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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Giant power sucking sound
Here's one problem that should be relatively easy to fix: appliances that use power even when they're not in use. The Economist has a nice summary of the problem:
Strange though it seems, a typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food. For while heating food requires more than 100 times as much power as running the clock, most microwave ovens stand idle--in "standby" mode--more than 99% of the time.
Apparently, somewhere between 5 and 13 percent of residential power is consumed by appliances that nobody is actually using. Hmph.
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Oregon tests out an alternative to the gas tax — pay-by-the-mile taxes
There was a bunch of comment in the blogosphere yesterday about hiking gas taxes, with the rough consensus that it's OK environmental policy, tough on the poor, and politically risky (though perhaps not quite as unthinkable as it once was).
So it's interesting to note that Oregon -- often considered a policy innovator among U.S. states -- is in the middle of an experiment that could eventually lead to a repeal of the state gas tax.
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A simple change that can help utilities and their customers conserve energy
This is good news: According to NW Current, more and more utilities are becoming interested in "decoupling" -- which could be the single most cost-effective step I've heard of for encouraging conservation.
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Always low toxics? Well, sometimes, at least
A while back I wrote about all the "fake news" -- really, just corporate P.R. -- that comes into my email inbox as a result of our work on flame retardants in people's bodies. Most of the news stories are really just press releases from companies touting the fact that they'd removed PBDEs and other hazardous substances from their products. Any single press release, by itself, is hardly worthy of notice. But viewed as a whole, the steady drumbeat of companies announcing that they'd managed to make their products less toxic seemed like an important, if unheralded, good news story.
