Independence day has just ended, and in the spirit of a holidy, I have something positive to report: some parts of the U.S. are making significant progress in improving their environment, meeting the Kyoto standard even though the White House failed to support it — and rather than going bankrupt doing it, they're actually coming out ahead economically. The trick appears to be to take a large number of little steps, all couched in terms of solving other problems that citizens want dealt with (such as traffic congestion or energy costs), redirecting saved money from energy into public transit, and nudging businesses to support public transit. Portland, Oregon's carbon dioxide emissions are at pre-1990 levels now.
California is also taking steps, covering the west coast, and the entire northeastern corner of the country has its own program. One can only hope that as more and more parts of the United States show environmental successes that it will bring enough light and pressure to the White House to force them to reconsider Kyoto.
Technological advances may help as well: the PAC-car, a high-efficiency prototype vehicle, set a new world record recently, completing its first test run around the Michelin test track at Ladoux, France using only 1.07 grams of hydrogen — this is reported to be equivalent to "5,134 kilometres per litre of petrol", which if my math is correct is about 12,075 miles per gallon. It then improved its own record the next day, going up to 5385 kilometres per litre of petrol (12666 miles/gallon). While this vehicle is usable only on a test track, if that kind of performance could be transferred to street vehicles, you could drive around the world on a couple gallons of gas, which means that we might be able to keep our transportation costs from crippling the economy as the price of oil rises — assuming the technology does transfer to real world machines well, and the vehicles are allowed to come to market in time.
More countries are starting to use ocean waves for power generation. The most recent country to experiment with this is Norway, which is building a wave farm near Portugal slated to go active in 2006, and the University of Oregon is also running wave power experiments.
It can be done. We just have to encourage the people willing to do it.
Link credit for the recent news about Portland's success (which inspired the entire entry) goes to Feministe.
