Daily Score Blog

A couple years ago, I mentioned that secure bike parking is important to creating affordable, green transportation.

Personally, I’m well provided. Here’s the backyard bike shed I built with my father in-law.

 

Here’s the bike storage room in Sightline’s building in downtown Seattle. (Pretty nice!)

And here’s what bike storage looks like in one bike-happy Japanese community, courtesy of video from the Guardian in the United Kingdom. Read about it here.

I guess I’ve known all along that introducing a baby into the family meant introducing a whole slew of stuff into our lives—much of it bulky, expensive, and—often—plastic.

But I'm fighting all the media and social cues to go on a shopping spree at Babies R Us. Instead, my husband and I decided to buy only one or two essential items new, like a state-of-the-art super-safe car seat. But, for the most part we’ve managed to “go green” as we’ve outfitted ourselves for pregnancy and parenthood—from used maternity clothes to garage sale furniture and non-material shower gifts. Our goal has been to reduce, reuse, and recycle—and to save money while we’re at it.

Here are three tricks that have worked for us:

Early in my pregnancy I developed a bloodhound’s sense of smell: even the faintest of odors overwhelmed me. It’s a common phenomenon during the first trimester of pregnancy, yet my new nasal superpower took me by surprise—and forced me into an unwelcome awareness of the pollution that surrounds all of us. Car and truck exhaust, to my unusually acute nose, was pure poison. It made me recoil, hold my breath, gag, choke. My new super-nose could detect the smell all over the place—waiting at the bus stop in my quiet Seattle neighborhood, wafting through 5th floor downtown office windows, even at the park and in my own backyard. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that the air I breathe really stinks. 

And just as my pregnancy had heightened my sense of smell, it also intensified my concern about what was entering my body with every breath. The well being of a clump of tissue no bigger than a lima bean became my top priority—making me more concerned than ever about the purity of the food, water, and air that was nourishing both of us (or not).

Of course, the professional side of my brain had been thinking about the links between pollution and health for years. (Working at a sustainability think-tank will do that to you.) But pregnancy personalized the issues. It turned a hypothetical threat to the imagined families I held in my mind’s eye, into a very real one that affected my own life and my potential child’s future. My work at Sightline on climate and energy policy started to be more about my body and my family than simply about curbing climate change and stabilizing energy prices over the next decade. It's about the air I'm breathing—and breathing for two—right now!

Editor's Note: Alex Steffen, the editor and cofounder of Worldchanging-a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers--sat down with writer Emily Knudsen to discuss some of the topics he’ll be covering in his upcoming talks at Town Hall. The first part of the interview discussed Worldchanging's role in the sustainability movement. This second discusses what Seattle can do to become a more sustainable city.

What can Seattle learn from cities like Copenhagen and London that are now leading the green movement?

There are two big lessons. One is that there are amazing policy and design innovations out there that we ought be just stealing outright. People are doing things elsewhere in the world much better than we are. And we need to catch up or exceed them. So that’s part of what I’ll be talking about (at Town Hall on Nov. 11 and 12)—trying to help people implement that range of really cool innovations out there.

The second part of it is that we really need to redefine realism, especially in Seattle. We have convinced ourselves that there are certain kinds of approaches to solving these problems that are unrealistic.

More and more cities in our region—and in the world—are developing plans to reduce carbon emissions. Both Vancouver and Seattle have plans, and Portland just passed the latest version of their plan last week.

To me the importance of these moves lies more in the substance of the plans than in their passage. Portland’s plan is big (literally), with 93 specific actions on 70 printed pages. It’s worth highlighting its focus on the importance of pedestrian infrastructure to curb climate change. Portland’s plan weaves them together into a strategy that will pay off in more ways than one.

Take walking. The Portland Daily Journal of Commerce recently highlighted one neighborhood, Powellhurst-Gilbert, as a place where a higher incidence of obesity correlates with lack of sidewalks. The Northwest Health Foundation has given a grant to the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to further study the link and to work on improving pedestrian infrastructure, making it easier to walk rather than drive. This pushes the climate reduction agenda while at the same time promoting health.

Editor's note: Clark will be on NW Cable News tomorrow morning (Nov 3) around 8:30 to talk more about this issue.

You may have seen the meme circulating around the internet:  some researchers from Australia New Zealand are claiming that owning a dog has as much impact on the planet as owning an SUV.  I'll let New Scientist summarize their case:

[A] medium-sized dog...consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food...So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares...

Meanwhile, an SUV...driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

It's just the sort of counter-intuitive claim that gets lots of attention on the brave new internet era.  So interesting!  So science-y!  So Twitter-able!

And yet, so false!  Once you sniff around the numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that those researchers are barking up the wrong tree.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were painless and unobtrusive ways to promote a shift to sustainable behavior? 

Well, there are. In fact, they're all around us, if you look for them.

You may have heard of the book Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, which describes tricks learned from behavioral economics -- the study of how real human beings, rather than the idealized, hyper-rational automata of traditional economic theory, make decisions.  Nudge shows how subtle shifts in how choices are offered can make a big difference to the decisions people wind up making.  For example, signing people up automatically for 401ks, and letting them opt out if they choose, can lead to massive increases in retirement savings -- even though a purely "rational" actor.sees no difference between that approach, and letting people voluntarily opt in. 

Once you're aware of them, you can see examples of effective nudges all over the place.  Take this look at laundry in the New York Times website.  The article compiles suggestions for reducing laundry's environmental impact--and this nugget stuck out at me, about an experiment with the cards that hotels use to encourage guests to reuse towels.

[W]e conspired with the management of an upscale hotel to place one of four cards in its guestrooms. Three cards employed some version of the typical environmental appeal. A fourth card added (true) information that the majority of guests do reuse their towels when asked.

The outcome? Compared with the first three messages, the final message increased towel reuse by 34 percent. How easily we can be influenced to act by honest information about how those around us are acting.

There:  actual data, showing that when we're reminded about the way our peers are behaving, we're more likely to do the same thing ourselves. Obviously, that sort of thing can be used to bad ends ("C'mon, Danny, everyone's doing it!!").  But wanting to fit in is a very human instinct, and a powerful motivator.  And the numbers show that it's not hard to harness that instinct for good ends.

Seattle always ranks high on lists of US cities with green buildings, with more than 80 large buildings and nearly 50 homes now certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Since the city began mandating green construction practices in its own buildings a decade ago, the techniques have spread to offices, condos, single family homes, educational centers, even clean-and-sober low-income housing.

Take the Hyatt at Olive 8, which will be hosting our lucky sweepstakes winner for two luxurious nights. It’s the first LEED-certified hotel in the city, with everything from low-flow showerheads to preferred parking spaces for fuel-efficient cars to spa treatments that feature locally-grown ingredients. It’s expected to use 23 percent less energy than a comparable conventional building, and 36 percent less water. Plus, it walked the anti-sprawl walk: by purchasing development rights that allowed it to build higher in the city, the project also helped preserve open space on Sugarloaf Mountain in rural King County.

Here are some other green building projects to check out while you're in town:

British Columbians have one more thing to be thankful for this holiday. September employment figures for British Columbia are in and the news is good.  BC employment increased in September by 31,000 jobs with the unemployment rate dropping 0.3 percent to 8.4 percent. This is the first monthly decline in unemployment since the collapse of the global economy last fall.

Manufacturing businesses hired 5,900 people and the construction industry, especially hard hit by the recession, created 4,000 new jobs.

A bit of a kerfuffle has broken out over a recent car advertisement between the new Hard Drive commuting blog at the Oregonian and the Bike Portland blog. Here, for your consideration is the ad:

Very funny. The ad shows people crowded in a bus and one guy negotiating his Segway down a crowded sidewalk. The car being sold passes an old Volvo with a “Powered by Vegetable Oil” bumper sticker. Yes, the very fact that Sightline’s now jumping into the fray might mean we’re doing the devil’s work, spreading the advertisement further into the blogosphere. But setting that aside for a moment, let’s examine what this argument is all about. Does this advertisement hurt efforts to promote more sustainable behavior? Is it an aggressive promotion of cars as a better and more fun way to travel than more sustainable alternatives? Do ads like this contribute to a social norm that promotes driving over taking the bus? Or is it just a funny ad?

As I have been researching energy efficiency something has bothered me about energy and poverty data. I wanted to see actual income numbers next to energy use, kind of the way we would look at prevalence rates in public health. That would help me wrap my head around the connections between climate policy and fairness. I want to be able to say something like “people who earn less than $15,000 a year pay x percent of their income in energy costs while those who earn more than $50,000 pay much less than x percent.”

I did find a chart on the Department of Energy website that indicated that the average family pays 5 percent of its income in energy costs while low income families pay 16 percent. Pretty good information; but I wanted more. The chart was based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) from 2001. So I looked behind the chart and found data from the most recent survey in 2005.

Here is a snapshot.

This Saturday, I will be speaking about energy efficiencies at the annual Wild Idaho North! Conference. Preparing for this presentation has given me a chance to zero in on the true potential of efficiencies for buildings and homes. I also used a recent gathering of Sightline supporters to help focus my thoughts. I had two minutes to talk about energy efficiency and here’s the gist of what I said

Efficiency programs and policies in Cascadia, if they are done well, can:

I remember the first time I drove into Vancouver in the late 1980s. Interstate 5 melted away into Highway 99 and eventually, I crossed over the Oak Street Bridge into a four lane city street with no turn lanes. How odd that the freeway didn’t just plow through the city with convenient exits at strategic points. What were they thinking?

Instead, it was a game of trying to pick the right lane and making the lights until we finally arrived in downtown Vancouver. Well, this was no oversight, as former Vancouver City councilmember and Sightline board member Gordon Price outlined in the Great Debate over the summer. Vancouver shunned freeways and, according to Price and others, that resistance to the freeway slicing through the heart of the city forms a core of the Vancouver’s well deserved reputation for being sustainable.

I had not realized, until reading Sara Mirk’s brilliant history of Portland’s dead freeways, that Portland can boast a similar history of resisting freeways. In her Portland Mercury article, Mirk highlights Portland’s Dead Freeway Society, a bike group that rides and remembers this chapter in the city’s formation.

Most of us have felt the sting of the economic downturn over the last year. Even folks who haven’t lost jobs  or taken pay cuts have cut back on spending. 

Now, imagine if a new law passed that froze family household spending to 2009 levels. The new law would limit all future spending increases to the pace of inflation and population growth, and no more. Any money earned above the limit could only be spent for food.

That might sound like a good idea, since it would force savings and thrift. But setting such strict limits might not be a great idea in rough economic times. Let’s think it through with an example:

Last month Clark Williams-Derry wrote about Bent Flyvbjerg’s work on analyzing cost overruns on megaprojects, those large and expensive projects like tunnels, bridges and light rail systems. Such projects are plagued, according to Flyvbjerg, by grossly underestimating the final cost of the projects.

The true cost of projects and whether those projects are actually going to do what they are supposed to do form most of the public debate on megaprojects.

This theme has been echoing in recent discussions on the pages of the Oregonian over the summer in three opinion  pieces written from different perspectives on the Columbia River Crossing project in Portland.