Daily Score Blog

The U.S. emits five times more CO2 per capita than the rest of the world’s average. Lately, I’ve been feeling frustrated about my share in this heavyweight status. I don’t live in an urban location (Poulsbo, Washington, about a one-hour drive and ferry ride from Seattle), and since the bus stop (and the actual town) is still about 7 miles from my house, this forces me to drive almost daily. Leaving the car at home just isn’t a viable option.

So I was eager to read what writer (and former Tidepool publisher) Seth Zuckerman had to say in an article in this month's Sierra Magazine about his effort to define and follow a “Low-Carbon Diet." Here’s the question he raises:

…Morocco and Indonesia emit only as much carbon dioxide per capita as Earth can absorb--and they're hardly known for their high standard of living. Is impoverishment the only way to bring our carbon bender under control?

New wolf census numbers from US Fish and Wildlife show another year of astonishing growth--a 20 percent increase. The population now stands at 1,229 in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. And pioneer wolves are now re-claiming their territories in Washington, Oregon, and Utah.

The Rocky Mountain wolf re-introduction program is surely one of the most encouraging success stories in the history of US conservation. The best thing we can do for wolves, it seems, it simply to leave them alone and give them room to recover--making the West a little wilder and healthier in the process.

When we started our family experiment in car-lessness seven months ago, David Sucher at City Comforts blog commented

All I ask is that they [us Durnings, that is] don't pull punches. Don't make their recounting of the experience a political tract about how much happier they are and how the world is so much better because they don't have a car. In other words, tell the truth. Tell us the good and the bad. . . . Tell us when they miss the car, too.

When I read that, I thought, “Exactly, David!”

Yet it’s been hard to write a post about the lows of car-lessness. I’ve been keeping a diary specifically on the drags and dregs of this experiment since the beginning. I’ve been trying without success to write on the subject almost as long.

My writer’s block, I believe, originates in my belief that interesting writing depends on new information, on unexpected lessons. And there’s little surprising about the downsides of car-lessness.

The lows of car-lessness are what you’d expect: episodes of bad weather, bad transit connections, bad health, bad karma. These lows are relatively rare, because we live in a compact community with fairly good transit and plenty of FlexCars on call. And lows strike the car-ful, too: traffic jams, car trouble, crashes, wrong turns, fuel bills.

Whether the lows of car-lessness are worse or more numerous than the lows of car-fulness is the subject for another day. Today, I just want to go on record to declare that car-lessness is definitely sometimes the pits. To answer David’s plea for naked honesty, I’ll recount a few anecdotes.

Being car-less has stunk . . .

[This is part of a series.]

New items are coming in faster than I can keep pace with. But here are a few gems...

In Washington, a group of developers and affordable housing advocates released a report arguing that I-933 would severely impair efforts to supply decent affordable housing.

In a similar vein, David Horsey, at the Seattle P-I, has a clever cartoon in today's paper.

Researchers at the University of Washington released a new study estimating the costs of I-933. The price tag for compensation, around $8 billion, is very similar to the estimate from the state's Office of Financial Management. Advocates for I-933 claim the study was biased, but a good article in the Seattle Times questions that claim's veracity--two of the lawyers working on the UW study are also legal advisers to the Building Industry Association of Washington, which is supporting I-933.

(Ever-astute commenter Dan has argued that the compensation price doesn't matter because communities will waive laws, rather than pay compensation. That's what's happened in Oregon. It's a fair point. But it's also worth noting, as the UW study's authors did, that there's actually no authority, in I-933 or elsewhere, to waive the laws. So Washington communities would be in a bit of a legal pickle. And the high price tag does matter in at least one way: it essentially forces the legislature to overturn important laws or face financial disaster.)

Lastly, the California Farm Bureau, which is opposing Proposition 90, released a short but scorching critique of that state's ballot measure. The reasoning applies well to the measures in other states too.

There's some interesting stuff in the most recent issue of the energy newsletter The Northwest Current.

Well, interesting if you're an energy policy geek (like me).  My faves: this article on the Clark County utility's conservation programs; this one on low cost opportunities for efficiency in the industrial sector; and this one on how power planners are trying to solve the technical problems associated with adding o the electricity grid.

But even the non-geek can get excited about this:  a new registry of energy efficient homes that are up for sale.

Apparently, the Portland-area Multiple Listing Service--which lists all homes on the market in the metro area--plans to start including information on each home's energy efficiency features.  So prospective homebuyers will be able to search for homes with a high-efficiency furnace or double paned windows, or ones built to LEED design standards.

Nifty -- it'd be nice to see this idea catch on!  (And, boy, do I ever wish that had been around back when I was house-shopping.)

[Note: This is part of a series.]

There was an odd little story in USA Today on Sunday, covering the raft of so-called "property rights" initiatives on the November ballot throughout the Western U.S.

I say odd, because it almost completely misses the point.

As the story notes, a lot of people are pretty exercised about a 2005 US Supreme Court decision in the case of Kelo vs. New London, which held that it was perfectly constitutional for a state or local government to condemn private property and hand it over to another private party--a trick that's been used off and on, sometimes in the name of revitalizing blighted urban neighborhoods, but other times with some seedy and distateful results (see, e.g., the Texas Ranger's baseball stadium).

The western states' initiatives are riding a wave of opposition to Kelo, which seems to have ticked off people across the political spectrum. And that's the story that USA Today focused on.

But Kelo isn't the real story in these ballot measures. It just isn't. 

You see, all but one of the ballot measures contains two separate parts: one that addresses Kelo abuses; and a second, essentially unrelated part that targets planning, zoning, and similar efforts that communities use to plan for the future, maintain their quality of life, and protect residents' property values. (Read more on the effects of these initiatives here.)

Now I'm no expert, but it seems to me that if the anti-Kelo portions of these initiatives were to pass, not a whole lot would change. Sure, there are a lot of people upset about the Kelo decision and its potential for abuse. Perhaps they're right to be upset. But for all the fuss, Kelo-style eminent domain cases are pretty rare. And more to the point, in some of the states where voters will weigh in on eminent domain, Kelo-style excesses are already illegal: state legislators have already voted to curtail them.

But if the anti-planning portions pass, the changes would be pretty profound. Overnight, it would become virtually impossible for communities, both rural and urban, to adopt new planning and zoning ordinances; changing or updating zoning plans could trigger big payouts to affected landowners.  Of course, some people could stand to make a bundle under that sort of scheme; but while there would certainly be a few winners, there would be far more losers.

To me, the anti-Kelo provisions of these initiatives are little more than a Trojan horse -- a showy exterior designed to attract attention and votes. 

The real story is the hidden anti-planning payload.  And USA Today missed the story. They fell for the Trojan horse.

Apropos of Clark's post on harbor seals, I'll indulge in a bit of shameless self promotion. Washington Law & Politics recently posted online an article I wrote celebrating the often under-reported good news about the environment.

Here's the crux:

Good news may not be the main story about Washington's environment. But the environmental movement has committed a colossal communications blunder by failing to broadcast the good news along with the bad. In the pressing need to sound the alarm--and the need truly is pressing--we have forgotten to notice, or at least to advertise, that some important things are getting better.

Give it a read, if you have time, and let me know what you think.

(The article published this summer, but I originally wrote it over a year ago. That's why few of the facts are a bit "aged." Like a fine wine, let's say.)

From today's Seattle Times:

For more than three decades, scientists have been rounding up harbor seals from Puget Sound, drawing their blood, sampling bits of blubber and running other tests to check for signs of disease.

Their goal: to track how harmful concentrations of toxic chemicals are affecting the animals' health.

Sounds a bit tough on the seals, perhaps. But biomonitoring -- the practice of gauging ecosystem status by looking at actual organisms, rather than at the chemical purity of water or soil -- is a very powerful tool that deserves more attention than it gets.

After all, I don't really care if soil or water are contaminated for the sake of the soil and water itself -- I care for the creatures (especially humans, but others too) that are affected by the pollution.  And what better way to figure out if pollution is affecting living things than by, well, measuring them.

But what really caught my eye in the article was this:

Statewide, harbor seals number about 32,000. They haven't always been that numerous. Because fishermen complained that seals took too many fish, the state once paid a bounty to reduce their numbers.

The statewide seal population numbered about 5,000 in 1970, Jeffries said. It began to recover after passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which banned killing.

From the first Earth Day to today, a six-fold increase in the state's harbor seal population.  Obviously, just because harbor seal populations are going up doesn't mean that aquatic ecosystems are healthy.  But it's encouraging nonetheless.

When, oh when, will Eric end this Ahab-like fixation on the takings ballot measures?

Don't hold your breath.

Yesterday, Washington's Office of Financial Management released estimates of the financial impact of Initiative 933. It's not pretty. Analysts are ballparking the costs to taxpayers at between $7.3 and $9 billion over the next six years.

I won't get into the technical details today—partly because I haven't studied the analysis carefully yet. But scary as that $8 billion price tag may be, I actually think it's a low-ball conservative figure. For one thing, the estimate doesn't include any costs of claims dealing with personal property. (I-933, alone among the rash of takings initiatives, explicitly deals with both real estate and personal property, including stocks, bonds, contracts, livestock, vehicles, etc. Yes, I know, it's mind-boggling.)

The best media coverage was in the Seattle Times.

Other coverage in the Seattle P-I and the Olympian (where I'm quoted).

(This post is part of a series.)

From the Seattle Times -- no surprises, really, but worth noting:

The price tag for a new, elevated structure to replace the aging Alaskan Way viaduct has grown from $2.4 billion to $2.8 billion and the cost of building a tunnel has gone from a high of $3.6 billion to an estimated $4.6 billion, according to a report released today by the state.

Meanwhile, the estimated cost of building a new 520 floating bridge has grown from an earlier estimated high of $3.1 billion to $4.4 billion, according to the state Department of Transportation report.

Plain old inflation, coupled with unusually rapid rises in the cost of steel and cement (blame post-Katrina reconstruction, the rapid runup in energy prices, and rising demand in Asia), have pushed construction costs way up. 

It's not just for highways, of course; from what I've heard and read, construction costs have risen for homes and commercial construction projects.

And that means that we can probably expect the same sorts of cost increases plaguing things like light rail, too.  Which suggests this: no matter how you slice it, mobility just isn't as cheap as it was just a decade or so ago.

UPDATE:  It looks like the figures above are the low end estimate for cost increases. The scaled-back "core" tunnel project could cost as much as $5.5 billion, and the "core" aerial highway as much as $3.3 billion. See the figure here, from the Seattle P-I, for more detail.

Unusually enough, the range of uncertainty in construction costs has escalated, rather than fallen, as time as passed.  I'd expect that cost uncertainty would narrow over time, as more of the planning is completed, and the project scope is better understood.  But in this case, commodity and construction prices have become so volatile that it's really hard to tell what things will cost in a few years -- which suggests that the public might never have an accurate cost accounting for the Viaduct or SR-520 until the projects are nearly complete.  Oi.

I'm giddy with hometown pride.

In an address to NYU's law school, the former Veep and climate protection champion par excellence singled out my neighborhood for praise:

Individual Americans of all ages are becoming a part of a movement, asking what they can do as individuals and what they can do as consumers and as citizens and voters. Many individuals and businesses have decided to take an approach known as “Zero Carbon.” They are reducing their CO2 as much as possible and then offsetting the rest with reductions elsewhere including by the planting of trees. At least one entire community - Ballard, a city of 18,000 people in Washington State - is embarking on a goal of making the entire community zero carbon.

Pretty cool. You can learn more about Ballard's somewhat quixotic community-driven initiative here. And you can learn even more over at Gristmill, where fellow Ballardian Dave Roberts geeks out on Al's speech.

I guess I should point out that Gore was mistaken about one thing: Ballard isn't actually its own city. Or at least it hasn't been since 1907, when it was brought under the oppressive yoke of the city of Seattle. Luckily for Ballard's efforts to go carbon-neutral, however, the tyrannical rule of Seattle's city hall has yield one or two big benefits: a city-owned electrical utility with zero net greenhouse-gas emissions and a city leadership committed to meeting Kyoto's standards.

Ballard is certainly not perfect, but it is inspiring to see communities rally to address what is, perhaps, the single biggest environmental challenge facing us in the twenty-first century. It helps, I imagine, that the neighborhood has a few thoughtful residents like this fellow, who has been jestingly dubbed a “freak” for his car-less ways. So I'm glad Gore shined a little limelight on my `hood.

p.s. I was kidding about the “oppressive yoke” bit. I love the rest of Seattle too.

Free Ballard!

Kidding.

With our often transient lifestyles,  it’s a question that many North Americans can’t easily answer. Alan Durning set out to answer this question for himself in the award-winning book, This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence, (free pdf), about returning with his family to the Pacific Northwest and founding Northwest Environment Watch (now Sightline). From skyscrapers in Vancouver to farms in the Palouse, Alan reflects on everything from the role that transportation plays in communities to the Northwest's love/hate relationship with its natural riches.

On the 10th anniversary of our flagship book, Sightline is offering the book free in pdf form on our website.

On one of the early rainy days of autumn, it’s a great reminder of why I love my (adopted) Northwest home:

If you have never traveled these groves, understand that they are not tidy, bare-ground woods. They are jumbled, pungent, soggy, dripping, prickly, almost impassable jungles. The standing trees approach the maximum height allowed by physics—much higher and they could not draw water up to the top. The lowest branches are often a hundred feet up, and the trunks are the sizes of Volkswagens. --This Place on Earth

(This post is part of a series.)

I meant to get to this last Friday, but life had other plans.  Still, if you haven't seen it already, this New York Times article from late last week is definitely worth a read. 

The article does a great job describing just how far ahead of the rest of the country California is in tackling climate change.  The state's recent CO2 law -- mandating a 25 percent reduction by 2020 -- is just a starting point.  California has been the nation's climate-protection trendsetter in other ways as well, from its recently passed emissions standards for cars, to mandatory efficiency increases for electrical appliances, to its "decoupling" rules that let power companies reap higher profits from lower sales.  (The wonky side of me is especially pleased to see decoupling get some love from the Gray Lady.)

One quibble about the article, though:  it portrays California's actions as an economic risk:

California, in fact, is making a huge bet:  that it can reduce emissions without wrecking its economy, and therefore inspire other states -- and countries -- to follow its example on slowing climate change.

I don't see it that way.  First off, most of the initial greenhouse reduction steps are likely to boost California's economy: buying conservation & efficiency is cheaper than buying new generation.  And think about Japan and Germany -- they're already more energy efficient than California, and have been for decades, and their high level of energy efficiency hasn't hurt their economic competitiveness.

And second, if you're thinking long-term, the real economic risk is runaway global warming.  The potential for massive increases in floods, drought, storms, etc., coupled with higher insurance costs, economic uncertainty, yada-yada are far off, perhaps, and hard to calculate, but nevertheless very real.  Inaction on climate is as risky as action.

As I see it, the risks are more political than economic -- that is, some California politicians could face some dicey challenges in the next decade or so, as the greenhouse laws kick in.  Greenhouse reductions are likely to create some economic winners and losers; but the losers will probably be pretty upset. Overall, I have few worries about California's economy; but that doesn't mean that the state's climate leaders haven't had to exercise some courage to do what they've done.

Obscure but interesting, at least to me. . .

Leaders know about land-value taxes and their benefits, but they almost never hear about them from their constituents.

A 2003 survey of legislators (I know, I’m behind on my reading) and local elected officials found that among both groups, two-thirds of respondents were either somewhat or very familiar with the concept of land-value taxation. Some 63 percent of state lawmakers and 77 percent of local officials believed that land-value (or split-rate) taxation would be a positive stimulus for urban development. (They’re right: it accomplishes this trick by inducing land speculators to change their investment strategy—into economically productive channels rather than the economic parasitism of speculation. We’ve written about it in Tax Shift and This Place on Earth 2001.)

What they don’t know is that their constituents want land-value taxes (which is likely because those constituents don’t know about the benefits of land-value taxation). When asked if they had ever been contacted by a constituent or organization to ask their support for land-value taxation, only one in ten said, “yes.”

Elected officials are contacted about every conceivable issue and policy proposal, over and over, day after day. The fact that only one tenth report ever having heard about land-value taxes from any voter or lobbyist suggests two things:

1. There’s vanishingly little organized constituency promoting this positive innovation (only a rag-tag crew of Henry George enthusiasts).

2. A little bit of lobbying might make a real difference.

[Note: This is part of  a series.]

What do the words "fraud" and "unconstitutional" have in common? (Hint: It relates to my latest obsession.)

Give up?

Okay, the answer is that those words were used by courts in Nevada and Montana to describe the "takings" initiatives in those states. What's perhaps even more interesting is that those words--and the legal reasoning that engendered them--could easily be applied to the mirror-image ballot measures in four other states.

Here's what happened.