Daily Score Blog

In the experiment, 100 college students were presented with two menus. One included fries, chicken nuggets, and a baked potato, and another with those three items--plus a salad. Students were told they could choose one item. Participants' levels of self-control were also measured through separate tests and then analyzed with their choices.

The first menu led to intuitive results: those with high self-control rarely chose fries. But the second menu--offering a healthy option, a salad--showed different behavior: participants with high self-control were "significantly more likely to choose the French fries."

The reason:

"The authors suggest their finding shows that merely presenting a healthy option vicariously fulfils health-related eating goals, drives attention to the least-healthy choice and provides people with license to indulge in tempting foods."

For anyone wondering how a green jobs revolution might look in their neighborhood, here’s a new video that explains the Switch Project already up and running in Seattle. It’s a relatively simple idea that creates jobs, saves people money on utility bills and strengthens community connections at the same time.

Crews of trained young adults have been knocking on doors in lower-income neighborhoods, offering to install compact fluorescent light bulbs and low-flow showerheads along with other basic home weatherization tasks. They do it on the spot, but also connect renters with programs to save even more through additional conservation projects. It may come as a surprise that people are willing to open their doors, bedrooms and showers at the drop of a hat. But that’s the beauty of a homegrown program that employs people who live in a community to talk to their neighbors, while benefiting everyone involved.

SustainableWorks, the intriguing green-collar jobs program I profiled in November and January, is on a tear.

The state house passed a bill (SB 5649) last week to match the state senate’s approval of spending some $20 million of federal stimulus on large-scale neighborhood-based energy upgrades on the model of SustainableWorks. House and Senate versions still need reconciliation, but that seems likely to happen.

Meanwhile, SustainableWorks has cut deals with labor unions for apprenticeship slots and Washington State University’s energy extension program for worker training.

The promise of the program – which aligns the interests of unions, contractors, workforce development programs, utilities, public agencies, and home and building owners—appears poised to get a full-scale test in the months ahead.

5:00 pm 4/21/2009  Update: Moments ago, the state senate gave final approval to the house's version of the bill. Governor Gregoire is expected to sign the bill. Chalk up a victory for green jobs innovation.

I wrote last week about a curious fact:  even though total CO2 emissions from the US electric power sector have dropped during the recession, the emissions intensity of the US power supply -- that is, the amount of carbon per megawatt hour produced -- actually inched upwards.  The decline in total emissions is good news in the short term.  Yet the increase in emissions intensity is worrisome: if we're going to keep emissions low once the economy picks up again, emissions intensity has to keep declining -- even if the economy is stumbling.

Several folks in the comments section wondered why emissions intensity went up -- and I really had no idea.  But Shakeb Afsah, of Climate Data Due Diligence, rides to the rescue again, with 2 charts that help explain what's going on.

The first, to the right, shows that carbon intensity at the end of last year moved roughly in tandem with the share of US electricity that came from coal.  One possible interpretation:  coal remained much cheaper than natural gas last year, so when electricity demand declined, power producers turned down the gas more than they ramped down coal.