Energy

Today's Crain's Insider, available to subscribers only, reports on the next steps for the Bloomberg Administration's broader Long-Term Sustainability Plan now that congestion pricing has cleared its first hurdle in Albany:

As New York State sets up a commission to study the costs and benefits of New York City's congestion pricing proposal, a new study by the Clean Air Task Force finds that, for many New Yorkers, the greatest exposure to dangerous and unhealthy air pollution comes during the daily commute. "Although we spend only about six percent of our day commuting to and from work, it is during that time when we receive over half of our exposure" to diesel exhaust, researchers found.

With new fuel economy standards under consideration in Congress, James Surowiecki ponders why Americans continue to buy gas guzzlers when polls show that the majority would like to see the government mandate big increases in fuel efficiency. What does all of this have to do with professional hockey players wearing helmets? This was in last week's New Yorker:

The Atlantic Monthly's Matthew Yglesias argues that high-density living is a key strategy to fight climate change. Yglesias takes issue with fellow Atlantic Online blogger Ross Douthat and author Joel Kotkin, who defend suburban sprawl -- what James Kunstler has famously called "the most destructive development pattern the world has ever seen, and perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known." Reporting on a recent talk by Kotkin, Douthat writes:

The New York Times published an editorial today about "an unpleasant and inescapable truth: any serious effort to fight [global] warming will require everyone to pay more for energy."

This eye-opening map from the Sightline Institute's blog uses US Department of Energy figures to demonstrate how individual states stack up against nations from around the world in terms of greenhouse gas emissions from energy use. The figures are especially astonishing when you look at the population comparisons (which can be found in spreadsheet form here). Just a couple of examples: Arizona, with 5.6 million residents, produces comparable emissions to Nigeria, with 122.8 million. And 19.2 New Yorkers manage to produce as much as 68.1 million Turks. Overall the map represents a comparison of fewer than 300 million Americans to more than 1.5 billion people in the other nations listed.

A new NRDC report ranks U.S. states on their level of oil vulnerability measured by how heavily each state's citizens are affected by increases in oil prices. States are also ranked on their implementation of solutions to reduce oil dependence. The report found that while oil dependence affects all states, some are hit harder economically than others. And while some states are pioneering solutions, many are taking little or no action. In fact, the report finds that about one-third of states are not taking any steps to reduce their dependence. From the NRDC report (via Car Free USA):

When George Monbiot, the popular columnist for the UK's Guardian newspaper, gets interested in something, he digs and digs until he's found what he's satisfied is the truth. Monbiot is interested in global warming, and presents in Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (U.S. Edition: South End Press, May 2007) a heavily footnoted 215-page brisk and compelling case for why we should all be very worried. This is probably the clearest and broadest book yet published about global warming, with doses of skepticism, inquisitiveness, sobriety and optimism. Every Streetsblog reader should read it. More important, every Streetsblog reader should get it into the hands of five Streetsblog non-readers and ask each of them to do the same.

... as NASA Scientist James Hansen and six other scientists publish a new global climate change study that concludes, "The Earth today stands in imminent peril and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change."