Charles Komanoff

Of the myriad motorist giveaways now being rushed into place around the U.S., none sting like California’s.

The benefits of taxing fossil fuels go beyond even helping curb climate damage. Everyone who wishes to see justice done for the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi should join the movement to tax carbon emissions.

Originally published by Carbon Tax Center. Before you take umbrage at the headline, let me be clear: President Trump’s decision last week to freeze federal car-mileage standards at 2020 levels and revoking California’s authority to set the nation’s pace on auto emissions and fuel efficiency is contemptible. The MPG freeze means more carbon emissions hastening … Continued

Hospital records from 2014 showed that distracted walking accounted for 78% of pedestrian injuries throughout the United States.

Long-term climate prospects brightened somewhat in 2015. Pope Francis put climate care on the moral and political agenda. President Obama rejected the Keystone XL dirty-oil pipeline. Denialist heads of state were routed in Canada and Australia, and their brethren in the U.S. faced growing ridicule. To cap it off, nearly 200 nations signed the UN Paris accord, committing to cutting emissions. Meanwhile, U.S. coal use took another double-digit plunge. And U.S. electricity generation from zero-carbon photovoltaic solar cells continued to soar and has now grown 20-fold in just five years.

Which Chinese city will be the first to try congestion pricing? Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai — megacities whose populations are on the scale of New York’s? Or second-tier but still mighty cities (think Chicago) like Hangzhou, Nanjing, or Xi’an?

The multiple-teenager-fatality car crash remains a sad staple of journalism. And no wonder. The instant loss of several lives is so dreadful and the death of a young person so poignant that the combination is shattering. When a car-full of teens crash and die, the article can almost be assembled by rote: the devastated families, the grieving community, the investigation that will forever be “ongoing,” and the seeming arbitrariness of young lives snuffed out in a few seconds.

There’s encouraging movement in Washington on a different automated-enforcement front: a rule to equip new cars with "black boxes" capable of recording up to 60 seconds worth of pre-crash data.

It’s not often that you get to see your work set off a Eureka moment for someone else -- particularly when that someone is from a different culture. But I had that experience recently, and it seems worth sharing on Streetsblog in light of the interest shown today in my analysis of the travel delay costs from FreshDirect deliveries.