Daily Score Blog

In the typical year, my family's biggest source of CO2 emissions is -- by quite a wide margin -- air travel.  We use a bit less gasoline than a typical American family, but we more than make up for it by travelling long distances to visit our family, scattered around the east and west coasts.

A few years back, I started strategizing about how to reduce our air travel.  And I settled on a two-step plan.

Step one:  convince my sister to move from San Jose to Seattle -- which would not only mean that we could see much more of each other, but also save our families at least 2 round trips per year. 

Step two:  vacation close to home every other year, saving at least one cross-country round trip flight for our family of 4.

So this year, we put both steps into action.  My sister will be moving into our neighborhood (yay!) and we decided to visit the Olympic peninsula rather than our families on the east coast.  We'll be flying a lot less as a result.

But as things have turned out, I'm not sure that our plans have saved a single drop of fuel.

The first ever world map of happiness was just released by a researcher in the UK. Using the results of more than 100 studies, he color-coded countries' levels of happiness. (In the map below, the redder the country, the happier it is.)

Denmark, apparently, is the happiest country on earth; and other Scandinavian countries also rank highly. Canada pulls in at a very respectable number 10 while the United States is 24th happiest country. Interestingly, all of Europe's highly populated countries rank below the United States (with, perhaps, the exception of the Netherlands at 15th).

Nearly all of the top-ranking countries are also among the world's wealthiest. But there are a couple of striking exceptions: Bhutan is 9th, though it has roughly 1/30th the per capita GDP of the US (and 1/25th that of Denmark). Much richer than Bhutan, but much poorer than the industrial West, another batch of countries scores in the top 20: Costa Rica, Antigua and Barbados, and Malaysia.

The Vancouver Sun has further details.

A quick vacation to Washington's Olympic Peninsula reminded me of two things.  First -- dang, those trees are huge! 

And second -- dang, there's still a lot of clearcut coastal forestland that's still just basically sitting there:  no trees, just scrub and piles of decaying stumps.

Which got me to thinking:  how much CO2 could the clearcut land store if returned to its full rainforest glory?  Enough to take a serious bite out of our climate-warming emissions?

Well, according to this study, a single acre of undisturbed, old-growth forest in coastal Washington stores more than 300 tons of carbon, counting soils, trees, foliage, and woody debris on the forest floor. 

And according to this (pdf), carbon stores are reduced by more than half after a clearcut, both because of the loss of the trees themselves, but also because the oxidation of carbon-rich forest soils.

Some interesting stuff follows.

I recently got a call from a casting director at Fox TV’s reality show Trading Spouses. (It’s not as salacious as it sounds!) Fox saw us during our first 15 minutes of fame (actually, 2.5 minutes, on CNN) and wants us on their network, too. We’ve never seen this program before, but we’re told it involves two moms from wildly different families swapping places for a week, while America gawks at the resulting arguments and break-downs.

What’s your opinion? Should we let TV crews and a visiting (presumably auto-centered) mom into the Durning home? Should Amy endure a week in a family of--umm--maybe five Hummer drivers? Would it help promote the values we stand for by making them visible to the millions of people who watch reality TV? Or would Fox use selective editing to make us look ridiculous, harming the cause?

Once you’ve had your say, we’ll make a decision.

P.S. If we do accept the invitation, we’ll be sworn to secrecy until the show is aired. So I won’t be able to blog the experience until afterward. Sorry.

Worth noting:  as this L.A. Times article explains, a rising economic tide in the US is still leaving college-educated workers floundering:

Earnings for workers with four-year degrees fell 5.2% from 2000 to 2004 when adjusted for inflation, according to White House economists.

It seems that, for a widening share of workers, income has become untethered from standard the yardsticks of prosperity.  Sure, economic output is rising, both total and per capita.  Productivity is up.  Profits are up.  Unemployment is relatively low.  But personal income is following a different trajectory.

Of course, there could be all sorts of confounding factors in play.  A hot economy brings more people into the workforce, which surpresses wages.  The number of college-educated workers could be rising, diluting the value of a college diploma.  And so forth.  But it's still hard to call an economy "thriving" when the typical worker -- even one with a good education -- is having a harder time making ends meet.  And above all, it makes me wonder if it isn't time to look for better yardsticks of prosperity.

I'm not sure why this surprises me, but it does:  in the Northwest states, transportation--our cars and trucks, plus planes, boats, and trains--accounts for the majority of the region's CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. 

When you break the numbers down a bit more, gasoline alone accounts for almost a third of all energy-related CO2 emissions.

For the country overall, transportation represents only about one third of total emissions from fossil fuels.  But that's mostly an accident of geography:  the Northwest's hydropower is relatively climate-friendly, which keeps emissions from homes, businesses and industry relatively low; whereas coal -- which supplies most of the nation's electricity -- is a first-order climate offender.  Nationwide, electricity generation accounts for nearly 40 percent of total climate-warming emissions from fossil fuels.

[Note: This is a part of a series.]

If you're following the Northwest's gaggle of anti-planning ballot measures, you have some new required reading today...

In the Oregonian, first rate reporting from Laura Oppenheimer on Washington's Initiative 933, the progeny of Oregon's Measure 37. She takes a look at I-933's supporters and opponents and their competing beliefs. Also, in the Oregonian, an excellent article by Allan Brettman on what would happen under I-933 to Portland's biggest suburb, Vancouver, Washington, where farms and suburbs share an uneasy detente.

In High Country News, writer Ray Ring investigates for-hire signature gatherers in Montana, where Initiative 154 was similarly spawned by Oregon's Measure 37. Ring also tracks I-154's shadowy campaign funding all the way to Howard Rich, the New York real estate tycoon who is bankrolling initiatives in several states.

High Country News also has five must-read profiles on Oregon residents who are personally affected by Measure 37. And HCN has a nifty round-up of the status of anti-planning initiatives in Western states.

Finally, in a preview of what other Northwest states may be facing if their anti-planning ballot measures pass, the New York Times' Timothy Egan takes a hard look at a notorious Measure 37 claim in central Oregon. Unless Oregon taxpayers pony up $203 million, a property owner will carve up his in-holding in Newberry Crater National Volcanic Monument with a mine, an energy project, and tract vacation housing.  

This month’s all-photograph issue of Price Tags, Gordon Price's urban design newsletter, takes a look at the Fourth Vancouver Sculpture Biennale. The Biennale incorporates an outdoor gallery space with a way for its visitors to view Vancouver, BC's community and surroundings in a new light.

The Biennale features the work of renowned sculptors from eleven countries. Each of the 22 pieces is strategically placed along a waterfront, a walkway, in a park or other public space in the city-- thus accessible by foot, bike, or blade in Vancouver's compact downtown. Gordon notes that the exhibit includes a "cell-phone tour": call a number and punch in a code from a particular sculpture, and you can learn more about that piece and its creator, as well as vote for your favorite or leave comments. (You can also try this while looking at Gordon's photographs of the sculptures.).

At 21, in a sweating, dirt-floor shack on an island in a Nicaraguan lake, I ate a lunch of coarse tortillas and salted beans. My crooked-toothed host, who invited me for the meal when he saw me standing disappointed outside of the sole restaurant in the hamlet (it was closed), peppered me with questions about life in the United States. Soon, he broached the subject that most intrigued him, “Tu tienes tu propio ‘pickup’?” He asked if I had a truck.

The throbbing allure of car ownership—of the personal mobility, even freedom, that it represents—is powerful and pervasive.

[Note: This is part of a series.]

Northwest voters are facing a line-up of so-called "takings" ballot measures. The basic argument in favor of these initiatives is that when a regulation reduces the value of property, the owner should be compensated for the diminished value. Supporters argue (incorrectly) that such regulations amount to a "taking"--a legal standard that requires compensation. 

First, there's a factual claim to sort out. Simply put: most regulations are not takings. Property regulations are litigated frequently and extensively, and the courts have decided--over and over again--that communities are not obliged to pay for the privilege of regulating property.

Second, there is a larger confusion about property values. Regulations sometimes diminish the value of property, but regulations often increase the value of property too. Many regulations amount to a "giving." 

So why don't we see outraged developers and speculators vowing to send fat checks to the government for the profits they've reaped because of planning and sensible regulation? 

Can this really be true? 

StatCan is reporting that residents British Columbia slashed their driving last year -- and by quite a lot.  Total passenger miles in the province fell rom 56 billion passenger miles in 2004, to 51 billion in 2005.  Meanwhile, driving in Canada overall edged upwards. 

Translink, the lower mainland's transit authority, attributed the fall to rising gas prices and rising transit usage.  According to a spokesperson:

"If they do the same survey a year from now, there will be less driving because the price of gas has gone up so much...We have seen a significant shift to transit ridership this year, and we have to attribute that to a rise in the price of gas."

Hm.  Color (or, rather, colour) me skeptical about this.

Guest contributor Dan Staley is Planning Director for the City of Buckley, a small town in rural Pierce County, Washington. He writes this post as a private citizen. [Note: this is part of a series.]

I get all kinds of phone calls in my office from folks with questions about some parcel of land for sale: What’s the zoning? How can it be developed? When will sewer be available? These questions all share one important premise: that the rules today will be the same rules tomorrow.

But I-933 would eliminate these questions to my office because land use planning in Washington will purposely be thrown into chaos. This chaos will have two main effects for rural areas, in my view.

First, many people buy land in rural areas as security for the future. Three or four decades ago, folks bought land in rural Pierce County so that they could live quietly, retire, and perhaps pass on some of their land to their children, prompting the phone calls to my office. They followed the rules and the rules told them that they could live out their dreams of selling their land to retire at some point in the future.

But I-933 takes away our dreams of quiet living then retirement by making our property insecure.

Winona LaDuke, Ralph Nader’s running mate on the 2000 Green Party ticket and longtime leader on tribal environmental issues, is stumping in Oregon again. This Thursday, July 20, she will address a gathering at the Portland Art Museum at 6:30 PM. (Details here.)

This time, she is not after votes, but wind turbines and solar panels. In the six years since she left the limelight of Presidential politics, LaDuke has been campaigning for renewable energy, especially on tribal reservations. A member of the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota, LaDuke says tribes have reaped few benefits from energy extraction and suffered a disproportionate share of the environmental fallout from mining, drilling, nuclear waste disposal, and emissions from coal burning. She believes that the combined wind power of the gustiest reservations, such as Rosebud and Pine Ridge in the Great Plains, could meet more than half of current US demand for electricity.

Americans, like most people in the industrialized world, are getting heavier.  That much is clear. 

But the reasons why our waistlines are expanding so fast are still a bit murky.

Sure, there is a simple explanation:  we eat too much, and don't get enough exercise.  But that explanation doesn't really get at the heart of the matter.  It's not as if we all sat down one day and decided to loaf around and eat bon bons and potato chips.  Culturally, thin is still in; and most of us who are packing on a few extra pounds would prefer to take it off, if we could.

A more plausible explanation is that, in a host of subtle ways, our physical and cultural environments have gradually changed, transforming sloth and gluttony from deadly sins into convenient choices.

Of course, some researchers posit that we worry too much about diet and exercise, and not enough on other, often overlooked causes of weight gain.  A recent article in the International Journal of Obesity, for example, cites a variety of unheralded factors that collectively contribute to growing waistlines, ranging from declining rates of smoking (nicotine is an appetite suppressant), to too little sleep (staying awake stimulates the appetite), to new medications (some antidepressants are linked with weight gain), to climate-controlled environments that require our bodies to expend less energy on heating and cooling. 

Still, there's plenty of evidence that cheaper food has made it much easier to overeat.  American agriculture has seen a startling increase in productivity over the last several decades.  According to the USDA's Economic Research Service, per-capita calorie availability grew from 3,200 calories per day in 1980 (about where it had been for a generation) to 3,900 calories per day today.  That means that we eat (or waste) about 700 extra food calories per day than we did in 1980.

According to The Washington Post, U.S. fuel economy is stuck in neutral:  despite high gas prices, vehicle fuel economy hasn't improved a whit compared with the previous year.

But it gets worse. 

Honda's new car fleet was the most efficient, with an average rated fuel economy of ... wait for it ... a whopping 24.2 mpg, just ahead of Toyota, the manufacturer of the Prius. Daimler-Chrysler trailed the pack, with new vehicles averaging just over 19 mpg. 

Overall, new car fleet got about 21 mpg, based on EPA fuel economy ratings.  Real-world mpg is likely lower, since most vehicles get worse mileage than their EPA ratings.