Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

Just plane frustrating

In a typical year, my family's biggest source of CO2 emissions is -- by quite a wide margin -- air travel. We use less gasoline than a typical American family, but we more than make up for it by traveling long distances to visit our family, scattered around the east and west coasts.

A few years back, I started strategizing about how to reduce our air travel. And I settled on a two-step plan.

• Step one: convince my sister to move from San Jose, CA to Seattle -- which would not only mean that we could see much more of each other, but also save our families at least 8 round trips per year (4 for her family, 4 for mine).
• Step two: give up traveling to see our east coast family for a year, and vacation close to home -- saving at least one cross-country round trip flight for our family of 4.

So this year, we put both steps into action. My sister and her family will be moving into our neighborhood (yay!) and we decided to go car camping rather than traveling to the east coast. We'll be flying a lot less as a result.

But as things have turned out, I'm not sure our plans have saved a single drop of fuel.

Sinks a lot?

A quick vacation to Washington's Olympic Peninsula reminded me of two things. First -- dang, those trees are huge!

And second -- dang, there's a lot of clearcut coastal forestland that's still just basically sitting there: no trees, just scrub and piles of decaying stumps.

Which got me to thinking: How much CO2 could the clearcut land store if returned to its full rainforest glory? Enough to take a serious bite out of our climate-warming emissions?

Stuck in neutral

According to The Washington Post, U.S. fuel economy is stuck in neutral: despite high gas prices, vehicle fuel economy hasn't improved a whit compared with the previous year.

But wait, it gets worse.

Lessons from Bogotá

Very worth reading: an article in British Columbia webzine The Tyee about the former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, who catalyzed sweeping reforms in the capital city:

Enrique Peñalosa presided over the transition of a city that the world--and many residents--had given up on. Bogota had lost itself in slums, chaos, violence, and traffic...He built more than a hundred nurseries for children. He built 50 new public schools and increased enrolment by 34 percent. He built a network of libraries. He created a highly-efficient, "bus highway" transit system. He built or reconstructed hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, more than 300 kilometres of bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, and more than 1,200 parks.

And much of the mayor's success stemmed from a decision to reclaim urban spaces from private cars, by restricting parking (no more cars on sidewalks!), raising gas taxes to pay for rapid transit, and reprogramming money for roads to other, more pressing concerns.