Daily Score

Big three-day series in the Seattle Times on Puget Sound launches today. Day one is great.

If you're time-pressed, here it is, shorter: Sprawl is the real killer of the sound. Cities--complete, compact communities--are the solution.

Fortuitously, that's exactly what Cascadia needs for jobs, health, energy independence, and climate security too.

Teaching old dogs new tricks? It took soaring fuel prices for old habits to shift. But they're shifting alright.  Just take a look at these poll results - Gallup finds that big numbers of Americans are making changes in their daily lives to deal with higher gas prices. Here's a snapshot:

Via Calculated Risk, USAToday is reporting that SUV resale value is plummeting.

[W]holesale prices on big SUVs such as Chevrolet Tahoes, Ford Expeditions and Toyota Sequoias are down 17% from a year ago. Full-size pickups have fallen as much as 15%...

The reason, obviously, is that soaring gas prices are souring car buyers on the big guzzlers.  When a gallon of gas was cheaper than a cuppa joe, size and power seemed like nifty luxuries.  But with gas nudging $4, the luxuries have become albatrosses.

There's absolutely no reason for "I-told-you-so's" here.  Cars are the second largest purchase most people ever make, next to their homes, so rapid depreciation will be a serious hit to a lot of families.  Still, there's not all that much to be done:  SUV owners, whether they knew it or not, were making a bet that oil would stay cheap for a good, long while.  It didn't, and they're paying the price for a bet gone bad.

The only thing that we can do, collectively, is to stop assuming that oil will be cheaper in the future than it is today.  Maybe it will be; but the experience of the last 8 years suggests otherwise.  Still, despite price hikes that outstripped most predictions, there are all sorts of decisions -- from what kind of cars to buy, to what kinds of neighborhoods to build, to what kind of transportation investments we should pay for -- that are being made under the tacit assumption that gas prices will come back to earth. 

That's a risky bet.  Just ask someone who's trying to trade in a Toyota Sequoia.

[Picture courtesy of Flickr user joguldi, distributed under a Creative Commons license.]

An economy-wide cap on climate warming emissions – our preferred climate policy  – has one enormous sticking point:  once the cap is in place, who gets the right to pollute?

That’s the core of the debate over the “allocation” of emissions permits.  Literally billions of dollars are at stake.  And not too surprisingly, just about every industry you can think of believes that, once strict emissions limits are imposed, they should get a generous slice of permits for free. 

Much of this is just money-grubbing, plain and simple.  Permits will have a market value, so giving away permits is a lot like giving away free money.  Free permits will mean big windfall profits to large emitters – an idea that shareholders and execs LOVE, but consumers and taxpayers should hate.

But in some cases, the arguments against free emissions permits aren’t so clear-cut.  In much of the US West, for example, investor-owned electric utilities can't set their own prices; instead, their rates are set by public utility commissions. And if those commissions are attentive and careful, the investor-owned utilities have a pretty hard time raising prices to capture “windfall” profits. Moreover, some utilities are actually owned by the public, or by the customers they serve – which makes the whole “windfall” issue moot.

Many utilities are arguing – in good faith, we think – that it would be better to simply give utilities permits, so that customers don’t have to pay for the cost of buying permits at an auction.  Free permits will benefit consumers, their argument goes, by limiting electricity rate increases.

Are the utilities right about this? Could free allocation to utilities be a real boon to consumers?

We don’t think so.  In fact, handing out permits to utilities for free has the potential to backfire, raising the overall cost of emissions reductions -- thereby increasing the cost that consumers pay for all of their other energy needs.

Seems like, every time I turn around, someone else has written about the virtues of auctioning carbon permits:  not just auctioning some of them, but auctioning all of them.  Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly has the latest examples.

The Western Climate Initiative -- the multi-state, multi-province pact designing a cap-and-trade system for the Western U.S. and, now, large swaths of Canada as well -- has contracted out a bunch of economic modeling, in an attempt to get a handle on how various cap-and-trade policies might play out in the real world.

That's a good thing.  Entering blindly into a cap and trade system would be dopey. 

That said, your friendly neighborhood research nerds are a little worried about how the economic analysis is being done.  It's not that we have specific complaints about the model itself.  It's the opposite -- we can't possibly complain, because the company that the WCI chose to do the modeling won't tell anyone how their model works.  It's a proprietary, closed system, you see, so there's absolutely no way to tell what inherent biases the model may have. 

That's obviously a substantive problem:  without a lot of eyes scrutinizing the model, flaws can go undetected.  But -- far worse -- it's a perception problem.  No matter how the model results turn out, people can point to the fact that the model is closed to challenge or outright reject its conclusions.

We even wrote a little letter to the WCI about these issues.

At long last, it's official: Washington gets a new wilderness area, the Wild Sky. It's 100,000 acres of  streams, forests, lakes, and mountains on the west side of the Cascades.

Big congratulations are in order to the hundreds of people who worked to win this designation. The Wild Sky political process was an epic. First proposed in 2002, the nascent wilderness area was an exercise in tenacity. Last week, when the bill finally passed out of Congress, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly had a nice article on the context and history. (Also good coverage last week from Seattle Times reporter Warren Cornwall, here.)

New wilderness designation in the Northwest has been tough to come by lately. But 2008 looks to be a promising year. As High Country News reports, the Wild Sky may be the first of several in the West: these include more than 500,000 acres in the Owyhee country of southwestern Idaho (the first wilderness in 30 years in that state); plus 264,000 acres in Utah (some of which is already in Zion National Park); and if we're lucky, a small but important new wilderness on the Oregon Coast that would protect nearly 14,000 acres in an area dubbed the Copper Salmon.

One of the biggest sticking points in the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) has been the question of "Scope" -- which emissions get included in the cap and trade program. Most public interest organizations argue for a broad cap that includes all the major sources of emissions that can be reliably measured and regulated. (Sightline's argued this here, here, here, and here.) And the biggest source of emssions, of course -- the biggest by far -- is transportation fuel.

Somewhat surprisingly, the debate about including petroleum is not a greens versus businesses standoff. In truth, most of the participating businesses and utilities are on the same page about Scope: they want it to be comprehensive. But this important agreement gets too often overlooked.

So, I'm setting the record straight here with a list of Western utilities and businesses already on record for a genuinely economy-wide cap (i.e. one that includes transportation fuels):

Alcoa, Boise Cascade, Chelan County Public Utility District, Clark Public Utilities, Florida Power & Light, Grant County Public Utility District, Independent Energy Producers Association, Industrial Customers of Northwest Utilities, Oregon Business Association , Oregon Forest Industries Council, Oregon Municipal Electric Utilities Association, Oregon’s Public Utility Commission, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative, Portland General Electric, Oregon's Public Power Council, Puget Sound Energy, Sempra Energy, Southern California Edison, Tucson Electric Power Company, Washington Public Utility Districts Association, WEST Associates Members (including Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, Arizona Public Service, Colorado Springs Utilities, Idaho Power Company, Basin Electric Power Coop, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Pacificorp, Platte River Power Authority, Xcel Energy/PSCo, Public Service Company of New Mexico, Salt River Project, Sierra Pacific Power, Southern California Edison, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, and Tucson Electric Power), and Weyerhaeuser. [You can find their written comments here, here, and here.]

No point, just cool:  The New York Times shows what Americans spend their money on -- and how fast prices are rising. 

Check out gasoline:  it's up 26 percent, year over year.  But that's nothing compared to fuel oil:  up almost 50 percent.  Energy's up across the board, as are plane tickets, and plenty of food items.  (What's up with eggs?  Why are they going up twice as fast as other dairy products?)

Great graphic, fun tool, fascinating data -- but beware, if you don't have a lot of time to waste this afternoon, do not click.

The nifty image to the right, taken from today's issue of The New York Times, says a lot:  gas prices, coupled with recession jitters, have ushered in a sea change in the vehicle market.  Fuel efficient cars are flying off the lot, while cars and trucks with big tanks are, well, tanking.

Hybrids aren't the only winner in this auto race.  High-mileage compacts -- the Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, and Ford Focus among them -- are experiencing a substantial sales boost too.

But to me, the most fascinating part of this article is this:  recent trends have completely upended the "conventional wisdom" about how consumers respond to high gas prices. 

You see, It used to be pretty common to read press stories that implied that drivers had no ability, or perhaps no willingness, to adjust their transportation habits in the face of higher prices.  As gas prices rose, the stories went, consumers were doing almost nothing in response, other than tightening their belts in other areas.

In the Northwest at least, this has been false for a while.  Gas consumption, measured per capita, has been going down for the better part of a decade.  Still, the idea that gas prices were having no effect on driving seemed to be pretty much ubiquitous.

But now, look at what the Times says:

How the downsizing of America’s vehicle fleet will affect fuel consumption is still largely unknown. When gas prices rise, as they are now, many drivers simply drive less to save money. [Emphasis added.]

That's right -- the article takes the link between rising prices and driving for granted.  They don't even bother to source it -- meaning that by the Times' standards, it's basically self-evident.

I think it's another sign that we've reached something of a tipping point:  people are starting to understand that many families do, in fact, have some flexibility in how much they drive, and how much gas they use.  And as gas prices near $4 per gallon, people are figuring out ways of cutting back. 

Of course, "price elasticity " (as this effect is called) has been the conventional wisdom among economists since the days of Adam Smith.  So it's nice to see the idea finally getting a little ink for a change.

Years ago, I heard from an economist friend about research showing that urban rents rose with oil prices in the 1970s, while suburban ones fell. Ultimately, land values reflect the shifts in the values of many things. So rising fuel prices would be expected to have the effect of making fuel-guzzling neighborhoods less desirable and fuel-sipping ones more desirable. We’re starting to see that pattern now.

Today’s top news story on Sightline Daily’s news page describes the way the subprime mortgage crisis is slamming suburban real estate. A similar story ran earlier in the Atlantic Monthly, as Kristin pointed out in today’s editor’s note.

Meanwhile, in Seattle at least, property values are holding strongest in the ring of walkable neighborhoods circling downtown, as the Seattle PI reports.

Reporter Aubrey Cohen notes a shift among buyers toward walkable neighborhoods:

“Many prospective buyers say they want "walking neighborhoods," [real estate agent Stacey] Brower said. "They want to be able to get up on Saturday morning and walk to a coffee shop and get a paper, or walk to a restaurant on Friday night."

“[Realtor Bob] Melvey also has noticed an increasing interest in walkability over the past five years, he said. "It's really wanting to be walking distance to a sense of community."

This new NRDC report (co-released with some major electric utilites) is kinda cool:  it looks at the potential financial windfalls to the nation's top 100 electric power companies under competing "cap-and-trade" bills currently being considered by the US Congress.  A key difference among the proposals is how many emissions permits the government gives out for free, and how many are sold at a public auction.

The report puts a spotlight on two federal bills in particular: the Lieberman-Warner "Climate Security Act" (pdf summary here), represented at the top of the chart to the right; and the Bingaman-Specter "Low Carbon Economy Act," represented in the bottom of the chart.

In the images to the right, the blue wedges represent the carbon permits that are given out for free -- and obviously, the blue wedges on the top graph, representing Lieberman-Warner's approach, are smaller than on the bottom graph, representing Bingaman-Specter's.

As NRDC points out, even with a relatively low carbon price of just $10 per ton, grandfathering means big money to the biggest utilities:

"The ten largest investor owned utilities would receive an annual allocation valued at $6.2 billion, assuming a CO2 allowance price of $10 per ton [under Bingaman-Specter].  To provide a sense of the magnitude of this value, this is equivalent to 16 percent of the companies’ total earnings in 2006.

Wow.  That's a huge earnings boost, and those utilities' shareholders will be sure to see some major gains in stock prices.  Of course, that "value" doesn't just appear out of nowhere.  It comes from the companies' customers, who have to pay higher prices for electricity without getting anything in return.

I thought this was interesting:

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals...[P]eople who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

So exercising willpower in one area can deplete willpower in another.  No wonder I have such a donut problem when I'm on deadline.

In a way, this simply confirms a common-sense understanding of human behavior:  people have only so much attention to give.  Which is one reason I've been concerned for a long time about the all-too-common idea that personal choices are key to solving major environmental and social problems.  Not only does the "personal choice" frame reduce the perceived importance of systemic and political change -- which I think are more effective -- but if willpower is truly a zero-sum game, then counting on continual vigilance and unwavering will seems like a losing strategy.

It's nice to see this kind of discussion about walkability and urban form -- treating it as an equity issue, not a question of amenities. Foot-powered access to decent food is not just a question of "livability," or even affordability, but really a question of justice. Especially nowadays in an era of rising fuel prices.

Here's a sampling from the terrific article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

In South Park... walking to the nearest Red Apple Market requires dodging a freeway cloverleaf of onramps.

...women worry about walking to stores alone at night, when the bus is infrequent and when fresh cherries cost more than a Hostess fruit pie. "Processed foods are basically what got us into this mess -- they're high in sugar, high in fats, high in sodium," she said. "People have the knowledge of what they're supposed to be doing, but they need support."

In Delridge, residents may be just a mile from the nearest grocery store. But the street map looks like a jigsaw puzzle, with roads dead-ending into creeks, a steel plant, a golf course, a boarded-up day care and jungled hillsides.

There are also some interesting maps, both in the article and in a short memo on the subject.

If you live in Seattle, chances are that you like to complain. You might like to complain about parking or you might also like to complain about ugly new development. (Or, like me, you might like to complain about all the complainers.) So today, all of us Seatteites were happy to see the Seattle Times devote an article to people complaining about the new townhouses sprouting up.

There are about as many complaints as there are complainers. Here are some, swiped from the article:

Their second-floor living rooms encourage residents to squirrel away upstairs instead of chatting with neighbors...

..And the shared driveways are so narrow that parking spills onto the streets...

...it's eroding Seattle's prized single-family neighborhoods...

...said City Councilman Tom Rasmussen. "They are bleak, poorly designed and not consistent with the neighborhood. Some are not sidewalk- or pedestrian-friendly...

...Oustimovitch said, "A project would have been built that would have been appropriate for the neighborhood. Instead what we got was a very vanilla, cookie-cutter town-house development."

Now, many of these complaints are legit. Some of the new townhouse developments are pretty bland, and many seem divorced from the street. But why are the designs so flawed?