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Officials hope voters might favor gas tax boost to fight warming
Rachel Gordon, San Francisco Chronicle
Regional officials are taking a close look at trying to increase the Bay Area’s gasoline tax by as much as 10 cents a gallon and believe voters might agree to it as a way to help combat global warming, The Chronicle learned Thursday.
Although the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been able to ask voters for a higher gas tax since 1997, a decade of polls indicated there was little chance such an unpopular idea would ever secure the necessary two-thirds approval in the nine Bay Area counties.
Now, however, with public concern building over climate change, the electorate might not be so opposed to a new gas tax as long as voters see it as a way to help the environment, officials said.
A 10-cent-a-gallon increase in the Bay Area could generate an estimated $300 million a year or more to pay for transportation-related projects. Although the money could be used for roads, the emphasis probably would be on public transit and efforts to reduce auto pollution.
(5 October 2007)
Global warming requires local solutions
John Bailey, Start Tribune
Cities should use bonding authority to promote energy conservation. The savings would easily pay back the expense.
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More than 650 cities around the country, including Minneapolis, have formally agreed to honor the Kyoto Protocol and reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. That’s very good news. The bad news is that many of these cities, according to a news reports, are counting too heavily on the federal government to pay for their efforts.
Mayor Douglas Palmer of Trenton, N.J., president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, was quoted recently as saying, “A lot of cities don’t have the money to do the kinds of things that are necessary.” He added, “The budgets are tight; we just can’t do it.”
Certainly one can’t blame these “Kyoto cities” for using their collective political force to go after some $24 billion of proposed federal money that would be used for local global-warming initiatives and planning over the next five years. But even if they manage to persuade Congress, you can envision that this money will come with many strings and a whole lot of paperwork attached.
These cities should not wait to take action. They should do what they can on their own, and they should do it today.
(5 October 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
Does Congestion Relief Equal Climate Relief?
Clark Williams-Derry, Sightlline
Over the past week or so, there’s been a big to-do about greater Seattle’s transportation measure — affectionately known as the “RTID” — that’s set to appear on the November ballot. The measure would spend more than $17 billion on new roads, road maintenance, and rail transit, mostly through an increase in sales and vehicle taxes.
To many people’s surprise, King County Executive Ron Sims (a former board chair of Sound Transit) came out against the RTID last week in an op-ed published in the Seattle Times. A chief reason for his opposition: global warming. Said Sims:
Tragically, this plan continues the national policy of ignoring our impacts upon global warming. In a region known for our leadership efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, this plan will actually boost harmful carbon emissions. [Emphasis added.]
On this latter claim, I think that Executive Sims could well be correct.
We recently took a look at the greenhouse gas implications of building a new lane of highway in a congested urban area. Our conclusion — which you can read in full here (pdf link) — is that every extra one-mile stretch of lane added to a congested highway will increase climate-warming CO2 emissions more than 100,000 tons over 50 years. Those emissions are broken out as follows:
(4 October 2007)
