Recently, Eric Britton of ecoplan (and the dynamo behind the Kyoto World Cities 20/20 Challenge) asked some of us for comments regarding possible long-term energy policy issues and options. His specific request was:
Given what you know about the long term needs, trends and prospects, (and please do specify a bit, is that out to 2020, 2030, 2050 and/or beyond), would you help us to understand what you think governments and policy makers at various levels, the key industrial and financial groups, and others should be concentrating their attention on in the next 3-4 years, say from 2007 to 2010?
Here’s my initial response to Eric’s request:
Continue reading Oil: Its status and options →
What got me started investigating telecommuting in the 1970s was snarled traffic. As LA’s population grew so did the traffic jams. We all looked forward to the opening of a new freeway between home and work. It was only later, sometimes as soon as a few months, that we learned, or relearned, Parkinson’s Law of freeways: Traffic grows to clog the roads available. Over a period of three decades it always seemed to take half an hour to forty minutes to get to the office 16 miles (26 km) away, regardless of the number of “improvements” in the freeways. Now, of course, a forty-minute commute is on a good day. That is, it would be if I were still commuting. The snarls keep increasing.
But there’s another snarl problem. Continue reading The Snarl factor →
. . . about telework, energy and the environment
