Author Archives: AlvaroHutchings

Nearly half of the country thinks Donald Trump is handling hurricane season well.

by AlvaroHutchings Posted on October 18, 2017

Those trips — 49 to 61 percent of all rides in metro areas — would otherwise have been made on foot, bike, or public transit, according to new analysis from UC Davis.

Sustainability-inclined urbanists — including us — often credit car- and ride-sharing services for reducing the overall number of cars in cities. After all, if people know they can get a ride when they need one, they will presumably be less likely to invest in a car of their own.

But the UC Davis study shows that the vast majority of ride-sharing users — 91 percent — have not made a change in their personal vehicle ownership as a result of Uber or Lyft. Meanwhile, these ride-share users took public transit 6 percent less.

That means that ride-hailing services aren’t necessarily taking people out of their cars — they’re taking them off of buses and subways.

There’s still lots of evidence that shows car ownership is an increasingly unappealing prospect for young people in America’s cities (after all, a big chunk of that 91 percent may not own a car in the first place).

Taxi apps may help kill the private car, but they won’t fix all our traffic and transit problems, either. That will take more work.

From:

Nearly half of the country thinks Donald Trump is handling hurricane season well.

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Climate agreements are way too wishy-washy

by AlvaroHutchings Posted on July 26, 2016

syntax on carbon

Climate agreements are way too wishy-washy

By on Jul 26, 2016 7:01 amShare

We live in a world where one single “shall” almost derailed the entire Paris climate agreement. As if it wasn’t difficult enough to get international leaders to agree on climate goals, we have to get them to agree on how those goals should be worded and interpreted.

Policymakers (much like the rest of us) don’t know exactly what it means to “sustain” the environment or keep it within “safe ecological limits.” And when one of these ambiguous terms squeaks its way into policy, it can stifle action.

That’s one finding from a recent study from the University of Dublin, which assembled a team of environmental scientists to analyze the words used in policy agreements. Luckily, there’s an antidote: better communication between scientists and policy makers, and measurable, clearly defined targets.

Here’s one example of a wishy-washy sentence taken from the recently published U.N. Sustainable Development Goals:

By 2020, [countries will] sustainably manage and protect marine and coastal ecosystems and avoid significant adverse impacts, including by strengthening their resilience.

Sounds great, right? But the study’s authors call it “ambiguous to the point of being meaningless.” How do we determine if an adverse impact is “significant”? What, precisely, does “resilience” mean here? Many policies, including the Paris climate agreement, use phrases like “strengthening resilience” — a target that sounds nice, but isn’t measurable or enforceable. There’s no Global Supreme Court of Linguists to step in and say, “Hey, Australia, you’re not ‘strengthening the resilience’ of your coastal ecosystems to a great enough degree!”

So what’s a goal statement done right? The Dublin study points to this example from a 2010 U.N. agreement:

By 2020, the rate of loss of all natural habitats, including forests, is [to be] at least halved and where feasible brought close to zero.

Now there’s something we can actually measure. Keeping ecosystems stable is a complicated task, and it’s one that ecologists and politicians need to collaborate on. The study recommends that scientists identify practical, quantifiable targets that we can use to evaluate an ecosystem’s health, and that policymakers address those targets in legislation.

In short, when it comes to getting things done, we need to crawl out of our comfortable burrows of “sustainability” and “resilience” on repeat, come up with specific goals, and focus on meeting them. Actions may speak louder than words, but we’re going to need the right words to prompt the right actions.

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Climate agreements are way too wishy-washy

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Eat What You Want, But Eat Fresh

by AlvaroHutchings Posted on February 25, 2015

Mother Jones

This is interesting. Yesterday I wrote a post suggesting that we should all try to eat more fresh food and less processed food, but that otherwise it didn’t matter much what kind of diet you followed. (Within reason, of course.) This was based solely on my intermittent reading of food research over the years, not on a specific rigorous study. Today, however, fellow MoJoer Tom Philpott tells me that there is indeed a rigorous study that backs this up:

Over the past decade, there has been a bounty of research on the ill effects of highly processed food. And when Yale medical researchers David Katz and Samuel Meller surveyed the scientific dietary literature for a paper in 2013, they found that a “diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”

Interestingly, Katz and Meller found that as long as you stick to the “minimally processed” bit, it doesn’t much matter which diet you follow: low-fat, vegetarian, and Mediterranean have all shown good results. Even the meat-centered “paleo” approach does okay. The authors conclude the “aggregation of evidence” supports meat eating, as long as the “animal foods are themselves the products, directly or ultimately, of pure plant foods—the composition of animal flesh and milk is as much influenced by diet as we are.” That’s likely because cows fed on grass deliver meat and milk with a healthier fat profile than their industrially raised peers.

Now, Tom is optimistic that processed food is losing its allure as Americans migrate more and more to fresh foods. I can’t say that I share this optimism, but I hope he’s right. There’s nothing wrong with a potato chip or a can of soup here and there (everything in moderation!), but a steady diet of processed food really is something worth avoiding.

Originally posted here:

Eat What You Want, But Eat Fresh

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