Daily Score Blog

I'm a couple of days late on this, but it's still worth mentioning the new 2006 "Pulling Apart" report that's just out. Even if you're not a data-geek, it's worth a glance, as it's easily the single best source for income inequality trends in each of the 50 states. Not dying to read it yet?

Are you sure?

It's chock full of fun facts like this one:

On average, nationally, the incomes of the poorest fifth of families grew by $2,660 over the two decade period [early 1980s to early 2000s], after adjusting for inflation. By contrast, the incomes of the richest fifth of families grew by almost that much ($2,148) each year over the course of two decades, for a total increase of $45,100.

You can find out how your state fared. And you can find out which Northwest state ranked 3rd in the nation for the greatest increase between the wealthy and the middle class. But you'll have to read the report for yourself--the full version and state-specific fact sheets are here.

The report is subtitled, "A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends," which pretty much says it all (though perhaps not in the most sparkling language imaginable). It's researched and written by economists at the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

In the debate over growth management, it's easy for the parties to forget that it's never us against them, it's us against us. For just one example, planners must strike a balance between our needs for food (in the form of nearby farmland) and shelter (in the form of decent housing for a growing population). And promoting density, while important in many respects, is not the whole answer to problems of growth.

Oregon's land-use task force is beginning to study what the state's citizens want, and The Oregonian is running a good series on planning that addresses the balance between desirable housing and fertile farmland. The articles offer some goods insights and they got me thinking.

Density done wrong does no one any good. Urban village development (and their traditional counterparts) must attract buyers, not be foisted on them. A subdivision crammed with more houses is not a real solution. It's still auto-dependent and segregates homes from shops and services. It adheres to the letter of planning for density, but ignores the spirit--density ought to empower residents with choices, not just wedge people together. Intelligent planning is required to build attractive homes that also offer privacy and a sense of space, as well as easy access to amenities. The point of smart planning should not to force people into the city, but to create more good places there for those who want it.

Cascadians suffering through this winter's unending rain may hearken back to the balmy winter of last year, when the rains didn't really begin until spring. Last year's freak weather, however, together with changes in ocean current behavior, may have been an advance signal of climate change with decidedly unpretty results for coastal ecosystems, particularly for birds. 

By summer of 2005, food was so scare that murres starved to death by the thousands on the Olympic Coast, while Washington's colonies of glaucous-winged gulls produced less than 1 percent of their annual chick numbers. Up and down the West Coast, from Vancouver Island to central California, researchers reported bizarre ocean conditions, bird die-offs (with no analogy in historical records), and extremely low stocks of some key fish. 

A cadre of 45 scientists recently convened in Seattle to figure out what caused the bird deaths. It's possible that last summer's ecological catastrophe was just a freak alignment of several weather factors, but there's increasing evidence that it bears the fingerprints of climate change. Read all about it in a top-notch piece of journalism by Robert McClure in the Seattle P-I.

Interesting timing:  this study (subscription only, except for the abstract), just published in the journal Science, may give a boost to the biofuels bill that's currently working its way through the Washington legislature.

The study addressed itself to the issue of whether ethanol from corn really reduces greenhouse gas emissions -- which has been an area of fairly intense interest among both supporters and skeptics of biofuels.

To me, it looks like the authors really did their homework, and have done their best to be conduct a fair analysis that takes the best points from all sides of the debate.  Their final answer: compared with gasoline, filling your tank with corn ethanol reduces total GHG emissions by about 13 percent.  Score a point for ethanol!

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

"Making Headway: A Little Logic Along Life's Journey." That's the helpful title of an advertising brochure--circa 1930 or so--promoting what was then ex-urban development in north Seattle. I thought the ad copy was so intriguing that I just had to share some excerpts...

No one who is normal can be content to remained imprisoned within the four walls of the modern stuffy apartment, with its lack of yard, grass plot, flower beds and garden for the kiddies' play and the family food.

Life to you must mean more than that. It must have freedom of both air and area to fully develop.

These, too, without the penalty of city taxes and with less expenditure of travel time than is experienced in many massed and narrowed neighborhoods.

  Oh, Canada ... The country that prides itself as the social-policy soul-mate of Scandinavia--with universal health care, progressive drug policies, gay marriage, and yes, even legalized swingers' clubs, of late--has elected as its leader a former oil-and-gas man from Alberta, the Canadian equivalent of Texas. Huh?

On Monday, Canada's Conservative Party won the majority of seats in parliament, ousting the once-formidable Liberal Party from power for the first time in 13 years. Paul Martin, who became prime minister in 2004, resigned as head of the Liberal Party.

What's an American Cascadian to think?

Well, Canada has four major political parties (the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois), so what may look like a sudden and unexpected upheaval is actually a more nuanced election than you typically get in the United States. Mix in the biggest political corruption investigation in years (the "sponsorship scandal," which involved widespread mishandling of a public fund used to promote federalism over separatism in Quebec), and you have a race that the incumbent Liberal government was itching to lose.

Upon closer inspection, the vote was tight, and the Conservatives, or the Tories as they're known north of the border, are left with a minority government--only 124 out of 308 seats in parliament--which means they have to reach out to other parties and form a coalition to actually govern. In fact, they only received 36.3 percent of the popular vote.

A mandate it ain't.

Washington's leaders have been making a lot of noise about cleaning up Puget Sound. Governor Gregoire wants to boost Sound restoration dollars by $42 million, or about 50 percent. It's earning the governor heaps of glowing media attention.

But the media has turned a blind eye to the astronomical number of cruise ships poised to foul local waters. A single line, Holland America, just announced that it will be increasing its cruises out of Seattle from 37 to 61. In 2006, according to the Port of Seattle, 200 cruise ships with enter and depart Puget Sound (roughly a 30 percent increase from 2005) and they'll ferry an estimated 735,000 people. Those cruise ships are potential ecological catastrophes, especially when their dumping practices are not actually, uh, regulated, as they are in California and Alaska.

What damage can a cruise ship do? According to WashPIRG:

In a day, a typical cruise ship of 3,000 passengers and crew produces 30,000 gallons of sewage, 270,000 gallons of other wastewater, and additional gallons of hazardous wastes, biomedical waste, oily bilge water, and solid waste.

You do the math. What I mean is: multiply each of those numbers by 200, then multiply again by the number of days each ship is in the Sound, and you'll find the potential environmental impact of just one year of the cruise industry. And the threat to Puget Sound is not just hypothetical. A Norwegian cruise line dumped 40 tons of human waste near Whidbey Island a couple of years ago. Oops.

The Ashland Daily Tidings has an interesting (though brief) article exploring what, exactly, might happen in their corner of southern Oregon if oil prices keep going up.  To me, it's good to see people thinking more about this.  Not just because it will help people prepare for the adjustments that will be needed should oil become progressively dearer -- but also because it might help shift people's thinking about what kinds of transitions might be possible, or even desirable, even if oil prices flatten out or decline.

But I do think that a word of caution is in order -- if energy prices do continue to trend upwards, we're going to have to take a cold and steely-eyed look at our proposed solutions to help people cope.  Some of them, however well-intentioned, just might not cut it.

Two interesting -- and a bit disturbing -- pieces of toxics news today.

First, several news outlets are reporting on a new study, coming out of UC Berkeley, showing that mixtures of several environmental contaminants (in this case, pesticides) can be far more potent than higher concentrations of a single compound.  The problem is especially bad for frog populations -- which, as frog-watchers everywhere will tell you, are in particularly bad shape.

Second, there's this new report, put together by two breast cancer groups:

As many as half of all new breast cancers may be foisted upon woman by pollutants in the environment, triggered by such items as bisphenol-A lining tin cans or radiation from early mammograms, according to a review of recent science by two breast cancer groups.

No comments here, except that, perhaps--just perhaps--the former study might help explain the latter.

Some snippets from an opinion survey of Puget Sound residents, conducted last year by Washington's transportation department, yield a bit of a conundrum: 

• When asked whether there's "enough", "not enough", or "too much" money going into the state's general -purpose roads and highways, 51 percent of respondents say "not enough," and only 9 percent say "too much."  That is, the majority of respondents want to spend more money on roads.
• When asked the same question about transit, 45 percent say "not enough" and 16 percent say "too much." 

Comparing transit and roads, the figures are fairly close -- but still, it seems that survey respondents think that road spending deserves a boost more than transit does.

But...the very next question in the survey asks respondents to choose between two statements:

• "We've got enough roads and highways. We need to expand our transit system with more buses, light rail, and other transportation choices to give commuters choices for their commute."
• "We've got plenty of transit. We need to maintain the roads we have, expand existing roads and highways, and build new roads to make faster connections for people in our region."

The result -- 51 percent of survey respondents in the Puget Sound agreed with the former statement; 38 percent with the latter.  That is, survey respondents support new transit over new roads, and by a fairly wide margin.

What gives?  How can public opinion tilt towards more funding for roads, when a majority believe we already have enough?

New studies of King County, Washington find that sprawl is linked to dirtier air and bigger bellies. Walkable neighborhoods (those places with higher residential density, more street connections, and nearby to shops, schools, and parks) appear to be healthier for residents and less damaging to air quality--even when taking into account age, income, education and ethnicity.

A few key findings (liberally excerpted from the full coverage in the Seattle Times):

• On average the Body Mass Index -- a measure of height and weight -- of residents of the more walkable neighborhoods was lower, and they were more likely to get 30 minutes of daily exercise.
• People who lived and worked in more walkable neighborhoods produced fewer pollutants associated with smog.
• A 5 percent increase in a neighborhood's walkability index was associated with a 0.23-point drop in Body Mass Index. Bigger changes in a neighborhood's walkability would be expected to produce greater differences in weight.

Oregon State University just won a $3.6 million grant for sagebrush ecosystem restoration. That's good news because sagelands conservation always seems to take a back seat to other landscapes. I wonder if the explanation for sagebrush's short shrift isn't surpisingly superficial (how's that for alliteration?). Looks matter and sagebrush just doesn't sell like the prettier places do.

If so, sagebrush ecology is paying the price for its lack of glam appeal. The American West is home to 100 million acres of sagebrush country, but it is a battered landscape. As the AP story today puts it:

Because of the invasion of non-native plants, increasing wildfires and the expansion of juniper woodlands, sagebrush ecosystems have become one of the most threatened land types in the United States, researchers say.

"We are losing sagebrush-steppe ecosystems at an alarming rate, as wildfires fueled by cheatgrass sweep across the landscape," said project coordinator Jim McIver, an associate professor of rangeland resources.

The ongoing tragedy of conservation biology, with its limited resources, is that large attractive creatures--"charismatic megafauna," in biologist-speak, such as the ivory-billed woodpecker--generate most of the hoopla and therefore receive most of the protection. Less sexy creatures are often ignored, though they may be no less critical to complete and well-functioning ecosystems.

Landscapes tend to go the same way as wildlife. People get animated by old-growth forests, coastlines, canyons, and alpine settings. These are the places that we protect in national parks, photograph endlessly, and write volumes of earnest prose about. Big conservation organizations have little trouble "branding" these ecosystems and drumming up the dollars necessary to protect them from depredations. But sagebrush country is another matter.

Seems to be a slow news day in Cascadia--so here's something from farther afield.  The economics-oriented Angry Bear blog has a nifty post on economic forecasts, in this case, of US Gross Domestic Product.

To a remarkable extent, economic forecasters from the private sector, the White House, and the US Congress tend to agree with one another about their predictions for economic growth.  Most of their forecasts agree within a few tenths of a percent--a surprising degree of unanimity about something so uncertain.  Which should, perhaps, give us some confidence in their forecasts--when different sets of economic experts tend to converge on the same prediction, it probably suggests that they're all onto something.  Right?

Or maybe not.  As it turns out, even though the forecasters agree with one another, their predictions don't do a particularly good job of predicting the actual econonmy.  In fact, rather than going through all the econometric rigamarole, if they just used a simple rule of thumb -- next year's growth will be pretty much like this year's -- they'd actually make more accurate forecasts.  Sheesh!

Washington state's health and ecology agencies want to ban PBDEs.  Completely.

Bully for them.  Now, let's see what the legislature says.

(For more info on PBDEs, see here.)