Deron Lovaas's Blog: Living Sustainably

Delivering Mobility Choices

2010-01-11T20:57:31Z

The Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting is underway here in D.C., with thousands of transportation experts gathering to hear presentations and participate in sessions exploring technical and policy issues. One blogger overheard talk of a drafting process going on within the new Administration from a top DOT official. I hope this is a real sign of progress, given that the unacceptable status quo law has been in place far too long.

How long, you ask? One could argue that it’s been in place since 1956, the year the Interstate System of highways was launched by Congress and the Eisenhower Administration. That law was dubbed the “National Interstate and Defense Highways Act,” and helped launch an era of economic growth and prosperity in the U.S. But the more precise answer is that it’s been in place since 2005, when the Safe, Affordable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act – A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU), was enacted. This was the latest in a series of multi-year transportation authorizations that built on the architecture of the 1956 law.

The end result is a teetering mass of more than 100 programs lacking a clear overarching set of objectives. But that may not be the worst of it. The latest law was signed into law just days after a huge energy bill. And then two years later, a new energy bill was passed. And now, less than three years later, we are debating another energy bill. This legislative activity since the turn of the millennium is partly aimed at tackling what President Bush called our “addiction to oil” in his 2006 State of the Union, and rightly so.

What drives that addiction? Transportation is responsible for the lion’s share of our oil consumption and is almost entirely dependent on oil-derived liquid fuels. So it’s logical to assume that policymakers would be intent on aligning our transportation policy with our national policy goal of energy independence (or as some prefer to call it, energy security).

Think again. Saving oil is not a goal of our national transportation policy, putting it potentially at odds with energy policy. That’s unacceptable, since both environmental quality and our nation’s security is at risk (for more details, click here, here and/or here for a newer, thought-provoking analysis co-authored by Amy Jaffe of Rice University).

That’s why I’ve joined a rather unusual group to push anew for choices for consumers. I’ve collaborated with some of these advocates and experts before, pushing for more vehicle choices at dealerships and more fuel prices at the pump. Now, with the transportation law up for renewal, is the time to boost investments in more mobility choices.

The principles that underpin our platform are: 1) Alignment of price signals to consumers closer to a full and transparent reflection of costs; 2) End federal bias for any particular transportation mode by basing investments on performance criteria and allocating costs based on use; 3) Push responsibility down to the metropolitan level; and 4) Aggressively deploy technology to improve operations in each transportation mode.

From these principles, we derive a ten-point plan for federal transportation policy:

1) Ensure the price of fuel better reflects oil’s security impact;

2) Deploy “HOT” lanes and congestion pricing;

3) Allocate transit dollars to optimize oil savings;

4) Increase insurance choice;

5) Provide transit vouchers for low-income households;

6) Make telecommuting more frequent and widespread;

7) Return gas tax revenue to areas with the most traffic and oil savings potential;

8) Liberalize local land-development rules;

9) Deploy smart traffic management; and

10) Deploy electric rail if justified by cost efficiency and oil displacement potential.

Next we plan to gauge the oil-saving potential of our plan. Stay tuned, and please fan the effort on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

50 Simple Things

2008-04-15T22:59:47Z

I cut my teeth on environmental work volunteering with the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) back in 1991. This was in the wake of 1990, a remarkable time which included the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, Congress amending the Clean Air Act, and SEAC hitting a high watermark by bringing 7,000 students from 50 states to the huge Catalyst conference at the University of Illinois.

1990 was also the year that a cool book chock-full of advice for protecting the environment sold like hotcakes: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save the Earth, self-published by John Javna and Julie Bennett.

Now, thanks to the hard work of the original author and his two teenaged kids Sophie and Jesse, this classic has been updated, enhanced and published under the same memorable title.

As a newly-minted father, I was touched by his rationale for launching this project, as he described it in the introduction:

"In 2006, my 13-year-old daughter, Sophie, started to become environmentally aware. She began asking why we didn't compost anymore...and why I didn't bring cloth bags to the supermarket. One day, I started to tell her why it didn't matter [John had become disillusioned since 1990] --why all the well-meaning recycling in the universe wouldn't stop global warming. But I stopped in mid-sentence. It was weird--I found myself staring, literally, into the eyes of the next generation, the person I had written my book for years before she'd been born. It dawned on me that I couldn't afford to be cynical-- I had to keep trying because I love this planet.

That epiphany was the genesis of the book you're holding in your hands. It's a father's effort to reclaim the Earth for his children, and yours."

The book as re-conceived has 50 specific issues, and progress with resolving each would have a big effect. And there is a partner with whom readers can collaborate on each issue. Some partners are small, like Seacology and Eco-Cycle, while others are big like Sierra Club and -- I'm honored to say -- NRDC.

NRDC, specifically our Move America Beyond Oil project, is the partner for #20: Too Much Gas! which calls for saving gasoline and therefore oil.

As the piece we helped John to write makes clear, and as I've written about before, getting higher fuel economy standards as we did in last year's energy bill is a good start, but there's a lot more we can do. Individually, we can inflate our tires, tune our engines, avoid idling, and take other measures. In terms of policy, the federal government must stop obstructing California and other states from moving forward with standards that will cut more pollution and save more gas, as my colleague David Doniger has discussed on these pages.

The book offers practical suggestions like these for saving gas and provides interesting background and facts on this and a host of other important environmental issues. John and his kids deserve huge kudos for this production, and I urge you to check it out and to track this issue on NRDC's new web page designed specifically for our partnership with the Javnas.

The Passing of In Business

2008-01-29T15:49:56Z

It's a tough time for print media, with unrelenting competitive pressures from proliferating alternatives for getting news and information on television and online. The magazine In Business: Creating Sustainable Enterprises and Communities became the latest casualty, closing its doors after nearly thirty years in operation.

I subscribed ten years ago, and learned about the activities of socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneurs across the country. I learned about new concepts like thinker Bill McDonough's "cradle-to-cradle" vision for closing production loops, putting waste into new products rather than landfills. I learned about application of this concept in eco-industrial parks and deconstruction rather than demolition of old buildings (a much more useful process than the "deconstruction" I learned about in Philosophy classes). I learned about New Urbanism and ecotourism. I even had the privilege, thanks to support from ever-generous editors Jerry and Nora Goldstein, of writing a few articles for In Business.

What distinguished the magazine is that it focussed on small- and large-scale ways to do good and make good. Business trends and activities in the magazine varied from the work of committed activists to save the first Community Service Agriculture farm in Massachusetts, a modest 17 acres worth protecting, to the multimillion-dollar chocolate bar company that protects endangered species, to a cool nationwide trend of reusing abandoned buildings downtown as art studios. In Business was a one-stop shopping place for stories about innovative business ventures that ran the gamut in terms of scale.

While I look forward to receiving its sister publication, the better-known BioCycle, I will now have to hunt down other means to learn what's new in the world of sustainable business. Huge kudos to Jerry, Nora and the staff and advisers at JG Press for running such a useful publication for nearly thirty years. I will miss it.

Setting the Record Straight, Again

2008-01-17T21:53:03Z

"A groundless rumor often covers a lot of ground."
- Anonymous

An old claim has been brought to my attention again. Hybrids pollute more than Hummers because of one component: The battery. Not believable, and definitely not true!

The best tool for debunking rumors like this is Argonne National Lab’s GREET (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation) Model. The respected Society of Automotive Engineers dubbed it the “gold standard” model for analyzing vehicles and fuels.

Argonne juxtaposed comparable internal combustion and hybrid cars, and did indeed find that the latter will yield slightly more global warming pollution in the manufacturing process. BUT – production accounts for a mere 10-20% of a vehicle’s lifetime emissions profile. Far more important is 15 years of driving, the average for cars. Take that into account, and you find that a regular car's lifetime emissions are nearly TWICE those of a hybrid.

The “regular car” in this example gets 25 mpg. Since the Hummer is lucky to hit double-digits in mpg its lifetime heat-trapping pollution eclipses the hybrid's.

Thanks to my colleague Luke Tonachel for passing along this analysis, and for adding some points to keep in mind when considering environmental downsides of batteries:

All cars use batteries and the elements for those batteries, whether lead in conventional vehicles or nickel in today’s hybrids, are mined. Mining is not without environmental problems.
Lead is more pervasive and therefore more toxic than nickel.
Nickel batteries, like lead batteries, can be recycled.
The use of nickel metal hydride batteries enables the hybrid car to exist because lead batteries would be too big and heavy to provide the same performance in a hybrid that they have today.
Nickel batteries will soon by transitioning to lithium batteries. Lithium batteries can be even more environmentally benign. Lithium is not toxic and lithium batteries can pack more power into each pound of cell than nickel metal hybrid batteries, enabling cars to use more clean electrical energy and less gasoline without weighing down the vehicle further. Some cars in Japan already have lithium batteries and they will likely be in US vehicles in the next couple of years.

Salon.com and the good life

2007-10-30T16:23:01Z

This week marks the beginning of "The Good Life," a new column on salon.com about living an environmentally responsible life as a citizen and consumer.

As the proud owner of a Honda Civic hybrid, I don't entirely agree with this first installment, which covers cars. It notes that the price differential for hybrids is daunting for consumers, and it may be rational instead to purchase one of the increasing number of cheaper, almost equally efficient vehicle offerings like the Honda Fit or Nissan Versa.

There's plenty of truth in that, but it's also the case that early adopters like yours truly shell out a premium for cool technology for good reasons. For example, my wife and I decided it's worth it in order to make a statement and to prod along the spread of hybrid technology in the marketplace. And with the price runups at the gas pump since we bought our car, any leftover heartburn about that premium quickly faded.

The article makes another important point, which is that consumers might want to hold off because as hybrid technology matures out of its tiny-niche status, the next generation will rise to compete in the marketplace: Plug-in hybrid vehicles, which are covered in a recent NRDC-Electric Power Research Institute report. That technology really stands a chance of denting both oil dependnece and global warming pollution.

Overall, it's a thought-provoking piece, and I look forward to next week's installment.

Yes, Growth Can Be Good

2007-10-29T21:32:53Z

Passionate defender of nature Edward Abbey once said that "growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Skepticism about growth isn't unusual among those of us interested in conserving natural resources. I have thought a lot about this issue during my career, most notably in my three years at Zero Population Growth about a decade ago.

Over time I have come to understand the wisdom in Abbey's words, which do not condemn growth per se. Growth can be good. In the case of land development, for example, it can be "smart growth." In the case of economic development, it can be "sustainable."

Unfortunately, a couple of recent polls show highlight a rising tension in the way Americans think about growth.

On the one hand, a national Public Opinion Strategies survey commissioned by Smart Growth America and the National Association of Realtors found that 88% of Americans approve of improved public transportation and 83% approve of building communities where people can walk more as approaches to reduce energy use. 81% of voters want to develop older areas to accommodate population growth between now and 2050, rather than building new.

On the other hand, the same survey found that the number of voters who disapprove of new development has doubled in the past eight years, to a large minority at 20%. Another poll, however, found that 78% of Americans oppose any new development in their communities, up five points from last year.

Spot the glaring inconsistency? Here it is: Redevelopment of older areas, walkability, and viable public transportation systems, which the vast majority of us want, all require something that too many of us are against: Growth, or development.

I am reminded of an issue that has oddly become a bit of a controversy in my neighborhood in College Park: A pedestrian bridge connecting our town with the town of Greenbelt across the tracks. You read right: Not a highway, not a big mall, but a pedestrian bridge. And yet a small but committed band is fighting this modest amenity. As a community leader recently wrote, Groucho Marx would probably be pretty popular in our neighborhood if he stuck to the sentiment he expressed in a song in the 1930s movie Horsefeathers: "I'm against it, I'm against it, No matter how you've changed it or condensed it, I'm against it!"

The silver lining on this issue in the Public Opinion Strategies poll is that the largest plurality -- 43% -- of people answer "Depends" when asked about new growth. I agree, and I like to think that Edward Abbey would too.