Articles by Clark Williams-Derry
Clark Williams-Derry is research director for the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, a nonprofit sustainability think tank working to promote smart solutions for the Pacific Northwest. He was formerly the webmaster for Grist.
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All mixed up
Everyone knows you have to be careful about taking more than one prescription medicine at a time, since drugs can interact in strange and dangerous ways. A Google search of "dangerous drug interactions," for example, yields nearly 10 million hits.
Apparently the same is true of chemical contaminants in the environment. From Scientific American comes this troubling but none-too-surprising story (only part of which is free, unfortunately) suggesting that mixtures of toxic chemicals are often more potent and damaging than the compounds in isolation.
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The price is right
I suppose it was bound to happen sometime: the Olympia, Washington Olympian is reporting that biodiesel is now cheaper than regular diesel.
Until now, biodiesel consumers have had to pay a premium at the pump; making highway fuel from vegetable oil was more costly than pumping it out of the ground. But thanks to rapidly rising crude prices, that's no longer true.
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Cities are cool
Cool images from the Center for Neighborhood Technology show that people who live in dense urban areas -- downtown San Francisco, the denser parts of L.A., or the Chicago city core -- emit less CO2 for transportation. See for yourself:
I'm showing San Francisco above because it's closest to my heart, but I think the Chicago map is coolest.
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Demand answers
This Oil Drum post goes a long way toward explaining why oil prices have risen so sharply over the last couple of years. According to international oil agencies, global oil production has been fairly flat since the middle of 2004, even as economic growth around the globe has boosted demand. The chart below, derived from U.S. Energy Information Administration figures, shows OPEC production only, but world figures are much the same.
Of course, the global petroleum system is so huge, and some production poorly enough tracked, that there's a lot of uncertainty in the graph above. But it's hard to escape the notion that high prices are being caused by actual global supply limitations, not by oil-company malfeasance or somesuch.
