Daily Score Blog

In Cascadia Scorecard 2004, we argued that our region is bombarded by news of the dramatic: wildfire and war, scandal and celebrity, stock market gains and losses. But this "fast" news ignores the slow-changing trends that determine our future.

Newsmap has created a continuously updated visual map of the fast news. Each headline's size reflects the number of media outlets running the story at the moment, according to Google news. It's an impressive technical feat--and a revealing indicator of what the media regard as important.

The state of Washington just released new population estimates for 2004. The verdict: the state's population grew by 1.1 percent over the previous year, adding 69,500 new residents. And state forecasters are predicting that, with the economy picking up steam in recent months, next year's population growth will be even faster.

There are two ways to look at this news. First, in historic terms, it's not that high a percentage growth rate. Since 1900, Washington state has averaged 2.4 percent annual growth, which was more than twice as fast as last year's rate. That long-term pace has been torrid enough to double the state's population every 29 years, on average.

But another way to look at it is this: a 1.1 percent increase, though slower than we've experienced in the recent past, is still runaway growth. At that pace, the population of Washington state will double, to 12.3 million, by the time today's preschoolers reach retirement age. Sustained over the long term, this pace of growth would massively increase the human population of our place--making it virtually unrecognizable within a generation or two.

The board of the greater Vancouver transportation authority, TransLink, will vote for a third time today on whether to build a rail rapid transit line from Vancouver to the airport and on to Richmond (dubbed the RAV line), as the CBC reports. Six weeks ago, the board shocked the region by rejecting RAV, despite big piles of money offered by the federal and provincial governments and by the airport authority.

The province, eager to get an airport train installed before the 2010 Winter Olympics, then promised to cover any cost overruns. The board revoted, but still rejected the offer: the plan was still a boondoggle, a majority said.

Many people hope that hydrogen, generated cleanly by harnessing the power of the sun and wind, may someday displace gasoline as the main automotive fuel.

But a new study from the Seattle-based Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment argues that if the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then generating hydrogen for fuel-cell powered cars isn't a particularly smart investment, at least not in the near-term.

Yes, burning gasoline is responsible for a lot of climate-warming emissions. But coal, the main source of electricity in the United States, is far worse. On net, using solar and wind power to offset generation from coal-fired power plants would be two and a half times as effective in reducing climate-warming emissions as using clean energy to generate hydrogen for fuel cell cars.

The most recent city to be inspired by Vancouver, BC's smart-growth success is none other than Fort Worth, as the Star-Telegram reported last week (registration required). The fast-growing Texas city is using Vancouver, particularly its waterfront development, as the model for a grand plan to transform its downtown, its river, and boost the city's quality of life "for the next century."

Early on, the idea--which includes rerouting part of the Trinity River and adding a lake and canals--was dubbed Fantasy Island. Now, with the latest proposal (presented by Vancouver architect Bing Thom), the Star-Telegram is waxing ecstatic:

"Vancouver may have its mountains and ocean. What nature has denied us, we're compensating for with bold thinking, modern engineering and plenty of gumption."

This post is for American Cascadians. It explains the Canadian elections.

Canada has a parliamentary system of government: whichever party wins the most seats gets to run the government, choose the prime minister, form the cabinet, introduce the budget, and so on. The short synopsis of yesterday's elections is: little changed. The same center-left party--the Liberals--retained power in Ottawa.

But a better-informed summary would be that Canada shifted to the right. The Liberals, plagued by a scandal concerning the abuse of funds, lost their majority-government status. Instead, they will form a minority government, as the Globe and Mail explains. And they'll only have their way on the issues with the help of their left-hand peers, the labor-aligned New Democrats. The New Democrats doubled their small caucus in parliament, partially recovering from huge setbacks they suffered in 2000. They may, or may not, play nice with the Liberals. And even if they do, the Liberals will have to find a few more votes, perhaps from the nationalist Quebec party.

BC is experiencing rampant wildfires right now. From the Vancouver Sun:

Nearly 50 new forest fires started on Wednesday, bringing the total to 260 wildfire burning around the province.Last year at this time there were 101 fires, in what turned out to be the worst year ever.

Compact fluorescent bulbs provide all the lighting that incandescent bulbs do, for about a quarter the electricity--which makes them very exciting to energy efficiency advocates. According to the US Energy Information Administration, switching all household bulbs that are on for more than 4 hours a day from incandescent to compact fluorescent would reduce residential lighting demand by more than a third.

That would definitely be a step in the right direction. But in the big picture, it is still only a tiny step.

The same study says that lighting accounts for less than a tenth of the electricity used in people's homes. (Collectively, refrigeration, cooling, cooking, laundry, and other major appliances use much more juice than do lights.) So 35% of less than a tenth is about 3% -- that is, a major shift to CFLs would reduce residential electricity demand by about 3 parts in 100.

The French Environment Ministry has announced a plan for feebates on new cars, according to the UK's Guardian newspaper. Coming on top of Canada's consideration of feebates, this marks an important breakthrough for the underutilized tool.

The U.S. poverty line is a notoriously bad measure of economic hardship. First, it's stingy: in 2003 a family of four could earn as little as $18,401 and still not be considered impoverished. Obviously, many families who are well above the poverty line still find it impossible to make ends meet. Second, it's inflexible: the poverty line is the same in Spokane as it is in Manhattan, even though the cost of living differs considerably between the two places.

Looks like a BC smelter has been dumping mercury into the Columbia River for decades. The most damning sentences:

In 1994 and 1995, the discharges exceeded the cumulative totals for all U.S. companies for copper and zinc. Mercury discharges were less than the U.S. total, but they were equivalent to 40 percent, 20 percent and 57 percent of all the U.S. releases to water in 1995, 1996 and 1997, the report notes.

Just about wherever scientists look these days, they find a commercial flame retardant chemical known as PBDE. The compounds are disturbingly similar to PCBs and dioxins, two compounds known to cause health effects ranging from learning deficits to sexual hormone disruption to cancer. PBDEs themselves have been linked to learning and memory deficits in laboratory animals, even after a single dose. The LA Times has the latest, including this:

The flame retardants have been detected in virtually every person and animal tested, even newborns and fetuses, around the world, including Australia, Arctic Canada and Svalbard, Norway, near the North Pole. Amounts in people and wildlife are doubling in North America every four to six years, a pace unmatched for any contaminant in at least 50 years.

That's certainly borne out by our experience: we found PBDEs in each of the 9 breastmilk samples we tested from Puget Sound-area women. (We'll have more complete results for elsewhere in the Northwest, and for dioxins and PCBs as well as PBDEs, later this year.)

Perhaps more disturbingly, according to Swedish researcher Ake Bergman, one of the pioneers of PBDE detection, "There is more or less a continuous exposure, and there is absolutely no way to really control it. You have almost a 24-hour exposure, except for the time you are outside."

The good news is that, provided that US PBDE manufacturers follow through with their commitments, they'll stop manufacturing the two most troublesome forms of the compounds by the end of this year. The bad news is that there are still millions of pounds of the substances in people's homes throughout North America, and some forms of PBDE (known as "deca-PBDE" because it contains 10 bromine atoms) are still being used. The bromine industry correctly points out that even though deca is more widely used than other forms of PBDE, it is not as prevalent in tests of wildlife and people. But what they don't mention is that it appears that deca-PBDE also breaks down into other forms of PBDE that accumulate more readily in people, and that may be more toxic than deca itself.

Here's yet another graph of gas prices, adjusted for inflation, taken from an article in the Sacramento Bee. In nominal dollars (the bottom line in the graph), prices are at their highest levels ever. But in inflation-adjusted dollars, gas is far less expensive than it was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and also less expensive than it was during most of the first half of the 20th century.

Most physical health trends have improved over the past half century. But mental health trends have diverged radically, according to this article (pdf) (Summarized in my previous post.)

For reasons that no one really understands (social isolation? pollution? competitive individualism? media saturation? secularism? modern conveniences?), as societies around the world have grown richer at a galloping pace, their mental health has plummeted. Depression rates in the United States have climbed perhaps tenfold in the span of 50 years, and the incidence of anxiety disorders has also skyrocketed. Authors Ed Diener and Martin Seligman write, "the average American child in the 1980s reported greater anxiety than the average child receiving psychiatric treatment in the 1950s." Mental illness is striking at earlier ages, as well. The average age of depression's first onset is now in the already-vulnerable adolescent years.

Further to last week's post . . .

Ed Diener, of the University of Illinois and the Gallup Organization, and Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania have assembled a stunningly complete review of the disparities between economic indicators, on the one hand, and trends in how happy and satisfied in life people are, on the other. An uncorrected proof of their article, which is slated for publication later this year, is posted here in pdf.

This field of research has exploded in the dozen years since I wrote about it in How Much Is Enough? It's exciting to see all the new research.

"Over the past 50 years, income has climbed steadily in the United States, with the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita tripling, and yet life satisfaction has been virtually flat," as you can see in the graph below. Similar trends are evident in other industrial nations. Depression and mental illness have also soared, on which I'll post separately.