This article originally appeared in WRI Insights. Read it here. https://www.greenbiz.com/article/5-ways-cut-oil-and-gas-use-through-clean-transportation There’s never been a better time to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Oil and gas prices are skyrocketing as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with gas prices exceeding $4 a gallon in the United States in March and more than $10 a gallon in other countries. Meanwhile, the …
Fare free or zero fare transit could address equity and ridership issues. Here’s how some cities are making it happen.
INNOVATIONS TRANSPORTATION https://www.planning.org/planning/2021/fall/can-zero-fare-transit-work/ Also: By 1980, there were more than 40,000 miles of road in the interstate system (most 90% covered by federal investment). Highway engineers have since added more than 5,000 miles aimed at speeding up traffic and easing congestion, especially for suburban commuters (with federal participation at the 80% level)…in the first 20 years of the interstate highway system, …
San Diego’s Climate Action Plan – Mobility and Land Use Measures and Actions
The Climate Action Plan draft is now out: Climate Action Plan Draft The City of San Diego’s new Climate Action Plan establishes a community-wide goal of net zero by 2035, committing San Diego to an accelerated trajectory for greenhouse gas reductions. PDF: https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/climate_action_plan_draft.pdf or read and comment online at: https://sdclimateaction.konveio.com/strategies-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://sdclimateaction.konveio.com/plan-overview Related to building electrification it has: Strategy 1: Decarbonization …
By 3-1 margin, Salt Lake City residents favor converting to a free bus system
(Rick Egan | Tribune file photo) A UTA supervisor directs TRAX riders to a bus to get them to the next stop, as Trax trains were not operating in downtown Salt Lake City on Jan. 28, 2017. By Lee Davidson | Aug. 6, 2019, 6:00 a.m.| Updated: Aug. 9, 2019, 6:03 a.m. Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story relied …
Nature: A wasted decade of climate inaction shows us that incremental shifts that might have been sufficient at one time are no longer enough. A rapid shift with 4x the work or a third the time is necessary now. Some have stopped fossil fuel production and exploration, but not US
04 March 2020, Nature. Emissions: world has four times the work or one-third of the time: New synthesis shows what a wasted decade means for the climate pact made in Paris. Nature 579, 25-28 (2020) doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00571-x, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00571-x The past decade of political failure on climate change has cost us all dearly. It has shrunk the time left for action by two-thirds. …
Arts and culture in just transition organizing
Excerpt, Common Dreams, May 2021, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/05/14/arts-and-culture-just-transition A central feature of the failed neoliberal experiment was the understanding that inequality of wealth and rights was accepted as a feature and force of economic growth, as Shoshanna Zuboff articulated in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In fact, our neoliberal economic system requires a continual supply of cheap land, natural resources, and labor to generate never …
Leading health damages from vehicle pollution in 12 states and Washington, DC: Ammonia emissions alone cause 10% of early deaths. The largest health damages were $4 million for every ton of particulate matter emitted. Ozone and fine particulate matter from vehicle emissions in 2016 led to an estimated 7,100 deaths in the NE and Mid-Atlantic regions of the US.
A new study that quantifies the total and interstate deaths from transportation-related air pollution from five vehicle types in 12 states and Washington, D.C. has been published in Environmental Research Letters. The research was led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H Chan School …
Is Free Public Transit an Idea Whose Time Has Come?
By SANDY SMITH, Next City, MAY 19, 2021 New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is one of several large public-transit agencies contemplating a fare-free future. (Photo by Adjoajo/CC BY-SA 4.0) The debate over transportation equity has heated up, given the sharp change in transit-rider demographics once the COVID-19 pandemic took most whiter and wealthier riders off of buses and (especially) …
Saving the Climate in a Triple Crisis: A moon shot model for the transformation of capitalism
A helicopter surveyed the area with a searchlight during the Lake Fire in the San Bernardino National Forest near Big Bear Lake, California, in 2015 .Mariana Mazzucato March 15, 2021 Capitalism is facing three major crises. A pandemic-induced health crisis has rapidly ignited an economic crisis with yet unknown consequences for financial stability, and all of this is playing out …
Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales: Tech change without political, economic, and social change that supports
Richard York, October 25, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117739217 Ironically, even though fossil fuels provided substitutes for the main uses of whale oil, the rise of fossil fuel use in the nineteenth century served to increase the intensity of whaling. The connections between fossil fuels and whaling are an example of the unanticipated consequences that frequently come with technological change. I draw on …