Daily Score Blog

Need weekend reading? Then check out the spring edition of Yes! magazine. It's an excellent read: all about climate and yet somehow not horribly depressing or crushingly boring. That's quite a coup. I like to believe it's due in part to ex-Sightline fundraiser, Madeline Ostrander, who's now the associate editor.

This is the first article you should read. It's by one Anna Fahey, who happens to be Sightline's communications strategist. In a shorter version of this popular blog post, Anna explains why the US may have some catching up to do. Catching up to China, that is.

I'll be on the Seattle Channel this evening at 7:00 (and then a few times next week). The show is City Inside / Out with C.R. Douglas, and the topic is housing affordability, regulation, and growth management -- all topics that are near and dear to my heart.

It's a roundtable discussion with yours truly; Sam Anderson, the executive of the Master Builders Association; and Richard Morrill, a professor emeritus of the University of Washington's Department of Geography.

It's on the web here.

(Sheesh, I need to look at the camera more.)

Maybe I haven't had enough coffee this morning, but the headlines on today's Seattle Times website seemed oddly revealing. Here's a sample:

Should toll roads help fight global warming?

Rabbi who hit, killed pedestrian gets two years deferred

SUV becomes airborne; 2 people injured

Delays ahead with I-90, I-5 roadwork

Crash in Seattle kills father, injures 2 daughters

$4-a-gallon gas? Predictions surprise Bush

Notice a pattern? The thing is, it's no special indictment of the Seattle Times; this morning's headlines are probably a fairly accurate reflection of our collective obsession with cars.

I hope I don't sound smug. I'm no different. I love writing about cars, roads, or fuel, in part because it's these posts that are the most widely read and emailed -- almost without exception.

And when you think about it, there's a good reason for our obsession. Cars are woven into everyday life for most of us. Unfortunately, as the headlines reveal, they are responsible for a large share of our tragedies too.

I can't let this nifty news go unmentioned -- King County, home to Seattle, Bellevue, and the bulk of Puget Sound's population, is taking the lead in trying to reduce the climate impacts of new development:

King County Executive Ron Sims plans to introduce legislation that would allow the county to reject or modify development projects because of their effect on global warming.

If the proposal is passed by the Metropolitan King County Council, county land-use officials believe King County would be the first jurisdiction in the nation to take that step.

Cool:  first in the nation.  It's good to see this corner of the continent forging ahead.

We've just posted an opening for a research internship this spring. All the details are here.

UPDATE: The application deadline is March 21.

About a year ago, I was cautiously bullish on British supermarket giant Tesco's pledge to start putting carbon labels on its food.  But I think that their progress so far -- which I'll get to in a minute -- suggests an important lesson about the policy risks of treating a fuzzy exercise as if it were completely reliable.

Tesco's idea was that the chain and its suppliers would pay for objective, comprehensive reviews of the greenhouse gas emissions from the foods on the store's shelves.  The analyses would cover all major steps in bringing food from farm field to the checkout line -- everything from running farm machinery, to food processing, to transportation, to refrigeration.  Then, each item in the store would be labeled with the climate-warming emissions that could be traced to that particular product.

This sort of exercise is called "life cycle analysis," and it's been used for decades, to great effect, to shed light on all sorts of questions:  paper vs. plastic (for bags), cloth vs. disposable (for diapers), hybrids vs. hydrogen (for cars), and a host of others.

Last week, a nifty article by Michael Specter in The New Yorker reported on Tesco's progress so far.  The results? There's still only one product on the shelves with a carbon label -- a single brand of potato chips, or "crisps" in British parlance.

You see, as it turns out, life cycle analysis can be really, really difficult.  And to make matters worse, it may be that the whole enterprise is chock full of uncertainty. 

Where carbon is concerned, it can be hard to trust the label.

True confessions: I love weatherstripping. And programmable thermostats. And insulation—all kinds. Oh, and efficient shower heads with “Navy shower” shut-off valves. And high-efficiency appliances. And waste-water heat recovery systems. You get the idea: I actually enjoy the process of making buildings more energy wise—enjoy as in, “Yippee, it’s Saturday! Where’s my caulk gun?” So today’s topic is especially near to my heart: the role in climate policy of low-income weatherization programs and related efficiency upgrades for working families.

A quick review: climate change is economically unfair by nature; it punishes those least to blame. Auctioned Cap and Trade can counteract this injustice. I’ve already written about two ways to seize this opportunity: distribute the money from the auction of carbon allowances as equal dividend checks to every citizen (“Cap and Share”) or make sure dividends get to low-income families who are hardest hit by rising energy prices (“Cap and Buffer”).

A third option is to invest auction proceeds in energy efficiency in ways that specially benefit working families, by weatherizing homes, for example, or improving the efficiency of household appliances. (Let’s call it “Cap and Caulk.”)

Last week, when I expressed my concern about biofuels, it generated a lively discussion. But I'd hate for folks to think I'm picking on biofuels. Petroleum can really chap my hide. To wit, check out this new report from Environmental Defence Canada. The title says it all: Canada's Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project On Earth (pdf).

I found the title a bit overheated at first, but take a look before you decide. The claim may be debatable, but it's also not mere hyperbole: the tar sands oil extraction very well could be the most destructive project on earth. In fact, it's already yielding catastrophic results for human health, not to mention for a vast swath of North America's ecology. (In any case, I've had the privilege of working on climate policy a bit with one of the authors, Matt Price, and I can attest that he's a smart guy.)

I won't summarize the study here, but just point out that among the many problems with tar sands oil, is that it can only be extracted and processed with very large energy inputs (which means very large carbon emissions):

The main reason is that extracting the oil from the sand is so energy intensive, from the large machines to the natural gas used to melt the bitumen out of the sand. It is estimated that by 2012 the Tar Sands will use as much gas as is needed to heat all the homes in Canada...  Using huge amounts of relatively clean burning natural gas in order to produce dirty and carbon heavy oil is what commentators have dubbed “reverse alchemy” – the equivalent of turning gold into lead.

For a long time, it wasn't economical to extract tar sands oil. But now, with high and rising oil prices -- and plenty of demand from Canada's neighbor -- it's starting to pencil out. It's just a shame the accounting doesn't factor in pollution, the cancer risk, the wildlife, the water quality, the air quality, the atmospheric carbon...

You get the idea.

This should be perfectly obvious -- but automotive technologies have changed an awful lot over the last few decades. From about 1975 through 1987, federal standards prompted massive and surprisingly rapid improvements in fuel economy. Cars designers focused on nimbleness and efficiency over raw power, and the fuel savings were enormous. But since the late 1980s, most engineering advances have focused on making cars more muscular, and fuel efficiency has taken a back seat.

For graphic proof, here's a nifty chart derived from this very large powerpoint presentation by Cambridge Systematics. The yellow arrow represents the passage of time, the horizontal axis represents fuel economy (increasing for the first 12 years) and the vertical axis represents horsepower (on the rise since the late 1980s).

The numbers show that, as of 1975, the average new passenger vehicle burned 7.6 gallons of gas for every 100 miles driven.  By 1987, that had fallen to 4.5 gallons -- meaning that new cars used about 40 percent less gas than they did 12 years earlier.

By any measure, a 40 percent decline in gas consumption in just 12 years is quite an accomplishment!  The fuel savings were the result of two simultaneous trends:  the average car got lighter, and engineers tuned new car engines for efficiency rather than power and acceleration.  In short, the auto industry -- from boardroom to design shop to factory floor -- focused its efforts on squeezing more miles out of less gasoline.

But in the mid-1980s, oil prices fell, the economy picked up, and federal fuel-economy standards topped out. So car manufacturers switched gears, pouring their technological advances into increased vehicle weight and horsepower. As a result, automotive engineers spent most of their time trying to squeeze as much torque and acceleration out of their engines as possible.  Efficiency gains stalled at first; and then later, with the rise of SUVs and other light trucks, fleet-wide fuel economy actually went into reverse.

Fortunately, since 2004 -- when fuel prices started to rise in earnest -- we've notched some modest improvements in fuel economy. Yet preliminary data for the 2007 model year suggest that those improvements may have hit yet another road block, with an incremental gain in horsepower but no improvements in fuel efficiency. Sigh.

Earlier this month, two independent studies in the journal Science dropped a bomb into the already controversial world of biofuels. To cop the New York Times' lede, the studies found that:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account...

Yesterday afternoon, when I finally got around to reading the articles, my chin hit the floor. The NYT was far too gentle: they don't just show that biofuels have worse GHG emissions than gasoline, but drastically worse emissions -- and for virtually every type of biofuel, including cellulosic ethanol (except in some highly specific conditions).

For really the first time, the studies are factoring in the carbon lost from land conversion. The authors argue (persuasively, in my opinion), that it's crooked accounting to simply do a GHG analysis of crops versus petroleum. After all, the crops used for biofuels don't grow in a vacuum. What really happens is that new land -- Indonesian rainforest, Brazilian woodlands, American grassland -- is cleared and ploughed to make way for biofuel feedstock crops. Existing agricultural land, of course, is already in production for food and fiber.

The clearing is a death sentence for wildlife in some of the most biodiverse places on earth. It also releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere -- called the "carbon debt." In fact, the carbon debt run up by land conversion is, in most cases, far more than is saved by subsituting biofuels for petroleum products. (Details on the studies' are below the jump; abstracts are here and here.) It would take decades at best, centuries at worst, to repay the carbon debt. And this when we need steep emissions reductions now.

Look, I'm sure there will be further debate, and maybe even counter-studies. (The biofuels industry appears to be fighting back already.) But in a way, uncertainty could be the real problem for biofuels, as well as for the latest fad in climate policy, low-carbon fuel standards. Either biofuels are a climate catastrophe, as these studies indicate; or we have no idea what biofuels do to the climate because experts don't agree. And that second option is the best case scenario, at least in the near term.

It was only in fun, but still . . .

Our regional identity as Cascadia is catching on in southwestern Canada.

When Victoria’s daily paper asked readers to imagine a new, less-colonial-sounding name for the province, the winner was “North Cascadia.” How ‘bout that?

Read the article. It’s amusing.

Apropos of British Columbia's big announcement yesterday, I have some ranting to get off my chest. One of the most frustrating things about US climate policy is the reflexive fear that if we ever raise the price of gas -- or of driving generally -- people will riot in the streets or something. This makes it exceedingly difficult to re-arrange the economy away from oil and its carbon contents.

But, of course, the price of gas keeps rising anyway. In fact, crude oil prices have more than tripled over the last half-dozen years, with futures closing above $100 yesterday.

To be sure, there's a silver lining to higher prices: they really do dampen demand, despite what you hear all the time. But it's a silver lining to a dark and ugly cloud: high energy prices mean that consumers are taking it on the chin -- and especially low-income consumers. And worse, all the revenue from the high prices goes to the energy companies. If prices had risen because of taxes or carbon fees, then the public could be reaping the windfall that big oil is raking in now.

For a decade, lawmakers have balked at the prospect of $20 per ton carbon taxes (a figure that is sometimes kicked around as a price that would get us on the right track). $80 per ton sets off screaming and wailing. But those figures translate into an additional 20 to 78 cents, respectively, per gallon at the pump. In the time that we've all been afraid of those comparatively modest figures, the price at the pump has jumped $2 or more.

We could have been intentional about getting ourselves off oil, and about protecting consumers from price spikes. But instead, we've opted for the expensive and volatile route: we'll do nothing and hope for the best.

Now let's just hope we can figure out a cap and trade program that doesn't send any price signal to drivers </ranting>.

British Columbia rocks my world. With the release of the annual budget today, provincial officials just announced that they will levy a carbon tax to help drive down emissions. Even better, the carbon tax will be a tax shift -- surely the best instance of tax shifting in the Northwest:

Finance Minister Carole Taylor vowed Tuesday that all money collected through the new tax will be returned through a package of tax cuts and credits.

Done correctly, the tax shift will send a clear price signal that discourages emissions, even while it promotes progressive tax policy. And what do you know?

Corporate and personal income tax rates will drop to help make the tax revenue neutral, and lower-income British Columbians will receive an annual climate action credit of $100 per adult and $30 per child.

In fairness, without futher details, we can't know for sure whether the tax shift will adequately address questions of climate fairness. Still, it's an awfully promising start.

Details of the plan:

Taylor said the new carbon tax will begin July 1, starting at a rate that will have drivers paying about an extra 2.4 cents per litre of gasoline at the pumps. The tax -- which will apply to virtually all fossil fuels, including gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane and home heating fuel -- will then increase each year after that until 2012, reaching a final price of about 7.2 cents per litre at the pumps. After that, Taylor said, it will rest with the government of the day to decide if the tax rate should change any further.

For non-metric Americans, this means...

Over at Smart Growth America's blog, Cary Moon -- one of my all-time favorite gadflies -- is doing some writing about Seattle's ongoing viaduct saga. Go check it out.

Maybe you've noticed that Clark and I haven't been blogging as frequently of late. It's mainly because we're spending a lot of our time working out the technical details of cap and trade policy, especially as it applies to the Western Climate Initiative (WCI).

I'd hate to leave you with the impression that we're not up to something. So, for our geekier readership, I give you: Sightline's comments on the scope of WCI's cap and trade program. ("Scope" refers to the range of emissions that are covered by the cap, whether it will include coal electricity, natural gas, transportation fuels, landfill methane, industrial emissions, or what have you.) We argue that WCI should include all the sources of emissions that are technically feasible to cover -- and especially transportation fuels, the single largest source of emissions in the region.

In the coming months we'll post more of our wonky stuff here, just in case folks are interested.