Daily Score Blog

Tonight is the kickoff of America's two-month festival of gluttony:   first Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then the extended food coma that has become the Hannukah-Christmas-New Year season.

As is now my holiday custom, I plan on packing on about 5-7 pounds over the next 2 months, then fretting about my growing girth, then vowing to eat better and get more exercise in the New Year, with mixed results. 

I know, I know, it's a vicious cycle -- I should just eat more healthfully to begin with.  But that's hard:  sugars and fats have become so cheap and abundant that they're virtually impossible to avoid.  Treats aren't a novelty any more -- they're the norm.  And even if I can steel my will to resist 9 out of 10 temptations, there's still way too many opportunities to fall off the wagon.

Growing girth is just one symptom of a food system that's fundamentally out of whack.  We've created a web of subsidies -- everything from agricultural research to tax breaks to direct payments to farmers --  that favor empty calories (e.g., corn syrup, vegetable oils, animal fats) over healthier foods, like fruits and vegetables.

A month or so ago, I got to wondering how just how many food calories the nation produces, compared with how many we need to keep our bodies fueled.  As it turns out, we produce vastly more food calories than we could ever use ourselves. Vastly.

On average, a person can survive quite well on a diet of 2,000 calories per day -- maybe a smidge more or less, depending on your weight and level of activity.  But the US corn harvest alone produces the equivalent of 13,500 calories per US resident per day -- almost 7 times more calories than we need.  And soybeans add an additional 2,600 calories per person per day. 

Add in wheat, rice, fruits, veggies, and a few minor crops, and we're talking about an agricultural system that produces at least nine times as many calories from plants as our bodies can healthfully use. (And that doesn't even count seafood, grass-fed beef, milk from pasture cattle, etc. -- just food crops.)

That's a lot of calories. 

Obviously, very little of that food is actually intended for direct human consumption.  Most goes to feed animals, a lot of it goes to ethanol, some gets sent overseas or used in industry.

Still, given how much we produce, it's no wonder that we're surrounded by sugars and fats. Spurred on by misguided subsidies, our agricultural system has become so phenomenally productive that it's actually a hazard to our health.

What could the guy next door do if I-933--or other western property initiatives--pass on November 7? Sightline has just launched a No on 933 issue ad that shows how these initiatives could pave the way for irresponsible development and an end to many commonsense protections.

Watch the ad! 

Forward it!

If you have an extra second, go to the YouTube version and rate it!

Please comment below or send feedback to elisa@sightline.org.

Seems like more and more people -- even conservative economists -- are going on record in support of higher gas taxes.

From an economists' point of view, it's a bit of a no brainer. Like just about any addiction, our gasoline habit carries lots of "externalities" -- ie., costs that fall on everyone, rather than just the person who uses the gas. (Think climate change, oil spills, air pollution, security vulnerabilities, international military entanglements, economic risk from oil price shocks, etc.)

If we consumers had to pay those costs every time we filled our tanks, then we'd tend to use gas a little more sparingly -- and we'd create fewer externalities as a result. Plus, the taxes could provide a source of revenue to deal with the problems created by energy consumption -- say, a source of revenue for energy efficiency, to ramp down our contribution to climate change

But that begs the question -- just how high should the taxes be?

There's no easy answer to that question, since there are so many uncertainties involved. Estimates of various military costs of petroleum vary by as much as a factor of six, for example (see this pdf for a summary). But taking a limited look at just the climate impacts of gasoline consumption, I'd say that a tax of, oh, about 25 cents (US) per gallon is a reasonable place to start.

That works out to roughly a penny per mile. 

Applied to both gas and diesel, that tax would raise about $2 billion per year to fight climate change in the Pacific Northwest alone.

Editor's note: Guest contributor David Kershner is a land conservation consultant who did research for Sightline's book Tax Shift.

In case you haven't noticed, environmental tax shifting is receiving national attention, thanks in part to Al Gore. Last month Gore gave a speech at New York University in which he proposed replacing the payroll tax with a carbon tax .

Last week Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that he asked Barack Obama "why [Obama] didn't support an energy-tax married to tax relief for working Americans" in a recent speech to members of MoveOn.org. Klein refers to it as Gore's "tax swap idea." Obama responded later in the interview that, "It's a neat idea. I'm going to call Gore and have a conversation about it. It might be something I would want to embrace."

Meanwhile, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has been promoting tax shifting as part of his current book tour. In an interview on KUOW's The Conversation about two weeks ago, Stiglitz lent his support to the idea and said that leaders of the Conservative Party in Britain are now talking about the benefits of lower taxes on labor and higher taxes on pollution.

From the October 25 issue of The Guardian:

On Conservative plans for ensuring how yet-to-be-defined [carbon reduction] targets were met, Mr Cameron reiterated that his own party was committed to rebalancing the system through a system of "taxes on things that are bad," such as pollution, and ["]tax reductions on things that are good," such as free parking for battery-operated cars.

Maybe tax shifting's time has almost come?

This past weekend, my brother and I escaped for an overnight backpacking trip in that rare gem, Olympic National Park. We saw scarcely another soul, but throughout the trip there was evidence that human civilization persisted: the sound of aircraft overhead. Not loud. But often enough that we remarked on it.

So it was apropos that this morning I discovered an article about a project called One Square Inch of Silence, which takes place in the Olympics. It's the work of an "acoustic ecologist" (who knew there is such a thing?) named Gordon Hempton.

To make a long story short:

"I've circled the globe three times in pursuing silent places," he said. "Olympic National Park is the most sonically diverse, and is the national park that has the longest periods of natural quiet that I have observed."

On a recent hike, Hempton stopped along the trail at various times, holding up his sound level meter. At one spot, the decibel level was so low -- just 26 decibels -- that he observed, "Probably the loudest sound was a few drops of the alder leaves back there."

Hempton takes his project so seriously that he actually designated a spot--a square inch to be precise--that is truly quiet. I think that's pretty cool.

The place Hempton designated is, apparently, in a part of the park that's mostly undisturbed by the distant roar of jet engines. It's the sort of place that I suspect many of us would benefit from getting to know, silently.

Want to find that square inch? Read all about it on his website, here.

(The backpacking trip was grand -- thanks for asking. Nothing but crisp autumn sunshine and bears working their way through salal bushes in anticipation of their long nap.)

As reported by the BBC, a new study on the economic impact of climate change....

...suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%.

But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, the 700-page study says.

As usual, I have no idea if the numbers are right, or even if they're in the ballpark.  But the basic concept -- providing a side-by-side comparison of the costs of climate change with the costs of business as usual -- is spot on. 

I mean, it's pretty commonplace to see global warming skeptics bemoan the "exhorbitant" cost of fighting climate change, just it's all too common to read about the terrible toll that global warming could exact from the global economy.

But presenting the costs of action and inaction in the same breath does far more than let people compare those costs.  It also reminds us that those two choices -- pay now or pay later -- pretty much exhaust our options.  There's no magical, cost free third way:  one way or the other, we're going to pay.  It's just a question of how much, and for what.

Once we collectively get over our magical thinking about climate change -- the thinking that lets us pretend that there's some way to duck the problem altogether -- we may be able to start making some concrete choices. And it seems to me that presenting costs as a given, rather than an option, is the first step to rousing us from our denial.

Hey, look!  Someone else cares about the link between neighborhood design and public health!

The Congress for the New Urbanism put out a big ol' report, covering a lot of the same ground we went over in our most recent Cascadia Scorecard.  The upshot -- there are a bajillion ways that neighborhood design might affect people's health; some of the connections are rock solid, while others are more speculative; and the big pathway for protecting health is through reduced vehicle travel -- which can ease car accidents and air pollution, while promoting exercise.

The neat thing here, though, is that the report was prepared specifically to help the green building community -- real estate developers, designers, architects, etc. -- figure out how to create neighborhoods that protect their residents' health.

Which is a big step forward.  Gradually, the academic research on the links between sprawl and health is being turned into practical lessons for the design world. And that should mean that, soon enough, we'll start seeing some progress in making neighborhoods healthier places to live.

** Late yesterday, the Montana supreme court unanimously upheld the lower court's decision to invalidate Initiative 154 because of pervasive fraud.

** Speaking of fraud, one of Howard Rich's key shell organizations, Chicago-based Americans for Limited Government, has been operating without a license to do business for almost 9 months. ALG has pumped well over a million in cash into the property ballot measures. It's not clear yet what the legal ramifications of this discovery will be.

** In Washington, support for Initiative 933 appears to be crumbling. Over at the Stranger's blog, Josh Feit says that new poll numbers show the measure down by 38 to 42. Just a few weeks ago, the same polling firm put the measure at 47 to 31 in favor. So support has weakend by 9 points, while opposition has vaulted up by 9. Undecided voters--still a whopping 20 percent--will make all the difference.

** Also in Washington, a new report (pdf) from the Economic Opportunity Institute puts some context on I-933's price tag of roughly $8 billion. What else could residents do with the money? How about this:

Currently there are 593,000 people in our state who lack health insurance. Health coverage for these people (through the BHP in which the state splits the cost of coverage with each individual) would cost the public $1.14 billion a year.

And the report has many other good examples of what you can buy for $8 billion. It's a great summary of the financial consequences.

UPDATE 10/31/06: A new poll has Idaho's Proposition 2 within the margin of error: 39 percent no; 37 percent yes. 24 percent are still undecided.

A new poll just released shows that Oregon voters now oppose Measure 37 by a nearly 2 to 1 margin. That's a shocking reversal from just two years ago the measure won 61 percent support.

But the Measure 37 backlash is not terribly surprising given our understanding of the effects of the measure. In our recent report, Property Wrongs, Sightline tells the stories of Oregon residents who claim they were sold a bill of goods -- that they didn't fully understand what they were signing up for when they voted "yes."

So there's that. And now for the "inside baseball" stuff...

 Being just a trifle interested in how to talk about the 2006 property rights ballot measures, I found a couple of interesting elements in the poll results: 

• Respondents who say they "have heard a lot" about Measure 37 are much more likely to dislike the measure, for a number of reasons. 
• After respondents weighed in on their current support for Measure 37, they were read a list of real life consequences of the law. The most objectionable result? The proposed mine and energy plant in a national monument.

Makes me think that education about the 2006 copycat ballot measures may be an effective antidote to them. And perhaps it's wise to emphasize the disastrous consequences for our natural heritage.

Poll details here. It was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. And it was commissioned by Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund and the Isaak Walton League of America, both of which take a dim view of 37 and the copycat measures in 2006.

For a moment, let's just ignore the political context of this NYTimes article (about how incumbents are having difficulty capitalizing on the "strong economy" in this fall's US election).  As ur-blogger Matthew Yglesias points out, there's something seriously amiss with reporting that describes the economy thus...

...the economy has not looked so good in a long time.

...the Dow Jones industrial average has finally returned to its glory days of the late 1990’s, setting records almost daily...

...glowing economic statistics...

....and so on, all with the subtext, "Hey, we're doing great!!!" -- all while burying the followng down in the bowels of paragraph 30:

[F]or many voters, their economic prospects do not feel as great as overall statistics might imply... {t}he wages of ordinary workers... have just started to improve after several years of falling short or barely keeping up with inflation.

The tens of millions of people lacking health insurance and the steady shrinkage in traditional pensions have also added to the sense of personal insecurity.

Ok, then -- the economy is doing great, it's just that, you know, actual people aren't doing that well.

On Monday night I was down in Vancouver, Washington participating in a panel debate on I-933. It was heated at times, like any old fashioned civic debate should be. But I was troubled to read the newspaper coverage the following morning.

Here's the bit that stuck in my craw:

Zimmerman said farmers resorted to I-933 because they couldn't get state government to take their concerns seriously.

He saved most of his ire for the critical areas ordinances that counties must update under the GMA. Those ordinances will require farmers to set aside as much as 250 feet on either side of streams and wetlands for salmon and wildlife habitat. That's unfair, he said, because developers could pave over that property and leave nothing for fish or wildlife.

What's wrong with that coverage? Well, it overlooks a few key things: 

1. During the debate Zimmerman was forced to admit that the 250 foot buffer he was complaining about was only a proposal -- a proposal that was withdrawn because of community opposition.
2. And the fact that the proposal was withdrawn is pretty darn good evidence that state government does, in fact, take his concerns seriously.
3. Finally, developers cannot pave over the property and leave nothing for wildlife. Why? Because the property he was referring to is zoned agricultural under current law. Exactly the sort of protection that may vanish under 933.

So Zimmerman's example is not only untrue, it turns out to actually suggest that our current practices, however imperfect, can work fairly well.

Unfortunately, the newspaper article neither refutes his assertions nor mentions his subsequent confession in the debate. And by not putting Zimmerman's claims between quotation marks, it lends them the weight of fact -- a gravity that they certainly do not deserve.

Sad.

Another Puget Sound orca is missing.

One of the calves born this summer whose mother was recently discovered to have vanished has disappeared, scientists said Friday. 

It's been a bad week for orcas; last week's news was even worse.

Three of the 90 orcas that call Puget Sound home are missing and presumed dead... At least two had shown signs of starvation...

[Two] factors have combined to frustrate rebuilding of the orcas' population: a declining amount of their favorite food, salmon; and the continued buildup of industrial chemicals that affect reproduction and the immune system and are believed to make the orcas hungry and weak.

Over the last few decades the orca population has fluctuated a fair amount -- but still, compared with the late 1970s, recent numbers have been looking pretty good. 

So let's hope that the disappointing news from this week isn't a harbinger of a new and more troublesome trend.

Fascinating article in the Boise Weekly.

We're so accustomed to conflict and outrage grabbing the headlines that it's surprising to hear about the day to day cooperation between Idaho's ranchers and conservationists -- they're working together to protect both wild wolves and livestock.

If you need a breather from the over-heated election cycle, this one's worth a read.

Property Wrongs is Sightline's new report on what other states can learn from Oregon's experience with Measure 37. It tells six stories of communities that got stuck with the consequences.

This is the final story in our series, but there are many more untold stories in Oregon.

Susie Kunzman and her husband love their quiet rural life. They raise alpacas, 35 of them, which have an estimated worth of $350,000. But all that could change if a proposed 80-acre gravel mine goes in just over the Kunzman’s fence line--a gravel mine that is the result of a measure 37 claim.

Alpacas are easily spoked, explains Kunzman, and the blasting and noise from crushing could stress them. Stress to an alpaca is reflected in the strength and quality of their hair, which for Kunzman equates to lost revenue. She wonders who will pay her for lost value from the effects of the mine, especially when it comes time to sell her property.

Kunzman's other neighbors are incensed too. One neighbor, Renee Ross, summed up the community’s sentiment best when she recently told a reporter, “I hope other states don’t do this.”

Read the rest of the story.

Reading Alan’s series, The Year of Living Car-lessly, has left me grappling with car questions: Could we do it? Could we kiss our only car good-bye? How would it change our financial picture? How would it change our daily lives in Seattle?

We’ve got a few things in our favor. First, we already ditched one car—my husband’s. Martin hated driving to work anyway, but part of his inspiration for becoming car-free was learning about Seattle’s “One Less Car” study. He says that his decision was easy, especially since we now share my zippy little Volkswagen GTI. But truth be told, he rarely drives. He commutes to work by bicycle around the north end of the lake—28 miles each way—or he rides the bus across the 520 bridge. When it comes to errands and entertainment, we tend to walk.

Second, we live in the complete, compact community of Capitol Hill (a neighborhood in Seattle) where our walkshed index is 445—that’s 445 businesses within a mile of our front door. We live only four blocks from our local co-op grocery, a great local coffee house, our local video store, a used book store, a locally owned music store, a not-so-locally-owned drug store and countless tasty restaurants. Plus, we’re only two blocks from medical care and two blocks from our yoga studio. For what more could we ask? There is no real reason for us to drive except to gather with friends and get out of town.