Reducing the Climate Impact of the Transportation System


Portland State University
Center for Transportation Studies
Winter 2008 Transportation Seminar Series

Speaker: Lewison Lem, Principal Consultant, PB
Topic: Taming the Dragon: Reducing the Climate Impact of the Transportation System

When: Friday, March 7, 2008, 12:00-1:30 pm
Where: PSU Urban Center Building, SW 6th and Mill, Room 204


0 responses to “Reducing the Climate Impact of the Transportation System”

  1. I was very disappointed with Lewison Lem’s presentation and perspective. “Don’t worry, everyone, ‘TECHNOLOGY’ will save us. Of course VMT (vehicle miles travelled) will increase and increase forever. No problem! We’ll all be driving super-duper cars.” Whatever this guy said Friday, I have little doubt has been severely vetted by money’d interests. Money is the classic technology, if you know what I mean.

  2. What will it take for the Global Warming hoaxists to stop misrepresenting science?

    http://www.heartland.org/Index.cfm

    A SMASHING SUCCESS!

    2008 International Conference on Climate Change
    New York City, New York, USA
    March 2-4, 2008
    The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say–over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films. They have dominated the media’s coverage of this issue. But they have lost the debate. Skeptics are the winners of EVERY scientific debate, always, everywhere. Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest calling of a true scientist.

    WHAT’S NEW?

    New Survey Confirms No Consensus on Man’s Effect on Climate Change
    Harriette Johnson – March 07, 2008
    Just two days after an international conference featuring hundreds of scientists who say global warming is not a crisis, a new survey of 51,000 professional … (read more)

    Plenty of Scientists at Global Warming Conference
    Joseph L. Bast – March 07, 2008
    Columnist Andrew Revkin, reporting from the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change (“Cool View of Science at Meeting on Warming,” March 4), wrote … (read more)

    Research of Hundreds More Scientists Shows the Natural 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
    Dennis Avery – March 06, 2008
    The co-authors of the best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years today released a second list of more than 400 peer-reviewed scientists … (read more)

    Report #3 from the Global Warming Conference in New York City
    Joseph L. Bast – March 04, 2008
    The final day of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by The Heartland Institute and more than 50 cosponsors, began with a keynote … (read more)

    New York Global Warming Conference Considers ‘Manhattan Declaration’
    Heartland Institute staff – March 04, 2008
    Scientists and researchers participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square in New York … (read more)

    Opening Remarks at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change
    Joseph L. Bast – March 04, 2008
    It is my hope, and the reason The Heartland Institute organized this conference, that public policies that impose enormous costs on millions of people, … (read more)

    Report #2 from the Global Warming Conference in New York City
    Joseph L. Bast – March 03, 2008
    The first full day of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by The Heartland Institute and more than 50 cosponsors, was by all accounts … (read more)

    New York Daily News Profiles Climate Change Conference Speaker
    Diane Carol Bast – March 03, 2008
    On Sunday, March 2, reporter Rich Schapiro of the New York Daily News profiled J. Scott Armstrong, Ph.D., a professor at the Wharton School at … (read more)

  3. John E. –

    I see you’ve moved from “skepticism” as you claimed in your previous posts here to denial. It is prudent to be skeptical in scientific matters, but to dismiss an entire branch of science as a hoax, as you have done here, is pure denial, plain and simple.

    Denial: -noun Refusal to believe a doctrine, theory, or the like. Disbelief in the existence or reality of a thing.

    For those who did not see the link last time, click here for another view of what that Heartland media event was all about.

    I’m glad you got your full say (yet again), so early in the thread. Now we can move on.

  4. What will it take for the Global Warming hoaxists to stop misrepresenting science?

    They’d need to start before they can stop. Thus far, the deniers have a monopoly on the whole “misrepresenting science” franchise.

  5. Getting back to the presentation, I’d guess JohnE would have found it refreshing to learn that a representative of Parsons Brinkerhoff isn’t serious about reducing GHGs.

    The one other thing that stood out for me was Lem’s discouraging position on “infill” development; that, and Lem seemed to speak like he was on the hot seat, though before a mostly friendly audience. Apparently, infill is old technology according to Parsons Brinkerhoff.

    Infill probably isn’t ‘big’ enough to be economically viable. You got yer ‘big box’ stores, yer ‘big’ skyscrapers, ‘big’ sports arena, ‘big’ Wall Street, ‘big’ container ships for ‘big’ globalization schemes reguiring ‘big’ amounts of petroleum to burn like there’s no end in sight and no reason to be the least concerned about economies of a ‘lesser’ scale.

  6. Bob,

    The reason I agree that the IPCC is perpetrating a hoax is because of the science you all repreatedly choose to ignore.
    Just as that link you provided which addressed not a shred of science, all you offer are suggestions that the skeptics have only fabricated critiqing paid for by big oil.

    Yet while the skeptics show, point by point, how the IPCC data and modeling is flawed you offer not a single example of how the skeptics have misrepresented anything. Neither does your link.

    It just attacks the motivations of the skptics.

    Contrary to Douglas’ and your belief, the basis for the IPCC report and summaries are fatally flawed. It’s stunning how so much misrepresentation gets by you all.
    Even the so-called “concensus” is a hoax.

    The Heartland and others have detailed specifically how so.
    It’s easy to comprehend and ultra clear.

    Just as it is easy to understand that increased congestion means a worsening of what you claim will be reduced by transportation policies that ignore traffic.

  7. Why doesn’t this blog have an “ignore” button like they do on AOL so you can ignore the posters of your choice.

    In my case I would like to ignore John E, cause I am sick of reading his feces.

    Sorry John E, but nobody is buying what your selling, not matter how many sales pitches you try to make.

  8. Well gee al, am I selling something?

    As far as the ignore part, you’re making my point.
    Forget me, you’re ignoring the IPCC flaws.

    Choosing instead to remain on the plantation of fanatasism that restricts one’s ability to be objective and perceptive.
    Anyone who hasn’t recognized the GW hoax by now has their brain attached to an ignore button.

    As evidence piles up debunking your fantasies you’ll have that button real handy.

  9. The evidence of global warming is significant. From record high temperatures, melting glaciers and measureable increases in CO2, to the increase of unusual, severe and changing weather patterns, these are enough for the layman to conclude that global warming is occuring. If the professional skeptics were not so closely aligned with industries whose products also produce the most likely culprit, CO2, their naysaying would be more credible. JohnE’s skepticism falls on ears that have become deaf to his shoutings.

    Monday’s Oregonian page B3, an Australian scientist advocates driving less, a view I expected to hear from Lewison Lem.

  10. John E.

    In addition to your “global warming hoaxists” line (which did not provide additional context), seven days ago you wrote:

    With the Governor and Rex trying to counteract global warming that’s been entirely fabricated.

    So not only are climate scientists “hoaxists”, but global warming has been “entirely fabricated”.

    That’s way beyond skepticism. You have reached a conclusion, not just that the science is unconvincing to you or that you want to see more evidence (that’s skepticism), but that the people doing the research are liars and frauds.

    To put it mildly, I’m skeptical of your conspiracy hypothesis.

  11. Wells,
    Of course the evidence of global warming is significant. Just not true.
    One of the worst claims is the notion that GW is already causing an “increase of unusual, severe and changing weather patterns”.
    That’s a neat trick since we haven’t had the predictied GW happen yet.
    Any layman curious enough to read can easily conclude that global warming is not occuring.

    Your naivety in believing that all the contrary science is fabricated by skeptics aligned with CO2 industries has you falsly believing the debunking science doesn’t exist.

    Forget “my” skepticism or so-called shoutings.

    The failure of the IPCC to correct their faulty science and modeling makes GW the fraud it is.

    Climate dissent grows hotter as chill deepens

    By Christopher Booker -Daily Telegraph
    Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 09/03/2008

    Last week, virtually unreported in Britain, the extraordinary winter weather of 2008 elsewhere in the world continued. In the USA, there were blizzards as far south as Texas and Arkansas, while in northern states and Canada what they are calling “the winter from hell” has continued to break records going back in some cases to 1873. Meanwhile in Asia more details emerged of the catastrophe caused by the northern hemisphere’s greatest snow cover since 1966.

    # *Read more from Christopher Booker *

    In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call “the Winter Snow Disaster” has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation.

    It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

    This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced Nasa’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

    On his website, Watts Up With That, he is currently posting a corrected version of the global temperature graph, combining satellite and surface data from all four main official sources. A measure of his scrupulous reporting is that although this shows a recent dramatic dip in temperatures, he cautiously explains that it is not yet conclusive evidence that the world has entered a new cooling phase (as he points out, there was temporarily an even sharper drop after the “peak” El Niño year 1998).

    But can we doubt that, if the data showed the opposite, the media would be rushing to report this as yet further “proof” that the planet is heating out of control? The fact is that, for all their caveats that this drop in temperatures can be explained by the cooling effect of La Niña, the official orthodoxy that “more CO2 means more warming” is facing its most serious challenge yet. In light of the colossal price we are all in so many ways being asked to pay for it, the data in coming years will be more than interesting.

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