Cars have made American cities uglier and more dangerous. Here’s the solution: Make Parking Impossible

Grabar shows how parking inhibits the production of new homes, creating the sad situation in which by “square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person,” and more three-car garages are built than one-bedroom apartments each year. Drivers in Texas alone account for 0.5% of all global CO2 emissions—which is more …

American Road Deaths Show an Alarming Racial Gap

April 2023 By Adam Paul Susaneck, Graphics by Sara Chodosh and Taylor Maggiacomo, Mr. Susaneck is an architectural designer and the founder of Segregation by Design. He uses historical data and archival photography to document the consequences of redlining and urban renewal. An estimated 19 pedestrians a day, on average, were struck and killed by automobiles in this country in 2022. The year before, pedestrian deaths reached …

Private equity firms like Carlyle that don’t have to report are acquiring the most heavily polluting oil and gas drilling operations, endangering Black and brown communities

April 27, 2023 Private equity firms are largely exempt from transparency requirements and in recent years the sector has increasingly bought up the heavily polluting “dregs” of the oil industry. “Despite its public statements to the contrary, Carlyle is a driving force behind climate change,” Oscar Valdés Viera, of the Americans for Financial Reform education fund and a co-author of the report, told The Guardian. “Without …

Trickery, guns, and slavery: The British had been so afraid, for so many centuries, of peasant uprisings that they banned guns and didn’t encourage military marksmanship

Thom Hartmann April 23, 2023 ….David Kopel in a Washington Post article titled on the foundation of gun culture.:1  Kopel shows that the British had been so afraid, for so many centuries, of peasant uprisings that they banned guns and didn’t encourage military marksmanship. Thus, there was virtually no “gun culture” in 17th-century England, so the whole idea of sharpshooters …

See concentration of gasoline superusers and percent of household income spent on gasoline. New bills would help incentivize shift to EVs there.

A pioneering bill that would advance Gasoline Superusers’ conversion to EVs is moving through the California legislature. AB 1267, authored by Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), would add a new EV incentive for Gasoline Superusers and prioritize lower-income Superusers.  The bill is gathering bipartisan support as it moves through the legislative process. The Assembly Transportation Committee passed it 15-0 on …

New Evidence Links Transit Cuts With Poverty and Unemployment

When bus service was eliminated for five years in Clayton County, in the Atlanta metro area, residents endured substantial increases in poverty and unemployment rates. Especially for low-income people and communities of color, transit is “an essential part of the infrastructure, and for now it’s underprovided in most American cities,” Li says. “Reductions in transit service are definitely harmful to …

Brazil’s Indigenous peoples mobilise against encroachment on their lands

As agribusiness, a slow legal system and Bolsonaro’s policies threaten lands, Indigenous peoples are fighting back Pablo AlbarengaFrancesc Badia I Dalmases 7 October 2022, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/brazil-indigenous-lands-mobilisation-landowners-agribusiness/ “Deni Farm, owner Edilson Pereira Duarte”; “Mato Grosso Farm, owner Vanderlei Martins de Oliveira”. These two signs, incorporating the Brazilian flag, are nailed to trees on either side of the road leading to Kapot village, …

Smart charging vs. dumb charging: Electric Vehicles & the Energy Grid — A Match Made In Heaven

By Steve Hanley, Clean Technica, April 2023 ….A pilot study by researchers at Cornell University was published recently in the journal Transport And Environment. In it, the authors acknowledge that the demand for electricity to power electric vehicles could create problems if not managed correctly. But that’s like saying commercial air traffic could create problems if there were no air traffic controllers. If we were still …

Mexico speaks at Democracy Summit: “The oligarchy reigns with the façade of democracy.” We need “greater equality and separation of economic and political power.”

March 31, 2023. By Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. Mexico’s Leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) Used The US Government’s So-Called “Summit For Democracy” To Indirectly Call Out Washington’s Hypocrisy. (A full transcript of AMLO’s speech follows below.) AMLO strongly implied that the United States is an oligarchy, not a real democracy. He argued that the government needs to challenge the …