss of jobs or compromising the nation's energy supply.

"These steps compromise a medically defensible energy policy: one that takes into account the public health impacts of coal while meeting our need for energy," PSR concludes.

* Facing South counts among the Southern states AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, TX, VA and WV.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Prologue to Copenhagen

Vinod Khosla Nonesense

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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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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My cries have been answered.

In Canada, at least, there is such a thing as a free market think tank with a free market perspective on parking policy. The Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently published a concise little position paper, "How Free Is Your Parking?" by Stuart Donovan.

It makes three points, briefly:

1. Parking regulations suppress economic activity:

Parking regulations suppress economic activity in a number of ways. Most importantly parking regulations tie up large areas of urban land and reduce the space available for other, potentially more-productive, uses... The Toronto Parking Authority estimates the costs for constructing parking in the central city at $20,000 and $40,000 per space for surface and underground parking respectively.

2. Parking regulations undermine the transportation system:

Parking regulations also drive down urban density and further exacerbate the need for motorized travel. This manifests in higher demand for parking, which over time has been reflected in ever-higher parking regulations, which then drive down density even further and in turn stimulate even more vehicle travel.

3. Parking regulations disadvantage low-income households:

...low-income households are likely to own fewer cars, carpool more often, travel more frequently at off-peak times (reflecting their propensity to work shifts and/or part time) and use alternative transport modes more often. Low-income households consequently derive less direct benefit from parking regulations.

Good stuff. The paper is hardly a magisterial treatment of the subject, but it does manage to limn the major reasons why existing parking regulations should be replaced with more market-oriented policies.

Unfortunately, I still haven't found anything similar from the right-leaning think tanks in the Northwest, but I can tide myself over with a good local example:

...the City of Richmond, B.C., requires that new banquet halls provide 10 parking spaces per 100m2 of gross leasable floor area. Given the average parking spot requires 20-40m2 of space (including vehicle access-ways), banquet halls in Richmond are required to provide at least 200-400m2 of parking for every 100m2 of banquet space.

This means that Richmond is effectively mandating that banquet halls dedicate a minimum of 2 to 4 times as much space for cars as for people.

You'd think parking policies like this would raise eyebrows, but they're incredibly commonplace in both the US and Canada. In fact, one thing you can learn from media coverage is that attempts to undo parking mandates like these are actually examples of "social engineering" (and here, too). Go figure.

Hat tip to Michael Lewyn.

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

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Like any Hollywood actor, and like any politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk a good game. And on climate, he talks a lot. He loves to promote inconsequential gab-fests like the Governors Global Summit on Climate Change. But when the rubber hits the road, will he actually, you know, do anything about it?

Whether a bill on his desk gets a signature will tell us whether he is real or all puffery.

That bill is SB 406, by state Senator Mark Desaulnier. SB 406 would allow regional planning organizations to impose a $1-2 extra vehicle license fee in order to assist in regional planning under California’s smart growth law, SB 375.

This is critical, because California cannot meet its emissions-reduction goals unless it reduces emissions from the transportation sector; it cannot reduce emissions from the transportation sector unless it gives transportation dollars to those cities and counties whose land use plans reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT); and those cities and counties cannot change their land use plans unless they have the personnel to do so, which requires cash. Most cities have substantially slashed their planning staffs because of budget cuts: Los Angeles’ visionary planning director, Gail Goldberg, has had to lay off dozens of people and put on hold her agenda for redoing community plans throughout the city.

Predictably, the right-wing crazies are screaming that a one-dollar-per-year fee increase will mean the end of the Republic.

So what’s it going to be, Governator? Whose side are you on? The Tea Partiers’ or the planet’s? Photo-ops like the Climate Summit don’t mean a damn thing in comparison.

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Some of the MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winners are doing work related to climate change. And they now they each have $500 grand, no strings attached. Neat-o:

Also sorta related:

Much, much more info on the foundation’s site.

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Ford custom built two battery-powered Ford Focus cars for Jay Leno, who will put celebrities behind the wheel for a segment on his new primetime NBC show.Courtesy Ford / Jay Leno ShowHollywood has is green crusaders. But Jay Leno, whose garage in Los Angeles (despite solar paneling, a steam engine and wind turbine power) is a veritable shrine to the internal combustion engine, has never been considered one.

But now, as part of his new show on NBC, Leno might just have come up with a concept that will strike an eco chord in Hollywood, and then on Main Street USA. Mr. Petrolhead could just have become Mr. Electric Car.

The new Jay Leno Show features one of the most high-profile green initiatives to date. On average, twice a week, Leno will ask his A-list guests to take part in a segment on the show called the Green Car Challenge.

"We will be asking guests to set a time round a track in the NBC parking lot in an electric Ford Focus and seeing who the fastest green celebrity is. Being a green car, celebrities can save the world and race at the same time," Leno explains out on his Burbank lot.

By marrying a zero-emission Ford with the most famous names on the planet (Drew Barrymore was the first victim on Friday), Leno has concocted a formula that has the capability of changing America's perception of eco cars.

"We wanted to show that electric cars can be fun and something you can race," says Leno. "In America, electric cars have the same cache as gold carts. To see an electric car skidding around a track, I think it has the scope to change people perceptions of eco cars."

Until now, Hollywood's greatest impact on green transportation has been its adoption of the Prius as its transport of choice -- at least to and from private jets. But with the Focus about to earn as much airtime on prime time TV as Starsky and Hutch's Gran Torino or the Dukes of Hazzard's Dodge, few in America will not experience green motoring right in their living rooms in a entertaining way.

Leno is also pleased that he has been able to wave the Stars and Stripes on this crusade. When creating the concept, he was adamant that the feature should support and promote American automotive engineering and ingenuity.

"I wanted an American manufacturer and the only one with anything ready to go and viable was Ford. GM is like a government company now. It's a little tricky to get anything done," Leno explains as he walks me round the car."

As part of a significant financial commitment, Ford has hand-built two cars in Detroit for the show. They are an amalgam of European-shaped Focus body and chassis and U.S.-developed Battery Electric Vehicle technology likely to be seen in production with 18 months.

Ford this week unveiled a Focus prototype with a 23kWh lithium-ion battery pack and a chassis-mounted 100-kilowatt permanent-magnet electric traction motor. Ford claim a range of up to 75 miles and a top speed of up to 85 mph.

Under the hood of the custom built Focus is a 23kWh lithium-ion battery pack and a chassis-mounted 100-kilowatt permanent-magnet electric traction motor.Courtesy Ford / Jay Leno ShowOut of the tight L.A. track, Leno is impressed with the punch the electric car packs. "I think this electric Focus is a fast as the petrol version of the car would be. It doesn't have the top end speed but with all that torque and on a short track I think it will be almost as quick," he reckons. "It also shows that Ford are in the game, on the cutting edge. American cars have this reputation for being great for big horsepower, gas guzzling and fast but not necessarily being fuel efficient. By doing this, Ford can change their image a bit."

Leno has a number of electric vehicles as part of his motorized menagerie. One, a Baker Electric, is a century old. It comes from an era when steam, electricity and the internal combustion engine all had a fair chance at being chosen for mainstream motoring. Gas won, of course, but now electricity is back in the running and is even a favorite of enviro hot-rodders.

"I meet guys who are hyper-miling their Prius' and getting 100 mpg or adding extra batteries, increasing tire pressure...doing whatever they can," beams an impressed Leno. "Miles per gallon is the new horsepower."

--

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George Voinovich (R-Ohio) [UPDATED]

Our new neighborhood fresh food market.What I find most striking about my mother-in-law's memories of the neighborhood where I live, and where she spent her childhood in the 1940s, is how many businesses our little residential section of town once boasted. Back then, there was a grocery store, hardware store, barber shop, two drugstores, a tailor, and several corner stores.

Those businesses all disappeared in the following decades, as the streetcar lines were dismantled, families acquired cars, and shopping migrated out to supermarkets and, later, malls and big-box stores. At the low point, my neighborhood hosted little more than a lone convenience store, great for snacks and beer, but not much else.

Recently that began to change: first a restaurant opened and then a tea shop. And then, in what many of my neighbors greeted as nothing short of a gift from heaven, a small fresh food market opened. Stop by at 6 in the evening and you'll find a row of bicycles out front and the store's narrow aisles packed with people pondering their dinner options.

This little store is one of hundreds of new neighborhood businesses that have opened in the last few years in what might be both the beginnings of a revival of small retail and one of the more important strategies we have for countering global warming.

So far, the public debate about cars and climate change has been dominated by fuel economy. But driving has been growing at such a rapid pace -- total miles driven in the U.S. rose 60 percent between 1987 and 2007 -- that even a big advance in fuel economy is likely to be wiped out by ever more miles on the road.

According to calculations by Steve Winkelman of the Center for Clean Air Policy, even if we achieve a major improvement in fuel economy (new vehicles averaging 55 mpg), cut the carbon content of fuel by 15 percent, and slow the growth rate for driving significantly, by 2030 greenhouse-gas emissions from transportation will be only slightly below 1990 levels.

That's nowhere near the 60-80 percent reductions we need by mid-century to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Perhaps electric cars will come online fast enough to close the gap, but we would do well to hedge our bets by also finding ways to make daily life not require quite so much driving.

This is where local stores come in. Academics who study travel behavior say that the presence of neighborhood businesses is a major factor in how much we drive. Dozens of studies have found that people who live near small stores walk more for errands and, when they do drive, their trips are shorter. And that's not all: a more surprising research finding is that small retailers influence how likely people are to take public transit to work.

One study, led by Susan Handy, an expert on travel behavior at the University of California-Davis, examined eight neighborhoods and found that how often people walked for errands closely tracked both the number and proximity of stores. In the neighborhood with the most businesses, where homes were on average only one-fifth of a mile from the nearest store, 87 percent of residents regularly ran errands on foot, averaging 6.3 shopping trips on foot per month. In the neighborhood where the nearest store was an average of three-fifths of a mile away, only one-third of residents reported walking to a store in the previous month and averaged only 1.4 errands on foot per month.

Another study by Handy found that residents of an Austin, Texas, neighborhood that has numerous small stores within a half-mile radius made 20 percent of their food shopping trips on foot and logged 42 percent fewer miles driving to supermarkets than residents of two Austin suburbs that lacked neighborhood stores.

The potential impact of these findings is quite significant. Shopping accounts for 1 in 5 trips we take and has been the fastest growing category of driving by far. In the late 1970s, the average household drove 1,200 miles a year for shopping. That figure has skyrocketed to about 3,600 miles today. What changed? Stores got a lot bigger. Between 1982 and 2002, more than 100,000 small retailers disappeared. The big-box stores that replaced them were many times larger, far fewer in number, and thus served larger geographic areas.

Reversing the super-sizing of retail and bringing back neighborhood stores would not only cut the miles we chalk up running errands. It could also prompt more public transit use. A study of 3,200 households in King County, Wash. (the Seattle area), found that the choice to commute by transit was strongly influenced by the number of retail stores near home and work (probably because people could opt for the bus and still run a few errands on the way home). Overall, the study found, residents of the most walkable neighborhoods logged 26 percent fewer miles than those in the most auto-oriented.

Critics have argued that these studies merely reveal people's preferences: those who like to walk choose neighborhoods where they can walk. But recent research has controlled for this "self-selection" bias -- by, for example, tracking people as they relocate -- and found that preferences matter but so too does the built environment. Those who favor driving walk more and drive less if they move to areas where there are places to walk to.

But the self-selection debate may be moot anyway. Demand for mixed-use neighborhoods is growing rapidly and may have already outstripped supply. In a new report, CEOs for Cities analyzed sales data for 90,000 houses and found that, in 13 of 15 markets, those in neighborhoods with higher Walk Scores have held value better than those in areas lacking destinations within walking distance.

These shifting preferences have the potential to remake the American landscape, but only if our public-policy priorities change too. Right now, everything from federal transportation spending to state economic-development incentives and local land-use policies heavily favor driving over transit, big-box stores over neighborhood businesses, and sprawl over infill.

Reversing these policies will be no small task. But bringing small businesses into the debate could improve the odds in two key ways. For one, having more stores within walking distance is the tangible, enticing upside of planning concepts that otherwise seem abstract, if not downright unappealing, like "density" and "street connectivity."

Engaging independent business owners could also provide a powerful counterweight to big business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is now waging an all-out offensive to ensure that, when Congress undertakes its once-every-six-years renewal of federal transportation spending, the new program heavily favors highway expansion.

On the other side of the debate is Transportation for America, a coalition of groups favoring more investment in transit and smarter land-use planning. The coalition recently gained a new member: the American Independent Business Alliance, an eight-year-old national network that represents about 15,000 independent businesses (and on whose board I serve).

"It's no coincidence that you rarely find local retailers in the big shopping centers that develop along highways," explained the group's outreach director, Jeff Milchen. "What we hear from many independent business owners is they compete more successfully integrated into neighborhoods, where their personal service and small scale are assets."

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American retail is riddled with cheap, fall-apart merchandise. We know this. Sales are a ploy to get a shopper to spend, as opposed to a boon for penny pinchers. Right. And how much mileage do we get from that old, overused adage, "You get what you pay for"? More than we'd like to admit.

So why is Ellen Ruppel Shell's new book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, so shocking?

Shell deftly weaves a compelling, cautionary tale out of disparate strands: the psychology of manipulating shoppers, the environmental costs of our lust for inexpensive things, the deskilling of the retail industry, and the loss of appreciation for "quality." Tracing the history of discount culture from the yesteryear excitement over brown paper packages to today's ambivalence about crammed plastic bags, Shell shows us why we feel we've been ripped off if we pay "full price."

She pushes readers to ponder the strange circumstances that make an item shipped from thousands of miles away less expensive than something homegrown. And how a major furniture retailer can convince a customer to get attached to a piece just enough to buy it, but not enough to keep it long. And, most disturbingly, just how expensive our bargain hunting is turning out to be.

_____

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Q. What audience did you have in mind when you wrote Cheap?

A. This grew out of my own curiosity about my own behavior. Since I have a science background, and I try to be a very rational person, I was startled by my own shopping behavior. So if that was happening to me, I figured it was happening to an awful lot of people. As someone who is socially conscious, I was making purchasing decisions that didn't reflect that social consciousness sometimes. I wondered what was behind that.

I'm trying to reach a thoughtful audience, and I'm particularly interested in reaching younger people because I think they have the spirit and the opportunity to change. Interestingly, it seems to resonate with young people quite a bit.

Q. Why do you think your message is resonating with young people, especially considering how inclined they are to move around and not get attached to their property?

A. I don't want to speak for all young people, but there are all sorts of ways to get value without playing into this con game of cheap.

You go to a place we have in my town [Boston], called the Garment District, which is second-hand, third-hand kind of clothes, and you can get really good stuff there for very little money. You can be creative with it -- dress it up or dress it down, do what you want with it. It's not a cookie-cutter piece out of H&M that everybody's wearing that week. You're the boss of that thing, it's not the boss of you. It's style rather than fashion.

The idea that you can go to IKEA and get good deals -- it's really not a good deal. You can't ever get rid of it, it's not something you can resell. You don't really own it; you're kind of renting it. So that's something that young people who are thinking about moving can think about. What you want to do is to be able to put it on craigslist, or maybe get your friends to help you move your stuff. You want your stuff to [have] resale value if you really want to save money. You're not being cheap, you're being smart. They're two different things.

Q. How does the psychology of marketing inhibit the ability of consumers to see an item in terms of its entire lifespan?

A. IKEA names all its products to make stuff seem cute, but then they're telling you, "You're not really attached to this, are you crazy?" They're getting you to laugh at and make a mockery out of the idea of durability. They make durability seem like an old-fashioned, passé idea. And it works. I think it's really juvenilizing: "Oh, come on, you want a new toy. You always want a new toy."

Particularly in the marketing of cell phones. You have a cell phone that works really well for you, and then you have a friend who has a cooler one, and you want it. That's kind of 4-year-old behavior. When you have 3- or 4-year-olds, they want the new shiny thing. But as you get older and a little more mature--and I don't mean 50, I mean 16 or 17--you learn that that's not what it's about. It's about what works for me. Marketers obviously don't want you to think that. In the case of the cell phone, they assume you're going to use it for a year or less, and it's not durable. Even if it is, they assume you're going to junk it. I say, "Screw them!" If it works for you, hang on to it. Don't buy into that, because basically, it's all about them making a profit. It's not about you and what you really want.

Come hither -- cheap goods for sale!Q. Do you see similarities between the psychology of marketing cheap goods and of greenwashing?

A. Yes, I do. There's a mnemonic device that's used by marketers in terms of discounting. The mental shortcut is, "Lower price, good deal." And those two things don't necessarily follow. Something that's low price triggers the impulsive side of our brains and causes us to make decisions without much thought. The same thing is true for some of this green marketing. We're told that something is green, or it has the aura of green, and that makes it OK to buy it.

That's actually why I [focused on] IKEA instead of Wal-Mart. Most of us think, "IKEA's the good guy." IKEA has taken some tiny, baby steps towards environmentalism. For example, they started charging for their plastic bags. When you charge for plastic bags, it's reasonable to question if it's really a green step or just a way to make profit. They use low-wattage bulbs in their stores. But those are cost-cutting measures. There's nothing wrong with cost-cutting measures, but they don't take environmental steps that cause them to reduce their profits. People think, "Oh, it's a green store." But the whole story that they tell of clean living and the outdoors is a mnemonic to get you to buy. When you look under the hood, and you look at something that is essentially being sold as a non-durable product, something that won't last and isn't necessarily marketed to last, that's not an environmentally sound product.

Q. What do you say to those who believe the way discounters do business is essential to the American spirit of capitalism?

A. If you reconsider Adam Smith's arguments, in light of today's realities, he would not say what a lot of people think he was saying. He was concerned about greed and morality. He was a moral philosopher. When we talk about a free market, Adam Smith could have never anticipated the free market that we have today, which is a global market of supply chain that depends on instant messaging across the globe and transportation costs being so low that they're essentially negligible.

That's why the invention of [shipping containers], which has severely lowered transportation costs, is so important in the story. In [Smith's] days, if you shipped something from Japan or China, it was costly. Now, it really isn't. It completely changes the argument about what works and what doesn't. And when you're talking about a global economy and you have workers who are completely out of our sight, who we use as a labor source--and the resources in those countries as well--and costs are so low because transportation costs are so low, it's a completely different equation.

Q. Do you foresee a change in our perception of cheap if transportation costs are driven up through climate legislation?

A. There's no question [about] that, if we actually taxed for carbon use around the globe so that we can't just outsource our pollution--which is what we're doing now to the developing world. In terms of pollution, it was pretty shocking to see the levels of particle pollution of areas in China. We're talking huge amounts of carbon being burned, toxins in the air and the water, which is all to keep prices low, because when you put in environmental protection it costs money. If the price of oil went up substantially and environmental restrictions were made globally so that we couldn't outsource our environmental costs, I definitely think this could have a big impact on cheap.

Q. So there are two ways to frame the rejection of cheap: from a personal, psychological standpoint and also an environmental standpoint.

A. And also sociopolitical impact, because as we pursue cheap goods, we also pursue lower wages, less benefits, and worse working conditions because that's what makes things cheaper and cheaper. If wages go up in Mexico, plants close up and go to China, and if wages go up in China, the plants move on to Vietnam. We're basically pursuing the least regulated cultures, where the rule of law is the weakest when it comes to enforcing the kinds of things we in the United States really value.

Q. Do you think the general public is shocked when they make the connection that their cheap habits are supported by deregulation?

A. Some of the critics have said the book is shocking in the sense that it kind of opened their eyes. And it was shocking to me; I didn't know this stuff before I did the book. I think with knowledge comes power and you get to enact change in people.

Q. Is a rejection of cheap goods and food sustainable on a global scale?

A. In the book I quote World Bank economist Michael Morris because I don't want people to think that this is going to be easy or that we're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is a world of many billions of people. In talking about agriculture and small farms, there's this notion of happy peasants--which is a myth. It's true that small farmers can flourish, but it's also true that in many places in the world, the small farmers are the poorest of the poor. We do need to feed this world, which has so many more people than when we had these small farms. We do need to have large agricultural systems.

What I call for in the book is a middle way. I don't think we necessarily need factory meat farms, for example. I think that's actually a very costly system in many different regards. If that's something that the local-food movement and the slow-food movement pushes against, it's probably a good thing. Do we need large fields of gain? I think we do. [Fields of corn] to be fed to livestock is an unfortunate thing, but, as my background is in science, I do see the positives there, and I don't want to sell them short. For people who are starving around the world, they need a source of readily available food.

To feed the world, we're going to have to keep some of that in place, but we're also going to need a lot of local farmers, and we need more diversity in what we subsidize. We subsidize the grain growers, and the corn growers, and the soybean growers--anything that has to do with the meat industry. But we don't subsidize very much fruit and vegetable growers, which, if you're going to have a healthy diet, that's what you need. We need to really rethink our agricultural system, but the way to do it, I believe, isn't just to tell everyone to shop at their local farmers market--it's too expensive for most people, and it's unavailable to most people. I take more of a middle ground than a lot of other folks, people who I very much respect, but who I think are looking through a very narrow lens. I think we have to be careful not to oversell or oversimplify.

Q. In Cheap, you talk about the role that corporations and politics have played in how we've gotten to where we are, but you also place a significant part of that burden on individual consumers. How do we get to a sustainable middle ground in the retail landscape?

A. Consumers need more information. When you go to New York City and you go to a coffee shop, they tell you the calories of what's in the food. You can make better decisions; you change your choices.

I didn't write this in the book and I wish I had, but some kind of labeling so that consumers know the origins of what they're buying, and how it's made, and what it's made of [is important]. And eventually you should be able to go on the web and find out what company made this, where's the supplier, and [if] are they acting responsibly. Suppliers in the developing world are notorious for labor abuses. The way you make these changes is to make the labeling at the point of purchase where the buyer can see, right then and there, what he's buying. And that changes behavior.

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This post was written by ProPublica's Marcus Stern and Jake Bernstein.

To supporters, the “cash for clunkers” program miraculously jolted the moribund car market back to life, engendering hopes that it might help revive the broader U.S. economy.

Skeptics saw it differently: The automotive industry had hijacked an environmental bill and turned it into a bailout for itself with the help of the Obama administration and a Congress besotted with wishful thinking and a hair-trigger for stimulus spending.

Both views may turn out to be correct. But one thing is certain. The sight of car buyers back in showrooms these past two weeks has raised hopes that U.S. consumers are ready, primed by government stimulus, to spend again. Those hopes gained momentum by the release Friday (8/7) of employment data showing a reduced pace of job losses in the overall economy.

The idea, in concept, anyway, was simple: Bring in a clunker – a used car with lousy mileage – and collect up to $4,500 in government money against the purchase of a new car with a government-approved mileage level. The clunker, or more properly, its engine, is destroyed. Pollution and oil imports go down by at least some amount, not just this year but by many years into the future – because many of the clunkers otherwise would have remained on the road. And inventories of new cars are cleared from dealers’ lots, allowing dormant factories to restart. Some dealers are even saying  that potential buyers whose used cars don’t turn out to qualify for the program are ending up taking a more normal trade-in and buying a new car anyway.

Questions, of course, remain. Having been broadly revamped at the behest of the powerful National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), will the program deliver, along with economic stimulus, a meaningful increase in the fuel efficiency of America’s automotive fleet? How necessary was the $2 billion expansion of the original $1 billion program that Congress passed with stunning speed last week? And what about the increasingly frustrating paucity of believable, well-sourced data about the program?

“I am completely infuriated by the lack of information,” said Therese Langer, director of the transportation program at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit research organization promoting energy security and environmental protection. “We asked for the transaction-by-transaction data, but (the Transportation Department) refused to give it.”

By knowing the mileage rating of the turned-in clunkers and the mileage rating of the new cars bought to replace them, analysts can get a better idea of the actual gas savings likely to be realized. The Transportation Department is releasing those numbers in summary form, but not the raw data that analysts like Langer seek.

“All of this information is being gathered and will be made public as soon as it’s available,” said Eric Bolton, a press officer for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is managing the clunkers program.

The problem, added NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson, is that the rebate vouchers the agency had received as of last Friday contain personal information that must be redacted before the data can made public.

“It will happen, we just don’t know when,” Tyson said.

A brief timeline underscores the rapid pace of developments.

In January, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, joined by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, introduced a bill to fund a national program to stimulate the economy and get gas-guzzling vehicles off the roads. Similar programs had been successful in several states and countries.

The auto industry opposed the bill’s tight fuel-efficiency standards. But instead of simply resisting the measure, NADA, a key lobbying group, seized the idea and converted it to its own purposes. In June, the House approved an industry-backed bill with looser fuel-efficiency standards. A similar industry-backed bill was introduced in the Senate.

Under the Feinstein bill, consumers would receive $4,500 only if they purchased a passenger car with a fuel efficiency rating of at least 13 miles per gallon higher than the clunker they were dropping off. In the bill passed by the House, the rating difference was lowered to 10 miles per gallon or more.

That NADA could bring off this change is no surprise. Its enormous clout begins with its universality – there are car dealers in nearly every House district. The association made more than $7.5 million in campaign contributions to House members in the past six years and $773,000 to senators, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Separately, it spent almost $3.2 million on lobbying in 2008 alone, according to a database maintained by the U.S. Senate.

At first, the environmental proponents behind the original version were outraged. “The truth is, the House bill and its Senate counterpart are another big bailout,” Feinstein and Collins wrote in an opinion piece called “Handouts for Hummers,” published by the Wall Street Journal. “These bills are expertly designed to provide Detroit one last windfall in selling off gas guzzlers currently sitting on dealer lots because they’re not a smart buy.”

The bottom line, they argued, “is that fuel-efficient vehicles should be the main focus of any ‘cash for clunkers’ bill.”

But the competing legislation never went before the Senate for a vote. Instead, the industry-backed version was slipped into a completely unrelated war-spending bill that Congress approved on June 18.

Moreover, even Feinstein and Collins acquiesced after getting an oral commitment from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that the Senate would consider increasing the bill’s fuel efficiency standards if more money was needed for the program, according to Senate sources.

Thirteen days later, on July 1, the industry-backed version of the legislation became law with the formal name of the Car Allowance Rebate System, or CARS, and the weaker fuel efficiency standards. The $1 billion program was expected to provide rebates of up to $4,500 each for 250,000 auto sales.

For the next 24 days, the Department of Transportation hammered out the program’s rules as sales-starved dealers around the country began lining up deals.

The Transportation Department completed the rules and waved the green flag to start the program on July 24. Dealers across the country immediately began promoting the program and making deals.

Six days later, on July 30, trade publications reported that the money was running out. Unattributed reports said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood would suspend the program at midnight for lack of funds.

The LaHood reports proved erroneous, but the media that evening began a brief shift in attention away from the health care debate to the delicious story of cash for clunkers, a government program that was so successful it had burned through $1 billion in stimulus funds within days.

The news reports were based on NADA’s spot survey of dealers, which estimated that 250,000 clunker sales already had been completed or were in the pipeline less than a week after the program began. Nobody, including the NADA and its dealers, was prepared for the popularity of the program.

Just 24 hours after the first press reports that the program was running out of money, the House hastily approved a $2 billion extension designed to underwrite 500,000 more sales. The money was taken from a renewable energy loan program.

Last Monday, after a briefing by the Transportation Department, Feinstein and Collins reversed themselves and agreed to support the $2 billion extension of the program, even with its lower industry-favored fuel-efficiency standards.

“The original intent of the clunkers program was to encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, and the data so far tells us that’s exactly what’s happening,” Feinstein said. “So, I believe the right decision at this time is that the program should be extended.”

Environmental groups such as the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy also ended up backing the additional money for the program.

The Obama administration, waging a full-court press, clearly was gaining support for the costly extension of the rebate program through the week, despite some Republican opposition. On Thursday, the Senate approved the $2 billion extension. A week after the media frenzy about the program had erupted, the Senate forwarded the legislation to a president eager to sign it into law.

Calling it a “proven success,” President Obama responded to the news with a statement claiming that the program is “getting the oldest, dirtiest and most air polluting trucks and SUVs off the road for good,” and “businesses across the country—from small auto dealerships and suppliers to large auto manufacturers – are getting people back to work as a result of this program.”

Ultimately, the nation will have to wait months or even years to find out whether government got it right this time.

Has the program actually revived the traditional “animal spirits” among American car buyers, and jump-started an economy that needed a jolt, or has it simply borrowed sales that would have been made by this fall anyway? How truly clunky are the clunkers destroyed by the program, and how much better are the mileage ratings of their replacements. How much will gasoline use be reduced after a year, five years, 10 years?

Meanwhile, the nation’s new-car showrooms, for the first time in a long time, are buoyant and busy, despite some severe computer glitches during the first week of the program that delayed rebates and soured some dealers.

Sales employees at Shottenkirk Chevrolet in Quincy, Ill., appear pleased overall with the cash for clunkers program, even though it took them as long as 10 hours to log one deal on the government computer system at one point.

“Everyone is running out of cars,” Rich Poe, the dealership’s general manager, told the Quincy Herald-Whig. “Ultimately, the program has done what it was designed to do—sell more cars and get better gas-mileage cars on the road.”

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So Congress approved and President Obama signed an extension of the hugely popular (and not-really-so-green) cash-for-clunkers program. Woohoo!

We can think of some better “Cash for ...” programs the government should be funding …

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Transmilenio municipal buses are seen on a street of Bogotá, Colombia (from a post first published here).

Transportation is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. This means that bold changes in transportation policies -- for both the developed and developing world-must be part of solving the climate crisis. The trick is to curb the world's emissions -- from industry as well as transportation-without preventing poor countries from developing and lifting their people out of poverty. The New York Times recently highlighted a promising mass transportation solution that could help make this possible: bus rapid transit, or BRT. This mode of transportation, which works like an above-ground subway, is already helping reduce emissions and fight poverty around the world, and could do even more if it gets a boost from the U.N. treaty in Copenhagen this December.

BRT puts long, sleek buses on exclusive lanes protected by physical barriers. In well-designed systems such as Bogotá's, the buses stop at enclosed, elevated stations. Passengers pay their fare before boarding. These features -- along with clear route maps, feeder buses, and free transfers between lines -- allow BRT to achieve the speed, capacity, and reliability of a subway at a fraction of the cost. The idea has been around for decades, but has only gained momentum since the triumph of Bogotá's TransMilenio. Good planning, rather than novel technology, is the key to a successful BRT.

BRT reduces smog and traffic. Bogotá's TransMilenio has made Colombia's sprawling and chaotic capital city much more livable: A 40-percent drop in air pollutants was reported in the first year of the system's use, and average travel times were 32 percent shorter.

The system also reduces greenhouse gases by introducing fewer, cleaner buses and coaxing people from their cars. By removing 7,000 small private buses, TransMilenio has allowed Bogotٔá to reduce its emissions by more than 59 percent since the system's opening in 2001. And BRT could cut nearly three times more emissions than light rail powered by coal-based electricity.

It's cost effective, as well. BRT is much cheaper than subways and faster to install. This makes it an attractive option for booming cities in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East facing massive transportation problems.

Bogotá's system is a flagship and a model for cities worldwide because of its excellent planning and implementation and its success in helping to lift the city out of poverty. BRT systems are now under construction in all of Colombia's major cities and around the world: Sixty-three systems are operating on six continents, and 93 more are being planned. Notable BRT cities include Jakarta, Istanbul, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Beijing.

Massive deployment of BRTs, where appropriate, could be part of the answer to avoiding catastrophe while ending poverty. Globalemissions linked to transportation are set to double by 2030. Eighty percent of this growth will come from the developing world, where major cities are already struggling to provide mobility to their exploding populations. The global climate treaty that will be hammered out in Copenhagen must confront this problem in addition to addressing energy generation, efficiency, and deforestation.

The treaty could finance the massive planning and construction that will be needed to expand BRTs through carbon offsets. In fact, Bogotá's BRT was recently the first transportation project to receive funding through the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM. Under the CDM, industries in the developing world that manage to reduce their emissions receive credits that they can sell to polluters in industrialized countries looking to reduce their footprint. Bogotá will be selling 250,000 tons of CO2 equivalent to the government of the Netherlands in the coming years. This offset scheme could be a way for developed countries to meet emissions caps, as is currently being proposed to fund anti-deforestation efforts.

Thankfully, China and India -- the two major emitters in the developing world-seem to be embracing such a technology. More than 30 projects are being implemented or studied in China alone. Their robust adoption of this and other efficient mass transport solutions will be critical.

But there's no good reason why industrialized countries shouldn't also consider BRTs as they look for ways to decarbonize their transportation systems. BRTs are cheap and could be deployed rapidly where appropriate. Most of the barriers to bringing them here are political -- unsurprisingly, they face stiff opposition from the car industry. Still, the Obama administration and local communities across the country should take a hard look at this emerging solution. Electric cars are good, but fewer cars are even better.

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Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!

Last week, Time magazine asked, "Why Are Southerners So Fat?"

There's no simple answer, of course. Poverty, culture and climate all play a role in the South's high obesity rates. But one factor that's increasingly blamed by everyone from medical journals to the CDC is how Southern cities are built.

"The South doesn't have many bus stops," Time writes. "Public transportation is paltry, and for most people, the best way to get around is by car. ... States like Mississippi and Tennessee also have a surprising lack of sidewalks, discouraging even the most eager pedestrians. Many roads are narrower than those in the North -- where streets have wider shoulders to accommodate winter snow -- and people who want to bike or jog find themselves uncomfortably close to traffic."

All of which speaks to the fact that cities matter -- to our health, as well as to the health of the planet. When we think of the environment in this country, we generally conjure up images in our mind of cuddly wildlife and pristine wilderness -- the kind of things that we go on vacation to see, not what's around us every day. But how we build our cities can play a very important role in preserving and protecting the environment.

"When it comes to global warming," Time says, "green acres aren't all that green -- life in the crowded city is actually much more climate-friendly."

There's a tendency in America to believe that everyone wants to live on two-acre lots in the suburbs, but city living has made a comeback in recent years, in part because cities are working to improve quality of life and sprawl is turning out to be not-so-sustainable or desirable to many people.

Well-designed transportation systems, mixed-use development, progressive planning, energy and water conservation, recycling programs, open space preservation -- all of these factors can help make a city more friendly to the environment and more livable for its residents.

A new website known as Smarter Cities, which launched earlier this month, aims to highlight the potential of cities to help reshape the environment responsibly. The site grew out of the Smarter Cities Project, formerly part of National Geographic's Green Guide and now affiliated with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Smarter Cities ranks communities across the country with a population of 50,000 or more on criteria of sustainability and livability. The data is collected and crunched with the help of a researcher from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The result: "One of the nation's most comprehensive and robust databases of U.S. urban progress toward sustainability," according to the Smarter Cities site.

So how green is your city? It will probably come as no surprise that among the nation's largest metropolises, perennial greenies such as Seattle, San Francisco and Portland topped the list (although you might be surprised at some of the other names in the top 15). Madison, Wis., is the top medium-sized city, while Bellingham, Wash., gets the small city nod.

Smarter Cities is far from the only attempt to identify the nation's greenest burgs, and not everyone is going to agree. The criteria used, how they're weighted, studying cities vs. metro areas, etc., can all make a difference. So while the rankings can be fun, it's more important to look at what they're based on and get a sense of what your city is doing right -- and where it needs improvement.

Is your city on the right path?

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The following post was written by Michael Andersen of the Nieman Journalism Lab blog.

When Adam Klawonn quit his job at a shrinking major metropolitan newspaper in 2006, he did what so many other journalists have: launched an online news operation that looked a lot like a newspaper’s web site, only with less stuff.

On The Zonie Report (“A New Kind of News for Arizona”), he set out to cover growth, immigration, the environment. The big issues. “The traditional papers were going local, and they were pulling back their bureaus,” said Klawonn, now 30. “It seemed like it was just wide open.”

And from the start, he seemed to be doing everything right—learning enough PHP to slap together a sharp-looking Web site; shooting videos and producing podcasts; painstakingly tagging articles into a dozen geographic categories; looting his bank account for a freelance budget; hiring a New York Times stringer for what turned out to be award-winning environmental reporting.

After two years, it was clear: The Zonie Report was—have you guessed, dear reader?—a complete commercial failure. Without a single town to target, advertisers shunned the site. And though Klawonn’s scattered readers gave him 20,000 pageviews a month, they passed on his offer of CafePress mugs and T-shirts.

So last year, Klawonn started sketching out the plan that, this week, landed him a $95,000 Knight News Challenge grant: a news service devoted entirely to Phoenix’s six-month-old light rail system. Its working title is Daily Phoenix.

Plan B is narrower. Much narrower. Old idea: regional trend stories about migrant labor. New idea: opt-in text alerts about train delays. Old content: “In Prescott, a water war escalates.” New content: the details of every crime within a five-block radius of each rail stop.

With his business partner, newly minted Arizona State MBA Aleksandra Chojnacka, Klawonn will offer businesses a chance to be included in twice-daily text messages to mobile subscribers. “It might be, ‘Two-for-one sandwiches!’” Klawonn said. “It might be, ‘Extended happy hour over here!’”

A print tabloid, conceived in part for advertisers still focused on physical objects, might include coverage of government actions that relate to rail transit.

Klawonn’s remains in a tight space: he figures his Plan B will cost $220,000 in its first year, far more than The Zonie Report ever has. He figures he has until spring to secure the next round of private grants or investments, and he’s confident that with his new idea, that’s possible. And he still believes in his first big idea, which he still hopes can become a sort of NewWest for the Southwest, or at least for Arizona. After all, believing in regional policy reporting has gotten him this far.

“The Zonie Report was a journalistic success and an economic revenue failure,” Klawonn said. “I just thought if I could hang in there in some way and prove that I’m committed to this field and that I’m interested in trying new things, that something was going to break my way.”

Reprint courtesy Nieman Journalism Lab, a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

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Open one of those minimalist black boxes that contain a shiny new iPod and you're greeted by five words -- "Designed by Apple in California." In much smaller print would be the phrase "Made in China."

Will Americans warm to a Chinese-built car when they can buy a domestic EV like the Chevy Volt for a similar price?Courtesy Coda AutomotiveThat, in a nutshell, describes the strategy of the latest entrant in the electric car sweepstakes: Santa Monica-based Coda Automotive. At a defunct Wilshire Boulevard Jaguar dealership on Wednesday, the startup emerged from stealth mode and CEO Kevin Czinger literally pulled the cover off the Coda, a $45,000 battery-powered sedan set to go on sale next year in California. Coda is an offshoot of Miles Electric Vehicles, a maker of low-speed "neighborhood electric" runabouts.

The Coda sedan, which resembles a previous-generation Honda Civic, is a highway-ready, 80 mph five-seater that will travel 90 to 120 miles on a charge, according to the company.

And it is likely to be the first Chinese-made car to hit American roads. The car's 333-volt lithium ion battery pack comes from the Tianjin Lishen Battery Joint-Stock Co., a huge state-owned corporation that supplies batteries to Apple and other consumer electronics companies. Coda has established a joint venture with Tianjin Lishen to design and sell batteries for transportation and utility storage. The sedan's design, brand and intellectual property will be owned by Coda, but it will be manufactured and assembled in China by Hafei, a state-owned automobile and aircraft manufacturer.

"We asked whether we wanted to be in the manufacturing and mass assembly business, and we said in terms of capital and know-how, it doesn't make sense for us to do that," said Czinger in the sparse former Jaguar showroom where the floor-to-ceiling window shades were kept drawn. "Instead of building a large manufacturing organization and spending a lot of capital on building manufacturing capacity, we wanted to have speed to market, we wanted to have affordability."

Coda will own 40 percent of the Tianjin Lishen battery joint venture in China and 60 percent of the operation outside that country. (Czinger said Coda has also formed an alliance with a U.S. battery maker, whom he declined to identify, and applied for a federal loan guarantee to build a factory in the United States.)

It's very much early days in the nascent electric car market, but the California-China business model embraced by Coda may be a prelude to the future as the automotive center of gravity shifts "East" from Detroit. That the first Chinese-made car to hit the Great American Highway will be electric speaks volumes about where the auto industry is heading.

China offers a steady supply of batteries and low-cost manufacturing while Southern California long has been a design Mecca for major automakers seeking to tap Angelenos' car-crazy zeitgeist. It's no accident that venture capital-backed EV startups like Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive have set up shop in the Golden State.

Those two companies have targeted the nosebleed end of the EV market, making sleek and sexy six-figure models that can induce drooling car lust in even non-gearheads.

Coda, like Norwegian electric carmaker Think, on the other hand, is staking its claim on the middle market -- and therein lies the Coda conundrum. The Coda sedan may be "an all-electric car for everyone," as Czinger puts it, but its sticker price is closer to BMW territory than Toyota's. Even after state and federal incentives, it'll still cost you in the mid-thirties for a car that could easily be lost in the supermarket parking lot amid look-alike Korean and Japanese commuter boxes.

Tesla Motors isn't going after middle class buyers with its incredibly expensive (and cool looking!) Model S, due out in 2012.Courtesy Tesla MotorsThe Coda may offer impressive technology, but it does not spark the gotta-have-it palpitations of Tesla's upcoming Model S sedan, a low-slung head-turner with a projected base price $14,000 more than the Coda. Nor does it stand out from the pack like the forthcoming Chevy Volt electric hybrid that is supposed to sell for roughly the same price as the Coda.

In an interview Czinger, a veteran of Goldman Sachs and online grocer Webvan, said Coda deliberately chose mild over wild, designing the car around a chassis currently in production in China so that it could focus on perfecting the battery system and drive train.

"We think commercializing an automotive-grade battery system will create a revolution," said Czinger. "The next version of the car will look much different. It will use different materials and have different aerodynamics whose form is appropriate for an electric car."

I took a short spin around Santa Monica in a prototype driven by a Coda product manager that still sported the Hafei logo on the steering wheel. As you would expect with an electric vehicle, it ran quietly and accelerated quick off the mark as power was instantaneously transferred to the wheels.

The car sported power windows, a navigation system and other features, but the fit and finish looked a bit rough-hewn and plastic fantastic. An automotive writer sitting in the back complained about the stitching in the faux-leather seats. Coda execs said the production model will feature an upgraded interior and such goodies as satellite radio, iPod dock, electronic stability control and a roadside assistance emergency button.

Any Chinese-built car to hit the U.S. market would face challenges with consumers concerned about quality, much as Korean automakers had a hard road to drive in the 1980s. Czinger said a team of Coda engineers is stationed at Hafei's assembly plant to oversee quality control.

The first Codas will be sold to fleet operators in mid-2010, with consumer sales set to begin in the third quarter. The company expects to sell 2,700 cars by the end of the year and ramp up production to 20,000 in 2011. By then the Coda will face competition from a slew of electric cars expected to hit showrooms, including the Volt and electric versions of Renault-Nissan sedans and SUVs. The Tesla Model S is supposed to go to market in 2012.

While those manufacturers will only offer ever-changing price targets for their electric cars, Czinger says the Coda's $45,000 sticker is not vaporware. "I'm giving you a price that's based on an actual bill of materials," he said.

Oh, and one more thing: You can have your Coda in any color you want ... as long as it's silver. Czinger has not decided yet whether to offer a full palette on a car that comes with no options other than a home fast-charging station.

--

Watch a promotional video for the Coda Sedan below:

Read more Green State columns by Todd Woody.

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Tough enough to drive over the Great Wall?GM.comI can't say as I know exactly what's going through the minds of the top executives at Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd. who have reportedly just purchased the Hummer brand from GM. I'll say one thing, though. I'm pretty sure they're not Peak Oilers. Still, give them credit for some much-needed greenwashing:

[Hummer spokesman Nick] Richards said the buyer planned to continue selling Hummer’s current lineup as it developed “more efficient” vehicles. The brand will eventually sell trucks fueled by diesel, ethanol and other alternative fuels, he said.

That's the spirit! Although getting 10 miles/gallon running on anything will start to pinch when that anything costs $5 a gallon again.  All I could think of was this passage from an awesome Fast Company article on renegade engine whiz Jonathan Goodwin:

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."

That's my vision for Hummer. Make them a minimum 60 miles a gallon vehicles. Sure you'd have to throw in a jet turbine. But for the discerning Hummer-owner (who in China would have to pay a 40% tax on the already hefty price for the current model) too much is never enough. What ever happened to auto companies that think big anyway?

Irony alert: Turbines aside, as the article observed Goodwin's "conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways." Hummer and GM know about Goodwin -- some of his straight-up Hummer biodiesel conversions caught their attention a few years back. But they never did get around to incorporating any of his innovative engine-building techniques. Ah, well. Maybe after bankruptcy.

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California is planning to invest millions to support the rollout of new hydrogen fueling stations. Pictured here is a station near Los Angeles Int'l Airport that was built by a partnership that included BP, Praxair and LAX.Courtesy Hydrogen Assn.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu may want to slam the brakes on future hydrogen funding, but California will continue to pay its own way down the Hydrogen Highway, infuriating electric vehicle advocates in particular.

Obama's top energy official cut more than $100 million slated for hydrogen fuel-cell research from next year's federal budget, arguing that in tough times, tough choices had to be made. His department will allocate nearly $800 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for advanced biofuels research and commercial-scale biorefinery projects, part of his area of expertise at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before he joined the Obama administration.

In California, however, state lawmakers and regulators are handing out more money for hydrogen projects. Shell Oil, for example, will receive nearly $2 million in state funds to help build a hydrogen pump at a gas station near a swank Newport Beach country club and high end shopping mall. The pump will service a few dozen cars. State officials and hydrogen backers say it is a small but key step forward in solving the nation's energy and environmental woes. An additional $5 million in tax dollars will help build hydrogen fueling pumps near UCLA's campus, San Francisco Airport, and at the foot of wealthy southern California coastal communities.

Despite the state's massive budget woes, officials also approved another $120 million in alternative fuel expenditures, paid for with revenue generated from fees of about $10 recently tacked onto the costs of renewing a driver's registration. Hydrogen and electric plug-in technologies will both fare well, getting an estimated $40 million and $46 million respectively from the state.

But electric vehicle advocates said even those expenditures prove their point: According to the California Energy Commission, it will cost $40 million to build 11 hydrogen fueling stations, compared to just $12 million cost to build 6,500 EV charging stations.

Critics of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) much ballyhooed "Hydrogen Highway" program, unveiled in 2004, say the hydrogen funding is the latest outrage in a doomed and costly effort to convert drivers in the nation's most populous state to a still unproven replacement for gasoline. California is reeling from a potential $20 billion budget shortfall, but critics say oil companies and car manufacturers will continue to be prime beneficiaries of costly, state-funded hydrogen boondoggles.

By contrast, Chu's announcement left them dancing metaphorically on hydrogen's grave.

"California is pouring good money after bad down the hydrogen rat hole, at a time when we can least afford it. They're spending taxpayer dollars for a technology that doesn't work, and I object," said Paul Scott, vice president of Plug In America, an electric vehicle advocacy group. He was far happier with Chu's decision to cut off funding for hydrogen fuel research in next year's federal budget. "Listen closely ... that sound you hear is the banging of the final nail in the fuel cell coffin. Sweet music to our ears," he wrote in an e-mail.

Jay Friedland, also of Plug In America, said studies had shown it takes four times as much funding to build and fuel a hydrogen vehicle as an EV car. Chu appeared to echo that sentiment, joining fellow scientists, engineers and policymakers in questioning the commercial viability of creating clean hydrogen fuel on a broad scale any time soon.

But boosters retort that Chu erred, and they will look to Congress to rectify that error.

California air board staff and hydrogen advocates said the latest state spending was a critical long-term investment. Hydrogen is the least polluting vehicle fuel on earth, they say, and continued funding now will pay off by 2050 in sharply reduced greenhouse gases and other air pollution, as well as new jobs. Most important, it is vital to keep funding a mixture of possible fuel options until it becomes clear which is truly commercially viable.

They insist other studies have shown that hydrogen has as good a chance as battery powered cars.

"Steve is making a major mistake on several fronts," said Schwarzenegger's longtime environment adviser Terry Tamminen in an email. "First, many automakers that are heavily invested in hydrogen ... were not consulted on this decision, showing that our new Secretary could use some help with stakeholder outreach and diplomacy at the very least."

As for California's spending, he wrote, "I think taxpayer dollars earmarked for developing new/clean technologies are very appropriate… in bad times, we see even more clearly the cost of failure to invest in this important infrastructure. GM is dying at great cost to taxpayers; hundreds of billions of subsidies…to oil companies are essentially wasted. By contrast, when we supported development of high tech, we ended up with Silicon Valley and the trillions of dollars that has delivered to CA and the US in terms of jobs and taxes. You be the judge!"

California air board chair Mary Nichols, who has repeatedly sought to defuse competition between competing alternative fuel advocates, wrote to Chu on April 1 and copied the letter to Obama environmental adviser Carol Browner, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and White House Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley, begging for continued hydrogen fuel cell funding as part of broad-range backing.

"Today it is not possible to know which technologies will be the market winners, but given that our global climate and future mobility are at stake, we must pursue all promising options. Fuel cell vehicles, with their potential to provide the range, high efficiency, rapid refueling, and performance consumers expect while achieving zero tailpipe emissions and dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions, are one of these options," she wrote.

Nichols noted hydrogen fuel cells were also "unique in their ability" to potentially power other current high polluters such as ships, locomotives and scooters. In a statement, she praised the state's latest expenditures.

"Hydrogen is one of the many fuels in California's future. But we need to cultivate the industry's early growth. This grant money will nurture a burgeoning technology that will provide jobs, invigorate our economy, and provide the state with clean power."

Anthony Eggert, Nichols' science and technology adviser, said late Tuesday that state officials were "puzzled' by Chu's decision, and that it would "obviously be a blow" to continued hydrogen technology development. He said the agency and a consortium of state fuel cell backers would push Congress to restore hydrogen funding in the energy department's final budget.

Asked for comment about Californians' pleas and criticisms, Chu's deputy press secretary, Tiffany Edwards, said in an email, "The President's 2010 Budget seeks to usher in a new era of responsibility -- an era in which we not only do what we must to save and create new jobs and lift our economy out of recession, but in which we also lay a new foundation for long-term growth and prosperity. The President and Secretary Chu are focused on investing in renewable sources of energy so that we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil and become the world leader in the new clean energy economy. Change is never easy, but we must use our resources wisely in the short term if we are to transform the way we use and produce energy in the long term."

As for California's expenditures during tough times, Gerhard Achtelik, manager of the air board's Zero Emissions Vehicle program, noted that it took a century and lots of money to build gas stations, as well. Explaining the latest round of California funding, he said in many cases it was matching money.

Shell was the highest bidder in an open process, he said, and will spend more of its own money than any other applicant. Shell's project could also create hydrogen onsite, using a promising natural gas steam reformation system.

Achtelik said it was crucial to continue to fund a broad range of alternative fuel technologies, because while electric plug-ins and hybrid vehicles might be market-ready sooner, hydrogen-fueled vehicles would emit no pollutants, a giant step in helping the state meet its mandate to slash greenhouse gases and clear Los Angeles and the Central Valley's still polluted air in coming decades. Critics of EVs note that plug in vehicles, by contrast, have a long way to go as well, because much electric power still comes from highly polluting coal plants.

Electric vehicle advocates dispute that, saying their cars can be plugged in at night in homeowners' garages, to take advantage of burgeoning solar, wind and other renewable sources during off hours.

Part of the debate, like an old-fashioned schoolyard fight, reflects intensely personal differences about whose car is better. That schism has erupted repeatedly over the years between hydrogen and EV fans, with each side arguing their fuel is the one that will win out. Of late, EVs have been winning key laps. In addition to Chu's decision, President Obama toured an EV test site in Southern California this spring, and has pledged to get a million plug-in cars on the road. But others say the wheels are not off hydrogen yet.

Tamminen, who drives a hydrogen-fueled Honda Clarity, said in an email that contrary to press reports, hydrogen fueled cars are "real and here right now ... I refuel at the Shell station on Santa Monica Blvd…and have driven the car all over CA with no problem."

Noting that there are now 30 hydrogen stations in the state, he boasted, "I drive 250 miles and spend 5 minutes to refuel, while my friends with Teslas drive 120 miles and spend 4 hours recharging."

He added that EVs "suffer from lugging around half a ton of batteries," making the vehicles less efficient, and concluded, "May the best car win!"

But Scott, who drives one of the original Toyota electric vehicles featured in "Who Killed The Electric Car?" documentary, countered that he plugs his car into his solar powered Santa Monica home each night, and goes an effortless 150 miles or more on a single charge.

He said compressed hydrogen fuel, by contrast, is often trucked in by diesel spewing trucks to the few stations that do exist wiping out any clean air gains. He said that new, lighter batteries are being tested for EV cars, and that tens of thousands of electric vehicles could quickly be on the street. In fact, he noted, the filmmakers who shot the original documentary about how California's air board decimated the original EV fleets are hard at work on a sequel: "The Revenge of the Electric Car."

Next Page: Watch two videos about California's hydrogen dreams >>>

<<< Back to first page of this article

Video 1: Terry Tamminen addresses the California Hydrogen Business Council discussing his experience with the Honda FCX and California's Hydrogen Highway.

Video 2: A tour of the California FuelCell Partnership testing facility and look at how hydrogen fuel cell cars are fueled.

<<< Back to first page of this article

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Courtesy Falcon PressOf all the cycling books to read in honor of National Bike Month, The Cyclist's Manifesto is better left on the bike rack. Though the author believes he is making a powerful case for the bicycle as a tool for serious transportation, the manifesto ultimately disappoints, offering a rambling, poorly organized tour through cycling history and current transportation politics.

The book begins with promise. Hurst slams David Brooks' cutting aside about bicycling (a zinger tucked into the end of this column written in the heat of the 2008 campaign), and argues that it's time the United States seriously considered the bicycle in energy and transportation policymaking. With true manifesto intensity, Hurst asserts, "the bicycle could, and should become one component of this multifaceted solution" for transportation in the face of peak oil.

But as soon as he makes a firm declaration on the necessity of the bicycle, Hurst switches gears and spends the next 100 pages (out of a total of 179) recapping the intertwined histories of the bicycle and automobile. Sure, Major Taylor's racing exploits are important, but what happened to the manifesto?

Worse still is Hurst's stumbling prose and condescending commentary. At the very end, when Hurst has finally gotten around to the manifesto, he includes this aside on the metaphor "kill two birds with one stone":

Dear editor, what were you thinking? Why was it necessary to include Hurst's tangential musings on a metaphor? I'm not nitpicking -- Hurst continues to strain this tortured metaphor for two more pages as he tries to say something positive about the bicycle. His point: cycling provides mechanized transportation while allowing us to burn the excess calories from our fat American bodies.

As a cyclist and a reader, I found Hurst's transportation policy arguments naive and his style irritating. The few rewarding stories -- in 1853, Jefferson Davis thought we should use camels (!) for transportation -- are entangled in a mess of subjective reflections on cycling culture. And though the bicycle-as-transportation community needs an call to action that the David Brooks-es of the world would take seriously, Hurst's manifesto is not that manifesto.

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From a study published in this week's Science Express ($ub Req'd):

Bioelectricity is the act of making electric power by burning biomass for boilers or turbines instead of fossil fuels like coal.

In a nutshell the study says that an electric car using electricity generated by burning biomass will get 81% more miles per acre than a car using cellulosic ethanol. That is equivalent to improving the purported American average of 24 mpg to 44 mpg, which coincidentally is also the improvement achieved by the Prius and Insight.

I touched on this subject in an article titled Misplaced Priorities over in Grist last year. Imagine replacing the coal in the above photo with corn or wood or hay. Something has to give.

Corn ethanol was also part of the study and as you might have guessed, faired much worse than cellulosic. Not studied by this paper are environmental impacts and costs:

Which of the above energy sources will be increasing in cost and which will be decreasing?

The study looked at pure internal combustion cars and pure battery powered electric cars. It did not look at plug-in hybrids, which would eliminate range constraints imposed by today's battery technology.

The paper also said:

What we have here is a battle forming up between increasingly electrified transport (hybrid--plug-in-hybrid--fully electric) and corn ethanol powered internal combustion engines (cellulosic is and will probably always be just five years from economic viability). One side is championed by consumer demand being met by market forces and the other side is championed by our politicians who force us to pay to turn our own food into fuel and then pour it down our throats. These are the same politicians who subsidize oil with one hand and its competitor, biofuels with the other. If it hasn't dawned on you yet that our politicians are not capable of solving complex problems like this, maybe it's time it did. Take matters into your own hands. Make your next car purchase a hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or full electric when they arrive (on dealer lots next year).

The Renewable Fuels Association and the National Biodiesel Board are going to have their hands full debunking all of this peer-reviewed rubbish being published in rags like Science (see here and here).

You can listen to a Science podcast here.

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