Book him, Danno.
Anthony Cardenas was arrested by Vallejo police for felony vandalism. … Cardenas is in [jail] for painting one crosswalk and adding cross-hatching to the three official ones…. [jail] time, …. $15,000 bail …
Read from the whole story from David Edmondson at Vibrant Bay Area.
From today’s Guardian – NASA’s James Hansen talks to the UK government:
Tar sands exploitation would mean game over for climate, warns leading scientist
[…] Hansen met ministers in the UK government, which the Guardian previously revealed has secretly supported Canada’s position at the highest level.
From last Friday’s Guardian – the UK government couldn’t care less:
UK’s climate change adaptation team cut from 38 officials to just six
Former senior official John Ashton attacks government for ‘spooking potential investors’ in energy infrastructure
Home delivery of groceries produces far lower CO2 emissions than driving to the supermarket: Erica Wygonik and Anne Goodchild find this in a recent study of the Seattle area (thanks to Tanya Snyder at Streetsblog for the reference). Wygonik and Goodchild cite similar findings from Sally Cairns in the UK, Hanne Siikavirta and colleagues in Finland, and Tehrani and Karbassi in Iran.
These studies find that the CO2 savings can be as high as 80-90% Continue reading
While we’re on taxes: several counties in Maryland (if your knowledge of American geography is limited, that’s Baltimore and The Wire) will now tax impervious surface cover. That’s rooftops, driveways, decks, etc. The contributions impervious surfaces make to urban heat islands, groundwater depletion, building subsidence, flooding, and water pollution are well understood (the wonkish may want to see Arnold & Gibbons, “Impervious surface coverage: The emergence of a key environmental indicator”). Taxing impervious surfaces is a simple and elegant solution, because there are very often simple, cheap, low-tech fixes (like replacing impervious surfaces with …. pervious ones!, or getting your rooftop exempted from the tax by collecting rainwater in a cistern for garden use): the tax provides an incentive for property owners to go fix these problems themselves.
Now, in honor of UKIP and of the general Brussels phobia that is sweeping Britain and much of the rest of Europe, here’s the connection between this wonderful tax, and federalism: Continue reading
Andy Hull, a councilor just down the road from here in the London borough of Islington, is advocating a land tax (thanks, Liberal Conspiracy). This is one of those excellent old ideas that seem to disprove the maxim that inventing a better mousetrap will lead the world to your door – Hull cites Adam Smith, Tom Paine, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Henry George, David Lloyd George
and Winston Churchill in its favor, yet most places in the world have never had it. For a nice statement of the land tax’s virtues, see this piece by Martin Wolf, three years ago in the Financial Times. Continue reading
Available as a poster from Copenhagenize.com.
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.
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…
Now cars only, soon no cars
Frederick Guy 