In order to fight climate change, we’re heading into a zero-carbon future. This is a problem that needs to be tackled in part by making cities and neighborhoods that are more walkable and bikeable with good access to mass transportation, but it’s clear that many people and many places won’t make the shift to those […]
With this cold snap bringing temps into –15º territory, I was reminded that a few weeks back I posted Minnesota’s Carbon Donut, a map showing which parts of the state of Minnesota have households contributing a larger carbon footprint. With current temps it is probably worth a map on the urban heat island of the Twin Cities. In September, 2015, The Journal of Applied […]
Via Fresh Energy’s blog, here’s a chart showing the number of “community solar” applications that are in the pipeline since Xcel Energy began the program in 2014. (This is accurate as of December.) While there’s a lot of interest in the program (which allows individuals or organizations to purchase solar electricity without having to build […]
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 […]
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 […]
On the week of October 19th, and 20th, the city councils of Hopkins and Saint Louis Park voted to do something exceedingly rare in Minnesota. The two city councils voted to go through with redrawing the city borders, annexing land from the other city. On paper, initially, Hopkins comes out on top gaining about 3 additional acres […]
A doctoral student at the UGA, Neil Debbage, led a study trying to determine with urban forms affected urban heat islands the most. The study also ranked the urban heat islands of the U.S. Researchers found no one size fits all urban model where the advice to build more dense or build more sprawling would solve […]
I came across a post reporting a recent study on U.S. farm data and found a dramatic loss in crop diversity, as the study then points out lack of crop diversity has implications with how farms handle evolving climates. This map was used to breakdown the U.S into agricultural resource regions. Minnesota is one […]
Via the Washington Post, here’s a detail from a beautiful map of all the electricity plants in the United States, colored and sized according to type and capacity. The details for Minnesota are highlighted: I general, I guess you can say that Minnesota has a balanced energy footprint. We’re not as coal-heavy as many Midwestern states […]