Daily Score Blog

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.