Daily Score Blog

Note: This is part of a series.

Plenty of folks on Washington's Kitsap Peninsula are worried about a NSACAR track that's being pushed by a Florida corporation. At least two county commissioners think the deal is a rip-off for taxpayers, who would be responsible for financing $166 million of the project. Under the proposal, the corporation would also be exempted from certain taxes, be given land-use waivers, and be allowed keep taxes from ticket sales for NASCAR. In addition to the worrisome finances, a racetrack of that size--83,000 seats--would also strain roads and infrastructure in Kitsap County.

So it's not surprising that plenty of locals are less than happy about the prospect of a gigantic speedway in their backyards. The opposition is a time-honored American tradition: a gathering of neighbors who want a say in their community. They don't have corporate funding or a slick PR campaign, just a simple website, roots in the community, and a belief in local decision-making. "Our Board Room is the kitchen table of whatever member's home we happen to be in," their website says. They may just have a fighting chance.

But in a recent public hearing, county commissioners threw up their hands up at the mention of Initiative 933. If 933 passes, they admitted, land-use changes to accommodate the racetrack would be a fait accompli. Neighbors couldn't do a thing about it.

Start your engines, Kitsap County residents. If I-933 passes, your semi-rural county will likely soon be home to the largest stadium in the Northwest--25 percent larger than Qwest Field and 75 percent larger than Safeco Field.

Canadians are healthier than Americans, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Americans are 42 percent more likely than Canadians to have diabetes, 32 percent more likely to have high blood pressure, and 12 percent more likely to have arthritis...

Coming hard on the heels of a highly credible study showing that Americans are much sicker than Britons, the new comparison should give US policymakers pause. Comprehensive health care coverage in Canada may be a factor, but I suspect that much of the difference may relate to these two facts:

• About 21 percent of Americans said they were obese, compared with 15 percent of Canadians.
• And about 13.5 percent of the Americans admitted to a sedentary lifestyle, versus 6.5 percent of Canadians.

But can policies make a difference in obesity and physical activity? You bet.  

Summer is upon us, unofficially at least.  And to usher in the driving season, here's Carbonfund.org, a new way to offset your personal carbon emissions from driving -- as well as from flying, and heating, cooling, and powering your house.

Here's how it works:  Carbonfund.org invests in energy efficiency, in solar and wind power, and in tree-planting projects.  And those projects either offset electricity that would have been generated from fossil fuels (coal and natural gas, mostly), or capture carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it trees and forest soils.

The fund apparently looks for projects that wouldn't be undertaken, were it not for the fund's involvement -- which helps guarantee that people who contribute to the fund are genuinely making a difference, not just taking credit for something that would have happened anyway.  And you can use a handy calculator on their website to estimate how much carbon you emit from driving, flying, and operating your home -- so you can tailor your carbon offsets to your lifestyle.

There are a number of similar efforts already underway (see here and here for a rundown of some of them, including the better-known Terrapass).  But the thing is, buying a ton of carbon through Carbonfund.org is cheap.  I mean, really, really, cheap.  A ton of CO2 costs just $5.50 US, which is less than one-third the current price on the European Union carbon futures market (which has rebounded somewhat from a mini-crash a few weeks ago).  It also means that a mere $19 will offset all the carbon that my family car emits per year.

Okay, okay, my headline is a tad sensational.

It's just a way to draw attention to the rediscovery of one of the Northwest's rarest species: Driloleirus americanus, better known, when it is known at all, as the giant Palouse earthworm. The earthworm, which may have once have reached 3 feet in length, was believed extinct until a 6-inch specimen was recently rediscovered by a grad student from Idaho.

The earthworm was found on a tiny 800-acre preserve, a remnant of an arid grassland that blanketed 2 million acres--an ecosystem now almost entirely converted to agriculture. For me, the earthworm's decades-long absence, is a reminder of how important bread-and-butter land conservation is. When we don't protect intact native landscapes, we rob the world--and ourselves--of the biological wealth we inherited. That's the sad story of the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, a species that went functionally extinct this month, largely because it lacked habitat.

It looks as if Canada is poised to ban flame retardants known as PBDEs, which are have been linked with learning deficits and behavioral abnormalities in lab animals, and are found at high levels in some people.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that some tests are finding alarmingly high levels of the compounds in kids.  You win some, you lose some.

Here's a quick & easy way to encourage people walk more:  give them pedometers (link may be subscription only -- sorry).  A pilot project in BC is doing just that -- and according to one of the participating doctors...

"[P]edometers may be as effective in changing patients' exercise habits as nicotine patches and prescription medications are for quitting smoking."

Research shows that walking at least 5,000 steps per day reduces the likelihood of obesity, and walking 9,000 or more steps per day can increase the odds of being of "normal" weight, rather than overweight.

The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how many steps I take during the average day.  A thousand?  Five thousand? More? It's pretty much impossible to gauge.  But with a pedometer, you know exactly how much you've walked -- which makes it much, much easier to set & meet concrete walking goals.

Perhaps another example of how a little bit of information can carry you a long way.

This is worth reading just because it's interesting:  an article on what actually makes people happy, which often has little to do with what people think will make them happy.

To boil the article down to 3 points (we read, so you don't have to!):

• Small but frequent comforts (say, a pair of shoes that really fits) can do more to make you happy than intensely joyful but infrequent events (say, winning the lottery). When it comes to happiness, frequency trumps intensity.
• People know when we're happy, but we're only so-so at predicting what will bring us lasting contentment.  We assume that big events -- winning the lottery, losing a leg -- will permanently alter our sense of wellbeing.  But apparently we humans are pretty good at getting used to things, and the joy or disappointment of what might seem like "life changing" events can fade pretty quickly.
  
• Finally, when it comes to happiness, comparisons to peers really do matter.  Living in a modest home in a neighborhood of mansions can make you feel lousy, since you're reminded of your relative deprivation every time you leave home.  As one happiness researcher puts it, "the brain is a difference detector; almost everything that it senses, it senses as a comparison."

My takeaway:  I should quit playing the lottery, and use the money I save to buy some new shoes.  Oh, yeah -- and I should never leave the confines of my own house.

Note: This is part of a series.

When Measure 37 passed in Oregon, it triggered an avalanche of imitation. It sparked I-933 in Washington, a ballot measure that would fundamentally re-define how property uses can be regulated. Because the authors of I-933 studied Oregon's law, it's often thought that I-933 is simply an Evergreen State version of 37.

But that's not right. The truth is that I-933 is not a clone of 37 so much as it's a steroid-pumped version of Measure 37. Despite the fact that I-933 weighs in at a hefty 1,600 words, compared to Measure 37's bantamweight 1,000 words, I-933 contains many fewer protections for communities and taxpayers. 

A close reading of I-933 reveals that Oregon's experiences under Measure 37 are not a reliable guide for understanding how I-933 would work. Like Barry Bonds stepping up to the plate, I-933 will have a much bigger effect than its predecessor.

Just how is I-933 "juiced"? Let me count the ways...

A few years back, Vancouver made an ambitious projection:  by 2021, the city hoped, 18 percent of all trips in the city would be on foot or bicycle.

But as this Vancouver Sun article shows (subscription may be required), city residents have already left that projection in the dust. Based on figures for 2004 and 2005, between 27 and 32 percent of all trips in the city are taken courtesy of shoe leather or bike tires -- more than any other North American city, with the exception of the Big Apple. Apparently, Vancouver's approach to transportation and land use -- promoting compact neighborhoods close to downtown, and treating walking, biking and transit as worthy transportation options -- is having its intended effects.

But the news gets better.

Here at Sightline, we're enamored of good visuals--especially maps that tell stories. So I was pleased to find a terrific interactive map published by Save Our Wild Salmon. Scrolling across features in the Columbia-Snake River basin, users learn the story of salmon conservation.

I'm not just talking about pop-up windows that describe the dams and wilderness areas (it has those too). I'm talking about clickable icons that activate movie clips. You hear real people tell their stories of life in a faltering salmon economy, and you see compelling images of the places where people and salmon meet. It's nice work.

 Click here to see the full map.

An experiment in Washington state makes headlines today: 10 prominent residents were tested for toxic chemicals to draw attention to the pollution hiding in our everyday lives.

Other investigations of this problem have occured before. In one of the more memorable and disturbing episodes of the PBS show NOW, journalist Bill Moyers was tested for pollutants in his body. In 2004, Sightline tested the breastmilk of 40 Pacific Northwest mothers for toxins. You can read the results and related articles here.

Author and scientist Sandra Steingraber also wrote a fantastic piece about this several years back for my former employer, In These Times magazine, titled "The Myth of Living Safely in a Toxic World." She thinks it's futile to try to buy yourself out of a polluted world.  Even if your home is completely stocked with groovy, green goods, you still have to take a shower. Your child still has to breathe the air:

"[T]he sooner we quit trying to turn our bodies and homes into fortresses against toxic invasions, the sooner we’ll realize that we have no choice but to rise up and demand an end to the invasion. The hard fact is that we cannot opt out of the water cycle or the food chain. ... The way continue the process of detoxification is to stop distracting ourselves with individual sacrifices and get involved with the political struggle. ... Ask yourself how other human rights activists you admire once prevailed against formidable opponents -- how women won the right to vote, how abolitionists succeeded in divorcing our economy from slave labor, how workers won the right to a weekend. I think you will find depression and cynicism soon yielding to inspiration and courage."

I don't know yet what to think about Seattle's proposal to spend $1.8 billion over 20 years on transportation improvements.  (Also see press coverage here and here.) Call me agnostic, until I understand the plan a bit better. 

Still, at first blush, there's certainly some stuff here to like.  I'll start with parking taxes.

I've written before that buying a hybrid car may not always be the most climate-friendly choice; sometimes, buying a cheaper (but still efficient) car can be greener, provided that you're willing to use the savings to do something else for the climate (see, e.g., Green Tags to ramp up solar, wind, or other renewable electricity generation in the Northwest).

Of course, my earlier posts on the subject were written before the recent run-up in gas prices. As gas prices have risen, hybrids have become an substantially better buy than they once were. Still, it depends on how much you drive: the more miles you log in your car, the better deal a hybrid is. For people who put on 40,000 miles per year on their car, driving a hybrid can save 10 times as much on gas as for people who drive 4,000 miles.

So I'm heartened (though far from shocked) to see that cab companies are starting to give hybrids a closer look. Cabbies drive a lot. That's their job, after all. And higher gas prices mean that they're starting to run up enormous fuel bills. So switching to hybrids offers an immediate benefit to a cabbie's bottom line.

The current work horse of the cab fleet, the Ford Crown Victoria, is rated at 17 miles per gallon in city driving. The hybrid Escape (apparently, the favorite hybrid for taxi fleets because of its interior room) is rated at 36 in the city. Even if those numbers don't hold up in real-world driving, the Escape is going to use about half as much gas as the Crown Vic. And a hybrid Prius (not as roomy as most cabs, but I'm sure it gets the job done) would save even more.

A few weeks ago we posted about this medical journal article, which found that Americans are significantly sicker than their British counterparts.  Controlling for factors such as race and income, the study found, Americans have far higher levels of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, lung disease, and cancer.

Not so fast, says reporter Gina Kolata in yesterday's New York Times.  According to Kolata, Americans aren't necessarily sicker; they're just over-diagnosed.  US medical culture, she claims, tends to look for illness that British doctors prefer to overlook.  (Stiff upper lip and all that, I suppose.)  And US doctors & patients are much more likely to go on medical "fishing expeditions," searching for illnesses that pose little actual risk to people's quality of life. She relates a telling (though possibly apocryphal) anecdote:

One day...a doctor-in-training was asked by his professor to define a well person. The resident thought for a moment. A well person, he said, is "someone who has not been completely worked up."

Perhaps more to the point, Kolata points to life expectancy rates in the US and UK -- which she calls "almost identical" -- as a sign that Americans' relative sickliness isn't actually making them any sicker.  Life expectancy tends to reflect the overall health of a population, so similar life expectancy should mean similar health.

Kolata raises some interesting points.  But consider me unconvinced.

Note: This is part of a series.

Washington's Initiative 933. Montana's Initiative 154. Idaho's "Property Rights Protection." All three 2006 ballot initiatives are modeled on Oregon's Measure 37--a prototype pay-or-waive scheme aimed to eliminate most land-use laws.

Last week, I wrote about claims made in Oregon under Measure 37. The claims are often pricey, sometimes absurdly so, and governments simply waive land-use restrictions for claimants because there's no (taxpayer) money to pay the claims. But there's an additional hidden cost to pay-or-waive laws: the expense of administering them. This week, I take a look at the administrative costs--the unavoidable costs--of a law like I-933.

How much will it cost to administer Initiative 933? This question should be of some concern to Washington voters because the entire cost will fall to taxpayers. I-933 stipulates that property owners wanting exemptions from land-use laws will pay no costs whatsoever--no filing fees, no attorney fees, nothing. So, what's the damage?

The answer, in brief, is "a lot." A low-ball estimate puts the figure in the neighborhood of $1 billion per year; mid-range estimates could be closer to $2 billion annually. (And remember: scary as they may sound, these estimates assume that agencies waive laws for every claimant and never pay a landowner to comply to with land-use laws. These are simply the costs of administering the law.)

Where do these figures come from?

There are two possible way to figure out how much I-933 will cost Washington taxpayers. First, we can see what Measure 37 costs in Oregon. Second, we can consider Referendum 48, a 1994 ballot measure--very similar in some respects to I-933--that Washington voters rejected. R-48 was vetted extensively by nonpartisan lawyers and economists who developed a sophisticated range of cost estimates. Those estimates can be applied, with some modification, to I-933.

Let's take a look.