Two of the best sources of information and dialogue about climate and related issues are the Climate Progress blog edited by Dr. Joseph Romm a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, author, former Clinaton Administration official and general smart guy (pretty much known to everyone as Joe) who is now assisted by longtime renewable energy writer/editor/video producer Stephen Lacey and the Dot Earth blog maintained on the New York Times website by Andrew Revkin, who started the blog while working as a staff reporter at the Times and has continued with it while moving to a new day job at Pace University (and yes, he is known to one and all, including people who just know him as the guitar player in Uncle Wade, as Andy).
Andy Revkin and Joe Romm often disagree in ways that can be grating and sometimes, less often, entertaining. So it is striking when they converge on the same topics.
In a Dot Earth post on May 25 Revkin calls out with approval for Romm’s blog post about tornadoes and global warming quoting Joe’s conclusion that:
When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.
Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.
In the same blog post Andy complements another Climate Progress blog post about the full greenhouse gas emissions associated with natural gas use, specifically discussing a new analysis from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (that is not yet peer reviewed) that, “appears to strongly undercut the widely cited conclusion by Robert Howarth of Cornell that leakage and other issues make natural gas a greater greenhouse threat than coal.”
These are two very important topics: the causal relationships that can be seen between global warming and our immediate environment, teasing apart the very real effects of climate change from other phenomena, and understanding the true environment effects of choices we make like increased extraction and use of natural gas.
Tony Redington
While carpooling and transit deserves consideration, the collapse of highway funding (the U.S. has been using general funds for hears now since the Highway Fund went bust) means an agonizing re-appraisal of ground transportation. Car pooling and commuter choice programs make sense and are easy. Cutting down the State highway systems down to size, slashing federal routes to a minimum (interstates, one or two other longer routes and some minor extensions off the interstate/longer routes and that is it), and jumping U.S. gas prices up to $9-$10 over a few years so that U.S./state gas taxes reach $5-$6 like other energy dependent modern countries–those are a start! Then a state like Maine would have about a half billion dollars from gas taxes to support general fund services (like Europeans do) and still provide necessary and unprecedented quality rail and public transport services.
With a $5 gas tax vehicle miles of travel would drop about 40, again look at European numbers. The tax itself likely get split evenly between the feds and a states like Vermont, for example, would receive about $500 million additional funds mostly available for social services like education, health and welfare programming. A dream? Not really, its the life is led in Scandinavia, Germany and France today.