Daily Score Blog

A terrific piece of journalism today in a small town paper, the Hood River News. It's a close look at the economic impacts of this season's anemic snowfall, a subject we've been following this winter. The article puts some hard numbers to the story of shuttered ski areas in Hood River County, Oregon.

Here's a look at Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort (which is just one of many struggling ski areas in the Northwest). By the numbers:

Employees, January 2004: 1000-plus

Employees, January 2005: 47

Payroll, typical year: $4.5 million

Payroll, this year: $1.5 million

Ski visitors last year: 350,000

Ski visitors this year: 76,000

Without skiers, receipts shrink for eateries, hotels, and even beer-makers. The losses add up, especially when you multiply the effects by the dozen or so ski resorts along the Cascades. Sadly, the consequences for rural ag-dependent counties like Hood River may be more serious than lost ski revenue. Low snowpack in the winter means less water in the summer for economic staples like apples, cherries, and pears.

Last week was predicted to bring new snow and a chance for late-season re-openings, but the weather forecasts were wrong. At the moment, it's 39 degrees at the Summit at Snoqualmie, which will likely stay shuttered until next winter. At Mt. Hood, the National Weather Service is currently predicting highs into the mid- and upper-40s for the rest of the week.

I didn't know this: in Canada, automobile fuel economy is expressed as gallons per mile, not miles per gallon as it is in the U.S.  (Well, really, it's liters per hundred kilometers, but if you're south of the 49th parallel and a metric-system-phobe, gallons per mile is essentially the same thing.)

Now, I don't mention this just to expose my lack of cultural knowledge of my northern neighbors.  I mention it because it seems to me that liters-per-kilometer is a much better way of expressing the fuel efficiency of autos.

It's hard to feel sorry for Jeff Reifman-he's a former Microsoftie who, for lack of better information on investment choices, was forced to agonize about the most socially responsible way to salt away his millions.  But his recent Seattle Weekly article is a useful primer for those struggling with synching their money decisions and their values. Because, as Reifman points out, it's pretty darn confusing.

He explains the various ways that socially responsible investment (SRI) firms choose their investments and the compromises they make ("there's no such thing as a perfect company," says one manager); and gives pointers on investment depending on how much change you've got-and what kind of change you want to see. A surprise to me was that some SRI companies actively work with corporations to improve their behavior, providing even more "change" value per dollar invested.

For me, the highlight of the weekend's news was Matthew Preusch's Sunday Oregonian article on central Oregon's renewable energy industry.

The crux:

. . . a private-public group called the Business Alliance for Sustainable Energy that launched an effort last week to promote the 65 Central Oregon companies working with renewable power or energy efficiency in a nine-county area east of the Cascades between the Columbia River and California.

The companies already employ more than 200 people and generate more than $20 million in sales annually . . . . The group hopes to increase those sales figures at least 30-fold and multiply the number of jobs by 20 over the next 10 years.

...read this one, from the Vancouver Sun.

According to the story, panelists at a forum on the future of the BC forest sector warned that the industry is completely unprepared for the long-term effects of globalization.  With the emergence of a worldwide timber market, BC is now competing against dozens of new rivals, ranging from New Zealand to Malaysia to South America to Europe.  And cutthroat competition among suppliers means one thing for timber prices:  they're going down, down, down. 

The upshot -- industry analysts predict that the extreme market competition in years to come will make the pressure of the 1980s and 1990s look 'tame by comparison'.  That doesn't bode well for BC, since its timber companies are only about half as profitable as those from other parts of the globe.

To add to the BC timber industry's woes, the worldwide demand for timber may be artificially high right now, as a global real estate boom (worldwide, property values are up an astonishing 33 percent in three years) has fuelled homebuilding in the US and elsewhere.  But booms can quickly turn to busts, and if the red-hot US real estate market turns out to be just a bubble, the biggest market for BC timber could dry up.

Low prices will mean that timber companies will have to radically squeeze costs -- which typically means replacing people with productivity-enhancing machines. But if the history of the US Northwest's timber wars in the late 1990s is any guide, we should expect the BC industry to turn to blame someone else -- either the government or environmentalists -- for the job losses.

In the end, pinning your economy to low-priced commodities in a global market is a sucker's game.  So if you start hearing stories about how BC's (still lax) environmental regulations are responsible for thousands of timber job losses, and a decline in BC's competitive advantage in forest products, don't get suckered yourself.

We've been focusing a bit on the crummy snow conditions in the Cascades.  But as this Bozeman Daily Chronicle story notes, Montana's having a tough time of it as well.

The money quote:

"So far this winter, Kaiser said, things are shaping up comparably to 1988 and 2001, both low-snow years that preceded summers filled with wildfire."

Let's hope they start getting some more snow.

Today, another article on our region's snow gone AWOL, this one in the Seattle Times. According to Philip Mote, a climate scientist at the University of Washington who is interviewed in the article, most basins in the Cascades are carrying just 20 to 30 percent of their average snowpack, the worst in 28 years. (Precipitation is down by only 20 to 30 percent, but warm winter temperatures have melted the snow.)

In the Northwest, a season of minimal snow can have serious ecological and economic consequences. So far, the media has paid a lot of attention to the ski industry, which is suffering through a truly awful year. But unless the snow situation reverses dramatically in the late-season, we'll soon be hearing a lot about salmon, farmers, and electricity too.

A bad year for snowpack is unfortunate, but not cause for alarm. Not, that is, unless the best scientific predictions point to a future of greatly diminished snowpacks and streamflows as a result of global climate change. And they do.

But is this year's lousy ski season really the consequence of global warming? Or is it just a natural weather pattern like El Nino, the Pineapple Express, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation?

Top story on the New York Times website all day today is carnage--the tragic helicopter crash in Iraq that killed 31 Americans and the tragic train smashup in California that killed at least 10.

But here's an even bigger tragedy: on average, in the United States, 116 people die from motor vehicle crashes every single day. Auto accidents are the leading cause of death at every age from 4 to 33.

The media gravitates toward big-bang stories like trains or helicopters crashing, but largely ignores the steady grind: The dull but far more important story of more than 41,000 Americans killed by cars in a single year.

Editor's note: We asked Thomas Michael Power, Chairman of the University of Montana's Economics Department, to comment on a new report by BC's Urban Futures arguing that the province's primary economic engine is its natural resource exports. Power disagrees--and argues that true economic development has little to do with exports and everything to do with creating a web of local economic relationships.

Two and a half centuries ago, early economists in France postulated that all wealth springs from the earth: farming, timber harvest, mining, and fishing were the sole sources of value, value that then circulated throughout the rest of the economy. It was not a coincidence that the ruling landed gentry who controlled the dominant resource, agricultural land, supported this theory. In England, at about the same time, a different theory dominated: All wealth results from exports that bring in the outside income that circulates through the economy. It was not a coincidence that the rising commercial trading class strongly supported that theory.

Economics as we know it, starting with Adam Smith, developed as a critical attack on such self-serving narrow conceptions of the "origins of the wealth of nations." But two and a half centuries later we still have self-interested parties flogging these theories rather than treating them as long discredited and abandoned historical curiosities. The Urban Futures, Inc. consulting group's "Regions and Resources: The Foundations of British Columbia's Economic Base" (article here; pdf of executive summary here); is the latest example.

The report argues that the BC economy continues to be almost exclusively dependent on natural resource industries operating in the rural areas of British Columbia. The greater-Vancouver metropolitan economy is simply an avaricious parasite living off the wealth generated by the hardworking folks in the hinter land.

Pop quiz:  What share of personal trips in the U.S. are to or from work?

Answer:  just 15 percent, or about one out of seven trips. 

And according to this (somewhat dated) study by the Puget Sound Regional Council, even during the peak afternoon rush hour, only a minority of trips actually take us from work to home. We make lots of different kinds of trips during that time -- shopping, school, errands, social visits, and the like.

Still, the issue of commuting -- particularly, how to make it faster, and how to accomodate more drive-alone commuters -- dominates transportation planning decisions, probably well out of proportion to its importance.  But perhaps the real place to start isn't with the commute itself, but with the places where we live.  Improvements in community design that let us drive less to go shopping, or to drop the kids off at school, could make a bigger difference to our commutes than highway projects specifically aimed at increasing traffic capacity. 

Just a thought...

The little-noted vulnerability to terrorism of Cascadia's energy systems-and solutions to this problem-is a theme of Cascadia Scorecard 2005, which we'll release in a month.

We can't yet reveal what we say in the book, but this week has brought three news items that provide hints:

1. The FBI reports that "jihadists" trained in Afghan terrorist training camps are living in Oregon, according to the Seattle Times.

2. California's attorney general has petitioned the US government to tighten security at nuclear power plants, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Cascadia's sole operating power reactor is on the Hanford Reservation in Washington.)

3. Proposals to build liquefied natural gas terminals on Cascadia's coast, as on other North American coasts, are raising fierce opposition because of their vulnerability to attack. Rare LNG leaks are potentially explosive on a massive scale, as the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer report. (On the other hand, natural gas is a better alternative than coal or oil, and North American supplies are waning. So importing the fuel from abroad, on LNG tankers, has some tremendous up sides.)

Fortunately, the region's energy vulnerability is a problem whose solution unleashes a torrent of benefits.

I guess I touched a nerve: more people expressed an opinion about my posts on the Prius and the potential benefits of hybrid SUVs than about anything I'd written before.

My question is:  why? 

It's late January, do you know where your skis are? Well, it doesn't really matter because practically every ski area in the Northwest is still closed on account of the incredibly scarce snow. Snoqualmie, Stevens, Baker, White Pass, Mt. Hood Meadows, and Mt. Hood Skibowl--Closed. All of them. Crystal, at Mount Rainier, is partially open. The shuttered ski areas are an ominous indication of climate change.

But there's a modicum of good news for skiers who like snow. As an alert reader of my earlier post on this subject pointed out, Northwest ski areas are industry leaders in addressing climate change by promoting renewable energy. The Bonneville Environmental Foundation is sponsoring a very cool program called SkiGreen. For a mere $2 skiers can purchase "Mini-GreenTags" that support 100-kilowatt hours of clean wind energy (which releases no planet-warming carbon dioxide), offsetting the energy used driving to the ski area.

The US National Forest system turns 100 this year, as today's San Francisco Chronicle reports. (The precise centenial birthday is either February 1 or March 3, depending on your intepretation of events.) The article focuses on policy changes in the Forest Service, which today faces a welter of pressures related to logging, forest fires, off-road vehicle use, grazing, watershed degradation, and invasive species.

National forest issues are critical to Cascadia. In fact, roughly half of the US portions of Cascadia are in national forest. That makes the Forest Service easily the largest land manager in the US Northwest. It also means that the long-term ecological prospects for Cascadia hinge, in large measure, on Forest Service policy.

By the same token, Cascadia is a vital component of the national forest system. Cascadia encompasses 45 percent of all national forest lands. Oregon, Washington, and Idaho collectively boast one-quarter of the nation's total (and Idaho alone has about 1 acre in 9 of all Forest Service land).

A caveat: The figures above are this morning's back of the envelope calculations. They're roughly right, but they're rough.

UPDATE: I made a numerical gaff earlier. Approximately 40 percent of the US Northwest is under Forest Service ownership, not half.