Daily Score Blog

The last few days, according to this Seattle P-I report.

In pictures, it looks like this and this.

UPDATE 12/10/07: Our friends over at Climate Solutions have a new blog. And Patrick Mazza has a good post on this very subject.

At least someone gets it:

All three of the leading Democratic candidates have proposed cap-and-trade plans that auction 100% of their CO2 permits. This is, economically speaking, the same thing as a carbon tax.

The context: NY Times columnist Tom Friedman is complaining that no major presidential candidate has proposed a carbon tax -- which he takes as evidence that nobody has had the guts to take a stand in favor of policies that would "trigger a truly transformational shift in America away from fossil fuels."

But as uber-blogger Kevin Drum points out, this is simply rubbish. There are plenty of presidential candidates who are proposing a "truly transformational" shift away from fossil fuels, by putting a price on carbon emissions. Yes, they've labeled their proposals "cap and auction" rather than "taxes" -- but economically they're peas in a pod. The only real economic difference, besides some administrative details, is in where they concentrate the economic uncertainty: in the price of carbon (for cap and trade), or the effectiveness of the program (for a carbon tax).

I'm not sure if Friedman doesn't understand this, or if he's just miffed that the candidates haven't adopted his preferred carbon pricing system. To his credit, Friedman's been a long-time carbon tax supporter. But claiming that taxes are the only "transformational" pricing policy for fossil fuels is silly.

Update:  Here's even more speculation on what Friedman was thinking.

We wrote a while back about the problem of "calorie density" -- namely, that junk foods filled with fats and sugars are way, way cheaper than healthier foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables. And, depressingly enough, the price gap between healthy and unhealthy foods widened in the 1980's and 1990s.

So even though it's technically true that food in America is cheap, healthy food is effectively out of financial reach of many low-income folks. (In some cases, healthy food is physically out of reach too.)

Well, apparently the problem is getting even worse.

The first-of-its-kind study by UW researchers found that between 2004 and 2006, the costs of some healthy foods went up nearly 20 percent at major Seattle supermarkets. But over the same period, the cost of some junk foods dropped.

"Healthy foods are gradually slipping out of reach for all but the affluent consumers," said Adam Drewnowski, director of the University of Washington Center for Public Health and Nutrition and an author of the study.

Jeez, what's it going to take to bring some justice -- or just plain old sanity -- to the food system?