Daily Score Blog

Sightline seeks a full-time senior communications associate to help package and market our research.  She/he will plan marketing and PR campaigns around priority products such as our daily news service (Sightline Daily), policy reports, or graphic tools; develop longer-term partnerships and promotions; and oversee our email outreach. The ideal candidate would have solid experience in marketing (particularly digital marketing), PR, and events.

Sightline is a smart, fun, productive office of 14 dedicated professionals that offers a terrific benefits package and flexible working environment to employees. Over the past three years, our size and influence on Northwest policy has grown steadily. If you’re passionate about developing creative marketing and media approaches for policy-oriented messages; if you love building audiences for work that matters; and if you’re willing to move heaven and earth to bring about a brighter future in the Northwest, we want to meet you!

Learn more about this wonderful opportunity!

Uh-oh, even the wild-eyed hippies at the International Monetary Fund are now admitting that reducing carbon emissions will cost the economy dearly. I made this chart to illustrate:

The red line is business as usual: we continue using the earth's atmosphere as a free dumping ground for our pollution. The green line is what happens if we reduce our emissions 60% below 2002 levels. (Both lines are indexed to 2007 as a reference year, which I arbitrarily assigned a value of 100).

See what I mean? Huge difference. Huge.

</sarcasm>

It's the difference between an annual average growth rate of 2.56% and 2.64%.

Wall Street Journal article is here.

The Western Climate Initative just released an "allocation" recommendation for its cap and trade program, which (together with complementary policies) aims to reduce the region's emissions 15% below 2005 levels by 2020. ("Allocation" refers to the method of distributing carbon permits, whether for free or by auction.) In case folks are interested in the highlights, I've selected key passages from the document:

"Each Partner will auction a minimum percentage between 25% and 75% of its allowance budget through a coordinated regional auction process by which each Partner will auction allowances throughout the WCI region and receive the proceeds of the auction."

"The minimum percentage of allowances to be auctioned should be increased over time, potentially to 100%. Even before such an increase, each Partner will have discretion to auction a greater portion of its allowances at the program outset or gradually over time as it sees fit."

"Purchasers and covered entities will be allowed to bank allowances without restrictions on the amount of allowances that may be banked or for how long."

"Borrowing of allowances from future compliance periods will not be allowed."

"The compliance periods will be three years long."

"...allowances will be issued by each Partner rather than issued by a regional organization."

"Each Partner initially will have flexibility to issue, beyond the minimum percentage auction amount discussed below and subject to the sector-specific assessments discussed below, its remaining allowances as it sees fit, including (i) auctioning more than the minimum amount of allowances; (ii) issuing some or all of the remaining allowances for free; (iii) holding some or all of the remaining allowances within a compliance period; and/or (iv) retiring some or all of the remaining allowances."

So that's it, basically. (Though if you follow this stuff closely, there's other stuff that's worth reading too -- including ways to assess economic dislocations for certain sectors and ensure fairness between jurisdictions.) 

I should also mention that the reporting recommendations are out too. Offsets recommendations are supposed to be released today too, but they're not up on the web yet. Okay, here they are.

I'll have some commentary later.

p.s. In many cases, free allocation can have big consequences for windfall profits. For an explanation of how this work, see our handy little primer on the subject.

This is one of the finest examples of local journalism I've encountered recently: KUOW's five-part series on the Purepecha -- a little-known community that links Seattle to a rural area of central Mexico. It's one of those rare stories that manages to avoid patronizing the audience with simplistic descriptions and easy answers. On the contrary, it adds complexity and depth to our understanding of the Pacific Northwest's economy and the people who live here.  

I happen to know the reporter, Liz Jones, and I'd heard she was in Mexico working on the story, but I had no idea the result would be something of this magnitude. It's not suprising that KUOW is playing it repeatedly. If you don't catch it on the air (or if you don't live nearby), you can stream it on the web. It takes about a half-hour to listen to the whole thing.