Articles by Alan Durning

Efficiency: the profit center

The School District in Olympia, Washington, provides an encapsulating anecdote of the continuing, Brobdignagian, untapped potential to save energy at a profit, as the Olympian reports. Newly hired resource conservation manager Brittin Witzenburg has implemented changes in her first four months on the job that will save the school district $21,000 a year, every year, for many years to come. And she's barely even begun.

Who’s getting PAYD?

The Northwest's guru on pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) auto insurance and related transportation pricing innovations is Todd Litman of the Victoria Tranport Policy Institute. He provides a useful summary of who's doing PAYD in his newsletter, which I'll simply insert below the fold. The growth of PAYD programs is very encouraging, because PAYD is among the most powerful incentives for sound transportation and land-use patterns. There are rumors that a Cascadia locale could be the next place to host a PAYD insurance offering -- more on that, if it comes to fruition.

Feebates, not fuel taxes, are key

Thomas Friedman's usually pitch-perfect commentary on energy and security hit some high notes Sunday, but it also went off key twice, in disappointing ways.

First, the sweetest passage from his New York Times column:

By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars and we are financing the jihadists--and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian mosques and charities that support them--through our gasoline purchases. The oil boom is also entrenching the autocrats in Russia and Venezuela....Finally, by doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are only hastening the climate change crisis.

Now, the ear splitters:

Clean-car dominoes

Clean-car dominoes keep falling. This week, it's Canada, with Oregon next.

On Wednesday, word came that the Canadian government and the big automakers have signed an agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from new vehicles. The previously announced target of a 25 percent reduction in new-car emissions by 2010 has apparently been nixed. In its place is a specified number of tons of gases that automakers must keep out of the atmosphere through improvements to new cars, as MacLeans reports.

The number of tons, according to one report, is roughly equal to the old 25-percent target. Unfortunately, that's a hard claim to assess, because the details of the agreement are still secret.

The 25-percent target has always been important, and ambitious--more ambitious than the 30-percent emissions reduction written into California's clean-car standards because the latter standard has a deadline of 2016. The year 2010 is just around the corner in a gigantic industry that takes many months to usher new technologies into mass production. So even if this agreement turns out to be watered down, it's likely that it at least matches the California standard.