Daily Score Blog

The sex-ed hanky panky accelerates. A great column yesterday by Nicholas Kristof (who is, you'll be pleased to know, a Cascadian from Oregon) tells the story: tripling the US federal budget for "abstinence-only" (aka, "ignorance-only") sexuality education.

The crux:

"abstinence only" is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There's a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins - it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS."

And:

"Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers' gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France."

In Cascadia, the disparity is equally stark. Teen birth rates in British Columbia are one third of those in Washington and Oregon, as we pointed out here.

Oregon State University and the US Environmental Protection Agency convened 30 scientists and policy experts to evaluate the future of wild Pacific salmon. Their prognastications were not rosy. Here's the crux:

"The most probable forecast if things don't change markedly is that by 2100, wild salmon will be reduced to remnant runs in the lower 48 states and southern British Columbia," said Bob Lackey of the Environmental Protection Agency in Corvallis.

The Salem Statesman-Journal reports.

We've been going on a bit about California clean-car standards.

California cars will emit 30 percent less greenhouse gas by 2016. But even more ambitious is Canada's commitment to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from new vehicles by 25 percent by 2010. It's a slightly smaller reduction but a whole lot sooner.

So far, however, the commitment hasn't had the force of law or binding agreement. It's simply been a government pledge.

Today's Globe and Mail gives an update on Canada's negotiations with automakers. Some parts of government seem ready to strike a deal with carmakers for a lesser reduction voluntarily; other parts--the Ministries of Environment and Transportation--are holding the line.

The David Suzuki Foundation has made it easy for Canadians to send letters of encouragement to the latter.

It's official. Wind power is now cheaper than natural gas-fired power.

Others have been saying this for some time, but I've been holding out. Now I'm convinced.

The Idaho Power Company, as I noted here, is not prone to being swept up in wishful green thinking.

So it moves me to see the following quote from Karl Bokenkamp, general manager of power supply planning at Idaho Power in this month's Con.WeB:

"Based on our analysis, and our assumptions for future natural gas prices, we expect the 30-year levelized costs of wind and geothermal projects to come in under the 30-year levelized cost of new [gas-fired] combustion turbine projects."

Translation: Wind and geothermal are now cheaper than gas.