Green Options

Without pavement and parking lots we would still be traveling cross-country in Conestoga wagons on 6-inch deep ruts and be breathing lungfulls of dust every time a vehicle drove by at the Kwik-E-Mart. Needless to say, pavement is one of the many things that makes modern life possible.

But, like everything else in our modern life, the more advanced we get in our ability to collect and analyze data, the more we realize that the good stuff always seems to have its awful consequences too. It’s the same story with pavement.

This is an excerpt of a guest column Nick Chambers, editor of Gas 2.0, wrote for Popular Mechanics. You can read the whole column on the Popular Mechanics website.

The road trip—driving cross-country for days on end, crammed into a vehicle with your family—is virtually a required rite of passage for most Americans. The lure of the open road is as ingrained in our psyche and culture as the hamburger, football or fishing. So it’s no surprise that proposals for new types of taxes on these seemingly free highways—traditionally paid for by gas taxes and tolls—are causing an uproar.

Back in July of this year, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) proposed a bill that allocates funds to research the effectiveness of taxing highway usage by the mile. On the surface, the bill seems to be laying the groundwork for big government to track our driving habits while simultaneously discouraging the driving of more fuel-efficient vehicles. It doesn’t have to be this way.

French energy minister Jean-Louis Borloo will announce a plan on Thursday for the country to invest 1 billion Euros ($1.46 billion US) in the infrastructure needed to encourage the adoption of electric cars. That investment will buy 4.4 million charging stations, upgrade the power grid, purchase a government fleet of electric cars, and provide subsidies to EV buyers and auto manufacturers.

France hopes that this amount of investment will be enough to get 2 million electric cars on its roads within 10 years.

As China marches forward with aggressive infrastructure construction plans, years of panda conservation face major setbacks.

Despite the panda’s status as China’s signature animal, China’s desire for economic development may spell doom for this shy and gentle creature.

The panda’s already fractured habitat is being split up into even smaller pockets by construction of highways at nature reserves. According to People’s Daily Online, WWF China has reported several panda populations have already been forced into habitats just 1 kilometer wide.

Pandas limited to fragmented home ranges are unable to breed with other populations, severely impacting opportunities for genetic diversity within the species - and leading to extinction in the wild.

The Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation (eTec), a subsidiary of ECOtality, Inc. and Nissan North America win a $99.8M grant from the Department of Energy to support the largest deployment of electrical vehicles (EVs) and charging infrastructure in U.S. history.

The project will use Nissan’s LEAF, an early stage zero-emission EV to study and develop the logistics and necessary scale behind the implementation of a national charging infrastructure, that will in turn, support large-scale EV deployment.  Initial stages of the project include the deployment of 5,000 EVs and EV charging stations in Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington.  Don Karner, President of eTec, sums up the industry e-coup:

By studying lessons learned from electric vehicle operations and the infrastructure supporting these first 5,000 vehicles, the Project enables the streamlined deployment of the next 5,000,000 electric vehicles…Nissan and over 40 government and industry partners, will enable this Project to successfully pave the way for electric transportation nationwide.

That was one of the many probing questions that the visionary former mayor of Bogotá Colombia, Enrique Peñalosa, asked a packed auditorium in San Francisco last night. How do we define what makes a good city, what is our criteria? What makes an urban environment desirable and livable, and how do we judge the quality of life? What is socially and environmentally sustainable?

Some people like to call them swamps — usually folks who want to turn them into concrete developments.

Others call them wetlands, for their abilities to reduce flooding and filter out contaminants that run off of city landscapes.

The fact is, you may not like wetlands or swamps (mosquitoes), but they do a lot of good. The next time it rains, watch the water run off of a driveway, sidewalk, street or nearby parking lot. That water used to go into wetlands, depending on where you live. Now it goes into sewer systems, and often ends up being flushed untreated, or only partially treated, to rivers and lakes.

What to do, short of “The World Without Us“?

Many cities are turning to constructed wetlands, which can’t replace the natural work of Mother Nature, but can do a pretty good job of keeping contaminants out of waterways that supply drinking water, fishing and good ol’ recreation.

Compared to most other industrialized countries, the rail infrastructure system in the United States is only in its most stunted infancy. President Obama’s stimulus package, however, is now going to help bring our nation’s transit system into the 21st century. Nine billion dollars has been allocated over the next five years to begin building a faster and cleaner high speed rail network that will not only provide many needed jobs, but will also give us more sustainable transit options and [...]

Mr. Obama said the plan had at its core a simple idea: “Let’s put America to work doing the work America needs done.”

Spending in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on environmental projects being debated in Congress right now already includes $100 billion in ‘green stimulus.’ But because of the stated preference for so-called ’shovel-ready’ infrastructure projects, long-term infrastructure projects like mass transit and a smart grid may suffer.

San Francisco has just announced that it will go forward with a pilot bike-sharing program to help increase the number of trips taken by bicycle in our city. The program will be implemented by Clear Channel, the operator of SmartBikeDC, currently the only other bike-sharing program in the United States. Many residents and bike enthusiasts are very disappointed that the program will initially only have five stations, with roughly a dozen public use bikes at each. The five stations will [...]