Daily Score Blog

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.