I love interactive maps and one got my attention recently. Christopher M. Jones and Daniel M. Kammen at UC Berkeley published a study in 2013 taking data on household carbon footprints to develop carbon profiles of zip codes, cities, counties, and states. They took the carbon profile data and produced an interactive map of the […]
It might seem lovely to be enjoying all this warm weather, green grass, sunshine and flowers here at the end of a Minnesota November. Welcome to the warmest month of all time (“all-time” equals “since 1880, and relative to a 30-year baseline beginning at mid-century). Via Paul Huttner’s MPR climate blog, here’s the NASA chart: […]
Here’s a chart from a recent study by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a big International thinktank, about the relationship between CO2 emissions and bicycling modeshare (i.e. the percentage of people who use one mode of travel vs. another). They ran two scenarios about how urban bicycling could affect greenhouse gas emission. […]
I am hereby naming this column “The Crank.” That’s because I’m cranky, I like bicycles, and a crank is the part of a bicycle that makes it move. With this in mind, I’d like to offer the following cartoon shout-outs. This one goes out to the Mall of America and “American Boulevard” in Bloomington: In […]
Via Brendon Slotterback’s Twitter, here’s a chart showing Minneapolis’ energy use and “built square footage” (i.e. the total amount of buildings) over time: As Slotterback says: Minneapolis’ total electricity use has declined 4% since ’06 while total square footage has increased 5.5%. At the global scale, preventing out of control climate change requires de-linking GDP […]
Summertime has caused a short delay in the effort to complete work on Bicyclopolis Book 2 as Ken And Roberta Avidor travel in multi-modal style by train, bus and Brompton folding bike to sketch far-flung, exotic locales such as Red Wing, Minnesota. in the interim, here’s another antediluvian Roadkill Bill comic. Click on the comic to make it bigger:
This isn’t a weather report. Well it is, but that’s not the point. Check out what MPR’s Paul Huttner’s great blog says about “climate disruption.” First your forecast: OK, that’s summer. But the real eye-raising part is Huttner’s link to the Weather Channel’s list of top 25 cities for climate disruption. For some reason, Minneapolis […]
Progress has resumed on Bicyclopolis Book 2 after a brief hiatus in which Roberta and I visited Sioux Falls, South Dakota via Jefferson Lines and Brompton bikes. Here again is a vintage Roadkill Bill comic. Click on the comic to make it bigger:
Here’s a chart from a NY Times story about how growth continues in the sunbelt cities, and not so much in the Northern parts of the country: For the record, the Twin Cities are growing faster than many other cities in the midwest or upper midwest, but the take-away from the Times piece is this: […]
Via Todd Graham on Twitter, here’s a chart that shows traffic projections that I can get behind: future emissions by mode in Minnesota, given some assumptions about traffic and fuel. Here are the projected changes: For anyone serious about climate change, thinking about mode share and transportation patterns is crucial to actually slowing our emissions growth. It’s […]