Climate Change

Cross-posted from the Frontier Group. 

Cross-posted from the Frontier Group.

Cross posted from the Frontier Group. 

The Obama administration purportedly wants to use the lever of transportation policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx recently said he'd like to reverse the damage highways caused in urban neighborhoods, but you'd never know that by looking at U.S. DOT's latest policy prescription.

The Obama administration wants state DOTs to report on the climate impact of their transportation policies, reports Michael Grunwald at Politico, and the road lobby is dead set against it.

How far will transportation agencies go to spin public perception of their highway expansion plans? San Diego's KPBS has produced a brilliant case study in this video and the accompanying report -- a deep dive into the media operation mounted by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) to defend its slate of highway expansion projects.

Crossposted from the Frontier Group. 

It may be "seven years too late," as tactical urbanist Mike Lydon put it, but President Obama has released a transportation proposal that calls for big shifts in the country's spending priorities.

Long-term climate prospects brightened somewhat in 2015. Pope Francis put climate care on the moral and political agenda. President Obama rejected the Keystone XL dirty-oil pipeline. Denialist heads of state were routed in Canada and Australia, and their brethren in the U.S. faced growing ridicule. To cap it off, nearly 200 nations signed the UN Paris accord, committing to cutting emissions. Meanwhile, U.S. coal use took another double-digit plunge. And U.S. electricity generation from zero-carbon photovoltaic solar cells continued to soar and has now grown 20-fold in just five years.