Of Cars and Carbon
Sure, everybody knows that what you drive affects how much you warm the climate. But now, for the graphically oriented: a chart that proves the point!
Just to be clear: this includes only the emissions from the highway fuel itself. It doesn't include upstream emissions, from drilling for oil and refining it into gasoline or diesel. And it doesn't include emissions from vehicle manufacturing. In other words, these are conservative figures -- so use them with caution.
This is all fairly obvious stuff -- I mean, at this point, doesn't everyone understand that a Hummer pollutes more than a Prius? Still, I think there's something kind of compelling about this figure. The gap between the Prius and the Hummer is freaking ginormous.
More tellingly, the gap between the Prius and the average car is much wider than between cars and SUVs. Perhaps that's one reason that the rhetorical war over cars vs. SUVs, which seemed to be in full swing a few a few years back, has cooled a bit recently. In terms of climate change, the divide between super-efficient cars and plain-vanilla combustion engines seems to be where the rubber meets the road.
(Research hat tip to Justin Brant!)
Income Equality Is For The Birds
It's increasingly well documented that income inequality matters for a variety of reasons: among them, it has negative efffects on public health and social capital. So it was interesting to read a recent study from researchers at McGill University in Quebec. They found that income inequality is also linked to biodiversity loss.
Examing 45 of the US states and 61 countries, they concluded:
Among both countries and states, we found striking relationships between income inequality and biodiversity loss... societies with more unequal distributions of income experience greater losses of biodiversity... a 1% increase in the Gini ratio is associated with an almost 2% rise in the number of threatened species.
A Gini ratio, by the way, is the most common measure of income distribution.
Naturally, it remains to be seen whether there is a causal link between the two factors. Still, it'd be interesting to see more research in this avenue. If income inequality does, in some sense, cause biodiversity loss, it might suggest that conservation strategies go hand in hand with development strategies.
(Hat tip to Kevin Connor, who clued me in to this article.)
