Daily Score Blog

A while back, Michael Kim's company won a bid to replace lights and fans in King County Housing Authority units. He added a couple employees to his small team to get the work done. But as federal stimulus money came through to make thousands more low-income homes energy-efficient in King County, his Federal Way, Washington company, Advanced Energy Management LLC's team of seven tripled in size to 24 employees.

It's the quintessential green collar jobs win-win scenario. The stimulus package has a significant energy-efficiency component, including $5 billion in weatherization assistance from the Department of Energy for low-income households. Right here in our backyard, those stimulus dollars are putting unemployed workers into good jobs doing important work. Not only will efficiency upgrades cut emissions, they'll also cut costs for the folks that live in those homes -- and put money into the local economy. 

As Deirdre Gregg of the Puget Sound Business Journal puts it, this experience is one example of how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is already starting to ripple out into the broader economy.

There may be many reasons to eat locally: supporting your local economy, ensuring food freshness, curbing sprawl, or reducing unnecessary energy use. One of the most pervasive arguments in favor of the local food movement has been to reduce or eliminate the environmental impacts of long-haul food shipments. But Carnegie-Mellon researchers Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews suggest that, at least from a greenhouse gas (GHG) perspective, food miles may not be as important as you may think.

In their recent article entitled “Food Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” appearing in Environmental Science and Technology, Weber and Matthews conclude that “the distance that food travels only accounts for around 11 percent of the average American household's food-related GHG emissions.” According to the authors, the more important factor in food-related GHG emissions is the amount of resources required to produce it. 

The authors show that for the average U.S. household, “shifting less than 1 day per week’s consumption of red meat and/or dairy to other protein sources or a vegetable-based diet could have the same climate impact as buying all household food from local providers." On average, they find, red meat produces more GHGs than any other form of food. So, while there are many reasons to support our local farms, there are also strong greenhouse gas reasons to be sure we eat our veggies, no matter where they came from. 

If you've got some time to kill this afternoon, I'd encourage you to take a look at this nifty tool that just came across my inbox. It's an online, interactive "State of the Salmon" tool that depicts the health of Pacific salmon populations through some pretty extensive hydrography maps. It's put together by Wild Salmon Center and Ecotrust in Portland. Take a look!