Daily Score Blog

Yesterday, the Bush Administration grudgingly (by court order, in fact) released an updated summary of federal and independent research outlining large and harmful impacts already underway in the United States from human-caused global warming. Two big milestones here: 1) Human-caused. According to the LA Times, for the first time the White House "endorses what most scientific experts have long asserted: that greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion 'are very likely the single largest cause' of Earth's warming"; 2) Climate fairness. The report spells out a clear case for the inordinately lopsided burden that will be borne by the nation's lowest-income families and the poorest American communities.

Sharon Hays, deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the report did not represent a changed assessment but "a rolling up of a whole bunch of reports on the science, showing that climate change of the past 50 years is primarily caused by human activity." (emphasis mine.)

As Andrew Revkin reports in his New York Times blog, Dot Earth, "the report included new projections of how the poor, elderly, and communities with lagging public health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming."

Milestones, indeed. But are we at a fork in the road? Let's just flog the metaphor and say that US opinion polls indicate an uphill path ahead. Gallup numbers released this week showed an increasing partisan gap among Americans when it comes to opinions on climate change -- especially whether or not humans have anything to do with it.

As CAP points out, though, there’s help – not a 12-step program, but just 5 steps! Here’s what they say (and we agree): “The good news is that we can transition to a low-carbon economy with tools that are already available to us.” They outline five key steps to “radically transform our security, economy, and environment”

There's a big carbon footprint report out today from Brookings. It ranks cities according to their per capita carbon emissions. Sort of, anyway.

Before I pick on it a little, I guess I should mention that Northwest cities do exceptionally well. Out of the 100 cities in the analysis Portland ranks 3rd, Boise is 5th, and Seattle 6th. There's very little difference between them.

That's wonderful and all, but the analysis only covers about 50 percent of emissions. It excludes, for instance, commercial and industrial energy, maritime and aviation emissions, and some other signficant pieces of the pie.

The scope of the research is understandably limited to available and comparable data, which makes the rankings possible. Specifically, that means the numbers for residential energy and transportation. And that's a winning hand for Northwest cities simply because the region's electricy grid is based heavily on hydroelectricity (and hydro doesn't emit greenhouse gases). Now, there's nothing wrong with taking credit -- our electricity system is pretty darn clean -- but in an analysis of such narrow scope, it tends to make us look better than we really are.

What's surprising to me is how well the Northwest cities also do in terms of transportation emissions. Portland ranks 10th, Boise 11th, and Seattle 27th. Frankly, I'm surprised both by the rankings and the differences between them; surprised enough that I'm a little skeptical. But what do I know?

Maybe the most important lesson from the report is a semi-geeky one.

Today, the Seattle Times has something of a landmark op-ed on the eternal viaduct debate. It's jointly signed by Governor Gregoire, King County Executive Sims, and Seattle Mayor Nickels.

It seems to say some good things:

In the year 2008 — not 1950 — we need a viaduct solution that not only moves traffic but addresses these larger issues so our children and grandchildren don't have to wrestle with the legacy of shortsightedness.

By pulling together transportation, climate pollution and environmental health, many voices and interests are shaping a path to success. A joint recommendation for the future of the central portion of the viaduct will be presented at the end of this year.

That sounds right to me. The viaduct clearly has implications beyond just moving cars. But as is often the way with joint statements, the article seems so hashed and rehashed that it's hard to make any sense of some parts.

Consider:

Today, we are looking at the existing transportation system as an integrated whole and determining how to make better use of what we have. We are looking at improvements to I-5, downtown streets, transit service and the existing Highway 99 corridor. We're also contemplating policy changes. We believe a combination of solutions will bring us more bang for the buck.

The 10 options referenced in a recent Seattle Times article ["Viaduct alternatives have expanded to 10," Local News, April 30] are just one dimension of the challenge. We have multiple options for what could replace the viaduct on the central waterfront. However, equally important are other considerations that will influence the future of this vital waterfront travel corridor.

Uh... what?

What are the "other considerations"? What are these "policy changes" they're contemplating? And what does "bang for the buck" even mean in this context?

Somebody help: I'm not being facetious, I'm just confused. (And I'm not the only one, apparently.) Is this statement supposed to be telegraphing something?

If anybody finds my secret op-ed decoder ring, please return it.

US Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, gives a clear and succinct account of a fair climate policy on NPR's Marketplace:

Our atmosphere belongs to all of us, and polluters should have to pay to use it. The citizens of Alaska get yearly dividends from the oil companies that take away their natural resources. Why shouldn't the same principle apply when industries use the biggest common resource of all? The money they pay for permits could be returned as yearly dividends to every American family.

Now, it stands to reason that if polluters have to pay for the right to pollute, some of these costs might be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But the yearly dividend checks would offset any price increases.

I'll have you know that I actually stood next to Reich once, briefly, in the corridor of a Senate office building. (Yes, you may touch my hem.)  [Image courtesy of Wikimedia.]

Lead makes criminals:

The first study to follow lead-exposed children from before birth into adulthood has shown that even relatively low levels of lead permanently damage the brain and are linked to higher numbers of arrests, particularly for violent crime.

Previous studies linking lead to such problems have used indirect measures of lead and criminality, and critics have argued that socioeconomic and other factors may be responsible for the observed effects.

But by measuring blood levels of lead before birth and during the first seven years of life and then correlating the levels with arrest records and brain size, Cincinnati researchers have produced the strongest evidence yet that lead plays a major role in crime.

This just makes me angry.  It's not like the health risks of lead were unknown -- they were well understood decades before the compound was phased out of gasoline and paints.  Still, politics got in the way of common sense:  and society as a whole suffered, and not just over the short term.

It makes me wonder what other kinds of long-term risks we're creating right now--risks that are well understood, entirely preventable, but simply tolerated.

Good article in the NYTimes over the weekend on how consumers are adjusting to rising gas prices.  The bottom line: it looks like people are starting to make some lasting changes in their transportation habits -- changes that will continue to trim consumption even if prices ease a bit.

Interviews with more than 70 people across the country suggested that the adjustments they were making, mental and otherwise, would last well beyond the summer. Americans have started trading their gas guzzlers for smaller cars, making fewer trips to the mall and, wherever possible, riding public transportation to work.

For years, it was not clear whether rising prices would ever cause Americans to use less gas. But a combination of record prices, the slowing economy and a tight credit market has beaten consumers down.

Gasoline demand has fallen sharply since the beginning of the year and is headed for the first annual drop in 17 years, according to government estimates.

The whole thing is worth a read -- if only to help dispel the notion that high gas prices have no effect on consumer behavior.

But CNN has even bigger news:

The Department of Transportation said figures from March show the steepest decrease in driving ever recorded.

Compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an estimated 4.3 percent less -- that's 11 billion fewer miles, the DOT's Federal Highway Administration said Monday, calling it "the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history." Records have been kept since 1942.

It's too soon to crow, obviously; the decrease could be temporary, or even illusory if the numbers are revised later.  But it does agree with my recent experience on the highway:  for the last month or so, rush hour traffic has been as clear as I can remember it.

Anyone else have the same experience?

Update:  Holy cow:  MasterCard says that gasoline sales were down more than 5 percent last week! 

This news from the Spokane Spokesman-Review caught my eye:

Tons of slash from a 250-acre logging site north of Loon Lake, Wash., could have gone up in smoke.

Instead, the woody debris will be chipped and hauled to Avista Corp’s biomass facility in Kettle Falls, where it will produce enough electricity to meet 37,500 homes’ needs for about eight hours.

I'm the very first to admit that I know very little about forest management.  No, strike that -- I effectively know nothing.  So I have no idea if carting away all of that debris could deprive the soil of necessary nutrients over the long haul -- or if burning slash is even a reasonable forest management technique.  (Can anyone out there in blog-land help me out?)

Still, from a novice's point of view, this doesn't seem crazy:  if the "waste" wood is going to be burned anyway, why not try to use the heat to generate some electricity?

Well, that's fine as far as it goes.  But what caught my eye was the numbers: 250 acres, for 8 hours of power, for 37,500 homes.  Could that possibly scale up?  Could wood waste offset a significant amount of fossil fuels in the generation mix?

Short answer:  probably not.

This isn't exactly a balanced article -- but luckily, its biases match mine.  So therefore it's great:  a nifty roundhouse kick, straight from the Willamette Week, to the notion that widening a highway is a boon, either to the climate or the economy. 

In this case, it's the Columbia River Crossing, connecting Portland and suburban Clark County, WA, that's in the crosshairs.  Here's my favorite bit:

The $4.2 billion [pricetag for a new bridge] could buy a $21,000 Toyota Prius hybrid and a year’s worth of gas, four new $1,000 bikes, and an annual $1,260 C-Tran pass to Portland for each of Clark County’s 150,000 households.

Yoiks!  That makes the wildly overpriced Alaskan Way Viaduct rebuild -- the one voters roundly rejected last year -- look like a bargain!  Of course, pitting cars, bikes and transit against a bridge isn't completely fair.  A Prius will last, what, 15 years or so, and the bikes and transit passes a lot less.  But a bridge could be standing for 50 years. 

But that's just the problem -- 50 years of bridge is likely to carry a lot of traffic over the long haul, which will make it that much harder for Oregon to meet its long-term climate protection goals.  The Willamette Week gets the traffic effects just right:

There’s a concept transportation planners call “induced travel,” which means more road capacity results in more traffic.

While the precise relationship between capacity and demand remains under debate, CRC figures show if a new bridge were built without tolls, the number of people crossing the Columbia would increase dramatically, versus the no-build option. Figures show that without tolls, a new bridge would carry 225,000 passengers a day by 2030, while the current bridges, if left in place, would carry only 184,000. The difference of 41,000 is the “induced travel” generated by the newly built capacity.

For more on all of this, you might want to peruse our memo from last fall, exploring how highway widening increases overall greenhouse gas emissions.

Seems I'm always late to the party.  A couple days back, NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman, writing from Berlin, had some smart things to say about the meaning of high gas prices for America's suburbs.  Starting with the obvious:

If Europe’s example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don’t drive them too much.

Well, duh.  But the problem is that, well, we don't currently own fuel-efficient cars--not most of us, anyway, and the way we've developed our cities can make it hard to cut back on driving.  Changing things will take some time.  Says PK:

Any serious reduction in American driving will ... mean changing how and where many of us live.

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America.

He's absolutely right.  In the US, a middle class neighborhood consisting of five-story apartment buildings is almost an oxymoron.  We tend think of that sort of development as the exclusive province of the urban poor, or maybe the urban elite.  Either way, that sort of neighborhood doesn't feel middle class to most North Americans. 

We've pointed out that grocery bags aren't nearly as important as what goes inside the bag. That's true from an energy perspective, but it doesn't account for the ecological harm of plastics. Consider this slightly terrifying article in the Globe and Mail:

...Captain Charles Moore stood at the bow of his 50-foot catamaran and looked toward the horizon. But instead of gliding along calm, sapphire-coloured waters glistening in the afternoon sun, his aluminum-hulled Alguita carved through a sea of shiny, modern-day refuse.

And:

What he discovered at the heart of the deep swirls were miles upon miles of water bottles, plastic tarpaulins, dolls and furniture that have been collecting there for as long as 60 years.

This plastic soup, with billions of tiny shards of the synthetic material floating just below the surface of the water, is estimated to span an area 11/2 times the size of the continental United States.

And:

The United Nations Environment Program says plastic accounts for the deaths of more than a million seabirds and more than 100,000 marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and seals every year. Countless fish, it says, die either from mistakenly eating the plastic or from becoming entangled in it and drowning.

It's useful context, I think, for debates like the one that Seattle is having about whether to levy a 20 cent charge on plastic grocery sacks, and to ban styrofoam food packaging.

Now obviously, it's not as if the city's conservation, by itself, will restore the Pacific to ecological health. But needless consumption is, well, needless. And limitless free plastic sacks are truly unnecessary, as pretty much anyone outside of North America can attest. So I get a little weary of the squeals of protestation at even the mildest efforts to make our economy a little lighter on the land.

The more often I see the same vacuous cant about "social engineering" and "nanny states" applied to recycling and conservation, the more I want to get self-righteous. There are consequences to our consumption, and there's a moral dimension to waste.

What a mess.  As Kevin Phillips reports in a Harper's article, "Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse Than We Know" (full text here) government agencies have made scads of tiny, incremental changes to economic statistics over the years that, in the aggregate, have completely changed our basic measures of economic health and wellbeing.  What's especially troubling: the changes have been consistently biased to make the economic outlook seem rosier than it otherwise would. Says Phillips:

If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

Look, for example, at inflation.  The nifty chart below is from ShadowStats.com, a website devoted to tracking this sort of statistical tomfoolery.  The blue line is the inflation rate as it was calculated before President Clinton came into office; the orange line is the current inflation rate; and the yellow line at the bottom is an experimental measure that--if made official--would ratchet down reported inflation rates yet another notch.

Unemployment figures are similar -- the unemployment rate would be higher if we excluded the military from the workforce, as we used to, or if we added back in people who haven't had a job in over a year, but would still like to find one.  Using the old methods, today's 'misery index' -- the sum of the unemployment and inflation rates -- would look a lot more miserable than the official figures currently show.

But here's the rub: statistical changes in the way that inflation, unemployment, and so forth are calculated aren't simply tomfoolery. Many of the changes are actually pretty reasonable -- or, arguably, even necessary.

Just released:  Sightline's analysis of smart growth trends in Greater Vancouver, BC.  We crunched Canadian census data from 1991 through 2006, looking in particular at residential development trends in BC's lower mainland. 

The good news:  pedestrian-oriented development is going gangbusters in the city of Vancouver itself, along with a few of the municipalities just outside the city.  Given the economic burden that's being created by rising gas prices -- let alone the challenge of climate change -- Vancouver can give itself a pat on the back for fostering the kind of neighborhoods where residents don't have to drive much.

The bad news: as a region, Greater Vancouver's overall smart growth leadership slipped a bit during the last census period.  In particular, the share of new growth that went into compact neighborhoods declined between 2001 and 2006, compared with the previous decade.  The decline was modest, but real nonetheless -- and it came as a bit of a surprise to those of us who've been impressed by the region's efforts to curb sprawl.  Still, by US standards, Greater Vancouver still stands out for its stellar smart-growth record.  But by its own lofty standards, the region lost a step.

We've put up an interactive map of the data (thanks to Umbrella Consulting, our fantabulous GIS consultant) that's definitely worth checking out.  Or if you're not into interactive maps, check out the eye candy below:

According to the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration, US petroleum consumption remained essentially flat for the fourth consecutive year in 2007.  If anything, our appetite for oil is shrinking -- throttled, no doubt, by higher prices.  Take a look at the first column of numbers, below, especially towards the bottom.

These are preliminary figures, of course.  I imagine that we'll get the final, official statistics in a year or so.  Still, this is half-decent news for the climate.  Total energy-related emissions went up a bit, but (according to EIA) mostly because of weather:  nationwide, 2007 had a hot summer and a cold winter, compared with the previous year.  But the trends in coal and natural gas have been pretty flat for the last few years, and it looks like petroleum's joining the party.

Seen from another angle, though -- gosh, that's an awful lot of CO2 from fossil fuels.  And with simultaneous price increases for oil, coal, and gas, that's a lot of impact on our pocketbooks, let alone the climate.  Sure, higher prices in 2008, coupled with a jittery economy, are probably spurring some additional conservation even as you read this.  But it's going to take a lot more than anxious energy markets to achieve real emissions reductions over the long haul. 

I'll take the good news where I can find it, though -- and for emissions from petroleum, the news isn't all that bad, especially if it recent trends convince our policymakers that, yes, in fact, our habits around oil consumption can change.

If I sound like a broken record, it's only because I'm obsessed.

Putting a firm, enforceable, and declining cap on transportation carbon may be the single most important climate policy now before the Western Climate Initiative. But what's remarkable -- almost astonishing -- is the chorus that supports putting a cap on the transportation sector. There's essentially unanimity among public interest groups, a surprisingly deep bench of support from business and utilities, and a growing movement from local government.

• As a local, I'm proud to say that Seattle's Mayor Greg Nickels was among the first to stake out a public position in favor of a comprehensive carbon cap for WCI.
• Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams, who oversees transportation policy for Portland, has also come out in support. Also in Oregon, Douglas County commissioner Joseph Laurance is on board with a comprehensive economy-wide cap.
• In Utah, now you can add Salt Lake City's mayor, Ralph Becker, and Salt Lake County's chief, Peter Corron to the list of folks who say that "all major sources of global warming pollution should be included." (Salt Lake City is hosting a big WCI meeting this week.) Plus Dave Sakrison, mayor of Moab, Utah. And Dana Williams, mayor of Park City, Utah.

Am I missing anyone? If so, send 'em my way and I'll post 'em up here.

It's not surprising that local governments want a cap on transportation emissions. A huge number of cities and counties have set responsible and sincere climate targets, but they mostly lack the authority to tackle the biggest emissions problem of them all -- transportation. If they're successful in urging WCI to step up to the plate, local governments have a real chance at making a big difference.

Who's next?