On Line vs. Driving to the Store
Via Green Inc., the answer (sorta) to a question I posed a while back:
Shoppers sitting in their living rooms and ordering items like hair-dryers or cameras online used 35 percent less energy, the study found, than people who shopped the old-fashioned way.
“Customer transport” — in other words, driving to and from the mall — accounted for 65 percent of energy and emissions from the brick-and-mortar shopping method.
Click through for caveats. Lots of them.
Crying Drought
One of the common themes in drought journalism (mine at times included, sadly) is the tendency to cry “drought” at minor excursions into the down side of natural variability, when the real problem is not so much water supply as voracious consumption. Blaming nature is a whole lot easier than blaming ourselves.
Is that the case now in California? Bettina Boxall’s story in this morning’s LA Times (h/t Belshaw) seems to suggest it might be:
The water interests who have spit out grim news releases the last two months were silent Monday in the face of the growing snowpack.
Those who would like to build new reservoirs and canals and to weaken environmental regulations have invoked the drought like a mantra in recent weeks.
A recently introduced congressional bill that would allow federal officials to relax endangered-species protections in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is titled the California Drought Alleviation Act.
“For over 100 years in California, the drought argument has been used consistently to justify actions, and I think this is no exception,” said Robert Wilkinson, director of the Water Policy Program at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.
Global Warming Somehow Contributing to Home Runs in Texas
From the Guardian:
“Global warming?” he sniffed. “Well, whatever.”
Kinsler did appear to agree, however, that the conditions are subtly changing at the Ballpark. “It depends on where you hit the ball and what time of year it is,” said Kinsler. “Rudy is right in that balls you think you tagged will sometimes get knocked down at the warning track. But a lot of days early in the season, the ball jumps to center field, then by June, from the edge of the berm all the way around past our bullpen [in right field], you can go for several weeks at a time when anything hit in the air will fly out of there.”
(h/t Dan McKay)
Dry Colorado
Great piece by Matt Jenkins in the latest High Country News about the Colorado River, and how it doesn’t really have as much water as we think. If you care about western water (or love a good water yarn), go read the whole thing.
Elephant Diaries: On Feeling Outnumbered
We’ve always been outnumbered. It’s getting worse:
Packs of lobbyists fill two rooms outside the House and Senate chambers in Richmond every afternoon, watching the proceedings on big video screens, zapping legislators with e-mails the instant the lobbyists sense that one of their bills might be in trouble. The interest groups that hire lobbyists can rest easy; they’ve got the legislature covered.
Down the hall, the people’s representatives have a hangout of their own, the press room. But there, nearly half the desks are empty. Reporters have been called home, reassigned, bought out, laid off. Only one TV station in Virginia still has a reporter at the capital. Many newspapers have decided to cover the capital by phone, if at all.
(h/t Jim Belshaw)
The Dance of the Gasoline Prices
Clearing out some old piles of reading material, I ran across an old CBO report from a year ago on gasoline prices. It seems so long ago, my obsession with elasticities (short term and long) and the effect of rising energy prices on behavior large and small.
Many drivers have responded to higher gasoline prices in the way that they drive, but overall the response has been very small.
Petroleum consumption
Let’s check in, shall we, just for old times’ sake, on US petroleum consumption. I never tire of this graph, as our consumption falls off a cliff. You can seem consumption leveling off there in that cloud of dots during 2007, and beginning to drop in the first half of 2008. That’s the result of the price increase. Modest, as the CBO study notes. Then – yikes! Off a cliff. That discontinuity is on the demand side, unrelated to prices, because we are (or feel) broke.
Here, I’ll show you what I mean:
personal consumption spending
Spring?
I’ve got work to do this afternoon, but I’m completely distracted by the show outside. It’s been so dry here that I had to turn on some water in the backyard. That’s drawn the birds like nutso – juncos, sparrows and house finches mostly, but I saw a couple lesser goldfinches in the neighbor’s elm tree (which is starting to leaf out).
The picture is from the window in my home office. There’s a little house finch splashing ’round in the bird bath like he hasn’t seen rain in two months.
The lilacs are starting to leaf out too, and we saw a hawk swoop low from southeast to northwest as we were sitting in the back munching lunch. Official Inkstain Daughter Nora dropped by unannounced on a long walk. There are few things better in life than having your kiddo drop in and spending some leisurely unplanned time in the backyard listening to birds, moving a sprinkler around and chatting with your offspring.
As you can tell, though, I’m back at the computer. The work will commence. But the window’s open and I can still hear the birds.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Dry Weather Edition
Closing out a rainless February, Albuquerque ties the record for driest start to a year.
update: Just for the record, while there was no rain at the official Albuquerque weather station, I did record 0.01 inch at my house Feb. 11.
It’s All About the Water
Two-thirds of the world’s population will face a lack of water in less than 20 years, if current trends in climate change, population growth, rural to urban migration and consumption continue, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro warned today.
Worth noting that, given climate change commitment, only three of those four, involving the demand side of water, are actionable on a 20-year time scale. We’d better get on it.
(h/t David Zetland, whose answer of course, is markets!)