Daily Score Blog

Apparently, the US Postal Service is considering cutting back on one day of mail delivery per week. 

Personally, I suppose I'm fine with this, since I get very little time-sensitive mail.  But I imagine that there are some folks who'd see this as a real hardship -- yet another little blow, at a time when there are plenty of big ones to absorb.

Regardless, someone just emailed me to ask if I know how the service cutbacks might affect global warming.

Sadly, I've got no time for a real answer.  But Google gives me just enough information for a ballpark answer: as an upper-bound estimate, I think that a one-day-per-week cutback in mail delivery could reduce vehicle CO2 emissions nationwide by as much as 700,000 tons per year.

As cap and trade legislation gets debated in Oregon and Washington, a worrisome lightbulb seems be going off for a number of folks. (Congressman DeFazio from Oregon, for example.) It goes like this: instead of "cap and trade" how about just "a cap without the trade?"

Under this idea, we'd meet the terms of the cap through command and control regulation. There wouldn't be permits or a trading system (and hence no auctioning). To be sure, this will reduce emissions, which is a very good thing.

But in terms of fairness and inexpensiveness, let me be completely clear: this is a horrible idea.  

For consumers and businesses who are already struggling to pay their energy bills, cap without the trade is actually worse than the very worst form of cap and trade. Plus, it misses out on almost all of the updsides of cap and trade done right.

In the worst form of cap and trade -- a "grandfathered' system, in which the government gives out permits to polluters for free -- consumers wind up paying massive windfalls to the big energy companies that get free permits. [Click here to learn why]. That's why we favor auctioned cap and trade, since it  makes polluters pay for their permits -- and the public keeps the money. Auctioned cap and trade is fair, effective, and efficient.

But if you can believe it, cap and no-trade would  actually be worse for consumers and businesses than a grandfathered system. Families would pay even more for energy, while Exxon and other big energy companies would get even bigger windfalls!

Here's why.

One of the problems with carbon taxes is that they're static. Let's say you set a tax at $20 per ton of CO-2. It's going to stay at $20 when the economy is hot, even if the tax rate doesn't do much to reduce emissions. Conversely, when the economy goes south, the carbon tax will persist at $20, even though emissions may be dropping fast on their own -- and companies may need some breathing room.

The first scenario is bad for the climate. The second scenario is bad for the economy.

If only there were a way for carbon pricing to respond to changing economic conditions in real time without any intervention from policymakers. If only. That would be like magic.

But I have good news for you: magic exists! There is such a thing as a magical self-adjusting carbon tax. It tracks economic conditions precisely and it always ensures the right amount of reductions. It's called "cap and trade."

Yet again, Seattle's schools are in a minor state of crisis.  The school board  is slated to vote today on a plan to close 5 schools in order to save $3.6 million next year.

At the same time, Governor Gregoire, along with the mayor of Seattle and the King County executive, are planning to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a deep-bore tunnel, at a cost of $4.2 billion or so -- and possibly much more if you include related improvements on I-5.

I'm not going to comment on the merits.  I simply don't know enough to have an informed opinion about the school closings -- though I'm sure that I'd be angry and offended if had a kid at a school targeted for closure.

But it's worth pointing out an issue of scale.  Sure, "$3.6 million" and "$4.2 billion" may sound similar.  But they're completely different.  A billion isn't just more than a million -- it's a LOT more.

In fact, the money we're planning on spending on the Viaduct would keep those 5 schools open until...wait for it...the year 3175.

Not only will there be hearings on the Cap and Invest bill, but there will also be a Senate Environment, Water, and Energy Committee hearing at 8am this Friday (Jan. 30) in Olympia (JA Cherberg Building, Senate Hearing Room 4) on a bill for energy efficiency upgrades in buildings.

For more info, check out the bill, and our posts Retrofits For All!, Financing Retrofits For All, and Financing Retrofits for All, II.

On February 3 at 10am, the Washington House Ecology and Parks Committee (John L. O’Brien Building, Hearing room C) and Senate Water Environment and Energy Committee (J.A. Cherberg Building, Hearing room 4) will be holding public hearings on the state’s Cap and Invest Bill.

You can read up on it on Washington Conservation Voters’ site, or check out Sightline’s Cap and Trade Primer for an introduction to how the system works.

Hot off the presses: these popular charts are now updated to include final energy price data for 2008.

Take a look:

Americans are falling behind -- most of us anyway. We're working longer than ever before to maintain a standard of living that once we took for granted. With respect to gas prices, average Americans are much worse off than they were in 1970.

The working poor, in particular, are getting absolutely crushed. Their economic standing has deteriorated even faster than the middle class. At average prices in 2008, a full day's work at the federal minimum wage would scarcely pay for a single tank of gas. In a car-dependent nation, that means that even basic transportation is quickly getting out of reach for low-income families.

Interestingly, the pain is being felt way up the income ladder. In fact, you'd see the same kind of trends for virtually every income strata if I had plotted their purchasing power here (though the effect is less pronounced the higher you go). But there is one big exception to the falling behind story: the super-rich. Nowadays, I suppose they should probably be known as the super-ultra-uber-rich. But whatever you call them, they're doing great!

So that's a relief.

The kind of figures that are kicked around in the income stratosphere are so mind-boggling that they're almost beyond the comprehension of us ordinary schmoes. Forty years ago a CEO might make 60 times the minimum wage -- a huge gulf that's comparable to the spread in other wealthy nations -- but nowadays a CEO might pull down 800 or 1,000 times the minimum wage. So despite skyrocketing prices for fuel and other basic commodities, the very rich are increasingly insulated from the real economy.  

But what can we do about it? First, we need to understand the cause.

Attention climate types. Your reading assignment for today is Setting The Record Straight: Responses To Common Challenges To Climate Science. It's fresh out on the Interwebs as of yesterday, courtesy of the good folks at the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon.

You've heard these challenges before:

"There was some warming earlier in the last century but it stopped in 1998; there is now evidence that the globe is cooling."

"Over 30,000 scientists have signed the "Oregon petition" that states that human impacts on the climate can’t be reasonably proven."

"The Hockey Stick graph, which is the basis of global warming theory, has been debunked many times."

And so on. Blah, blah, blah. There are a bunch others too, of course.

You'll find the answers here, approved by leading climate experts. But in a big departure from "leading climate expert-ese" this summary is short and fully comprehensible to a lay audience. Sure, it could cover more ground -- and perhaps a later edition will -- but it's already a great contribution.

Folks in British Columbia enjoy relatively long, healthy lives.  The most recent data release from BCStats, the province's statistical agency, shows that life expectancy in 2007 reached 81.6 years, an increase of about 3 months over the previous year.

So at this point, if BC were an independent nation, its average lifespan would rank second in the world, just behind Japan and tied with Iceland.  (This, according to the most recent United Nations Human Development Report.)

By comparison, the Northwest states lag quite a bit.  As of 2006, the latest year with complete data, Washington's life expectancy stood at about 79.7 years -- which was a smidge ahead of its two neighbors, Oregon and Idaho.  If Washington were an independent nation, it'd rank 13th in the world, tied with Singapore.  That's not too shabby, I suppose.

The US as a whole, however, is doing abysmally on life expectancy, compared with other developed nations.  For all its wealth and power, America's life expectancy now ranks 30th in the world.  Here are all the countries with better life-expectancy records than the US:

Japan, Iceland, Switzerland, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, The United Kingdom, Malta, Finland, Belgium, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Luxembourg, Costa Rica, the United Arab Emirates, Chile, South Korea, and Denmark.

At this point, we're just a month or two ahead of Cuba, and less than 4 months ahead of Slovenia, for heaven's sakes!

The reason that all this matters is that life expectancy is probably the best single indicator of the overall health of a population.  Anything that can shorten lives -- cancer, infectious disease, car crashes, heart disease, infant mortality, you name it -- gets incorporated into a region's life expectancy statistics.  Plus, regions with long lifespans tend to have people who are happy with their health, and to live more of their lives free of disease or disability.

So the fact that the US does so poorly on life expectancy is a sign that the nation is lagging -- badly -- in a key indicator of human well-being.

The Sunday Seattle Times had an excellent article on how wolves might restore the ecosystems of Olympic National Park. 

The basic idea is this:

...elk today don't behave like they did when wolf packs were on the prowl. Gone is the "ecology of fear" that kept browsers on the move, wary of narrow river bottoms and thick brush... the big herbivores feel complacent enough to hang out in the valleys and eat their fill. That's disastrous for the young plants they fancy most, like cottonwood, hemlock, big leaf maple and Western red cedar.

Beschta and Ripple walked transects in the park's valleys, counting and aging every cottonwood and big leaf maple. They found that after wolves were eradicated, very few seedlings made it past the knee-high stage.

Along one 3-mile stretch of the Hoh, not a single new cottonwood survived the ravenous elk in the last half-century.

If it sounds familiar, it's because the article is based on the same research I wrote about here a couple of months ago. The Times also has a neat -- if somewhat too brief -- video that explains some of the research findings.

But in case the words "ungulate" and "extirpated" aren't in your everyday vocabulary, I'm going to break it down for you.

Roe v. Wade, he said, “stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters.”

And: “no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make.”

In honor of those 36 years, it’s also worth remembering, even for a moment, what the Roe v. Wade stakes are. In 2006, Alan wrote a personal piece describing how the Roe decision had shaped the world he grew up in, and—if overturned—how it might shape the world his daughter and her peers grew up in. Hint: It has a lot to do with injustice and inequity. An excerpt:

Reversing Roe would create in many red states a two-tier system of reproductive rights. The day after Roe, the red-blue map of US presidential elections would begin turning into a hazard map for low-income women. (USA Today recently drew such a map.) Daughters of fortunate families would travel to blue states to get abortions. Daughters of unfortunate families would risk abortions from clandestine providers close to home, endangering their lives….

Or—and this outcome might be just as tragic—they’d bear children they resented and never wanted in the first place. Unwanted births bring a chain of disheartening consequences: more infant deaths, more child abuse and neglect, more school failure, more children in foster care and juvenile courts. And more women who blame themselves for all of these ills.

The long-term implications of this reproductive schism would be grave for unfortunate and fortunate alike. My sister and I have lived in a country that guaranteed women--as a fundamental, American right--that they alone would choose whether to carry early pregnancies to term. This inalienable guarantee has been part of the broad foundation of legal and political equality that all Americans knew they stood upon: the equal entitlement to freedom that has always defined Americans’ understanding of themselves as a people.

Overturning Roe would degrade women’s sovereignty over their own bodies. It would demote reproductive choice from a right to a privilege—a privilege distributed, like others, on the basis of money. Downgrading reproductive choices in this way—lumping them in with other class-based commodities of American life such as higher education, medical care, and housing—would substantially erode Americans’ sense of equality.

And thus, even if my daughter and her friends suffer little loss of choice themselves, overturning Roe would nonetheless cost them something of surpassing value. It would deny them the sense that they live in a country that stands up for all women. It would rob them of another reason to believe that as Americans, we’re not just a collection of workers and consumers who happen to share a currency, we’re a nation--we’re all in this life together.

You can read the whole essay (the director's cut) here.

Also, see Sightline's population indicator (soon to be updated in the Cascadia Scorecard).

At first glance, the latest poll numbers from Pew Research Center on Americans' top priorities for the new president might appear worrisome to climate policy advocates.

Global warming is in last place in the top 20 and the environment in general slipped down in the list since last year. Andrew Revkin over at NYT's Dot Earth blog goes so far as to say "America and President Obama are completely out of sync on human-caused global warming." (There are some startling new numbers from Rasmusen on that question...)

But I'm convinced that's not the point. The fact is, solutions that will address the top two concerns -- the economy and jobs -- as well as several other top 10 concerns -- energy, terrorism, helping the poor -- are all wrapped up in the best solutions for combating climate change. 

The fossil fuel roller coaster has long whiplashed family budgets, and our economy remains shackled to its adrenaline-boosting unpredictability. Any economic recovery we muster in coming months will sputter if we fail to reduce our fossil fuel dependence. As soon as the economy rebounds, oil prices are sure to shoot up again, negating the economic gains that we've made.

Our job now -- and Obama's -- is to encourage fellow lawmakers and citizens to connect the dots and stop seeing the economy, energy policy, and the environment as even vaguely separate issues anymore.

Legislators in Olympia must have loved Alan's talk on climate fairness so much that they called him back for an encore presentation. This time, decoupling is the name of the game, and a subject near and dear to Alan's heart. Check out the clip of Sightline's Executive Director Alan Durning presenting to the Washington Senate Environment, Water, and Energy Committee:

 You can also see it here. (Skip ahead to 1:23:47 to go straight to Alan's bit. Apologies if it doesn't work in Firefox).

We've posted the handout Alan prepared for the committee, a collection of excerpts from our work on decoupling, titled "Decoupling: Turbocharging Efficiency Programs." It'll tell you what decoupling is, how it works, and why it's a great idea.

It's great news for our friends, a big step towards their goal of getting Walk Score on all property listings. Zillow alone gets around six million visitors per month. That's a lot of people getting exposed to Walk Score's ratings. For more, check out Walk Score’s blog.