Daily Score Blog

A little frustration of reading our blog--or so we've heard from readers--is that it's hard to keep up. No surprise there: In 2007, we posted around 290 pieces on the blog, more than one per weekday. It's hard even for us to read 'em all.

So in the spirit of recycling, here are links to reader favorites from this year, as well as some of our picks for categories we created. Please feel free to add your own picks and pans in comments. And while we're at it, thanks to our blog readers--some 200,000 of you this year--for reading, commenting, and keeping us on our toes. Keep it coming!

Most popular posts, in order:

• The most popular posts of the year were two recent posts on the surprising math of mpg: 18 is enough and How SUVs can save the climate
• My Toxic Water Bottles
  
• Car-head: The opening salvo to Alan's "Bicycle Neglect "series (related posts The Wheel World and What Bike Friendly Looks Like were just after Car-head in popularity).
• The United States of Climate Change (Again)
  
• Minimum Wage's Minimal Effect on Unemployment
• I Know Why the Caged Nerd Sings
  
• One Mile from Home: A 2006 post from Alan's car-less series.
• The Weakest Link: Second post in the Bicycle Neglect series
• Sorry Climate, I had to Clean my Keyboard

On my email accounts, I have filters that keep out most spam. But my regular mail boxes at home and the office? No such luck! Advertising arrives in the post daily, by the sheaf and by the ream.

It annoys me. Here I am, scrupulously recycling and contemplating the climate impacts of my consumption, while L.L. Bean and its ilk are dropping slabs of paper in my mail box: paper that took carbon-storing trees to create, climate-polluting factories to mill, and carbon-belching trucks to haul. All told, it’s 41 pounds of junk mail a year per American.

Admittedly, junk mail isn’t high on Cascadia’s lists of menaces. According to estimates developed for the US Postal Service, it accounts for just over one tenth of one percent of all energy use (at least, if Cascadia matches the US average), plus one-fiftieth of municipal solid waste.

Still, it’s worth a little attention, especially when you consider that virtually no direct mail actually works. Postal advertising is an industry where a mass mailing is considered successful if 2 percent of envelopes or catalogs generate a sale. That means 98 percent of the paper and ink was pointless waste. If we could wave a magic wand and make it disappear, both the mailer and the recipient would be better off.

At least in Seattle, according to the city's vaunted Green Ribbon Commission report. As I've been yammering on about for the last couple of days, 12 mpg is needlessly bad.

For each taxi boosted to just 22 mpg -- the average vehicle on the road, roughly -- the climate would be spared about 570 gallons of gas and more than 7 tons of carbon-dioxide.* It'd be like taking a car off the road for good. It'd be like upgrading an average car to one that gets 140 mpg. It'd be groovy.

The city of Seattle regulates the taxi medallions. So one good step would be to provide strong incentives to switch to cleaner and more efficient vehicles. Requiring hybrid taxis -- which are in use in New York City and Vancouver -- might be in order.

Hybrid taxis, by the way, are rated at 36 mpg in the city. So the savings could be more like 800+ gallons of gas and over 10 tons of carbon-dioxide saved.* Multiply that by the 667 cabs in Seattle's fleet and it's starting to look like a serious climate benefit.

*My figures are probably ridiculously conservative because they're computed on the basis of 15,000 miles driven per year. Cabs almost certainly drive far more than that. In fact, the city's report appears to be using higher numbers. The report, however, doesn't make clear whether it's just some cabs that get 12 mpg or if that's the fleet average.

Article in the Washington Post today about a 35 year high in American fertility. Apparently, we've once again reached 2.1 children per woman, aka "the replacement rate."

Here's what I found interesting:

While being a mother who works outside the home is far from easy for many American women, many experts said the United States is in many ways more amenable to the practice than many other developed countries. The high-octane consumer economy, for example, helps women run households more efficiently in a number of ways, including making prepared foods more widely available, and weekend and late-night shopping possible. American men are also helping more with their children than in the past, experts say.

"We also have a relatively high percentage of part-time jobs available," said Ronald Rindfuss, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina. "There's also more shift work outside the normal nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday schedule that enables parents to share child care."

Alright, I don't have children so I probably shouldn't chime in, but does this bug anyone else? Are pre-prepared foods, late-night shopping, and off-hours shift work really positive developments for families? Or for the women who -- of course -- run households?

I wrote a couple of provocative blog posts last week (including one that went careening around the Internets and became my all-time most popular post). They elicited reactions ranging from the mildly inquisitive to the genuinely spittle-flecked. Good times!

But while I always welcome an argument -- even a heated one -- I was chagrined to learn that many readers misunderstood my intended point. That's usually the author's fault, as it was this time, and my post titles didn't help matters.

So, I'm going to clarify a couple of things now:

• While it's true that the biggest fuel savings by far can be found at the bottom end of the fleet, I don't think that 18 mpg minimum is an acceptable stopping point for conservation. We should aim for much higher fleet averages.
• While it's true that the there's a bigger fuel consumption difference between 15 and 18 mpg than there is between 50 and 100 mpg, there is, of course, an even bigger difference yet between 15 and 50 (or 15 and 100). It'd be terrific if 100 mpg cars became commonplace.
• On the other hand, it'd be even more terrific, perhaps, if cars just became less commonplace than they are now. I didn't say this earlier, but I should now: from the perspective of fuel conservation, we can also do other things besides vehicle efficiency standards. I think it's of paramount importance to reduce driving too.

I don't know about you, but I've been spending my holidays reading papers about the price elasticity of demand for gasoline. Wait, where are you going?

Listen, I'm sure you've heard this before: "It doesn't matter if we tax gas, people won't change their behavior." Or: "Gas prices go up and down, but people keep using just as much."

So here's what's interesting about my Yuletide reading: these claims just are not true -- not at all! Over the long run -- usually meaning longer than a year -- a 10 percent increase in gas prices results in a decline in gas consumption of around 6 or 7 percent. (This is what economists call the "price elasticity of demand," or just "demand elasticity" if they're feeling hip.)

Now, it's certainly not a one-to-one correlation, but the connection definitely exists and it's much stronger than most people think. Interesting, right? I'll get into the details below the jump.

And hey, is that mistletoe?

Get this:

You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car.

Okay, I'm obsessing. But apropos of my post yesterday, I just calculated this little fact and I had to share. This assumes, of course, that both cars are driven an equal amount. (Hat tip is in order for Jon Rynn, commenter at Gristmill.)

So, we should stop trying to design a techno-magic "car for the future." It really won't end our oil addiction or save us from climate change. That's right: no more HyperCar and no more FreedomCar. At least not until we've done the dull and unsexy work of boosting fuel economy at the bottom of the fleet, where it matters far, far, far more.

The real fix for oil addiction isn't exciting, and it doesn't lend itself to massive research investments. But the good news is: we just need to do stuff that we already know how to do. So here's my new policy proposal. While CAFE standards (fleet averages) are groovy, what we really need to do is simply outlaw vehicles that get below, say, 15 or 18 mpg.

It's easy like that.

Check out the chart below the jump...

Grrrr. Last week, I was all excited that a federal judge had cleared the way for California to demand cleaner cars. All that remained was approval from the EPA.

Not too surprisingly, the EPA has said no.  No clean cars for us.  Not yet, anyway.

And, of course, Arnie's pissed -- and so are the 17 other states (including Washington and Oregon) that have hitched their car standards to California's.  Says Gov. Schwarzennegger:

“It is disappointing that the federal government is standing in our way and ignoring the will of tens of millions of people across the nation,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “We will continue to fight this battle.”

And Arnie will never, ever stop fighting. NEVER!!  Well, not until we melt his robotic endoskeleton.*

* This is 100 percent true -- I even saw it in a movie once!

A while back, I mentioned that I'd traded in my clunky old furnace for a new-fangled, super-efficient model. Not without some trepidation, though, since I took out a home equity loan to pay for it. For me, debt = yikes!!!

But despite my aversion to living on borrowed money, I reasoned that -- provided that things played out as I expected -- the furnace would start paying for itself from day one.  It was a risk, sure, but one I was willing to take.

Without a loan, an efficiency upgrade like this can take a while to pay for itself.  With up front costs of $3,500, more or less (really, more, since I went for the most super-efficient model), it could be 7 years or longer before the gas savings would pay off the cost of the furnace.  And while that's a rate of return that patient investors would leap at, I'm just not that patient!

However -- and despite the greed and farcically bad judgment on display in the ongoing mortgage market meltdown -- financial instiutions do tend to be more patient than consumers.  Banks are willing to lend now, in the hope of making a profit a decade down the road. 

So I figured I could take advantage of their farsightedness, by letting them pay for my furnace now, and paying back the loan gradually, using whatever money I saved on fuel to pay interest and, eventually, principal.  That way, I'd use less gas right away -- with obvious climate benefits -- and I wouldn't pay a cent more for heating (combining fuel and financing) than I did before the upgrade.

But it was a bit of a leap of faith, since I didn't know in advance how much fuel I'd save!  If I gambled wrong -- and it turned out that the old furnace was actually pretty efficient -- the new furnace might turn out to have been a dud of an investment.

So how have things turned out?

In a word:  AWESOME!!  (Thankfully.)

Via Kevin Drum, here's a doozy of a chart developed by blogger Afferent Input, comparing how the top income earners are faring, compared with everyone else.

The left axis on the chart represents how the distribution of income has changed, from 1979 to the present. The various lines break down the trends by income group.

The clear messages:  the top 1 percent are doing great; the next 1-4 percent are doing pretty well; but the bottom 90% -- the bottom 5 lines on the chart -- are getting squeezed out. 

To me, these numbers put the lie to the adage that "a rising tide lifts all boats."  Really, it's lifting yachts.  And the rest of us are foundering at best, sinking at worst.

Mind you, this isn't the end of the story: the chart shows relative income distribution, not absolute income.  Adjusted for inflation, median income (best represented by the orange-ish line in the middle) has risen a bit nationally since the late 1980s, and remained roughly flat in the US Northwest.  So compared with their parents, young entrants into today's middle class aren't so bad off -- at least, not according to these numbers. 

It's just that the phenomenal growth of the economy over the last several decades -- and the extraordinary wealth generated by the stock and real estate markets -- hasn't done all that much for the folks in the middle and bottom of the income ladder.  Fair?  Not so much.

This never fails to fascinate me.

The chart shows how much fuel is consumed over 15,000 miles by cars of different fuel efficiencies.

The curve matters a lot. It means that from the perspective of fuel conservation, it's not terribly important to trade in your Honda Civic to buy a Prius. But it's hugely important to trade in your Dodge Durango for a Toyota Tacoma.

I'll use some rough numbers to illustrate. You trade in your Civic, which averages about 32 miles per gallon, and buy a Prius, which gets a whopping 47 mpg. You've bumped up by 15 miles per gallon -- a big deal, right?

Sort of. Over the next 15,000 miles of driving, you'll have reduced your fuel consumption by 150 gallons. That's fine. But consider what happens when you upgrade your SUV. That's where the real action is.

Over the past few days, I've been trying to pull together some data on how airplane travel affects global warming, as part of a broader project on transportation and climate change.

My stunningly obvious conclusion: it's complicated.  Worse, different calculation methods yield wildly different results.

Take, for instance, this brilliant chart (below) from the Stockholm Environment Institute, comparing many of the major online emissions calculators. Emissions are represented by the light blue lines. As you can see, the online calculators find that a Boston-DC round trip has the impact of somewhere between .19 tons and .48 tons of CO2 emissions, depending on which calculator you use. (By the way -- as I discuss below, it looks like the Atmosfair calculator is probably the most accurate and comprehensive.)

The high-end estimate is over two and a half times higher than the low-end estimate. What's up with that?

Sickening. Kevin John Moran of Camano Island was just convicted of illegally cutting down 27 old-growth cedars on public land. They were between 400 and 700 years old. And they were dry-side trees, even rarer than our west-slope titans.

But here's the worst that can happen to him:

Theft of government property is a Class C felony, which means a maximum sentence of 10 years or less, and a fine not to exceed $250,000.

Some of these trees were mature giants long before Europeans ever encountered the Pacific Northwest. They were protected on public land. They were our natural heritage.

But destroying them? That's just "theft of government property." 

Sentencing is in February.

Yee-haw!

California's first-in-the-nation effort to limit cars' emissions of gases that contribute to global warming took a big step forward Wednesday when a federal judge upheld the state's right to control air pollution and dismissed a challenge by the auto industry.

The nice thing here is that a lot of states have now tied their own policies to California's.  So if this ruling holds, Washington and Oregon will be able to follow suit!

There's still one roadblock, though:

[The judge's] ruling "leaves the Bush administration as the last remaining roadblock to California's regulation of tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions," said state Attorney General Jerry Brown, whose office defended the law.

A decision by the EPA is expected by the end of the year. Stay tuned.

A new study by researchers at a British Columbia cancer agency stands as a stark reminder that, when it comes to pollution, an ounce of pollution prevention is worth a pound of cure:

Researchers found people with the highest levels of a certain type of insecticide in their blood had 2.7 times the risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma as those with the lowest amounts....

People with PCBs in their blood, meanwhile, had twice the risk of developing the disease as those with the lowest exposures. That's about the same level of increased risk as having a family history of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The thing to remember is that these compounds were banned 30 years ago.  But they're still hanging around, tainting the soil and the food chain, and causing all sorts of problems.

For some kinds of pollution, you just can't put the genie back in the bottle -- meaning that it's much better not to open the bottle in the first place.