Daily Score Blog

Update: Watch the story here.

If you’re in range, tune into KOMO television (channel 4 in Seattle) tonight at 5 pm to see Alan Durning taking carlessness to the streets – literally.  

KOMO’s John Sharify interviewed Alan this sunny morning and caught footage of the Durning family's car-less experiment in action, telling the story of how a neighborhood like theirs – compact, with nearby shops and services, bike and pedestrian-friendly street design, and good bus service – has made the year-long experiment possible.

Northwest endangered species have been generating a lot of ink lately. Rocky Mountain gray wolves are likely heading for de-listing. Meanwhile, Puget Sound's orcas were recently added to the list. Even a recovery effort for a handful of rare rabbits made the news. There are plenty more examples, of course, but these species remind us that much of the region's natural heritage relies on the protection afforded by federal laws.

So it's a bit worrisome that there's lately been whispering about big changes to the US Endangered Species Act. (A leaked memo from the US Fish and Wildlife Service suggests the agency is considering an adminstrative re-write of some rules.)

But perhaps even more worrisome was today's revelation:

A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions, the department's inspector general concluded.

[The appointee] "admitted that her degree is in civil engineering and that she has no formal educational background in natural sciences" but nevertheless repeatedly instructed Fish and Wildlife Service scientists to change their recommendations on identifying "critical habitats."

I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

A comprehensive new analysis of the latest US income data finds that:

• "While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005... average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent."
• "...the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928... The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression."
• "The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent."

In truth, the analysis almost certainly understates real income disparities, something the authors readily admit. For one thing, the study relies on IRS data, which does not completely capture business and investment income -- largely a province of the wealthy. For another, it overlooks the continued erosion of benefits and government services -- health care, child care, education benefits, retirement, and the like -- items that are far more critical to the middle class than to the affluent.

Just one word for you, middle class: "bootstraps."

Think about it.

Last week I reported on the wide and growing partisan divide in US public opinion over global warming: self-identified Democrats are 39 percentage points more likely than their Republican counterparts to rate climate change as a serious problem.

But what puzzled me most was the 13-point drop in concern among Republicans since 1999. Call me naïve, but with all the scientific evidence that’s been piling up on the issue – accompanied by increasing media attention – I guess I expected slow (though perhaps reluctant) increases in concern all across the political spectrum. Years of rising global temperatures, melting sea ice, and solidifying scientific consensus ought to have converted at least some honest skeptics, right?

A big report released last week by Pew, charting 2 decades of American political values and core attitudes, provides some clues about what’s going on.

Typical Republicans, circa 1999, haven’t necessarily found their belief in global warming shaken over the years. Instead, for whatever combination of reasons, people who believe in global warming are drifting away from the Party.

Pay-as-you-drive insurance--a new way for families to save money on car insurance and a new incentive for low-oil, climate-friendly transportation--is finally coming to Cascadia!

As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported yesterday, the US Department of Transportation has committed the remaining funding needed to start a $6 million ground test of pay-as-you-drive car insurance in Washington.

As part of our research on wildlife, Sightline monitors the population of the Selkirk caribou herd, the last population of caribou to venture south of the Canadian border. Last year, we even created a map showing the historical range of North America's mountain caribou, and compared it to their much-diminished current range. (It's on the left; a bigger version is here; animated version here.)

Our map gives the continent-scale picture, but now the good folks at the Mountain Caribou Project have produced a new map with incredible local detail for the British Columbia Rockies (the cartography is by Miistakis Institute). Their map is a fine-grained look at just how fragmented and precarious are the Selkirk caribou and their similarly-endangered brethren in the Purcell Range. Same goes for most of the caribou along the spine of the Canadian Rockies. (A small version is on the left; a much bigger version is here.)

While US mountain caribou are now all but extinct, British Columbia's caribou are facing a barrage of threats, the most serious of which is unsustainable logging. (See, for instance, Sightline's maps of BC's vast clearcuts in the Rockies: here and here. Animated versions are here and here.)

So kudos to the Mountain Caribou Project for their skilled mapping of vanishing habitat. I'm hoping it's a wake-up call for BC to provide sufficient protection before the caribou make like their cousins south of the border -- and disappear forever.

One of the side effects of the rapid increase in ethanol consumption in the US is that corn--the main feedstock for ethanol--has gotten much more expensive. Just take a look at the futures markets: the July 2007 corn contract started climbing last fall, which was about the time people started to realize just how quickly demand for corn-based ethanol was growing.

Obviously, rising costs trickle down to consumers in all sorts of ways. If corn prices stay high, meat, poultry, and dairy products will all get more expensive, since the animals are fed lots of corn. But more directly, stuff that's made from corn -- such as the corn flour, corn sweeteners, and corn oils that are used in all sorts of processed foods -- will get pricier too. (Sorry, donut fiends.)

So wait, does this mean that there's an upside to the rapid rise in corn prices? If junk food gets more expensive, will we eat more healthfully?

Not likely.

Here's an interesting factoid from north of the 49th parallel: in British Columbia, birth rates for women over 30 recently overtook birth rates for women under 30. Behold, the pink line overtakes the blue!

Historically speaking, this is beyond weird:  women under 30 had always been the more fertile demographic group.  Always.  But no longer.  In fact, if current trends continue, births to women over 40 may soon outnumber births to teens.  Teen births in the province have fallen an astonishing 89 percent since their baby-boom peak, and are still falling; while births to 40-somethings are steadily rising.

And while I haven't looked at this more broadly, I'd bet that BC's fertility patterns are similar to a number of wealthy European nations, and possibly Japan's as well.  The trends are all comparable in the US Northwest, but 20-somethings south of the 49th are still way more fertile than 30-somethings.

Who said this?

"The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says, 'You have to intervene here,' you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that says this isn't important.'"

Why, it was none other than wooden old Al Gore -- who keeps surprising me with his deft touch in explaining climate change in ways that just about anybody can understand. I mean, you'd have to be a pretty terrible parent to entrust your sick child to the care of a bunch of quacks.

It’s the first night of the Environmental Comedy Festival, where great comics will crack jokes about the environment (and environmentalists). Sightline, meanwhile, will enjoy the satisfaction of knowing we’re helping to reconcile laughing people and nature.

And the first person to call me—Stacey—at (206) 447-1880, ext. 107 (or email at stacey@sightline.org), will get a free ticket!

Since it came out about a year ago, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's climate change documentary, seems to have pushed the issue into mainstream consciousness.

Millions saw the movie itself -- but they were largely true believers anyway. But perhaps more importantly, Gore's Academy Award has earned him a wider audience among the potentially undecided: 39.9 million TV viewers tuned in for the academy awards themselves, plus 49 million weekly viewers who saw Gore on Oprah. Heck, combined, that’s more than the total number of people who voted for George W. Bush in 2004! It’s almost as good as being on American Idol.

But, how much effect has this media blitz had on attitudes among Americans?

Sadly, it’s not as dramatic as you may think.

I first ran across Sightline's book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things during the winter of 1997, just after it was published. I was working as an editor at a now-defunct weekly newspaper, and part of my job was to look through stacks of new books that publishers sent us and assign reviews for a handful of them.

Stuff was one of 'em. I can't remember if we reviewed it, but I do remember how intrigued I was by the book's premise--that everyday products, from your Korean-made shoes to your Columbian-grown coffee tell powerful, largely untold stories of the social and environmental impact of seemingly mundane choices.

And the book--slim at 88 pages--was packed with startling facts that told these stories. Producing a cheeseburger requires 700 gallons of water. Coffee is the world's second largest legal export commodity. Americans spend twice as much on children's athletic shoes as they do on children's books. Ten percent of the world's pesticides are used on cotton farms.

Well, a few years later, I ended up working at Sightline, so it's clear Stuff (and the organization's other work) had an impact on me. But I'm far from the only one. On the book's tenth anniversary, it's worth sharing a few tidbits of Stuff's own secret lives over the years.

Since Stuff was published, we've sold or given away some 40,000 copies. It's been turned into a musical and a high-school video documentary. Teachers and educators have used it in countless ways--including developing a curriculum around the life cycle of a sneaker. Our online curriculum for the book (on our site, pdf) has been downloaded thousands of times.

Just last week, I fielded a call from a film producer (a kinda famous one, even), who is keen on turning it into a feature film. In January, a commercial publisher wanted to update and re-release Stuff (sorry readers, we're not going to do it).

I'm not much of a gourmand, but I do love to play with food. Well, food data, anyway. So when I happened upon the Food System Factoids blog, I totally pigged out. The menu may not be for everyone, but if you have a craving for analyses of food pricing trends, or evaluations of carbon emissions from US agriculture, you'll find plenty to satisfy.

Take, for instance, this post on the relative change in prices of soft drinks and processed fats vs. fruits and veggies. The data's a bit old now, but what a story. From 1985 to 2000, the real, inflation-adjusted cost of fresh fruits and veggies went up almost 40 percent, while the costs of soft drinks went down by nearly a quarter.

Putting the numbers in context: a dollar's worth of coke in 1985 cost just over 75 cents in 2000. But a dollar's worth of apples or broccoli rose to almost $1.40.

So the incentives are pretty clear: given that median incomes didn't rise that much over that period, and poverty rates remained constant, there were quite a few folks who pretty much had no choice but to trade apples for Coke. No wonder North Americans (including Cascadians) grew so much heavier over the period.

Today's top news story in Tidepool reflects a trend ongoing in the major metropolitan areas of our region. More people are moving to King County, including the city of Seattle, primarily because of the job market.

Also, the Seattle P-I reports (several paragraphs into the article) that "In the case of downtown Seattle, some people are deciding really for the first time that urban, high-rise living can be more attractive than owning a house farther away."

The old thinking, as author and thinker Bill McKibben explains in today's LA Times, goes like this: bigger is always better, growth is good no matter what, and a booming stock market is the ultimate measure of our success.

McKibben illustrates the kind of lopsided priorities that naturally flow when we’re ruled by the bottom line, pointing to a scarcely-reported White House report that said the US would be pumping out almost 20 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than we did in 2000, our contribution to climate change going steadily up – against all warnings to the contrary.

That's a pretty stunning piece of information — a hundred times more important than, say, the jittery Dow Jones industrial average that garnered a hundred times the attention. How is it even possible? How, faced with the largest crisis humans have yet created for themselves, have we simply continued with business as usual?

New thinking, by contrast, might go something like this: measure what matters. (Have we mentioned that before?)

When you start to do that, the bottom line looks a little different.

In fact, it's not all about sacrifice and set backs as the old thinking would have you believe. Part of the work to be done to combat global warming is the work of rebuilding what McKibben calls our “broken communities.”