High Gas Prices

There's an article in the New York Times about how high gas prices have pushed many from cars to mass transit. I know I should be all "rah rah, go mass transit" but I'm not exactly feeling it.

The high fuel prices might directly hurt our pocketbooks with gas prices, but it's also nickel and diming us, too, as pretty much every product we use now costs more to manufacture and ship. So while I like that more people are using mass transit, the high gas prices right now are not to be applauded.

Instead of getting us into a fix, I wish that we'd been able to make this work on our terms--I wish that on September 12, 2001, George W. Bush had called for a $1.00/gallon gas tax (phased in over at least 5 years). Now that I could have gotten behind. Slowly increasing the cost of gas before the market forced the increase on its own would have helped us out a lot.

First, oil-rich despots would not be flexing their muscles right now, they'd be hurting, because they wouldn't be getting the money off high gas prices, we--the US--would. That gas tax could have been a national security measure and I would bet that Americans had the political will to go for it after September 11. The easiest way to send a message to states we don't like is to weaken their biggest source of revenue.

Second, with a 5 year steady increase in gas prices, car manufacturers and consumers can plan ahead a little bit more. Knowing gas is going to be expensive in advance means that people start making decisions based on that knowledge, and they buy homes closer to bus lines, buy hybrids, etc. Those are decisions some will start making now, but more slowly.

It's those big choices that will actually influence how much gas an individual family uses--the location of the house, the car they will have at least 5 years. Switching to mass transit is all well and good, but it's small potatoes compared to these other choices.

Third, the price of gas would probably not be $1.00/gallon more than it is right now, despite the tax. I'm not an economist, but I'd wager that the slow shift in 7 years would mean that gas would be perhaps only $0.50/gallon than it is now, which means that $0.50 stays with the US instead of going to the countries and companies who own the fields.

... I think high gas prices will be with us for awhile. And it's going to hurt us all, which makes it hard to be excited about ridership gains on mass transit, even though that's something I really want. I just wish we had chosen the path rather than been forced in to it.

Sunday Update: Paul Krugman, not a man I normally agree with, makes the point that as of 2005 only 4.7% of Americans get to work using public transit. Figure then that if mass transit ridership went up across the board 10%, you're still only pulling about half a percent of drivers off the road.

He concludes: "The point isn’t that nothing can be done — it’s just that serious reductions in driving would require a lot of long-term rearrangement of the way we live. It will come — but not quickly."

Exactly.

More on the gas tax summer hiatus

Ezra Klein:

"Unanimity is rare. Except on this gas tax holiday. Just about no one thinks it a good idea. Conservative economists loathe it, liberal economists loathe it, energy experts loathe it...it's shameless pandering of the worst sort."

Thanks to Don in the comments of the Friedman article for the suggestion. I don't know of any conservative economists to read to see if Ezra Klein is right on this. Anyone know a conservative economist blogger or writer on this one? And then ...

From the NYT editorial board:

"Leave aside that suspending the 18.4-cent-a-gallon excise tax would cost the deficit-burdened federal government $9 billion and that turning a tax off in May and on in September would be an administrative nightmare.

Even leave aside that nixing the gas tax would increase demand for gasoline — exactly the wrong response to global warming and rising energy prices. So wrong, in fact, that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain support policies that would cut carbon emissions and increase the price of energy. (Talk about voting for something before they voted against it.)

The fact is that drivers would, at best, see only the briefest reduction in prices at the pump. Gas prices rise during the summer season of heavy driving as rising demand pushes refiners to produce virtually at full capacity. If a suspension in the excise tax reduced the price at the pump, it would encourage even more driving. This would simply push prices back up. Oil companies would be grateful, drivers less so."

James Fallows is even offering a one year subscription to the Atlantic if someone can come up with an example of a more "foolishly destructive" bipartisan pandering. Man this one brought a lot of people out ...

Friedman's Back!

After getting a pie in the face, Thomas Friedman is back to writing regularly for the New York Times. I'm glad to see him back, especially since he's backing up a post I made yesterday:

"Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country."

This was disheartening, however:

" ... when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December."

Dang.

Kudos to Obama

I'd like to tip my hat to Obama (yeah, yeah, big surprise).

McCain and Clinton are both calling to drop the federal gas tax for the summer. That would take 18.4 cents off of each gallon of gas for the summer.

This is in the Times: "Mr. Obama derided the McCain-Clinton idea of a federal tax holiday as a “short-term, quick-fix” proposal that would do more harm than good, and said the money, which is earmarked for the federal highway trust fund, is badly needed to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges."

And then this: "Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. ...“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

I think this is a case where Obama rising above the obvious political move is a net gain for him. First, it allows the New York Times to write things like "McCain-Clinton idea," something Clinton probably doesn't like. And he gets back to his message that paints Clinton as "same old Washington." He's also taking the high road on an easy choice. If lifting the gas tax really only saves everyone $30 over the entire summer, then I think that's argument he can win. It would also likely cost 300,000 construction jobs (also according to the article).

Regardless of what you think of the gas tax, I'd venture that Clinton's position isn't consistent with her stated goal of weening the US off foreign oil, where Obama's position is consistent with his energy policy.

Cradle to Cradle

I found a great article in the most recent "Vanity Fair" about William McDonough who believes in a "Cradle to Cradle" philosophy. He doesn't like that the legislation that has resulted from the environmental movement only seeks to make things "less bad" rather than actually good.

As an architect, one of his most important buildings was at Oberlin College. The building puts out more energy than it uses. It is also built so that the entire building can be disassembled (not destroyed) and its elements used again in more buildings.

Here's a better explanation of his ideal:

He wants to "make a five-year car that allows for industry to transform the technology at high speed toward the Cradle to Cradle concept. The five-year car is a car whose material are all coherent and tagged. In fact, all materials in the car have 'passports.' So we know where they come from, and we know where they're going--back to the automakers--after five years of utility, so the car could be recycled and updated with the latest in safety and efficiency ... They keep making cars out of the same stuff."

The "Cradle to Cradle" ideal promotes growth and jobs because it's goal is that each product has zero waste. Waste=Food is his mantra, because if you build it right, all waste can become the food for something else.

It's a very good kind of environmentalism.

How is rail like a freeway system?

RBD over at 5views has an argument against rail as a way to save greenhouse gases. There are sound parts to the argument that are worth investigating like whether it's better to get 1% of commuters onto rail or into hybrid cars (assuming you get to choose) and the benefits of congestion pricing (probably not RBD's favorite part of the report). That said, I do want to make one point here that I made on his blog as well. Please allow me to cut and paste ...

I feel like a lot of anti-mass transit arguments are almost predicated on the belief that there is something natural about the freeway and getting people off the freeway is unnatural.

But the freeways were built for moving troops across the country, not for moving people between Tacoma and Seattle, or other shorter distances. (In fact, the official title of the Interstate system is the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.") It just happened to have that effect.

In total, if you adjust for inflation the cost of the Interstate and Defense Highways system is about $425 billion dollars. That is a crazy crazy amount of money. The only reason anyone was willing to pay for it was because it was considered necessary to national security.

In many ways, I believe the success of the highway system speaks to what could become of a well-developed and well-funded rail system. We pushed billions and billions of dollars of public money into an infrastructure that then spurred even more billions of dollars in private growth (would the automobile industry be what it is without the freeways? Of course not).

What I wouldn't give if last year's TGV rail speed record was broken in the US instead of France ... think of the products we could create and then sell ...

So how is rail different? Why not spend billions of dollars on a transportation infrastructure that will most likely eventually create more innovative technologies that will then end up generating more money back then we spent in the first place (not to mention providing better transit options in and between major cities? It's what happened with highways. Why shouldn't we expect the same thing with rail system too?

Gore Now Has Right-side Bookend

An Academy Award on the left, and a Nobel Prize on the right. Voila! Two good bookends.

I was a skeptic of An Inconvenient Truth before I actually sat down and watched it. I left feeling quite impressed. I know some are going to hate that he got this award. But I would point out that it's not like he was given a Nobel for making a movie. He has been fighting against pollution and climate change for a very long time.



And when we have a Northwest Passage for the first time in human history, it's a reason to start being a tad concerned.

Q&A with Al Gore

I thought this was a very interesting exchange:

Among the current crop of candidates, who has the strongest position on global warming?

Gore: I don’t think anyone has given it the emphasis that it should have. But [Connecticut senator] Chris Dodd deserves credit for proposing a CO2 tax—I’m convinced that we should eliminate the payroll tax and replace it dollar for dollar with a CO2 tax.

...

Are any Republican candidates good on the issue?

Gore: No. John McCain was strong on the climate crisis in the past, before he got swept up in the effort to court the base voters of his party. Mike Bloomberg has had a responsible position on the issue, but he’s no longer a Republican.

I was critical of Gore last summer for not advocating for a gas tax in his film An Inconvenient Truth. I am glad to see him take a stand on an even more comprehensive tax solution.

I thought Democrats liked the environment

Upsetting news from New York today.

Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to overhaul New York City traffic was besieged in the State Senate by Democrats who, en masse, decided they would oppose the measure.

From the NYT:

In a tense meeting on Monday, testy exchanges erupted between the mayor and the Democratic state senators he was trying to win over. At one point, according to several people present, Mr. Bloomberg told the senators that his administration had sent plenty of information about his plan in the mail, and that it was not his fault if they had not read it.

...

So angered were Democrats that they decided to vote as a bloc to defeat the measure, and there were not nearly enough votes among the Republican senators for it to pass.

Guys. Congestion pricing for a city the size of New York makes a lot of sense and will be an incredible boon to the environment as it gets more people out of their cars and onto mass transit. I can understand that there might be concern about how the measure would affect poor families but, let's face it, if you live in the New York metropolis region and commute to Manhattan in a car, you're probably not poor.

It taxes rich people, which you like; it helps the environment, which you like; it's awesome, which you should also like. But the idea came from an ex-Republican, which you don't like. Why is it that Arnold and Bloomberg are greener than all of you in the New York State Senate? Why is it a Republican governor in Florida is on the bandwagon and you're not?

Oh, right. You don't like Bloomberg. That's just dumb.

Carleton and the Environment

Carleton has long been into worrying about energy and pollution. Apparently they and St. Olaf compete for a week in the spring to see who can save more energy than the other school. Students will camp in the Arb, classes are taught with the windows open and the lights off, they really get into it. Carleton even built a windmill to produce energy (St. Olaf later followed suit).

Their conservation has spread to Reunion weekend. Everything we used to each lunch of dinner with either recyclable or compostable, including our silverware which was called spudware because it was made from potatoes. No foolin'. We used potato cutlery (suprisingly strong, by the way).

So thanks for introducing me to Spudware, Carleton. Your biodegradable cutlery was very fun.

Big Yellow [Hybrid] Taxis

'Don't it always seem to go, like you don't what you got till it's gone ...'

... or something like that. Earlier this year I linked to an idea of converting taxis to hybrids to cut down on pollution. It's an easy step to curb greenhouse gases but it also mandates a larger market for hybrid technology that will further innovation.

So I'm very happy to link again to Bloomberg's announcement that New York will start mandating that all new taxis in the next five years must be hybrids as they retire the old taxis (Crown Victorias).

Congrats to the Big Apple. I hope other large cities (LA, I'm looking at you) give this a shot. It's very easy to mandate and in cities with high volumes of taxis it makes a whole heck of a lot of sense.

Unfortunately here in Tacoma we have about 5 taxis total, so I'm not sure it would do much good here. But maybe someday ... when we have ten.

GreeNYC

Major kudos are due to Mayor Bloomberg, I'd say, whose plan for remaking New York green and sustainable seems ... frankly, awesome.

127 projects that are likely to make a lot of people angry, but from this little West Coast burg, it looks like good planning. Most controversial will likely be the $8 daily fee for cars who enter Manhattan south of 86th Street. Least controversial seems to be cultivating mussels to the rivers to help clean them out.

Glad to see him and Schwarzenegger (who introduced Bloomberg) standing apart as beingly strongly pro-green but still Republican. It's certainly a welcome change from other Republican leadership. And if 'going green' can become a bi-partisan agreement, this country will really be moving in the right direction.

Thanks, Mayor.

Now, what does Tacoma have up their sleeve? ... I'm think we need to do a dramatic expansion of Wright Park and add a lot more trees.

The Case Statement

Thomas Friedman lays it out pretty clearly.

Going green is a silver bullet to our global warming, Islamic terrorism, and globalized outsourcing problems.

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

It's a long article, but it's very very persuasive, if you haven't been persuaded already.

Socialized Bike Rentals

When I was at Carleton, students created "Yellow Bikes" based on ideas from Amsterdam, Portland, OR, and other cities where they refurbished bikes and put them out for general use, cost-free.

As happened elsewhere, the Carleton bikes were in varying degrees of functionality and were frequently death traps waiting to happen. They were too small, the brakes didn't work, the seat was sharp, etc.

Paris seems to have come up with a novel public/private partnership to get around the problem but still provide bikes to its residents. They'll put 20,000 bikes on the street by the end of the year, which can be checked out from one of 1,450 locations. If you check one out, it'll cost you nothing for the first half hour, and each half hour after that it gets more expensive.

Their idea is not only to get people out of cars and taxis, but also some studies have shown that the quickest way around Paris is by bicycle.

It'll be interesting to see how well the whole thing works out. I don't know how effective it would be for Tacoma. Too many hills downtown? Maybe with a gondola going up 11th and 15th ...

Point North - A Tacoma Quiz

This got forwarded to me a long time ago (long enough ago I can't figure out where I got it from).
Update: Actually, it turns out I stole it from Exit133, who posted it last July. Oops. Guess I'm way out of date.

But on the first day of spring, I thought it would be appropriate to ask Tacoma locals how much they know about where they live. These questions are hard, and I can't say I know the answer to more than half of them. But they should get you thinking about this very specific place.

How well do you know your home?

1) Point north.

2) What time is sunset today?

3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.

4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?

5) How many feet above sea level are you?

6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?

7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?

8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?

9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?

10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.

11) From what direction do storms generally come?

12) Where does your garbage go?

13) How many people live in your watershed?

14) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?

15) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?

16) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?

17) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water?

18) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?

19) How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)?

20) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?

21) What was the total rainfall here last year?

22) Where does the pollution in your air come from?

23) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today?

24) What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?

25) Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.

26) What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable?

27) Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated?

28) After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go?

29) Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it?

30) How many days till the moon is full?

Bonus Questions:

31) What species once found here are known to have gone extinct?

32) What other cities or landscape features on the planet share your latitude?

33) What was the dominant land cover plant here 10,000 years ago? 34) Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.

Tacoma Power!

Good for Tacoma Power. They are further investigating a proposal to use the Narrows tides to generate power if it is economically and environmentally feasible.

Good for them. I would be very proud of my Power Company.

I rather like this idea

Here's an idea that seems incredibly sound to me: convert taxis into hybrids. First, they drive on average 10 times more than regular passenger cars (that actually seems low to me). And second, there are 196,000 of them in North America.

You could cut smog substantially, reduce emissions, and it would be a stepping stone toward greater fuel efficiency for all cars. But since taxis are already registered and monitored, why not? Mandate that all new vehicles applying for their taxi license be hybrids; and all taxis must be hybrids by 2012, five years from now. Brilliant!

Of course, a lot of things appear brilliant at 12:25 am on a Saturday night after an evening of theater. But this one will stick, I think.

The TerraPass

I've discovered a good way to feel better about driving.

I drive a 2004 Hyundai Elantra, manual transmission, and put about 8,000 miles per year on it. Most of that is in and around Tacoma, but it includes a few trips to Oregon, Seattle, and the east side of the Cascades. Although clearly it's not as many miles as many drivers, especially commuters.

Even so, I checked up on my car and mileage on TerraPass.com. According to them, with my driving habits and that make of car I am putting out 5,224 lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's probably close to the weight of my car or slightly more.

Here's what makes the website so cool, though. I purchased a TerraPass for $29.95 that will offset 6,000 lbs of CO2 for the next year of driving by investing that money in wind energy or industrial efficiency.

As a model for a non-profit and environment change it's pretty great. I can pay to level out my car emissions so that my car has a zero sum effect. Sure I'm not exactly helping the environment, but I'm not exactly hurting it anymore either.

Soon I will get a decal in the mail that I can put on my car to advertise how I am assuaging my guilt over polluting. I hope I will see more around Tacoma. Relieve your guilty conscience and buy a TerraPass!

The Alchemist - Redux

I called this alchemy before. And I'll call it alchemy again.

Turning garbage to diesel is the modern equivalent of lead into gold. I just don't believe it. This plant in Fife is never going to get off the ground.

Thanks to the News Tribune for investigating.

Inherit the Wind

I've been blogging about wind power pretty regularly ever since Carleton installed a wind turbine on their campus. I find turbines fascinating to watch (they're not exactly windmills, as they don't mill anything, but I do think windmill is much better sounding than wind turbine). They also seem to have no downside. Even their biggest problem, that they tend to kill a lot of birds, has been solved by slowing the rotating speed of the blades.

Wind seems to be coming into its own right now. Washington is the 7th biggest state for generating power from wind. And this article in the NYT today pretty effectively argues that industrializing countries like India and China can choose wind and skip the pollution of coal.

I should mention how backward Sen. Kennedy is on the issue. He's opposing the Nantucket Sound wind farm, on the grounds that it hurts his view, I suppose. Both his Republican challengers for the Senate (not like they're likely to win) are in favor of the wind farm and the Democratic candidate for governor is also in favor. He also swept the primary on the Cape and on the Islands. Putting the wind farms at sea is even better than on land: the likelihood of killing birds is much smaller and the wind is much more regular.

(image of the Carleton wind turbine by David Dyer-Bennet, a Carl alum. Click to make it bigger)