Articles by Payton Chung

Leave your car(e)s behind on vacation

Dreaming of getting away in August? How about getting away from your car? Xtracycle, a maker of "cargo bike" kits, offers up "car-free vacation tips" so you can fill your vacation with "clean, affordable, soulful transportation," whether in town or exploring the wilderness. Among the hints: plan ahead, choose your destination wisely, combine modes, and travel light.

Others … not so much, says new poll

A recent Pew Center poll done just as An Inconvenient Truth was opening nationally finds, not surprisingly, that Americans don't care about global warming. Or do they?

41 percent say global warming is a very serious problem, 33 percent see it as somewhat serious, and roughly a quarter (24 percent) think it is either not too serious or not a problem at all.

That puts global warming 19th among 20 issues ranked. However, a very strong partisan pattern emerges here: although it's dead last among Republicans, it ranks 14th for both Democrats and independents, above such "hot button" issues as government surveillance, flag burning, abortion, the inheritance tax, and gay marriage, and about the same as the budget deficit and immigration.

EU may introduce carbon tax on airplanes

Following up on an earlier post on commercial aviation and global warming: the European Parliament voted 439 yes / 74 no / 102 abstain last week to tax jet fuel used on cross-border, intra-European flights, to allow member states to impose VAT (sales tax) on jet fuel, and to apply a cap-and-trade system to carbon dioxide emissions from aviation. (Currently, international flights, including those within the EU, pay no tax on their jet fuel.)

Airlines predictably condemned the maneuver, calling on the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization to issue a proposal that would apply globally.

Investors see green in buildings

Contrary to popular belief, most developers don't bulldoze Bambi solely to satisfy their innate avarice. Instead, they pave the Earth at the bidding of their clients -- by which I mean lenders and investors, not homebuyers, office tenants, or other such "end users." Regardless of how exciting and cool a development proposal is, it just won't happen if some faceless banker doesn't advance a big pile of cash.

As rapacious national banks swallow smaller, local competitors by the dozen, these lending decisions have increasingly fallen to bankers blindly applying generic guidelines. The result: a paint-by-numbers landscape of interchangeable (but financially safe) subdivisions, strip malls, and office parks. Any developer who dared to innovate would have to do so on his own dime -- and sure enough, many pioneering examples of New Urbanism have been backed by "nontraditional" investors like old-money families, large corporations (like Microsoft, Disney, EDS, and Ebsco), and even charitable foundations. Despite growing interest in socially responsible investing, few investors have thought of how to clean up the picture in the building industry -- source of, say some, half of America's greenhouse gas emissions.