Daily Score Blog

Sightline has a great opportunity to join its team: communications manager.

The communications manager plays a central role in Sightline’s success as captain of a team that produces, disseminates, and promotes Sightline’s suite of products. S/he delivers change-making information online to tens of thousands of northwesterners:

• Sightline Daily news digest and blog
  
• Weekly Score blog update
• Monthly communications tip sheets, Sightline Flashcards
• Cascadia Scorecard News monthly update
• Periodic in-depth reports
• Annual Cascadia Scorecard. 

S/he grows our audience, adding to our current 12,000 email subscribers and roughly 30,000 unique monthly visitors to sightline.org and daily.sightline.org. S/he also serves as chief liaison with the media, coordinating some 200 high-quality media placements per year for Sightline’s ideas.

McKinstry Company is perhaps the most dynamic and interesting company in the Northwest right now. They're earning high-profile shout-outs from President Obama. And even in this economy, they're adding jobs and expanding.

Check it out:

SEATTLE – Mayor Greg Nickels today presented McKinstry Company with a permit and approved plans for an expansion of its Georgetown facility in south Seattle.  The company expects to hire an additional 500 people, a combination of professional and union craftsman, in the next two to three years.

But how can anyone prosper right now?

Well, a big part of the reason for McKinstry's success is that they get it. They get that the current energy economy is broken. They get that we're facing a climate crisis of alarming severity. And they get that a state like Washington shoveled $16 billion out the door in 2008 to pay for fossil fuel imports.

Consider what David Allen of McKinstry Compnay said yesterday to the Washington legislature. In testimony before the House Ecology and Parks Committee, he fielded a hostile question about some businesses objecting to the governor's Cap and Invest bill. (Video is here, starting at about 43:15.)

Allen said flatly that McKinstry will be regulated. But he doesn't fear putting a cap on climate pollution.

Allen: "We need to suck it up and get innovative."

In an earlier version of this post, the comments thread degenerated into an overheated argument between me and Charles Komanoff, who's a noted expert in carbon taxes. Mea culpa. I've rewritten the post slightly to improve the clarity and, I hope, forestall the antagonism, if not the disagreement...

This is surprising: to date, state gas taxes appear to have had very little effect on either driving habits or fuel consumption. Or, more precisely, there’s been no correlation between a state’s gasoline tax and the amount of fuel its residents use or the amount of driving they do.

Don't believe me? Then feast your eyes on these babies:

And:

Those are big, fat, and completely uncorrelated blobs. What you're seeing is all 50 states plus DC plotted to show a relationship between state gas tax rates and per capita fuel consumption (in the first chart) and per capita miles driven (in the second chart). You can see that there is essentially no relationship whatsoever.

Maybe this shouldn't be surprising. We know that raising the price of gas reduces its consumption. That’s something we all saw clearly during the 2008 price run-up. But there are at least two very good reasons why state gas taxes don't appear to reduce consumption. For one, the tax revenues are dedicated to boosting consumption. In fact, in most states, gas taxes are set aside especially for building and maintaining roads.

So state gas taxes are sort of like tobacco taxes… if the tobacco revenue were funneled into advertising cigarettes. The tax slightly reduces consumption, but the use of revenue slightly increases consumption.

And for another thing, state gas taxes are pretty small.