Daily Score Blog

Washington's worst round-the-clock air pollution, at least for ozone, is in - of all places - Mount Rainier National Park.

Watch Sightline's cool animated map that shows how air pollution blows from the cities to the mountain here.

Read Sightline's backgrounder on the issue here.

And read the Seattle PI's coverage here.

Last week brought a Bush administration report on climate change indicating a possible shift in the president's position on the role of human activity in global warming (this is according to the media; the administration denied such a shift). I wonder if Bush was influenced by the nation's best picture book, National Geographic, which devoted this month's cover story to global warming. The issue's stunning photos illustrate climate change's many warning signs, from melting glaciers (here's the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, which shrank by eight miles from 1977 to 1999) to species shifts (such as gender imbalances in sea turtle populations), to droughts. One note, though: the Web site doesn't come close to capturing the visual power of the print version.

The issue also illustrates that warming is hitting closer to home. Northwesterners will be dismayed that Glacier National Park's glaciers have decreased in number from 150 to 30 since 1910; and the park's famed Sperry Glacier has shrunk from more than 800 acres to 300 acres since 1901. As a transplanted New Englander, I was disturbed that Vermont's maple industry may also suffer. With luck the magazine, which reaches some 6 million people every month will help a wider audience understand that the "slow news" (pdf article) of climate change is becoming more dramatic all the time.

The latest from the Census Bureau: incomes are stagnant, poverty is up, and a red-hot real estate market is leaving Washington's low-income renters feeling the squeeze.

In 2000, about 34 percent of Washington renters spent 35 percent or more of their income on rent. Last year, about 40 percent of renters did so. Many experts say that 35 percent of income is about the upper limit of what families should spend on housing.

The housing report comes on the heels another Census survey that showed that median incomes in the U.S. stagnated while the number of people in poverty or without health insurance increased.

But in better news, consumer confidence rebounded slightly. (Irony alert: see the previous post for what I really think about consumer confidence.)

This sort of thing has no place on this blog. But someone has to mention it, so I guess it will have to be me.

The Olympics are over, and the U.S. sports pages were full of the news that the U.S. athletes won more medals than any other nation. Quite an accomplishment, huh?

Well, not really. The U.S. is an awfully big country -- the third biggest in the world, with about 293 million residents at last count. So with 103 medals, that makes about 1 medal for every 2.8 million people. Adjusting for population, Canada did slightly better than the U.S.: 1 medal for every 2.7 million people.

Both nations were in the middle of the pack. Of the nations that participated in the Olympics, 75 won medals. Person for person, the U.S. haul ranked 40th, Canada's 38th.

The real winner of the Olympic games was...wait for it...the Bahamas. The island nation pulled in just 2 medals--a gold and a bronze--but has a population of less than 300,000. That gives the country a medal for every 150,000 residents, making the Bahamas about 19 times as athletic, person for person, as the U.S. and Canada.

Australia won the silver in the medals-per-capita Olympics, and Cuba just edged out Estonia for the bronze. China, which pulled in the third largest medal haul, was close to the bottom in medals per capita; though India, with just one silver medal for its 1.1 billion residents, was the real cellar-dweller.

None of this should take anything away from U.S. or Canadian athletes. I just thought it was an interesting example of a widely reported statistic in the mainstream media that, on closer examination, is almost meaningless. So the next time you read about the Dow Jones or the Consumer Confidence Index in the business pages, just think "Olympic medal count."

Perhaps this is a bad news/good news story: the Northwest's orcas are contaminated with high levels of a toxic flame retardant chemical that is known to cause mental impairments and thyroid problems in laboratory animals, and that is similar to compounds that are known to weaken mammalian immune systems.

But at least the whales won't catch on fire.

Cascadia's inland pine forests have been, predictably, catching fire a lot this summer. (From the safety of a boat, I came within a couple hundred yards of a giant blaze on my vacation earlier this month.) And climate change has likely fanned the flames.

But climate change's biggest toll on inland forests, so far, has been to turn them blue - the color, not the mood or the political leaning.

Yes, trees in the inland Northwest, especially in British Columbia, are increasingly stained in azure shades. The explanation is such a perfect example of ecological interactions that, like foxes and rabbits, it might start appearing in biology textbooks.

The best thing in the new edition of World Watch magazine is the article by Martha Farnsworth Riche called "Low Fertility and Sustainability." (pdf) As birthrates slow in the Northwest and across the industrial world, many observers are worrying about aging populations. As the baby boom ages, there will be more elders per worker than ever before. That will put strains on public retirement and health care financing.

Riche, a former director of the Census Bureau, sheds considerable light on this legitimate, but much overblown, challenge. (We touched on the issue in the Northwest here.)

One key idea she discusses is unlocking retirement ages. The retire-at-65 pattern was established when lifespans were 67 to 69 years. As lifespans stretch toward 80 years and beyond, and as seniors' health during those years keeps improving, there's little reason to retire so soon. There is a political problem posed by aging populations (raising the retirement age), but it's not an economic or cultural or social or mathematical problem.

One final point, not from Riche: the number of dependents (including children and seniors) per worker was about as high during the height of the baby boom as it will be during the boomers' retirement, in both the United States and Canada. All societies managed it then, during the childhood of the baby boom generation, when incomes were far lower. There's no reason we can't manage it again.

A striking lede:

New research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) finds that all the impervious surfaces-buildings, roads, parking lots, and roofs-in the continental United States cover an area nearly the size of Ohio.

But what really interests me about the article is the pointed questions it raises about "smart growth" -- particularly, whether increasing the density of new development is really better for water quality.

Not surprising, but worth a mention: incomes grew over the 1990s in Washington, but the gains were lopsided. Adjusting for inflation, annual wages at the 25th percentile grew by $800 over the decade. At the 90th percentile, wages grew by $8,864 -- ten times as much.

Don't get me wrong -- the gains in the 25th percentile were probably good news. (I say "probably" rather than "definitely" because inflation adjustments are a tricky business: inflation may progress at a different pace for the poor and the well-off, since they spend different shares of their incomes on housing, food, and services -- all of which have slightly different paces of inflation.) But don't celebrate too much: the growing gaps between rich and poor come with hidden costs. Increased income inequality tends to correlate with higher rates of violence and property crimes, lower voter participation, less support for public investments, and slower increases in lifespan. Some of these trends improved over the 1990s, but some evidence suggests that they could have improved even more if economic gains had been more broadly shared.

Although the gaps between rich and poor widened over the decade, the gaps between men and women narrowed, at least somewhat. By most measures, gains in women's incomes outpaced those of men. For women working full time, median incomes increased by $4,700 over the decade; for men the gain at the median was $2,000. (Still, the median wage for women who worked full time in 1999 was $29,000 -- about 28% lower than the $40,000 earned by the median man.)

So the lessons for me: as one form of inequality wanes, another form waxes. And in setting economic priorities for the region, we should pay close attention to these changes--the priorities of the last decade may not be the priorities of the coming one.

On a side note: only about half of all adults aged 18-64 in Washington State have full-time jobs; the rest work part time, or not at all. And that doesn't include all of the kids and retirees -- if you include them, then it's more like a third of us who have full time jobs. Which makes me all the more astounded at our region's economic prosperity -- and also makes me wonder whether I *really* need to work so hard.

New to me in this morning's climate change news, the New York Times mentions

carbon dioxide promotes the growth of invasive weeds far more than it stimulates crops and . . . it reduces the nutritional value of some rangeland grasses.

That's important and troubling information.

Was this fact already well known and I just missed it?

Late last month, before a much-needed vacation, I posted a hastily drafted comment praising Airbus for its fuel-efficient jet design. The Seattle Times ran the piece as an op-ed called "Airbus wears the 'green' hat."

Not surprisingly, it brought two dozen angry rebuttals from around the Northwest, many of them from Boeing engineers.

Along with the predictable rounds of name calling, the email barrage contained contradictions to my essential argument. I've now checked those core claims and must admit that I made an appalling mistake. I want to apologize, because I pride myself on (usually) getting the facts right.

It sounds like good news: some California legislators are trying to open up high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes to hybrid gas-electric automobiles, even if they have only one occupant. But--no surprises here--Ford is complaining, claiming that the move would only benefit Japanese-made cars such as the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius.

At first blush, the proposal to open up HOV lanes might seem like a reasonable idea: it could provide a slight incentive for people to purchase hybrids, which could help cut gasoline consumption, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions as well.

But on the other hand, hybrids don't seem to need much help right now--the Prius is flying off the lots faster than Toyota can buld them. So in the short term, it's not clear that opening up HOV lanes would do much, if anything, to boost hybrid sales.

In case you've been living under a log, forest fires have been a serious problem lately. So far this year just over 6 million acres have burned nationwide, almost double the ten-year year-to-date average. Out of the 25 currently reported large fires in the US, 17 are burning in the Pacific Northwest, totaling 65,391 acres. The story north of the border has been even more dire. And forests fires aren't just frightening, they're expensive. From 1999-2003 the U.S. government alone spent an average of $1.3 billion dollars per year fighting the nation's wildfires.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. Forest Service has taken a lot of, shall we say, heat recently for its fire fighting policies. Over the long term, suppressing forest fires in the West has allowed undergrowth and other combustible fuels to build up--which leads to bigger conflagrations once fire does break out.

However, a new study by scientists at the University of Washington shows that it is climate, not fuel buildup, that has the dominant influence on the extent and severity of forest fires.

Over the past century, fires have been more frequent and more severe during hotter, drier summers, even during low fuel years, and less frequent and severe during cooler summers with high amounts of ground fuel.

All available climate models predict warmer and drier summers for the Northwest over the next century, with regional temperatures expected to rise .4-.9 degrees fahrenheit per decade in this century (100-200% the rate of increase during the last quarter of the 20th century). As the climate warms, fire seasons will gradually start earlier and end later, and new areas completely unused to the threat of fire will begin to go up in smoke. This is already happening in Washington, where the fire season started 3 months early this year. Furthermore, these climate changes not only cause fires, but also wipe out forest stands by reducing trees' resistance to diseases and to insects such as the Mountain Pine Beetle. The Climate Impact Group warns that as the region continues to warm, forest coverage in the Cascades could decrease by 20-50%.

So, while forest management practices have certainly contributed to the forest fire problem, the time may have finally arrived when greenhouse gases will replace the chainsaw as the leading threat to the health of Cascadia's forests.

9/1/04 UPDATE: The Missoulian has a nice follow up piece today.

 (This post is part of a series.)

Last night, I spoke briefly at a lively public debate about the future of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the elevated highway hugging the Seattle waterfront through downtown. Constructed in the early 1950s, the Viaduct is aging and considered seismically unsound, and is slated for replacement. The Washington Department of Transportation is looking at several alternatives for replacing the facility, including a tunnel, a surface highway, and a rebuilt aerial highway similar to what's there now.

One problem with the Viaduct--and with the idea of reconstructing it as a surface highway or as another aerial--is that it cuts off the the waterfront from the rest of downtown. The Viaduct is noisy and ugly, occupies some of the city's best real estate, and depresses property values throughout the waterfront corridor. And that represents a huge loss to downtown Seattle, denying the city center an amenity that could become an increasingly important economic engine over the coming decades. When San Francisco opted to tear down its waterfront-hugging Embarcadero Freeway, instead of replacing it after it was damaged in a 1989 earthquake, the waterfront blossomed, real estate skyrocketed, new development, housing, and jobs moved to the area--and the threat of gridlock never materialized.

For those of us who are obsessed by oil prices, it's a fun time to be alive: crude oil spot prices just topped $48 per barrel. That means that prices have risen more than four-fold in under six years.

Now, commodity prices are inherently volatile. But it appears that oil prices, after a long period of relative stability, are becoming more unstable by the day.

That doesn't mean that prices are going to maintain their upward trajectory indefinitely; volatility implies collapses as well as spikes in oil prices. But at a minimum, the people who are most involved in thinking about the future implications of oil prices -- and here I'm thinking most especially of the region's transportation planners -- ought to start giving a closer look at the long-run implications of rising and volatile oil prices on today's decisions about transportation infrastructure.

So far, rising prices haven't put much of a dent in oil consumption in the region, if any. Short term price volatility doesn't have much of an effect on how much people drive. But over the long term, high prices start to shift people's behavior, either by encouraging more fuel efficient vehicles or by promoting a mode shift away from cars and to transit.

But most traffic projections assume that oil prices will remain constant -- which may mean that we're overestimating how much traffic the Northwest's roads will have to support 30 years from now.

And, just as a side note -- in the time it took me to write this post, oil spot prices climbed another 50 cents, to just under $49.