Daily Score Blog

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.