Clotheslines, Condoms, and the Climate: Sightline's "Seven Wonders"
Seven Wonders, which was penned by award-winning journalist Eric Sorensen and Sightline staffers, examines seven everyday objects that serve not only as solutions to global warming, but also--and more importantly--as springboards for exploring some of the key issues behind climate change.
What are the wonders? Stop thinking Taj Mahal and start thinking of bikes, condoms, and clotheslines--ingeniously simple devices that have transformed our lives but often go unnoticed. Each wonder is profiled in a lively chapter full of brain-teasing facts and forward-looking solutions for our climate (and for our pocketbooks, health, and cities).
- “The Bicycle" is an ode to the most energy-efficient vehicle
ever devised--and the world of transportation solutions that is already at our feet. (My favorite biking fact: "Pound for
pound, a person on a bike can go farther on a calorie of food than a
gazelle can running, a salmon swimming, or an eagle flying.")
- “The Condom” examines how a little more "wrapping-up" could have a big impact on global-warming pollution, and our health.
- “The Ceiling Fan” shows that energy efficiency isn't just a free lunch. "It's a lunch you are paid to eat." (Great quote, huh? Amory Lovins said it.)
- “The Clothesline” starts with a six-dollar piece of rope and ends with the vast potential of renewable energy.
- “The Real Tomato” uses the well-traveled vegetable to examine how to make agriculture greener. (Favorite veggie fact: "Even a seemingly innocent one-pound bag of lettuce can be a fossil-fuel glutton, consuming 4,600 calories to grow, process, and ship an item that is mostly water and contains a scant eighty calories of food energy.")
- “The Library Book” shows why "reuse" is the most important of the "three R's." (Library fact: "A typical US library prevents 250 tons of greenhouse-gas emissions each year, just from the paper it doesn’t consume.").
- “The Microchip” is a testament to how the online world--and all the technology that drives it--can benefit our real-world climate.
Special Series
Climate Fairness
In a Series
Cascadian Carbon Tax Shifts?
(4/25/2008: Updated by correcting two errors)
One of Washington State’s conservative think tanks has just proposed a carbon tax shift. Interesting. (Read it here.)
The Washington Policy Center has garbed its tax shift proposal in anti-government clothing. Some of the rhetoric makes my skin crawl.
But the proposal itself is sensible if modest. It includes a starter carbon tax that pays for a small sales tax reduction. As a bonus, it throws in a business and occupations tax reduction on all capital investment. It’s not goofy. It’s the kind of thing I was hoping we might get about a decade ago, when energy and climate issues weren't front-page news.
Today, I hope we can do better: a comprehensive, auctioned, regional Cap and Trade system with built-in buffers for working families.
I’m guessing that the political chances of WPC’s proposal are somewhat slimmer than the odds for my preferred climate pricing policy. So rather than engage in a fight over the rhetoric, I’ll use it as a springboard to answering four questions that I’ve had from readers and from people at my speeches on climate policy.
Vehicle Miles Unraveled
***Update 4/24, 4:00 p.m.: The original version of this post was wrong.
***Update 4/30: I wrote a very important addendum to this post.
There's a lot of confusion about the VMT provision in Washington's new "Climate Action and Green Jobs" legislation (HB 2815). That's to be expected because that section of the bill is rather confusing.
It calls for reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled. But reduce them from what level? And, is that a reduction in total VMTs, given population growth?
Well, readers, you're in luck. Armed with my readin' and countin' skills, I'm going to try to figure out what the new law means. Buckle your seat belts.
First off, here's the aim:
- decrease the annual per capita vehicle miles traveled by 18 percent by 2020;
- decrease the annual per capita vehicle miles traveled by 30 percent by 2035; and
- decrease the annual per capita vehicle miles traveled by 50 percent by 2050.
But reduce VMTs from what baseline? The answer, says the bill, is 75 billion, minus the miles from trucks, which are apparently exempted. But wait: 75 billion is not a per capita figure! (At least, I don't know anyone who drives 75 billion miles a year.) So what does this mean?
Here's my best guess, based on the rumors one hears from policy wonks: the figure is connected to 2020. Mind you, the law never actually says this, but it happens that 75 billion is roughly the total VMTs that the state forecasts for 2020 (which, by the way, represents a 33 percent increase from where we are now). So, apparently, the "reductions" are to be from that 33 percent predicted increase.
Confused yet?
It gets weirder because, as Clark has astutely observed, the increase isn't actually materializing. So the reductions come from a projection that we may never reach. My head is spinning.
Okay, back to business: what's the baseline? The bill says 75 billion, but that's nonsensical since it's not a per capita figure.
So who knows what the 75 billion is supposed to reference. But I'm going out on a limb here, and assuming that the intended baseline must be for the per capita figure that's forecast for 2020 at which point the state says we'll have 75 billion total VMTs. In 2020, we're officially projected to drive, on average, nearly 9,800 miles apiece, as opposed to around 8,700 now. So I'm going to assume that the per capita reductions must come from that projected 9,800-ish figure.
It's a big assumption, but I'm stumped otherwise.
Moving on. Let's say that the state achieves the per capita reductions -- the ones relative to projected per capita VMTs in 2020. Would that be an absolute reduction, or not?
