Daily Score Blog

France is supercharging vehicle efficiency -- not by doling out big R & D subsidies for cars that never make it to market, but by instituting a system of efficiency feebates. 

In a nutshell -- the French ministry of ecology has announced a program that would require purchasers of new gas guzzlers (luxury Mercedes, for example) to pay an extra fee for the privilege.  And that money is rebated to people who buy super-efficient cars. If it's done right, the system doesn't really involve taxpayers, since the rebates balance out the fees.  And it gives huge incentives for sales of the most gas-miserly vehicles.

Voila -- instant fuel efficiency!

(Hat tip to Green Car Congress.)

It's well known in environmental advocacy that people can easily be overwhelmed by problems. They wind up feeling paralyzed, rather than motivated. In the past, I've treated this as a theoretical point about communications, but just this morning I've had to admit that I'm a living example. Here's how.

Mountain Equipment Co-op, (aka "the REI of Canada"), just pulled from shelves a batch of polycarbonate plastics, including those ubiquitous Nalgene bottles. According to an article in the Globe and Mail:

The plastic in question is made mostly from bisphenol A, which mimics estrogen and is derived from petrochemicals. It has been linked in dozens of independent research studies to illnesses that could be caused by hormone disruption.

Now, I've known about the research for years. But I use those products, including the problematic Nalgene bottles, a lot. (I'm a semi-rabid hiker, backpacker, and mountain climber.) Over the last couple of years alone, I'll bet I've guzzled hundreds of gallons of water from those bottles while on the trail. My bottles are old and battered, and the plastic is degraded by sunlight, heat, and ice.

Is this bad for me? What are the potential health effects? I don't know. I keep ignoring the research. And I literally -- literally -- cannot get myself to finish reading the Globe and Mail article.

The headline says it all:

PacifiCorp labels coal a no-go for new plants

PacifiCorp has backed away from plans to build any new coal plants within the next 10 years, conceding that coal no longer can overcome tightening regulations and environmental opposition.

This seems like a big deal, since -- in my opinion at least -- the gravest long-term climate threat from our part of the world is coal-fired power. Nationwide, coal power plants represent America's largest source of GHG emissions; and there's still an awful lot of coal in the ground in the American West. Until recently, coal's abundance, coupled with rising demand for electricity, has made a rapid proliferation of coal power seem more or less inevitable.

But this announcement throws that into a cocked hat. Maybe Old King Coal has been deposed!

The big lesson here, though, is that the politics of climate change are changing so quickly that what seemed inevitable as recently a few years ago is starting to look unthinkable.

Can anyone out there help me out? 

Fact checking our upcoming book, I was looking for some data on the total power consumed by lighting in the US.  But at risk of looking like a dim bulb, I have to confess -- I couldn't figure it out!!

The Green Home Guide says that lighting uses 5 to 10 percent of household electricity.  That lines up pretty closely with figures from the US Energy Information Administration (part of the US Department of Energy) which reports that, as of 2001, electric lighting represented almost 9 percent of total household power consumption. 

But another branch of the Department of Energy says that lighting accounted for over 16 percent of electricity use in households, and 24 percent in offices and stores. Based on these figures, and after I add in industrial electricity consumption, it looks to me as if lighting represents about 17 percent of total electricity consumption in the country. 

So that's getting close to the 20 percent figure we used in our 1999 book, Seven Wonders.  That book also noted that electricity consumption from lighting would be even higher, if you include the extra air conditioning that's required by all those hot bulbs in your house in summertime.  And, in fact, this New York Times story from earlier in the year cites figures that lighting consumes close to 22 percent of the nation's electricity. 

But that's not the end of it:  the Worldwatch Institute report says that lighting consumes 15 percent of household electricity, but up to 34 percent of the nation's electricity overall! 

Hmmm.  So light bulbs represent somewhere between 5 percent of home electricity consumption, and 34 percent of total, economy-wide consumption.  That last figure is a real outlier, so I'm inclined to discount it.  Still, it's quite a spread, and all from reputable sources. 

Which leaves me baffled and, er, in the dark.  So if anyone else can shed some light on the subject, feel free to illuminate me.