Climate Change

Michael Woo has a long history fighting for a cleaner Los Angeles.  In the late 1980's, he was the rare City Councilman who was also a trained urban planner and had a strong showing in the 1993 Mayoral Election coming up short to Mayor Riordan.  He currently teaches urban planning at USC, and consultant to Climate Plan, a coalition promoting transportation and Land-Use strategy.  Streetsblog caught up to him in the USC faculty lounge on Bike to Work Day to talk about Climate Change, S.B. 375 and what all of us can do.  If you’re interested, you can read a lot more about Woo at his Wikipedia Page.

Energy and Commerce Committee, has just struck a deal on his long-awaited climate change bill -- and though the agreement makes a number of concessions to polluters, it also takes a step forward towards popularizing the cause of "complete streets".

Behind the scenes, we're hearing a lot of sustainable transportation advocates sounding alarms over California Senator Barbara Boxer these days. As chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee, Boxer is going to play a critical role in this year's federal transportation funding effort. Environmentalists want to see transportation policies and funding formulas that encourage reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But the highway lobby, AASHTO and the EPW committee's ranking Republican and vocal climate change denier, Senator James Inhofe, don't want anything get in the way of their pork-tastic federal highway projects. Environmentalists have come away from meetings and conversations with Boxer and her staff with the sinking sensation that she's going to cave to Inhofe and friends when it comes time to write the transportation bill.

At the end of March, representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey introduced an ambitious federal climate bill. This is the real deal — the legislative centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to combat global warming. Transportation contributes about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., so any climate bill will have to green … Continued

"We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change."

Yesterday the State Assembly passed Asm. Mike Feuer's A.B. 2558, the controversial piece of legislation that would allow voters to increase fees on drivers whose vehicles produce the greatest amount of pollution, despite unanimous opposition by the Republican caucus.

This image comes courtesy of TrucksDeliver.org, not the Onion.

When you write for a blog you get used to getting some amount of criticism for what you type. But a letter responding to the efforts of Fred Camino and I to bolster the Feuer bills after a bewildering editorial in the Desert Dispatch prevoked a response that was so shocking it made me spit my tofu cilantro shake all over my comic book collection.