How economic growth sold Portland landlords on a bikeway | People for Bikes

In central Portland, landlords championed a plan to remove two lanes of car traffic in order to create separated bikeways serving a residential commercial district.  If only we could have gotten something more like this out on Pearl Parkway in Boulder Junction.

ALEC attacking renewable energy standards nationwide

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is at it again, trying to roll back state renewable energy standards nationwide.  The argument behind their model bill, entitled the Electricity Freedom Act, is that renewable energy is simply too expensive.  The Skeptical Science blog offers a good short debunking of this claim, based on the cost of electricity in states with aggressive renewable energy goals, and how those costs have changed over the last decade.  And this is before any social cost of carbon or other more traditional pollutants is incorporated into the price of fossil fuel based electricity.

US States with renewable portfolio standards or binding goals.

Their summary:

  • States with a larger proportion of renewable electricity generation do not have detectably higher electric rates.
  • Deploying renewable energy sources has not caused electricity prices to increase in those states any faster than in states which continue to rely on fossil fuels.
  • Although renewable sources receive larger direct government subsidies per unit of electricity generation, fossil fuels receive larger net subsidies, and have received far higher total historical subsidies.
  • When including indirect subsidies such as the social cost of carbon via climate change, fossil fuels are far more heavily subsidized than renewable energy.
  • Therefore, transitioning to renewable energy sources, including with renewable electricity standards, has not caused significant electricity rate increases, and overall will likely save money as compared to continuing to rely on fossil fuels, particularly expensive coal.

But really, go read the entire post for more detail.

On the Legality of Assassination by Flying Robot

A long but interesting (as well as horrifying) court decision pertaining to our government’s secret legal justifications for its extrajudicial assassinations by flying robot, the world over.  The judge is clearly infuriated by the situation.  Many thanks to the ACLU and my senator Mark Udall for fighting to get this stuff out in the open.

The FOIA requests here in issue implicate serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the US, and about whether we are indeed a nation of laws, not of men.  The Administration has engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing to any statute or court decision that justifies its conclusions…

However, this Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the US.  The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules … I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.

Orange County toll roads’ under review by California

Orange County’s toll roads are unable to pay their own way, leading the state of California to investigate whether their administrative agencies are viable as a going concern.  Obviously the situation is complicated by the fact that there are public highways (I-5 and I-405) that duplicate some of the connectivity of these tollways, but their financial duress would seems to suggest that when people actually have to pay, directly, to use freeways… they’re far less interested in footing the bill than when we socialize the resource, and force everyone to pay.  This isn’t very surprising, but it does get one thinking: just how much of our infrastructure would we have never built if it was transparently priced?  How many hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars have we wasted on a polluting, oil dependent, dangerous, city destroying, obesity inducing means of transportation?  If you’re going to subsidize something at the scale we’ve subsidized automobiles, you better be darned sure that the externalities that come along with it are positive!  Hopefully this will serve as a wake up call to the beltway developers around Denver.

Passive Passion

Passive Passion is a great 20 minute long documentary about the German Passive House energy efficiency standard.  It looks at the roots of the design standard in Germany, and gives a bunch of examples of implementations in Europe, from single family homes to row houses, apartment buildings, public housing, office buildings, etc.  Talks about what makes the standard work: airtight building envelopes, super insulation, no thermal bridging, heat recovering ventilation.  Also looks at a few builders and designers in the US trying to popularize these methods, and do it cost effectively.  Clearly it’s possible, we just have to decide to do it!

Empowerhouse: an affordable, net-zero Passivhaus in DC

The Empowerhouse is an affordable, net-zero Passivhaus design, that came out of the Solar Decathlon competition.  In collaboration with Habitat for Humanity, the team as built a duplex in the Washington DC area that is site net-zero, despite having the smallest solar array of any of the homes entered in the competition.  It was able to do this because it took a Passivhaus approach, aggressively minimizing all loads first, sealing the building nearly airtight, and super-insulating it.  They also integrated a rooftop garden and terrace.  By sharing the heat management equipment between the two relatively small units, they were able to reduce costs substantially.  All this means the low income residents will spend much, much less on energy over the lifetime of the building.  We need more affordable housing that looks like this.

The Danger in Republican Climate Denial

An Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle warning fellow conservatives off continued climate denial, lest the GOP be left out of climate change policy decisions altogether as public opinion swings behind the scientific consensus.  There’s still plenty of FUD and straw man partisan BS in its language, but the fact of climate change and the farce of painting it as some kind of hoax is called out loud and clear.

NRDC plan to cap GHG emissions from power sector using the Clean Air Act.

The NRDC has a plan that would allow the EPA to regulate GHG emissions from existing power plants, without either capitulating to the power sector, or banning coal outright immediately (which would be politically… uh, difficult).  The trick is to use fleet-based target, as we do with vehicle emissions standards.  The natural (regulatory) unit is the state, so each state could have its own carbon intensity targets or degression pathway, tailored to its initial generation mix.  The carbon intensity would decline over time, eventually squeezing coal out of the mix, and could allow energy efficiency improvements to count toward the goal, at least initially.  It really amounts to a kind of back-door cap-and-trade for the power sector, and it can be implemented by Obama, all on his lonesome, without any help from the intransigent congress.  The hard part here will be setting stringent enough long term targets.  40% reduction by 2025?  90% reduction by 2050?