Purple Line Politics Not Green Enough

"Rail Gains Momentum As Purple Line Pick" appeared in a recent edition of The Washington Post and impressed me with its obtuseness to "green" considerations.

Some background: rapid transit in the Washington D.C. area is provided by "Metro," aka the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Metro runs Metrorail, as well as the Metrobus bus service. Metrorail is mostly a subway system in D.C. itself, an above-ground system outside the center city. The rail system has several lines, identified by colors: the Red Line, the Green Line, etc.:



Now comes a proposal for a new Purple Line:



The Purple Line is to link various locations in Montgomery and Prince Georges counties, in suburban Maryland just outside the District of Columbia. But will it be light rail (left), or bus rapid transit (right)? If the former, the cost to build it could be double or even triple the cost of implementing rapid bus service.

The Post article gives many of the ins and outs of making the choice ... but what it fails to do is tell which option is "greener"!

Light rail would be slightly faster, end to end. It would be more reliable than buses, since it can't get snared in traffic tie-ups. And it would foster more needed redevelopment in the increasingly seedy areas near its stations, since the bus route could always be changed and the rail route couldn't.

Also, light rail advocates say their choice would be "snazzier" and attract more ridership from the denizens of the depressed areas along its route, giving them more of what, in their own eyes, they deserve. A bus system would only reinforce to them that they are second-class citizens.

Fine, but it would seem to me that the clinching argument for light rail over bus is that electrically powered light rail would spew less carbon into the atmosphere than gasoline-powered buses. Or would it? The article doesn't even mention the topic. For shame, Washington Post!

Finally! Clean Coal in Germany

Clean-Coal Debut in Germany, from ABC News, documents the opening of the first "clean coal" power plant. Owned by the Swedish utility Vattenfall, the small 30-megawatt pilot plant in Spremberg, Germany, captures the carbon dioxide and water given off when electricity is generated. After being "scrubbed" of pollutants that make acid rain, the carbon dioxide is cooled to liquid form, at -28 degrees Fahrenheit, and stored temporarily.

The liquid CO2 will eventually be trucked to where it can be safely pumped 3,000 feet underground for permanent storage. And one day, it will be sent to its final resting place in a depleted natural gas field via specially built pipeline.

"Carbon capture and storage" (CCS); "carbon sequestration"; "clean coal": these are all buzzwords for the idea that we can still burn coal to produce electricity, if we minimize its huge carbon footprint somehow. We heard a lot about it in the recent presidential election, with John McCain advocating it and Barack Obama being less thrilled. Most of the relatively liberal advocates of reducing carbon emissions purse their lips at CCS, saying it hasn't really been tried. Well, now it has!

Vattenfall spokesman Staffan Görtz, according to a recent article in Discover Magazine that is as yet not available online, calls clean coal more of a bridge to better renewable-energy technologies than a final solution to climate change: "Using this technology will buy us time."

Greening the Ghetto

Greening the Ghetto is Elizabeth Kolbert's profile of Van Jones, an African American advocate of seriously addressing climate change, in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Jones wants programs that will help inner-city youth at the same time as they remedy global warming.

What Jones wants is "that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun, picking up a caulk gun." That is, he wants disaffected ghetto youths to be first in line for the new "green collar" jobs America is about to create: "weatherizing buildings, installing solar panels, and constructing mass-transit systems."

Done right, Jones is saying, the Green Revolution in America can be a twofer: it can get us on track with sustainable energy use, and it can reinvigorate our inner cities! What's not to like?!?

America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency

Want to know what the best strategy for quickly reducing America's carbon footprint is? America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency in a recent issue of TIME is must reading.

Michael Grunwald's article says we have untold opportunities to get more utility out of the energy we currently use, even if we don't intentionally cut back on the amount we use by lifestyle-denying conservation measures: turning off lights, driving less, turning down the thermostat. Efficiency, as opposed to conservation, reduces demand through "consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory" (italics mine). Conservation is gritting your teeth and making do with a lesser amount.

It's all about eliminating waste: "Our power plants ... waste enough energy to power Japan. Only 4% of the energy used to run a typical incandescent bulb produces light; the rest is frittered away as heat at the plant, over transmission lines or in the bulb itself, which is why you burn your fingers when you touch it."

Utilities have to be regulated differently than most are today. Currently, they increase their profits by building more generating capacity and encouraging consumers to use it. Grunwald:

Let utilities make money saving energy. Six states have already decoupled electricity profits from sales volume to give utilities incentives to eliminate energy waste, and nine more may follow. Regulated utilities should also be assured a reasonable rate of return on their investments in efficiency improvements for their customers, just as they are for other capital investments.

This kind of approach complements the mandates, incentives, and standards for efficient generation and transmission of clean energy that we also need to put in place, but it has a quicker payoff. All environmentally conscious Americans should pay heed.