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Critics of new urbanism’s grid street pattern miss the point.

One of the defining characteristics of sprawl is a branching street pattern -- one in which cul-de-sacs feed residential streets, which feed local arteries, which feed thoroughfares, which ultimately feed freeways. It's a design that can work fine for cars, but not so well for people. I spent (or misspent) part of my childhood in that sort of neighborhood. There were houses that were literally 100 yards from my house as the crow flies, but nearly a mile by the road network. That sort of thing discourages, you know, walking and stuff. Which is one reason why people who care about promoting walking and biking as transportation prefer an interconnected street network to a hierarchical one.

Now, Wendell Cox, a smart-growth skeptic and fellow of the Heartland Institute, writes in defense of the cul-de-sac:

But the hispanic portion is growing like gangbusters.

U.S. population grew by slightly less than 1 percent from 2003 to 2004, according to new Census Bureau figures. In both 2003 and 2004, annual U.S. population growth was slower than it was from 1990 to 2002, when the annual rate averaged more than 1.2 percent. (In the big scheme of things, 1 percent may not sound like much, but it's enough to double the population every 70 years. If the U.S. continues to grow at 1 percent per year, the country will number almost 600 million people by 2076.)

But none of that stuff made headlines like the news that Hispanics comprised half of the nation's growth. People who identify themselves as being of Hispanic origin now make up about 14 percent of U.S. residents -- about one in seven.

Lots more on the document-editing scandal.

As Lisa and Andy note below, the fuss du jour is over Philip Cooney's editing of scientific gov't reports on climate change to exaggerate the appearance of uncertainty. Two of the finest science bloggers going, Roger Pielke Jr. and Chris Mooney, have a wealth of interesting material on the subject.

First, Pielke argues that the whole thing is a case of manufactured controversy -- another attempt to play "gotcha" with government documents that just distracts attention from substantive policy debate.

The author of the NYT piece, Andy Revkin, emailed Pielke a congenial response, including this amusing bit: "Sadly, the White House is so hermetically sealed on such matters that it has essentially created such stories by making scraps of tea-leaf-like information noteworthy." It's true -- by playing footsy with the public, with a long history of contradictory and ambiguous statements on climate change, the Bush administration has created a situation where every official word or document on the subject is examined and parsed like the friggin' Zapruder film.

Chris Mooney unearths this tidbit from Cooney's past, revealing that his opposition to CO2 limits is longstanding. He also has an amusing rundown of White House flack Scott McClellan's typically opaque and evasive performance this morning. McClellan made a big deal out of a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report that praised the administration's 10-year climate plan. Mooney points out that the report also "seriously faulted" the plan, and oh yeah, is four years old.

And finally, in a post on The Huffington Post (who doesn't post there? oh, right, me.) Mooney lays out Revkin's history of uncovering Bush administration interference in climate science -- the same story over and over again, just the names and details change. And yet every time the larger media act like it's an isolated event, and the administration goes back to doing it. Sigh.

New Apollo Energy Act introduced

FYI: The New Apollo Energy Act, which Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) discussed in the pages of Grist, has been introduced. From Inslee's press release:

U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee and fourteen other Members of Congress today introduced the New Apollo Energy Act as a comprehensive clean energy policy for the 21st century. Inslee's legislation will use new and innovative tax incentives and market-based assistance, along with energy performance standards to address three challenges to America: creating clean energy manufacturing jobs, decreasing dependence on foreign oil, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As the most comprehensive and technologically visionary energy program proposed in Congress, New Apollo seeks to solve America's energy problems and high energy costs through technological innovation much in the same way that President Kennedy channeled the resources of the American people to meet the challenges of the race to the Moon.

I hasten to add: It has a snowball's chance in hell of passing. But it's nice to see debate on these issues being stoked.

Walking octopus inspires robot design

In the vein of marine animals inspiring design, I offer today the octopus-cum-robot. I kid not.

After discovering in March that some octopus species use two of their eight arms to "walk" along the seafloor bipedal style (it's true! see footage here and here), scientists at the University of California at Berkeley were inspired to develop an entirely new field of robotics involving soft, muscle-like machines that would walk much like the octopus.

"Each arm rolls along the suckers and pushes the animal back, and then the other arm touches down, rolls along the suckers, and pushes the animal back again," says biologist Chrissy Hufford.

"They flatten part of their arm like a tank tread, and roll backwards on it. They make a functional foot, even though they don't have an anatomic foot."

Scientists are hoping they will be able to mimic this fluid movement and flexibility in robots built without hard parts, and a prototype -- essentially a tube with a spring inside -- has already been constructed. The advantage of soft robotics, says biologist Bob Full, is that the robot could squeeze through tiny spaces, much like the octopus, and could function in a search-and-rescue capacity, moving into tight areas no other robot could reach.

Pretty cool, though the idea of robots in general kinda freaks me out.

Commencement speech

Good God.

Barack Obama. That's all I can say.

Barack Obama.

Tender Loving Scare

Babies in intensive care endangered by hormone-altering plastics Infants in hospital intensive care units have much higher levels of a hormone-altering chemical in their bodies than other newborns, according to […]

Acres and Pains

Senate panel recommends tighter regulation of land conservancies A two-year investigation by the Senate Finance Committee may lead to big changes in federal regulation of America’s land conservancies. The panel’s […]

McClellan has his feet held to the climate change fire

The New York Times article yesterday detailing Philip Cooney's creative writing skills has been bouncing around the world as well as the blogosphere. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had his feet held to the fire yesterday at the press briefing. One of his more interesting assertions:

Q: In every example that we have seen, and Mr. Cooney's emendations and deletions from these reports have been to the effect of making them less critical, less stringent, less apparently in need of immediate action. In other words, he's done everything in the examples we've seen to pull back from worst-case scenario. He is not a scientist.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's your opinion, and I think your opinion is wrong.

It seemed the press corps sensed that McClellan was on the ropes with this topic, which led to zingers such as this one:

MR. McCLELLAN: Like I said, there are policy people and scientists who are involved in this process, in the interagency review process. And he's one of the policy people involved in that process, and someone who's very familiar with the issues relating to climate change and the environment.

Q Because of his work lobbying for the oil industry?

It's fun to read; even better to watch [RealPlayer]. Fun in a depressing, upsetting kind of way.

Yesterday's press briefing was also the most time spent on an environmental topic in a White House press briefing in a long time.

A link dump.

Is there some sort of news and commentary deluge this week? It's enough to overwhelm a blogger, I tell you.

Anyway, since there are 50 new things to blog about, I'll leave the subject of peak oil behind for a while, with a final round-up of links.

• Despite my critique of his positive proposals, Kevin Drum really did do a public service with his peak oil series. Read it.
• Also worth reading -- though much of the material overlaps -- is Drum's review of Twilight in the Desert, by Matthew Simmons, wherein he makes the following points: a) most of the reasonably optimistic forecasts of our oil future rest on Saudi Arabia's spare capacity; b) Saudi Arabia doesn't actually have much spare capacity (the subject of Simmons' book), and thus, c)
  

  ... it's likely that we're now in a permanent state of near zero spare capacity, which in turn will lead to an increasingly unstable world. As we enter an era in which even Saudi Arabia has no spare capacity to smooth out supply disruptions elsewhere in the world, any blip in supply, whether from political unrest, terrorism, or merely unforeseen natural events, will cause prices to carom wildly. A world with $100 per barrel oil is bad enough, but a world in which a single pipeline meltdown could cause prices to skyrocket to $300 per barrel for a few months and then back down is far worse.

• Speaking of Simmons, The Agonist has an excellent three-part interview with him. Simmons says: "The current model is not sustainable. It is not sustainable but it is insatiable."
• Speaking of Drum (ha ha), The Oil Drum has an excellent rundown of the many ways that cheap oil undergirds our food production system.
• There's not much new in this E Magazine piece, but, well, there it is.
• And in the Macon, GA, Daily of all places, James Kunstler does that thing he does.