Daily Score Blog

During the California energy crisis in 2001, the Northwest's aluminum smelters found that they could make more money by selling their electricity to California than by using it to produce aluminum. So they shut down. And most have remained shuttered since.

One consequence is that, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the Northwest states used less energy per resident in 2001 than in any year since 1965.

At first, the reduction in energy consumption may seem like reason to celebrate.  Obviously, energy makes our lives better; but wasting it certainly doesn't.  And overconsumption of energy--both from fossil fuels and from hydro-electric dams--is a first-order environmental problem, contributing to air pollution, global warming, declining salmon runs, yada yada.

But celebration is probably a bit of a mistake.  Just because aluminum smelters shut down here in the northwest doesn't mean that Northwesterners are using less aluminum; much of the production has simply shifted to other parts of the globe.  Outsourcing our climate warming emissions is no solution to anything.

What would really be cause for celebration, of course, would be if the Northwest states could reduce energy consumption without losing a major industry.  That would be a real sign of progress.  Simple declines in consumption are not.

Alan's been critical of USDA's old food pyramid--particularly because it appears to promote a diet filled with starch and low in oils. Recent research suggests that plant oils can be good for you, while over-consumption of refined carbohydrates may be contributing to rising levels of obesity and diabetes.

Responding to his concerns (ha!) USDA just released its new food pyramid.  Behold:

Oh my. Talk about incomprehensible.  This thing is worse than useless. The only clear message I get out of it is that, when making choices about my diet, I should be sure to avoid eating things that aren't food.

To be fair, the USDA website does give custom-tailored dietary guidelines, based on your sex and age. (I'm obviously not qualified to comment on the quality of those recommendations, but wouldn't be surprised if they were of similar, er, quality to the pyramid itself.)

But to the extent that the food pyramid is supposed to be an handy memory aid to remind you of what sort of things you should be eating, it fails. Miserably.

You have to wonder about the political process that creates something like this. No, wait; actually, you don't.

Update:  I'm just sitting here getting angrier and angrier about this thing.  Why?  Bad diets are KILLING PEOPLE. Giving people some useful & accurate information about healthy eating is the easiest & least intrusive thing the government could possibly do to change that.  But this thing is neither useful nor accurate -- which makes it both a waste of money and a wasted opportunity.  And that makes me think that it's mostly a sop to the food industries that were unhappy about being at the skinny end of the old pyramid.  Facts and cash collided; the facts bounced off, and cash stood firm.

In what some researchers have dubbed "The Starbucks Effect," it seems that people's morning coffee-buying habits have added miles onto morning commutes.

It's an interesting piece of social-science detective work, actually.  Researcher Nancy McGurkin analyzed federal transportation data, and found that between 1995 and 2001, many people added errands to their morning commute.  And unlike afternoon errands--typically done by women--many of the new morning errands were being done by men.  From the Washington Post:

A closer look showed that...while younger men were sharing in more household-related errands such as ferrying children, older men were devoting many of their morning trips to coffee and such portable breakfast food as bagels.

Of course, this is about much more than Starbucks:  there are lots of other places that people can get take-out breakfast foods.  But it is, perhaps, a sign that we are doing much more of our living inside our cars, and less inside our homes.

Well, from the LA Times, at least. 

The paper's had a series of guest editorials about traffic, transit and urban planning -- specifically, how sprawling, congested LA can get itself out of the fix it's put itself into over the last 60 years or so.  The LA area is surprisingly dense, but the population is spread out fairly uniformly over a large area -- which makes it very hard to service the region cost-effectively using transit.  At the same time, building new roads has become both exhorbitantly expensive and politically unpalatable.

Sounds a little like some parts of the Northwest, no?

To summarize...

The New York Times covers salmon migration the modern way: as downriver passengers on a barge in order avoid the big federal hydro dams along the Columbia and Snake Rivers.