Daily Score Blog

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.