Daily Score Blog

Cue my self-righteous indignation. The next time I hear someone carping about "elites" wanting to minimize highway-building, I'm going to remind them that highways are a direct threat -- not just who use them, but even to those who live near them.

In a first-rate article in the Seattle P-I today:

Residents of a broad swath of South Seattle from Seward Park to West Seattle face elevated cancer risks because of air pollution, according to a soon-to-be released government study.

The risks are significantly elevated in pockets of industrial pollution – and skyrocket within about 200 yards of highways, says the long-awaited study by state and federal scientists.

And:

The risk is far higher.. in South Seattle areas next to highways, the study found. Those places can be expected to produce as many as 3,600 cancer cases per million people exposed over a 70-year lifetime.

For context, when the risk exceeds 1 per million, environmental agencies have typically acted to reduce the risk. So 3,600 is a scary figure. Check out this map:

This particular study was just for south Seattle, but some of the findings can probably be generalized. Those bright-red high risk corridors along highways are likely to be just as problematic in north Seattle, not to mention Portland and Vancouver, as well as in wealthy suburbs and poorer enclaves, and so on. Highways generate tremendous amounts of dangerous pollution.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that folks who live within 200 yards of a highway have lower average incomes than those who live farther away. So highways aren't really a problem for elites as much as they're a problem created by elites -- and dumped right into the laps of the poor.

This is the sixth in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative -- the West's regional cap-and-trade system.

Although there is tremendous urgency to reducing climate pollution in the near-term, it can be time-consuming to fire up a cap and trade system. The Western Climate Initiative is no exception. Policymakers have to sort out a number of details -- about scope, offsets, reporting protocols, allowance distribution, reduction schedules, and more --  and not all the participating states and provinces agree. Then they have to set a start-date for the program so that the emitters have enough time to prepare themselves. So there's a lot of work to be done just getting to the starting gate.

Still, time is of the essence and it's not clear that WCI is acting with sufficient urgency. In the most recent draft proposal, WCI recommends starting in 2012.

The delay is problematic enough, but it's compounded by a slack reduction schedule that will become very abrupt in later years. It could create undermine the environmental benefits of the program even while it risks undue economic pain and perhaps a political backlash. In a worst case scenario, it might actually increase pollution in the near term. But more on all that in a moment.

Specifically, WCI's schedule will play out like this: 

• In 2009, states and provinces will adopt the initiative's provisions, including its protocols for reporting emissions from polluters;
• In 2010 and 2011, WCI will implement the reporting program, gathering two years worth of pollution data;
• From 2012 to 2014, WCI will have its first "compliance period." (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.) Unfortunately, the first compliance period will be limited in scope: it will include the electricity sector, plus emissions from big industry such as smelters and refineries.
• In 2015 to 2017, the second compliance period, WCI will expand its scope to include transportation fuels, the largest source of climate pollution in the west, and the natural gas that is used in homes and businesses, which is also a very significant source of emissions.
• The final compliance period will be 2018 to 2020, by which point WCI aims to have reduced economywide climate pollution by 15 percent below 2005 levels.

It's actually slower that I've made it sound.