Daily Score Blog

Confession: I have long coveted a Bike Friday. What Cascadian cyclist wouldn’t? A made-in-Oregon folding bike that fits in a suitcase—and the suitcase becomes a bike trailer! Pedal to the airport or train station, take your luggage out of your trailer, fold your bike into the trailer, check your luggage (including your bike), and at trip’s end, reverse the process. Ingenious!

So I danced a jig when a founder of the Eugene-based company offered to let me try the new Tikit model this summer, to use on my public speaking trips around the Northwest. The question that interested me was whether a folding bike can meet the challenges of urban business travel.

The answer is a provisional yes, but the real revelation is the Bicycle Neglect at Cascadian airports.

New data from the US Department of Energy reveal that Oregon and Washington rock.

Together those two states, with just 3.5 of the nation's population, have accounted for more than 24 percent of all new renewable power in the United States this year. And that doesn't include hydro.

The lesson here is not that the Northwest is super-duper special, but that this kind of clean power surge can happen anywhere. Neither state is uncommonly well-suited for new renewable projects. We're famous for our lack of sun, so solar's not a great option. Parts of the region are windy, but plenty of other places are windier.

What Oregon and Washington do have going for them is the foresight to make smart investments. So I say: both states should get credit for aggressively pursuing an array of technologies and solutions. It's also a case where virtue is its own reward: a robust clean power portfolio makes it easy for the Northwest to adapt to new policies that will crimp greenhouse gases.

The more early action like this, the smoother the transition to a carbon-constrained economy. As a result of these investments the Northwest will be better-positioned to succeed in that era than many other places.

More details below the jump.

As promised, we're continuing to make improvements to our climate pricing primer. I think it's a lot clearer than it was.

So far, readers have asked to see some explanation of why grandfathering permits creates private windfalls; whether so-called "safety valves" are a good idea; and whether there would be "leakage" from a cap and trade program. We're developing answers to those, and other, questions now -- tune in later for more.

You can also check out all our climate resources and tools here, and then let us know what you'd like to see next.

Recent improvements are due largely to the big-brained Yoram Bauman, who offered many helpful suggestions.

The big story yesterday was congestion: the Texas Transportation Institute released its annual Urban Mobility Study to the typical fanfare. See, e.g., stories here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The headlines, as always, are gloomy: congestion's on the rise just about everywhere, and is wasting our time, gas, and money. The word from the researchers isn't particularly hopeful either.  Sure, there are things that can be done to slow the increase in congestion. But they can be expensive -- and, worse, there's no guarantee that they'll actually work.

I dipped into the numbers a bit today.  And to the extent that the TTI estimates are actually accurate (which, as we've written about before, and as this LA Times story mentions, is a big question), it seems to me that there could be a silver lining in all of the wailing. You see, depending on how you look at things, congestion may not be as big a deal as the headlines make it out to be.

One of the curiosities of language is that our usage can sometimes inadvertently reveal our underlying beliefs. Consider how condos are often described as if they are conscious actors who perform actions, such as "packing people together."

One example comes from today's Seattle P-I: "Now, condominiums are building upward, packing people into to what used to be inexpensive property." According to this way of writing, it's the condos, not the owners, that have what we philosophy majors call "agency."

This is just weird. Admittedly, I don't get out a lot, but I've never seen condos roaming the streets, rounding up suburban residents, and stuffing the poor saps into boxes. I've always been under the impression that developers build condos in urban neighborhoods because there are lots of people who want to live in them.

Single family homes, by the way, aren't given the same treatment in our usage.

I recently bicycled from Seattle to Bellevue, Washington, across Lake Washington on the I-90 floating bridge. This trip is not complicated. Once you’re on the wide, well-shielded bike lane, you’d think that getting to Bellevue would be assured. You’d be wrong. First, you have to get across Mercer Island.

On the island, the bike route leaves the freeway and vanishes into a labyrinth of branching paths. They’re beautiful bikeways, no doubt: wide, separated from traffic, well-graded, gracefully curved for smooth cornering—a pleasure to ride. But they’re almost entirely unmarked. Where there are signs at all, they only say “Bike Route.” (All of them are bike routes. Duh!) Imagine traveling in a city without street signs – or with ones that only say “Car Route.” Next time you see a sign like the one above that says “Bike Route,” remember, it’s a symptom of Car-head. (Photo by orangejack on flickr.)

Ending bicycle neglect—with all the benefits that would bring—means providing for two-wheeled navigation. Many Cascadian cities, including Portland, and Vancouver, BC (both the city and the metro area) now have reasonably good cycling maps. On Mercer Island, I was carrying this one. Portland also has an online bicycle trip planner, and Thurston County , Washington has a nice online biking map.

But maps aren’t much use without reference points on the ground, as I learned while wandering Mercer Island, looking for markers amid the atheletic fields and cul de sacs.

[Alas, this is super-intern Justin Brant's swan song -- his last Daily Score post before he moves on to bigger and better things...]

Reader Jonathan Shakes came up with a great idea in response to Clark’s blog post on the absurdity of the paper-vs-plastic debate. Says Shakes: “I'd love to see an illustration from one of the data geeks just why the bag contents matter more than the bag itself.”

Well Jonathan, this data geek accepts your challenge.

Assuming that a grocery bag holds one day's worth of food for a family of four, the choice about what to put in the bag is about 186 times as important as the bag itself. (For an illustration, see the graph to the left.)

This number was calculated using the concept of embodied energy -- the energy used to produce,  transport, and dispose of a product over its entire lifetime. For food this includes making fertilizers, processing, transportation, storage, and cooking.

When my wife and I bought our house, the yard was typical for our neighborhood: a mostly barren plain of lawn so sunbaked that you could bounce a tennis ball off it. So being eco-groovy types, we've tried to improve the place: we put in a rain barrel, built a natural drainage system, and added topsoil planting berms. But I'm most proud of the trees we've planted: a pair of akebono cherries in the parking strip and a white-star magnolia in the front yard; and in the backyard, a shore pine, a Chinese dogwood, a couple of vine maples, a Japanese maple, and a limelight cypress.

I recently began wondering how much carbon our new trees are soaking up. Since tree planting is the sine qua non of carbon offset programs, how much of my emissions are offset by my yard? Enough, perhaps, to justify moving from a dense highly walkable neighborhood to a still-urban but less foot-friendly place? (My Walkscore dropped from 92 to 80.)

The answer, I'm afraid, is "no."

I estimate that in an average year my nine trees will soak up right around 100 pounds of carbon-dioxide combined. (Brief methodology note at the end of this post.) That's the emissions equivalent of burning 5 gallons of gasoline -- or actually just 4 gallons, if you consider the "lifecycle" emissions of gas. In other words, my tree planting allows me to burn about one-third of a tank of gas guilt-free each year.

That's certainly better than nothing. But then again, the average American is responsible for about 45,000 pounds of yearly CO-2 emissions from energy use alone. Nine trees like mine offset about 0.2 percent of those emissions -- and much less when non-energy sources are considered.

Even giving myself a big benefit of the doubt -- my electricity is carbon-free hydro and I take other steps to reduce my climate footprint -- it's highly unlikely that my trees are offsetting more than half a percent of my annual emissions. Plus, half of those tree offsets belong to my wife. So that means at the very, very most I'm offsetting about one-quarter of one percent of my own emissions.

I could do more for the climate by simply avoiding a couple of trips in my car.

I know that the home mortgage industry has taken a beating recently. But this actually sems like good news to me.

Lenders are [offering] homebuyers bigger loans or discounts if they are making energy-efficient improvements -- or if their new home meets certain efficiency standards....

[E]nergy-efficient improvements could save a homeowner $50 a month. The $600 extra a year could allow a person to borrow about $10,000 more on a 30-year mortgage.

OK, I suppose that some people will say that this is just a way for mortgage brokers to sucker home buyers into going even deeper in debt. Just buy a better furnace, and you're on your way to a bigger mortgage!

But I think that's too cynical. Energy efficient homes really are cheaper to operate, which gives homebuyers a little extra cash to buy a home that they'd really like to own.

And even though rolling energy efficiency into a mortgage payment may seem like a subtle change, I think it has the potential to be a really big deal, since it helps overcome what may be one of the biggest obstacles to efficiency investments: shortsightedness.

I doubt that anyone who's followed British Columbia's real estate trends will find this news surprising:  apparently, home ownership in the province isn't as affordable as it used to be.  Shocking, I know.

But what does interest me about the article is this bit:

The RBC affordability index measures the proportion of pre-tax household income needed to service the costs of owning a home...Across B.C., a standard two-storey home stood at 68 per cent...and a standard condo at 34 per cent.  [Emphasis added.]

Lookit:  condos in the province cost about half as much as standard two-storey homes.  (I'm all about the Canadian spelling!)

Which makes me wonder:  what's all the fuss I hear about condo developments making housing unaffordable? 

I'm not sure that this Wall Street Journal article gets the "carbon tax" vs. "cap and trade" debate quite right.  It portrays the dispute as a split between politicians and economists:

Many academics, even conservatives, favor a tax on carbon emissions. Many lawmakers, including some liberals, fear a political backlash against new fees. They lean toward a cap-and-trade system, which would set a limit on carbon-dioxide emissions and require companies to obtain permits to release carbon dioxide into the air.

Obviously, there's some truth to the economist/politician divide.  And to its credit, the article gets one big issue right:  to a large extent, "cap and trade" is a tax by another name.  Both drive up the cost of emitting carbon, which leads all actors in the economy to cut back on emissions. (Even some proponents of cap-and-trade don't seem to recognize how similar that system is to a tax.)

But to me, the fundamental divide isn't politics vs. economics. It's this:

Do we want a system where the emissions reductions are fairly certain, but the price tag for polluting is unpredictable (i.e., a cap)?  Or would we rather have a system in which prices are a given, but the effects are difficult to gauge in advance (i.e., a tax)?

I was wrong.

Chatting with some friends back in the summer of '05, when oil prices were flirting with $60 per barrel, I ventured a guess that oil would surpass $70 before it fell below $50. That is, I thought that oil prices would continue to rise in the short term.

I got that part right. Oil prices on the futures market briefly touched the $70s that fall, and reached the mid-$70s by the following spring.

But I also predicted that oil would fall to $40 per barrel before it reached $80 -- on the theory that, over the course of several years, rising oil prices would put a crimp in demand, while goosing production a bit.

That part I got dead wrong.

Seeing as how I'm Sightline's expert on all things giant earthworm-related (no, it's not on my business card yet) I'd be remiss not to mention this story. Apparently, a conservation group is suing the feds for not responding to a petition to list the giant Palouse earthworm as an endangered species.

What's interesting about this story is not only that it's about a giant worm (though that does help). It's also interesting because the not-so-lowly worm may be the last best hope for protecting the remnants of the nearly-destroyed Palouse grasslands -- an inland Northwest ecosystem that was once astonishingly fertile and that now supports mostly wheat. For reasons both good and bad, conservation often piggybacks on charismatic ambassadors like polar bears or bison. But it remains to be seen whether the giant earthworm has the star power to do the trick in the Palouse.

In the worm's favor, it's won at least one convert in the person of Sightline's very own Leigh Sims. In an email yesterday, she upbraided me for my worm skepticism. I quote:

How can you say they aren't charismatic wildlife? You never told us that the giant Palouse earthworms smell like flowers and can spit! You can't get much more charismatic than that. [Emphasis hers.]

Fair enough. I stand corrected. So much so, in fact, that I'll let Leigh have the last word:

They're so rad.

From a P-I story comes this gem of a quote about declining housing affordability:

"It's going to affect people more so than the economy."

Uh, what's that again?  The economic outlook is still rosy -- it's just, y'know, people who are in trouble.

A post today on Gordon Price's Price Tags is, well, priceless.

Gordon took a gander at this summary of British Columbia's long-range transportation plan -- which mostly describes massive road building projects. And he combed through it, looking for a few choice phrases, including "climate change," "agricultural land," "cyclist," and "pedestrian."

Needless to say, he didn't find much. Which makes Gordon wonder:

[H]ow can an organization charged with strategic thinking have no viewpoint on the issues which will determine the fundamental livability, viability and even the existence of parts of this region through which their roads will run?

How indeed?