I was traveling for the month of June but of course the news doesn't stop! Here are a few highlights.
First, the always great Hannah Ritchie posted this blog listing energy sources by US state. That info has been on this blog before but it's a nice, clear formulation.
Also related to energy: I don't spend enough time talking about public utility commisions in my class. Yes, it may be efficient to allow one provider (who faces lower costs by virtue of operating at scale) to dominate the market, but that also creates its own problems, as shown at the above link.
While I start off my class talking about successes like Norman Borlaug, we quickly turn to current problems. I enjoyed this other reminder of technical success: the way that lighting has become basically free where it used to be very expensive (centuries ago). (And speaking of Borlaug, I enjoyed this piece about how GMOs save cropland, and the new phosphate resource recently identified in Norway, which would undercut West Africa's stranglehold.)
Another technical development has been the increase of US petroleum production. The US is close to producing the most oil that it ever has. That's good and bad, I guess?
Transitioning from energy to urban transportation. This Brookings study finds that "activity centers" make a huge difference for vehicle miles traveled, and the conclusion is that urban centers should be built around these clusters to minimize transportation time. VMT are what this NYT article thinks we should be taxing more, arguing that it will be more efficient than a gas tax for the roads. Meanwhile, urban researchers found that having more urban density doesn't improve people's health, but it makes people more likely to be sedentary (my interpretation of the metabolic scores in the article). And finally Vox has a new piece up on the huge number of pedestrians who are killed by cars every year in the US. It's all very complicated, isn't it?
