Climate Change

While any city would be overwhelmed by so much rain in so little time, land use in the Houston region has made a difficult situation worse.

The White House is trying to squash assessments of how transportation projects affect carbon pollution. NRDC, Clean Air Carolina, and U.S. PIRG are suing the administration to ensure these climate impacts are publicly disclosed.

De Blasio dismisses the importance of getting out of his SUV. But if he's getting chauffeured everywhere he goes, there's no way the mayor can viscerally understand what the three-quarters of New Yorkers who don't commute by car experience on a daily basis. If he doesn't regularly experience what it's like to get around without driving, he won't feel on a gut level why improving transit, biking, and walking is so important.

To do its part to avert catastrophic climate change, the United States would have to eliminate carbon emissions from transportation in the next 35 years. But America is nowhere near on pace to make that happen.

Sprawl isn't just a problem in car-centric America. Even cities with the world's best transit systems are surrounded by suburbs with poor transit access, according to a new report by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. As billions of people migrate from rural to metropolitan areas in the next few decades, these growth patterns threaten to maroon people without good access to employment while overwhelming the climate with increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Mayor de Blasio wants NYC on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, but reducing transportation-related emissions won't be possible without a significant mode shift away from private vehicles.

How polarized are the two political parties on key questions about transportation policy and climate change? As you can imagine, the answer is "very."

Every year state DOTs receive tens of billions of dollars in transportation funds from the federal government. By and large, they can do whatever they want with the money, which in most states means wasting enormous sums on pork-laden highway projects. Now that U.S. DOT might impose some measure of accountability on how states use these funds, of course the states are fighting to keep their spending habits as opaque as possible.

For the first time in almost four decades, the nation's tailpipes now spew out more carbon emissions than the nation's smokestacks. It's an indication of how slowly the American transportation sector is rising to the challenge of preventing catastrophic climate change.