Author Archives: Frederick Guy

Carbon footprints smaller in city centers

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Carbon footprints in metropolitan Philadelphia

The basis for comparison is not entirely clear from the picture: it says “population + employment”, so if we use less carbon on the job than at home, the city center gets a bonus. But something similar has been found in other cases: for central vs. suburban Toronto, see Norman, Jonathan, Heather L. MacLean, and Christopher A. Kennedy. 2006. Comparing High and Low Residential Density: Life-Cycle Analysis of Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Journal of Urban Planning & Development 132 (1):10-21; for Dortmund, see Wegener, Michael. 1996. Reduction of CO2 emissions of transport by reorganization of urban activities. In Transport, Land-Use and the Environment, edited by Y. Hayashi and J. Roy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. There’s some discussion of this in my paper on road traffic externalities and the competitiveness of walkable retail.

For more discussion of the study behind the map, see Brendon Slotterback at streets MN.

Opportunity in scarcity of pro-austerity studies?

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Research papers that justify today’s austerity policies are scarce, and the first thing economists teach is that scarcity creates market value. The two big jewels in the small crown of austerity justification have been Continue reading →

Does Exxon hate your children?

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Exxon Hates Your Children – what a name for a website, for a campaign. Nice because it is so obviously true while being literally wrong simply because the corporation has no emotions. If an individual were doing what Exxon does, we would see their actions as hateful and hold them up as objects of hate in return – as indeed we do with the Koch brothers or Gina Rinehart. With Exxon and its ilk you get just a bunch of corporate cogs, a machine of impersonal hatred, banal evil…

Transparency in Extractive Industry Deals?

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A deal among EU states, apparently overcoming strong opposition from the oil industry.

This is very good news for two reasons.

It’s no secret that proceeds from the sale of oil, timber, etc, often wind up in the pockets (and offshore bank accounts) of public officials around the world. It would be hard to add up the damage this does Continue reading →

Go Glenda

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Glenda Jackson’s stirring eh, tribute, to the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher. As you’ll learn at the finish, “nothing unparliamentary has occurred here”.

Also note: on news of Thatcher’s death, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead rocketed to number one in iTunes download chart. Normally this would lead to BBC Radio One (the public broadcaster’s pop music channel) putting it at the culmination of its Sunday chart countdown, but precedent may be broken in this case.

How can we explain all this giddy disrespect for the deceased?
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Cyprus and re-regulation

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The Tax Justice Network dishes dirt on what the “financial services” industry of Cyprus was selling. So will the EU really close this business down in Cyprus? And will it roll on from that to the many other tax havens (or what the TJN people call “secrecy jurisdictions”) either in the EU or under the protection of various EU states? It could, in the end, go that way.

We can hope that this is a step on the road to bringing the financial sector under control. Continue reading →

Piracy as opportunity

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Many westerners have scolded me when I’ve told stories of the obscene amounts of music, movies and software I have pirated. What they fail to understand is that I used this mode of distribution for the lack of any realistic access to an alternative.

– Bozhan Chipev, “Piracy was my shot at equality“

In paradise, build on the parking lot

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Now cars only, soon no cars


In a more civilized country this would be entirely unremarkable, but in the city of my birth it’s a sign of great progress: for at least the second time in a year, the San Francisco Planning Commission has approved construction of a city-center apartment building with no car parking and a number of indoor bicycle parking spaces. The site is currently a parking lot, and was once under a freeway. Progress!
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