Andy Revkin talks to Nate Lewis about the scale of the challenge we face in addressing climate change. Lewis (whom I took Chem 1 from at Caltech) was one of the first people to communicate the scale of the problem effectively to me, in his Powering the Planet talk. He’s of the opinion that there are big technical gaps to be filled if we’re going to address the issue seriously — we need to learn how to do things we’ve never done before, in a technical sense. But one of his underlying assumptions is that we will 1. have continuing economic growth globally, and 2. that this will necessarily mean an increase in energy use (even as we continue to decrease our energy intensity). I think this need not be the case. High quality lives are available at vastly lower energy usages than we see in the US, or even Japan and Western Europe. They’re different, sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re inferior. Compact, walkable/bikeable/livable cities. Drastically reduced flying and driving, zero energy buildings, petroleum free agriculture, heirloom designed durable goods instead of cheap plastic disposable crap. These things are huge, and make the remaining energy generation challenge much more manageable. Yes, we still need to figure out long term storage and reliable renewable portfolio management, but it’s not the same herculean task that Lewis puts forward: of running our society as we do today, but on some other energy source. Which simply will not work.
The Death of the Fringe Suburb
News of Suburbia’s demise reaches the New York Times Op-Ed pages. Let’s hope someone out there allocating federal transportation dollars is reading.
The Great American Adderall Drought
The manufacturer of Adderall is holding out on us… in a bid to migrate its junkies customers to a more lucrative, patented drug. It’s as if Mustapha Mond found himself with a shortage of Soma or something.
The Militarization Of Campus Police
An essay about the militarization of campus police, in response to the pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters at UC Davis this week. William Gibson (@GreatDismal) reminisces:
Glad I had opportunity to visit overtly fascist nations as a young man. Good to know the smell. Like skunk, state terror.
Coal Exports a Bigger Threat Than Tar Sands
Eric de Place does some simple calculations, which demonstrate that the planned coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest will be a larger climate catastrophe than the temporarily delayed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Alberta tar sands bitumen to the Gulf of Mexico for refining. A sobering reminder that in this conflict, we must win many battles consistently for many years to keep the atmosphere from being changed.
Counting Parking Spots, From Above
A couple of researchers inferred the rate of parking supply growth in New Haven, Cambridge and Hartford from aerial photographs, between 1950 and 2010. Both Connecticut cities had explosive parking growth, even while their populations were declining. Cambridge enacted parking maxima in 1985, and its shrinking population trend reversed. Thus parking is not required to facilitate growth. Felix Salmon comments on the paper as well:
Parking lots are — with only a handful of exceptions — the best possible way of destroying a city’s soul. They’re gruesome, lifeless places, and I’m constantly astonished by the way in which governments and developers are convinced that they’re a great idea.
Electoral gains for Pirate Party in Berlin
In Berlin, Pirates have won 9% of the vote, and now have 15 seats in the city-state’s legislature. This kind of gradual integration of supposedly “fringe” issues into mainstream politics is valuable, and also impossible in an electoral system like the US has.
A Power Company President Ties His Future to Green Energy
Yale Environment 360 has an interview with the CEO of NRG Energy, a fossil fuel based, nationwide independent power producer (IPP) that sells their 22GW of generation into the wholesale market. He’s bullish on solar PV, much less so on wind. No mention of solar thermal. He believes storage will be vehicle batteries. Net metering policies and pricing will be key to broad adoption. Given the lack of forecast energy demand increase, he sees different sources of energy (esp. coal, gas, solar, wind) having to compete for market share for the first time. It’s important to note that as an IPP his position and incentives are much different from those of regulated utilities like Xcel, who certainly do not want to “keep [their] rates to [their] consumers down and get these electrons onto its grid at a very cheap price”. And I think regulated utilities still make up a large majority of electrical generation in the US.
New bike and pedestrian ordinances in Boulder
A city-scale bike and pedestrian omnibus bill is coming before City Council. Among other things, it creates a well-defined cross walk speed limit for bikes (8 mph), requires bikes and peds to activate the blinking lights at mid-block crossings, and legalizes back-in angled parking, which the city wants to experiment with on University, near the intersection with 17th, to make the bike lane safer.
Revisiting Junction Place, the TVAP and Multi-Way Boulevards
Last fall I and other representatives from Community Cycles participated in a discussion with the city and various stakeholders regarding upcoming redevelopment along Pearl Parkway. I wrote about the experience and the Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP) more generally from the perspective of a human-powered urbanist. Mostly, we looked at different possible streetscapes for Pearl Parkway between 30th and the railroad tracks. The property at 3100 Pearl Parkway is slated to be developed in the near future, as a 320 unit rental apartment complex, and as one of the first major developments in the area plan. The city is interested in experimenting with novel street treatments in order to try and make the place special and attractive.  Community Cycles got involved largely because the TVAP “Connections Plan” had, with minimal fanfare, superseded the Transportation Master Plan (TMP) and removed the bike lanes which had long been planned along Pearl Parkway in favor of off-street only infrastructure. We felt that this change was not necessarily in the best interest of cyclists, and wanted to ensure that whatever did end up getting built would be safe and efficient.
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