Daily Score Blog

Last week when the Western Climate Initiative's latest draft appeared it mystified most folks who aren't insiders to the process. That's a shame because WCI is hugely important. So over the next few days I'm going to embark on a series of posts that I hope will clear up some of the misunderstandings. Along the way, I'm also going to explain what Sightline wants to see improved.

Maybe the single most important question in cap and trade is the question of "scope," the question of what we should include under the cap. How do we decide which carbon pollution counted? And who must obtain the tradeable carbon permits that are equal to the cap?

WCI gets a couple of things right. First, they will regulate all six of the major greenhouse gases. And they've opted for an "upstream" approach: regulating carbon at the handful of points where it enters the economy (pipelines, refineries and so on) rather than further downstream where hundreds or thousands of fuel users would be implicated. It's the coal plant, not the residential electricity meter, that gets treated.

But other questions have been stickier. Some sectors are getting a pass, at least for now, because they are technically infeasible to cover. For example, emissions from agriculture and forestry are difficult to count and there are multitudes of small-scale emitters who have little capacity to participate in a cap and trade program. Fortunately, however, the vast majority of the West's carbon pollution is relatively easy to count, and the polluters are large and sophisticated companies that are accustomed to regulatory requirements. (Think utilities, oil refiners, and smelter operators.) The right thing -- for the climate, for the program's cost-effectiveness, and for equity among businesses -- would be to include as many sources of carbon pollution as is technically feasible.

But that hasn't happened.

The single biggest problem with scope is that WCI is excluding oil companies -- even though transportation fuels are the single largest source of emissions -- until the second "compliance period," which doesn’t start until 2015. (A "compliance period" is a unit of time over which the regulated firms must match their climate emissions to the number of carbon permits that they have obtained.) Seven years is a long time to wait to address the central climate threat of the West. And it gets worse: because each compliance period is three years long -- meaning that polluters have three years to match their emissions to their carbon permits --we might not see meaningful reductions until eight or nine years from now.

That's hardly the only problem.

Here's the word from the US Department of Transportation:

[Vehicle travel] on all public roads for May 2008 fell 3.7 percent as compared with May 2007 travel...marking a decline of 29.8 billion miles traveled in the first five months of 2008 than the same period a year earlier. This continues a seven-month trend that amounts to 40.5 billion fewer miles traveled between November 2007 and May 2008 than the same period a year before, she said.

So it's official:  high gas prices (coupled with a slack economy) are encouraging us to drive less. And if you look at the chart to the right, the recent downturn comes after a fairly long period of slow growth in vehicle travel.  It looks like the gradual rise in gas prices has been tempering the growth of driving since at least 2005.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that total gas consumption has fallen even more steeply than the number of miles driven.  After all, SUV sales are down; sales of efficient cars are up; highway speeds are slowing slightly; congestion is down (because fewer cars are on the road); and there's anecdotal evidence that people are choosing the more efficient car when they have more than one vehicle in the driveway.  All of these factors tend to decrease gasoline consumption, above and beyond the decline in vehicle miles traveled.

Of course, the DOT responds to the news by...calling for more money for roads!

"Less driving means less money for the Highway Trust Fund," said Acting Federal Highway Administrator Jim Ray. "The status quo cannot and will not work in the 21st century."

That's right: we're driving less, gas costs are through the roof, and people are turning to transit in record numbers.  But according to the DOT, the real problem is that the Highway Trust Fund is running out of cash.  (How on earth are we going to pay for all those new roads that people can't afford to drive on?)

George Erb of the Puget Sound Business Journal recently shot some ink at Washington Governor Chris Gregoire. He wrote:

Earlier this year Washington was competing with four other states for a $2 billion uranium enrichment plant that could be located on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The facility would employ about 400.

But Areva, the French company that proposed the plant, announced in May that it would build the facility at Idaho Falls, Idaho. The Tri-Cities were stunned.

The Tri-City Herald later learned, through a public records request for correspondence, that the governor’s office was aware of Areva’s offer as long ago as the summer of 2007.

Civic leaders had urged the governor’s office to help close the deal for the state. But the Tri-City Herald discovered that Gregoire instead canceled a telephone call with Areva’s chief executive in September 2007. Then she didn’t contact the company for another six months.

Um. I don’t know terribly much about this, but it smells a little off.