Via Carbon Brief, here’s an (interactive) world map showing the price people pay for a pound of CO2 in each nation around the world. The US has a “per-ton of CO2” price of 85 cents, versus $26.21 in Germany or $3.79 in Canada (for example). Note that this is the “effective carbon price,” which is […]
Via Fast Company, here’s a chart showing the national CO2 emissions trends from 1990 to 2014, divided up by sector as a percentage of the whole. As you can see, though emissions relative to each other remain largely stable, there is clear trend where transportation emissions are becoming a larger piece of the pie. Here’s the chart: Charlie […]
Passed on from a reader, and from this Citylab article, a simple side-by-side comparison of the USA and Germany. Check out some of the transportation stats: It’s not that the Germans don’t love cars. In fact, I hear they have a few car companies there, and sort-of invented the modern day freeway. Here’s what […]
A friend of mine was recently discussing her problem with air travel, and how impactful emissions from flight can be in ways that people seem to ignore. In other words, even people that care a great deal about the environment and reducing climate change emissions seem to fly around an awful lot. Here’s a chart […]
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: