Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

What’s right with the WCI?

Last week, my colleague Eric de Place dinged the Western Climate Initiative -- an effort by Western states and provinces to develop a carbon market with a strict, declining cap -- for kicking the can down the road on transportation fuels.

Of course, the WCI has not ruled out the possibility of capping emissions from the transportation sector. They've just delayed a decision until they run some more economic analysis. So there's no reason to gnash our teeth over a lost opportunity -- not yet, anyway. Still, it's hard to tell whether the glass is half full (transportation fuels haven't been ruled out -- hooray!) or half empty (transportation isn't clearly in yet -- boo!).

However, I listened in on a WCI climate conference call yesterday -- and I gotta say, I really like what they've done with electricity!

The WCI floated a draft proposal last week. And in my view, at least, the glass is about as full as it can get:

A fun traffic simulator and lessons learned

Via Brad Plumer: a traffic jam in in a bottle.

To me, it's pretty remarkable how closely the real-world experiment above matches up with this java-based computer traffic simulator.

Warning: if you click the last link, and you're at all geeky, prepare to lose your afternoon!

Cuteness saves the climate

I thought this was clever -- a Cliff Notes version of climate-friendly lifestyle choices. Click the image for the full-sized version.

Can we trust carbon labeling?

About a year ago, I was cautiously bullish on British supermarket giant Tesco's pledge to start putting carbon labels on its food. But I think that their progress so far -- which I'll get to in a minute -- suggests an important lesson about the policy risks of treating a fuzzy exercise as if it were completely reliable.

Tesco's idea was that the chain and its suppliers would pay for objective, comprehensive reviews of the greenhouse-gas emissions from the foods on the store's shelves. The analyses would cover all major steps in bringing food from farms to the checkout line -- everything from running farm machinery, to food processing, to transportation, to refrigeration. Then, each item in the store would be labeled with the climate-warming emissions that could be traced to that particular product.

This sort of exercise is called "life cycle analysis," and it's been used for decades to great effect, to shed light on all sorts of questions: paper vs. plastic (for bags), cloth vs. disposable (for diapers), hybrids vs. hydrogen (for cars), and a host of others.

Last week, a nifty article by Michael Specter in The New Yorker reported on Tesco's progress so far. The results? There's still only one product on the shelves with a carbon label -- a single brand of potato chips, or "crisps" in British parlance.

You see, as it turns out, life cycle analysis can be really, really difficult. And to make matters worse, it may be that the whole enterprise is chock full of uncertainty.

Where carbon is concerned, it can be hard to trust the label.