Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

Pollution’s effects linger, long after compounds are banned

A new study by researchers at a British Columbia cancer agency stands as a stark reminder that, when it comes to pollution, an ounce of pollution prevention is worth a pound of cure:

Researchers found people with the highest levels of a certain type of insecticide in their blood had 2.7 times the risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma as those with the lowest amounts ...

People with PCBs in their blood, meanwhile, had twice the risk of developing the disease as those with the lowest exposures. That's about the same level of increased risk as having a family history of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The thing to remember is that these compounds were banned 30 years ago. But they're still hanging around, tainting the soil and the food chain, and causing all sorts of problems.

For some kinds of pollution, you just can't put the genie back in the bottle -- meaning that it's much better not to open the bottle in the first place.

French government charges fees to new owners of gas-guzzling vehicles

France is supercharging vehicle efficiency -- not by doling out big R&D subsidies for cars that never make it to market, but by instituting a system of efficiency feebates.

In a nutshell: the French ministry of ecology has announced a program that would require purchasers of new gas guzzlers (luxury Mercedes, for example) to pay an extra fee for the privilege. That money is rebated to people who buy super-efficient cars. If it's done right, the system doesn't really involve taxpayers, since the rebates balance out the fees. And it gives huge incentives for sales of the most gas-miserly vehicles.

Voila -- instant fuel efficiency!

How much power do Americans guzzle for lighting?

Can anyone out there help me out?

Doing some fact-checking for a book, I ran across a question I didn't know the answer to: How much power is consumed by lighting in the U.S.? I spent a bit of time Googling for an answer, but at risk of looking like a dim bulb, I have to confess -- I just couldn't figure it out!

More backlash against new coal power plants

The headline says it all: "PacifiCorp labels coal a no-go for new plants."

PacifiCorp has backed away from plans to build any new coal plants within the next 10 years, conceding that coal no longer can overcome tightening regulations and environmental opposition.

This seems like a big deal, since -- in my opinion at least -- the gravest long-term climate threat from our part of the world is coal-fired power. Nationwide, coal power plants represent America's largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions; and there's still an awful lot of coal in the ground in the American West. Until recently, coal's abundance, coupled with rising demand for electricity, has made a rapid proliferation of coal power seem more or less inevitable.

But this announcement throws that into a cocked hat. Perhaps the lesson here is that the politics of climate change are changing so quickly that what seemed inevitable as recently a few years ago is starting to look unthinkable.