Daily Score Blog

You know Washington CEO, right? That free business mag lying around the office? Pretty boosterish, with end of the year lists?

Well, it turns out they have a blog and it's, uh, really good. Check out these two posts by senior writer Aaron Corvin: here and here. This is thoughtful, nuanced writing about Sightline-ish stuff like land use, transportation, and climate change. (Lots of business coverage too, obviously.)

To me, it's further proof that there's a sea change happening about climate protection. In 2002, I co-authored an article (pdf) for Washington CEO; it was about the projected economic impacts of climate change on the state. After the piece ran, the editor told me they had never received more negative mail from any article.

Ouch.

It soothed my bruised ego only a little that the published letters in response were gimcrack denials that global warming was happening, not substantive objections to the article's content, which was pretty straightlaced and science-based.

But nowadays, the magazine is doing credit to itself by hosting well-reasoned discussions about the links between the economy, climate emissions, energy prices, transportation planning, and smart growth. More like this please.

This is excellent news:

Seattle is one of the first major U.S. cities to claim it has cut greenhouse-gas emissions enough to meet the targets of the international Kyoto treaty aimed at combating global warming.

The achievement, at a time when the city has enjoyed a boom in population and jobs, sets Seattle apart both from the nation as a whole and other cities that have seen greenhouse gases soar in recent years.

Well, good on Seattle.  But at risk of sounding like a stick in the mud, there's still a question mark in my mind about how much progress the city's really made.

This is pretty cool: an interactive map of Seattle's natural systems. Using a Google maps interface, you can travel all across the city's public places to find detailed information about the presence of native (and non-native) plant species. Kinda fun to play with, and probably quite useful to restoration efforts. It's the handiwork of Seattle Urban Nature.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Vancouver, BC at a conference where it seemed like everyone was talking about a new book called Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change.

Reviewing dozens of empirical studies, the book's central argument is that urban form is inextricably linked to climate. Low density sprawl has been a principal contributor to North American climate emissisons. And by the same token, smart compact development -- the kind that fosters less driving -- is essential to curbing climate change.

From the executive summary:

...if sprawling development continues to fuel growth in driving, the projected 59 percent increase in the total miles driven between 2005 and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and low-carbon fuels. Even if the most stringent fuel-efficiency proposals under consideration are enacted, notes co-author Steve Winkelman, “vehicle emissions still would be 40 percent above 1990 levels in 2030 – entirely off-track from reductions of 60-80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 required for climate protection.“

This is exactly right. Transportation emissions, whch are mostly (but not entirely) auto-based, account for over half of the Northwest's climate emissions from fossil fuels. Under any realistic climate program, it is imperative that we reduce emissions from transportation. But even the rosiest assumptions about fuel efficiency and biofuels won't get us there: we'll need to reduce driving. The best way -- and maybe the only meaningful way -- is to invest now in climate-friendly urban form. Now, because the neighborhoods we build today will be with us for many decades. They will create the conditions of possibility -- or impossibility -- of reducing our transportation emissions.

In 1998, shortly after Sightline (then, Northwest Environment Watch) published Tax Shift (pdf), Gordon Campbell, then BC's opposition leader, invited me for a sit-down to discuss the book. He had read it and said he loved it. At the time, the New Democratic BC government was gearing up to do a pilot tax shift, inspired by the book. It was also about to be routed in provincial elections, to be replaced by Campbell's Liberals.

Campbell said, "In our first term, we're not going to shift taxes. We're going to lower them. But in our second term, we might." I didn't put much stock in his words.

Maybe I should have.

Today's Globe and Mail reports that Campbell's Finance Minister Carole Taylor is seriously considering introducing North America's first real carbon tax, paired with reduced income taxes.  She calls it a "tax shift."

On a hot day this summer, Chinese President Hu Jintao and a group of state leaders appeared at a public function wearing short-sleeved shirts, rather than their normal business suits (not pictured here). According to the state press, the casual attire wasn't just a new fashion statement: China's top brass were leading by example, encouraging Chinese workers to dress in light clothing in order to reduce the use of air conditioners in office buildings.

Fashions do change. Outright denial of global warming is out of vogue. Instead, the climate change do-nothing set is sporting this season’s new line: “Why should we bother trying to fight climate change when China won't do anything to reduce its emissions?” (Conservative communications consultant Frank Luntz even insists that the “'international fairness' issue is an emotional home run.” Emotional home run? One might ask what a win looks like in his game?)

How to counter this flawed logic? Hu Jintao’s climate-fighting wardrobe choices aside, here are three ways:

I don’t always balance my checkbook (ok, almost never, only when there is a problem). I only check my investments a couple of times a year, often when there has been a big market swing. And, call me small minded, but I also don’t always take into account in the long-term economic effects of my energy use. Like many people, to focus in on the big-picture in my day- to-day, I have to be reminded.

I happen to see Sightline’s energy counter almost every day, and it has made me think, very actively, about how spending on oil and gas is affecting the regional economy. Imagine the boost we’d give our economy if we didn’t pump $53 million out of our region every day to pay for oil and gas.

Now you can help remind northwesterners of just what that oil addiction means for our economy by putting the energy counter on your website or blog. You can download it for free, just go to this page to select the state you want (OR, ID, WA, sorry we don’t have accurate data for BC yet) or the full energy counter.

Download your free energy counter here.

Much thanks to Callie Jordan for volunteering to create the downloadable widgets of our energy counter for everyone to use!

Yesterday, I had a couple of interesting conversations about fairness and climate change. One of the problems is that in order to reduce climate pollution, society will probably have to put a price on emissions. The price could come in the form of a carbon tax or a carbon permit or something else entirely. But the basic idea is that to reduce pollution, we'll have to charge for the privilege of emitting carbon.

So far so good? Not really, because putting a price on emissions means that energy costs go up. That's regressive -- it hits poor folks hardest -- because lower income people spend a greater share of their income on energy than do higher income people. But what can we do?

The good news -- and I take this to be very good news indeed -- is that it's possible to distribute revenue (from a carbon tax or auctioned permit) to solve the regressivity problem. Toward that end, I wanted to share with readers an excellent position paper from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. It lays out clearly how one could address regressivity in climate pricing.

Even better, perhaps, is that it's possible to make strategic investments of the revenue that could benefit lower income families and the climate simultaneously. Imagine, for example, upgrading all the inefficient furnaces and water heaters overnight with super-efficient replacements: consumer energy spending could go down (because people would need to buy less energy) even while prices are rising.

Finally, there's another point that sometimes gets overlooked. Arresting climate change is not mostly an environmental issue, at least not in the way that word has often been construed in the past. It's a question of justice. As recent research from the IPCC reveals, climate change is likely to hit the poor hardest. So while protecting low income consumers from price increases is important, protecting the world's poorest from losing their homes and livelihoods is paramount.

Obviously, there's lots more to say about this; and today's post is just the tip of the iceberg. But stay tuned: Sightline's going to be diving into these questions in the coming months. In the meantime, we'd welcome your comments and thoughts.

What bicycle-respecting streets, intersections, and neighborhoods look like is largely a mystery to most Cascadians, even those who cycle regularly. I’ve offered descriptions twice before. Since then, two wonderful new tools have been completed.

Silly me. 

A few years back, I was astonished when oil prices had nearly touched $50 per barrel -- which at the time seemed exorbitant.  And just over a month ago, I was agog that oil prices had breached $80 a barrel.

I should have saved my breath.  Today, US crude oil futures reached nearly $90 per barrel -- a $10 increase in the past month alone.  And talk of $100 per barrel oil is becoming increasingly common.

Luckily, I suppose, the thick Alaska crude that gets shipped to the Northwest's refineries tends to be a teensy bit less expensive than the "light sweet crude" that's used as the oil price benchmark.  But oil prices throughout the globe tend to rise and fall in tandem--so higher prices on the futures market translate, almost dollar for dollar, to higher prices for the Northwest.

Somehow, though, the recent price spike has gotten virtually no attention in the press.  It's a bit weird, really.  I mean, we're contemplating massive highway spending throughout metropolitan Cascadia -- billions upon billions of dollars of new roads and bridges.  Yet at today's prices, the cost of roads is nothing compared with our spending on oil.  So It's a bit of surprise that oil prices aren't at forefront today's transportation debates, rather than being lost in the shuffle.

Hugely good conservation news yesterday from British Columbia, where officials agreed to put 400,000 hectares (almost 1 million acres) of forest under wilderness-quality protection. The move is largely to protect mountain caribou, whose range has dwindled substantially (see maps here).

Mountain caribou populations have been declining for decades in North America so that they now maintain only a toehold presence in the continental U.S. (in northeast Washington and northern Idaho, seasonally). Their numbers are also diminished even in BC, which is considered their last stronghold. The reason is partly because logging in BC's interior has been very destructive to habitat -- you can see Sightline's animated maps here and here. The new protected areas, which are integrated into an additional 2.2 million hectares (5.4 million acres) of managed caribou habitat, will be hugely important for rehabilitating their populations.  

More info is available in an advocates' press release here.

A decade ago, we wrote that the bicycle is one of the world’s seven everyday wonders because it’s so simple, effective, affordable, and pollution-free. To that list, we might have added “enriching.”

Bicycling for transportation pumps money into local economies. Bikes are wheels of fortune. (Thanks to Flickr photographer hanbyholmes for the above picture.) If your community spends money building bikeways, you and your neighbors will cycle more. Your cycling will put extra money in the local economy. (I’ll explain how in a moment.) The extra money will make the community rich enough to pay for more bikeways. More bikeways will induce more cycling, and the virtuous circle will continue.

Let’s break the process into steps.

It's an article by Tom Reese in yesterday's Pacific Northwest Magazine about the Lake Washington wetlands near Seattle's Arboretum. I actually found myself strangely upset by the article. Not only because he's describing a place I've loved for years, but because he so carefully describes the contingency of the natural environment there.

Reese takes the pied-billed grebe as his touchstone, which is a good choice. If you know where to look, you can find the grebe's nest resting on the lily pads. It's exposed. It trusts to camoflauge to avoid disturbance. And the grebes there always make me worry because they're so small and tentative, with so little to defend themselves. They're the perfect metaphor for our stewardship of the natural refuges in our cities.

Plus, the seventeen photos that accompany the article online are also astonishingly good. Much better than ordinary newspaper shots. But you should go see for yourself.

The ever-geekalicious Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute had a great take on traffic congestion a few weeks back on Planetizen.

As Litman explains, most congestion studies (such as this annual study, which always gets a lot of press) consistently overestimate the costs of congestion. But even using these relatively high estimates, the costs of congestion are pretty modest, compared with the comprehensive costs of owning and operating a car.

In fact, a quick scan of Litman's data suggests that congestion represents less than 5 percent of the total cost of car transportation. (In the chart to the left, the "All other costs" bar includes car payments, parking, gas, insurance, crash costs, air pollution, road building, road maintenance, and the rental value of land occupied by roads, among other factors.)

Of course, some congestion "solutions" actually increase other costs of driving. Building lanes, for example, is costly in itself. Plus, more lanes means more total traffic on the region's roads, which can simultaneously a) increase congestion elsewhere in the road system, b) increase overall parking costs, c) increase crash and pollution costs. Taking all costs into account, "curing" congestion by expanding capacity can be more expensive than the disease itself. And as the graph shows, you don't have to increase the other costs by much, in percentage terms, before the extra costs overwhelm the modest, temporary benefits of congestion relief.

The Wall Street Journal has the goods:

The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That...surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000...

The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.

So half of the population gets about an eighth of the income.  Fair? Not so much.

Now, some might argue that relative incomes don't really matter: as long as the middle class is doing well enough, who cares if the top 1 percent is earning more? 

But even if you bought that line of reasoning (and I don't, since sharp inequalities are linked to a host of social ills) the numbers still look gloomy.  According to the latest figures, median income --the annual earnings at the very middle of the income ladder -- fell by 2 percent between 2000 and 2005, after adjusting for inflation.  So it's not just that the super-wealthy are pulling ahead.  The middle class is actually falling behind.

Just something to keep in mind, the next time you hear about how awesomely awesome the US economy is.