Living “Green”
Today is Earth Day and groups around the globe are contemplating what it means to live sustainably and make “green” choices.
RFF Senior Fellow and Research Director Margaret Walls discusses “how to live, work, and play more sustainably” in a Wall Street Journal video discussion with actor Ed Begley, Jr. and Kateri Callahan of the Alliance to Save Energy. She says that one roadblock is that people lack information about the impacts of their energy use and options for reducing consumption. Walls also suggests ways to close the information gap in an online post for the Journal.
Pipeline Spills
The March 29 oil pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, “released at least 157,000 gallons of crude oil,” which ran through neighborhoods and yards. The premier of Alberta, Canada, recently said that such spills “are very isolated incidents,” although as noted in the above article, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, “between 2008 and 2012, US pipelines spilled an average of more than 3.1 million gallons of hazardous liquids per year.”
In a recent blog post, RFF Fellow Lucija Muehlenbachs and Beia Spiller examined the data on pipeline spills. While they note that "the number of major spills greater than 250 barrels has been decreasing over time," they also caution that "it is important to consider pipeline integrity for decades to come—the Arkansas pipeline was 63 years old." They conclude that a more in-depth examination of the data would be a worthy excercise.
