[posted to “gristmill”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/6/13/115230/255%5D

This week’s “The Economist”:http://economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7033931 (paygate, although you may be able to get a “day pass”) carries a special report on aviation’s contribution to carbon emissions:

bq. [F]lying a fully laden A380 [super-jumbo jet] is, in terms of energy, like a 14km (nine-mile) queue of traffic on the road below … Aviation is a relatively small source of the emissions blamed for global warming, but its share is growing the fastest. The evidence is strong that emissions from jet engines, including the streaks of cloud (called contrails) they leave behind in the sky, could be especially damaging … You can buy a hybrid car, switch to low-energy light bulbs in your house and eat locally grown organic food. But the dozen daily decisions on which you base your husbandry are trivial compared with the handful of yearly choices about that holiday or this business trip.

Even worse, air travel demand has grown by 75% since 1980 (my brief lifetime) and shows no sign of abating: Airbus projects that in 2020, just the increase in miles flown will equal all air travel worldwide in 1969.

Measuring the “true” fuel (and thus carbon) efficiency of aviation depends on many assumptions, including load factors aboard planes and the distance of trips. (As with car trips, longer trips are more efficient.) Measuring on a per-mile basis ignores the fact that few people drive 10,000 miles a day; measuring per trip ignores the fact that most people fly infrequently. However, the best-case scenarios show that flying is no more carbon efficient than driving; the worst-case scenarios show emissions three times higher than driving.

The obvious solution to these externalized costs would be a carbon tax of some sort, and naturally the European Union would be the first the propose one: the European Parliament will vote in July on whether to add flights at European airports to its “emissions trading scheme” (ETS), a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Yet this would constitute a first-ever tax on jet fuel: currently, tolls (landing charges and passenger fees) pay for airports, quite unlike how the gas tax pays for roads.

Furthermore, the financially teetering airline industry can’t agree on anything. American carriers say they’d be exempt, as the U.S. is no longer party to Kyoto; European “legacy” and low-fare carriers disagree about how to allocate the initial carbon cap.

Worse yet, few alternatives exist to Jet A kerosene. New aircraft offer incremental efficiency improvements, but few breakthroughs are on the horizon. Alternative fuels and fuel cells are too heavy for use aboard planes, and alternative travel modes are far slower. (One exception is high-speed rail over short and medium hops, but even the best such services worldwide face stiff competition from low-fare bus and air routes, and besides, trips under 1,500 km account for only 20% of aviation carbon emissions.) Operational efficiencies, like reducing congestion at busy airports, could reduce emissions, but not by a whole lot.

I’ll admit I feel vastly more guilty about the carbon emissions of the taxicab ride to the airport than the plane ride from the airport. I’ve often chosen cheap short-hop flights instead of overnight Amtrak trips, and the notion of offsetting that choice by buying carbon credits doesn’t really cross my mind when the flight attendant hands over those pretzels. But perhaps higher prices might be the ticket: “fuel surcharges” of $100 atop already pricey transoceanic trips did partially dissuade me from a recent long-distance getaway.

Stumbled across an online copy of Erik Reece’s “Death of a Mountain,” an article I sharply remember from the April 2005 Harper’s as a paragon of well-written environmental journalism:

September 26, 2004, Lost Mountain

It was one year ago this month that I first came to Lost Mountain. When I look back at the pictures I took then, I see dense stands of trees and rolling ridgetops painted orange and yellow by autumn coolness. Now I see a long gray plateau piled with mounds of wasted rock and soil. It’s drizzling as I start up the eastern slope. Today is a Sunday, as it was a year ago, and the rain has kept even the smaller weekend crews away. At about 1,400 feet, I begin walking along the top edge of a long highwall that marks the eastern boundary of the land permitted for mining. This cliff line drops about 100 feet down to the number 10 coal seam, where several pyramids of coal stand ready to be loaded away.

I’m walking along a thin strip of soil here at the edge of the highwall that divides the strip mine from the forest. The oaks and maples descend down into the watershed on my right, and the highwall drops away abruptly to my left. The sharp contrast between these two landscapes, heightened by the fall color and the gray mine site, gives me the strange sensation that I am walking on the edge of Creation, on a thin membrane between the world and the not-world. Everything past this point is an abyss, a lifeless canvas, a preternatural void.

It’s also a book.

Oil companies are beginning to hint “in their advertising”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/63444879 that “oil will not last forever”:http://willyoujoinus.com. Still, I was a little surprised to find “this at BP’s site”:http://www.bp.com/iframe.do?categoryId=9005522&contentId=7011382, a cheeky little Flash-animated household carbon emissions calculator complete with little Fisher-Price men. (More interestingly, it was advertised at “Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2131024/fr/rss alongside an article on Jayanta Sen’s idea to set up an oil importers’ cartel to take OPEC oil profits and invest them back home; the BP tagline is “Small carbon footprints can make a big difference… Learn about ways to reduce your carbon footprint.”)

Since the calculator updates the totals dynamically, you can very easily see how going car-free will *very* substantially cut your household carbon emissions — the gases that cause global warming. Example: a hobo living in a sedan and driving 20,000 miles a year (less than the average American car) produces more carbon dioxide than my entire household, even with my frequent-flyer habit.

The Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology, the folks who own I-Go car sharing, also runs two air pollution calculators, one that measures “carbon emissions from transportation”:http://travelmatters.org and another measuring “toxics from all household activities”:http://airhead.org. “Ecological footprint” analyses come in “simple”:http://earthday.net/Footprint and “more complex”:http://www.mec.ca/Apps/ecoCalc/ecoCalc.jsp flavors.

[adapted from CCM list]

Well, simple to understand, but the spirit of Gar Smith’s 50 Difficult Things You Can Do to Save the Earth lives on. Umbra over at Grist gives a quick, peer-reviewed overview of highly effective environmental choices. Topping the list, naturally: “buy the most fuel-efficient vehicle possible, and use it as little as possible,” followed by home energy efficiency (lightbulbs, appliances, windows) and citizen action (letter writing, joining groups). The Consumption Manifesto puts it all a bit more elegantly:

1. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
2. Stay close to home.
3. Internal combustion engines are polluting and their use should be minimized.
4. Watch what you eat.
5. Private industries have very little incentive to improve their environmental practices.
6. Support thoughtful innovations in manufacturing and production.
7. Prioritize. Think hardest when buying large objects.
8. Vote.
9. Don’t feel guilty. It only makes you sad.
10. Enjoy what you have — the things that are yours alone, and the things that belong to none of us.

This comes to mind partly because someone on the Critical Mass list keeps retreading some tired PETA numbers about how meat is worse for the environment than driving. Um, nope; that’s specious even on the weight principle: even if the average American goes through hundreds of pounds of meat each year, that’s nothing compared to the collectively thousands of pounds of car and car-related products (principally gas & oil), and the environmental impact of the latter per pound vastly exceeds the impact of the former. Sure, we should all curb meat consumption and eat lower on the food chain, but I’m not about to be guilt-tripped into changing my well-considered, mostly-local, low-meat, high-organic diet anytime soon.

“[T]he real cost of oil, is not just what you pay at the pump,” says Press. “It’s what we’re paying in Iraq. That’s the true cost.” — Jim Press, Chief Operating Officer, Toyota, as reported by Brendan Koerner in Wired

Nicholas Kristof’s recent editorial applauding the efforts of Portland, Oregon to cut carbon emissions — it has already reduced emissions below 1990 levels despite appreciable population and economic growth (per-capita emissions have dropped 13%) and is on track to exceed Kyoto targets — has reached #1 on the most e-mailed articles list.

What’s really notable is that the Portland strategy (of course) focuses on transportation and livability as strategies to build sustainability. Too many environmental critiques still take an engineer’s perspective and look for more efficient systems to save the day; a challenge as large as climate change could certainly use tinkering around the edges, as with more efficient street lights, but also requires rethinking much larger systems like private transport.

[O]fficials in Portland insist that the campaign to cut carbon emissions has entailed no significant economic price, and on the contrary has brought the city huge benefits: less tax money spent on energy, more convenient transportation, a greener city, and expertise in energy efficiency that is helping local businesses win contracts worldwide… Portland’s officials were able to curb carbon emissions only because the steps they took were intrinsically popular and cheap, serving other purposes like reducing traffic congestion or saving on electrical costs.

ELPC reports that over 3,000 MW of electric capacity is proposed for Illinois, enough to power over a million Illinois homes. Indeed, one 400 MW project near Bloomington could power a medium-sized city. Illinois is far behind some of its Midwestern neighbors in the wind power game because of its slow movement towards a Renewable Portfolio Standard and, compared to the Plains to the west, meager wind resources.

Localities, too, can charge ahead to encourage renewable energy: not only by doing as Chicago did and purchasing Green Tags, but through good planning. Klickitat County in southern Washington state has created a zoning overlay district that allows wind turbines as-of-right in parts of the county that are both suitably windy and ready to deal with the land-use impacts. The zone was created after a $500,000 feasibility study, money that it will quickly recover with 500 MW of generation capacity planned.

Most of the rest of the world will begin working to actually do something on a global scale about global climate change starting next Wednesday, when the Kyoto Protocol formally enters into force. Most other industrialized nations have developed or are developing carbon emissions plans, but, of course, not the USA.

Man, we really are going to have to be dragged into this kicking and screaming. Even as an industry-backed “National Commission on Energy Policy”:http://www.energycommission.org agrees to mandatory caps on greenhouse gases and stricter fuel economy, the White House won’t budge one bit from its faulty logic:

bq. Dana Perino, spokeswoman for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, which coordinates environmental matters, said the administration opposes the plan because it would raise energy costs and push “industries to move jobs overseas, and that does not result in the environmental benefit all of us are seeking.”

from the “WaPo”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45176-2004Dec7.html

From the FT, 26 October:

The world economy will face higher prices than in the past decade as more oil comes from �politically unstable� countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, and production costs rise, the International Energy Agency warned on Tuesday.

The western oil watchdog said in its World Energy Outlook 2004 that US crude would cost in real terms $27 a barrel in 2010, rising to $31 in 2020 and $34 in 2030… The oil industry has been raising its long-term oil price forecasts since the beginning of the year, but today most companies still base investment using $20 a barrel as long-term reference.

Higher prices, political (and thus price) instability, and dwindling reserves. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? And to think that, had a President Gore started an Energy Independence campaign in 2000, we’d be halfway down the path to cutting off mideast oil.

Northwest Environment Watch, one of my favorite — wonkish, optimistic, and pro-urban — enviromental groups, has started Cascadia Scorecard, a blog that builds on its annual regional sustainability scorecard of the same name. They’re a great source for highlighting neat policy innovations on the ecological front.

Similarly, their site also hosts an archive of Price Tags, a weekly column by Gordon Price–NEW board member, former city councillor for downtown Vancouver, and leading advocate of livable urban densities.

Redefining Progress has released state by state reports of how The Apollo Project — a largely unheralded initiative (which has been folded into John Kerry’s platform) to “declare energy independence” by launching a nationwide effort to harness renewable energy and improve our efficiency — will affect each state. It’s pretty cool.