Things are a little slow at the moment, so here are bits, some of them perhaps to revisit in more detail later.
On Thursday, Eugene Weekly had a charming story about a man's conversion of a vintage car from gasoline to electric.
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| On Thursday |
It didn't give enough attention to significant details about the batteries, though.
“The two Tesla batteries add 600 pounds of weight to the car,” Diethelm says, opening the front bonnet to display one of them. It looks like a rectangular high-tech suitcase with very sharp corners lying inside the otherwise empty compartment. The other battery is behind the rear seat, for weight distribution. That all makes the car heavier than it used to be. “So I had disc brakes put on.”
We don't talk enough about the materials and mining for the batteries, or about the increased safety hazard and lethality from the additional weight. What is the social utility of conversions like this? As a hobby and kind of nostalgia it's great, though also expensive, but as an emblem of any approach to climate, the benefits are more private than public.
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| Front page, Saturday (comments added) |
Here in Salem, the front page on Saturday exemplified the disconnect on climate.
A national story perhaps overoptimistically estimating the impacts of
summer heat is merely juxtaposed with a localized story about Oregon gas
prices. (Online the stories are completely disaggregated, of course, and are in even greater need of interconnection.) The gas story frames cheap gas as an unambiguous good, and
while it suggests the heat wave is driving increased gas prices, it does
not also look at the reciprocal relationship, that gas use itself drives
greenhouse gases and the summer heat waves.
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| July TAC minutes |
At the technical committee meeting last month for the MPO, they talked
about the difficulties the railroads pose to modernizing transportation
and safety.
This may be a topic for increased conversation and debate. Statewide MPOs are grappling with this, and ODOT Rail may be involved.
Also in the minutes are a couple of brief notes on climate:
Marion County, city of Salem, and city of Keizer have submitted work programs to the state for the regional scenario planning.
SKATS staff has completed all the technical memos for the CFAs (Climate Friendly Area) with DLCD and they have been accepted.
It looks like any critique of CFAs as a literal kind of Potemkin Village has not got much traction and DLCD is ok with an excessively theoretical/on-paper kind of approach rather than anything focusing on substantive outcomes. This is disappointing.
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| From the City's press release |
The City also sent out a press release on the Sustainable City Year Program. They lead with a "course on potential safe uses of artificial
intelligence...in local government." Hmm...
The "resiliency hubs" also sound a little suspect, a gesture for accommodation, rather than move to reduce emissions.
These hubs could also be a rebranding of the concept for neighborhood hubs. Sometimes there's too much stress on the style of communication, as when the City sees itself as having a messaging and PR problem, rather than any stress on substantive matters and transparency.
Much more exciting are the projects for "thinking about mixed use building designs for branch library and housing" and for "pedestrian corridors."
It's a mixed bag, and there will surely be more to say as projects develop and mature.
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