Daily Score Blog

Did last summer's Cash for Clunkers program do any good?  The latest assessment by Maritz Research, highlighted in Green Car Reports, suggests that it did:

[The] government-funded "Cash For Clunkers" program ...did just what it set out to do: get old, low-mileage cars off the road and stimulate auto sales in the U.S.

That may come as a surprise, given the sharp criticism leveled at the program last year.  On the one hand, some folks claimed that the program was an ineffective economic stimulus; they argued that it mostly helped people who were already planning on buying a car, rather than stimulating new sales.  On the other hand, some felt it did too little to reduce gas consumption -- and pointed out that some buyers simply traded an old pickup for a new one.

But now that the dust has settled, it seems that the program was at least modestly effective in meeting both economic and environmental goals.  On the environmental side, the new vehicles sold under the program used 38 percent less gas per mile than the clunkers that got traded in.  Of course, I still wonder how much of that MPG gain you can attribute to the Cash for Clunkers program, as opposed to just general industry and consumer trends.  Still, those numbers are at least consistent with the claim that Cash for Clunkers did help trim the nation's appetite for gas.  And now, on the stimulus side, Maritz found that the Clunkers program really did spur additional sales of more-efficient vehicles, rather than just shifting the timing around a bit. 

So it seems that some folks have given the Cash for Clunker tires a good kick, and concluded that the program was no lemon.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Tony the Misfit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonythemisfit/ / CC BY 2.0

My favorite cliff hanger scene is in a film called the Italian Job, in which the hero (played by Michael Caine) is left at the end, hanging, quite literally, over a cliff in the Alps. Following a bill through the legislative process can often feel much like watching one of these thrillers. Take Washington State Representative Hans Dunshee’s bill that would increase the state’s debt limit to improve energy efficiency in public schools. In spite of passing the House of Representatives the bill seemed dead after it failed to get out of the Senate during the regular session. But now the bill is back, as Publicola reports.

The opposition continues to raise fears that the bill's passage would require the state to raise its debt limit, and what that might mean for the state’s credit rating. Opponents argue the legislation could lower Washington's credit score. It’s true that agencies frown on states taking on lots of debt when they aren’t collecting enough revenue, which is a special problem during an economic downturn. A bad credit rating means higher interest rates.

However, in our analysis of the bill we found that its impact on Washington’s bond rating would be comparatively small – tiny even – compared to the large outlays planned for highway projects. The legislature is considering billions of dollars worth of these costly road projects that are prone to cost overruns (and that contribute to auto dependence and to the state’s carbon emissions). By rights, the legislature should be more worried about those multibillion dollar roads projects than the relatively small $860 million increase in debt created by Dunshee’s bill.

Over at Grist, Dave Roberts has a fascinating interview with congressman Brian Baird, who hails from southwest Washington. Baird argues, basically, that behavioral science is often better context than economics for thinking about climate and energy policy.

An excerpt:

Science offers ways of figuring out how to help people understand and adapt to new technologies... nobody designs a fighter plane or a spaceship or a nuclear power plant without human factors engineering. You can't build a fighter plane without putting people in mockups to see whether they can read the dials, whether alerts make sense, whether the radar information is understandable. That's social-behavioral research in the applied realm.

These are little, simple things about how to interact with technology. Should adjustable thermostats be pre-programmed at the store so people don't have to worry about it? It's not always clear on the water heater how you set the temperature. People say, ha ha, it's obvious. Well, if it's so obvious, and people can save money, and people are motivated by the desire to save money, why don't they do it? The argument that it's all economics just fails repeatedly, but people continue to make it.

Baird has a PhD in psychology, so he knows of what he speaks. It's a shame that Congress will be losing his perspective after he retires this year.

In his recent TED Talk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates focused on global energy policy.  He clearly takes the risks of global climate change seriously, and nicely summarizes the state of the science -- namely, that the majority of professional climate scientists sincerely believe that humans are changing the climate, and that climate disruption could bring new troubles to the world's poor.

If we're going to reduce the risks of climate disruption, Gates argues, we need a major research initiative to look for an energy "miracle" -- a game-changer that advances energy technology radically as the silicon chip advanced computing.  If you've got the time, the talk is worth watching:

Almost as an aside, Gates mentioned that he's funded research into a particular nuclear reactor design.  And for some reason, we've gotten a couple of follow-up press calls focusing not on the guts of his talk, but on the aside:  what do we think about Gates's endorsement of nuclear power?

That's exactly the wrong question.

I see carbon neutrality as a necessary goal in and of itself. Many people, including Bill Gates, think we need the entire developed world to be carbon neutral by 2050 in order to reach a worldwide reduction in emissions of 80% by that time. I think that 80% reduction is an insufficient goal, but leaving that argument aside, if we want carbon neutrality in the developed world by 2050, then we need leading cities to hit that goal decades earlier to create the innovation paths others can follow.

Just as importantly, however, I see carbon neutrality as a huge opportunity. Urban climate action offers us a fabulous tool chest, presenting solutions to all sorts of other problems we want to solve as well, from a flagging economy to energy vulnerability to mounting health care costs. Overall, I think Eric's missed a few key points...

Go the read whole thing here.

Far from it! For many of the reasons Alex's mentions, it's conceivable that Seattle (or any city, really) could do much better.

What I said was that if the city could do that in the next 20 years, then it would be worth "shouting from the green rooftops." And I stand by that. With an electricity supply that is already essentially carbon free, cutting emissions by a further 50 percent in Seattle by 2030 would be a feat worthy of celebration.

I was messing around with some spreadsheets, and out popped this little guy:

The chart plots the 50 states -- minus Hawaii but plus DC -- with the price of electricity on the horizontal axis and consumption on the vertical axis. (I left off Hawaii because it's a serious outlier, with average electricity prices nearly twice as high as any other state.) A simple regression shows that price "explains" about 42 percent of consumption.

My conclusion? Price seems to be a factor in residential electricity consumption. In fact, the same kind of relationship appeared when I ran a couple of regressions using utilities instead of states.

But I don't want to venture too much further, because things get murky. In statisics, "explains" doesn't mean "causes" -- and I haven't controlled for income or for local climatic conditions, either of which could have a big influence on response to prices. Plus, 50 data points is a pretty small number for trying to tease out a statistical relationship with a regression; and data that's aggregated up to the state level may mask important differences that would be apparent in a more granular picture.

Yet even with all those caveats, it hardly seems crazy to think that price affects demand -- and that high prices dampen demand. I mean, the relationship is true in some sense for pretty much every consumer good I think of, even including purportedly inelastic goods like gasoline.

All of which may mean that the Northwest's extremely low electricity prices may be working at odds with conservation. (Idaho has the cheapest residential electricity in the nation; Washington is fourth cheapest; Oregon is 11th; Montana is 16th.) The Northwest has a laudable history of efficiency and conservation programs, and there are still many more market failures to fix. Yet if policymakers are serious about taking the next steps toward a cleaning up the region's energy portfolio, they should probably take a hard look at raising prices.

All figures in this post refer to 2008 and are calculated from the US Energy Information Administration data found in Table 5A, here.

For Earth Day 2010, Sightline wants to put together photos that illustrate what a sustainable Northwest looks like. We need your help to come up with photos of sustainable solutions in the region. Farmers' markets, rain gardens, transit--all the things that make our communities sustainable.

If you're interested in being a part of this project, you can post your photos to our Flickr photopool (or email them to nate@sightline.org). Selected pictures will be credited if we get enough great images to assemble a video or slideshow. Keep an eye out for the final product in April.

Thanks for your help!

Consider the Washington state sales tax exemption for candy and gum, currently on the chopping block in the legislature. Current state tax policy means that when you reach for a candy bar in a grocery store you won’t pay sales tax, but go for a pre-assembled salad in the same store’s deli, and be prepared to tack on 8.6 percent (not to mention that candy bar is the energy equivalent of a car crash). Or consider a proposed excise tax on packaged beverages, such as bottled water and soda (for more, see Washington Budget and Policy Center’s excellent post).

How we price food can have a substantial impact on the dietary choices we make. In a previous post, I wrote about the surprising and unintended side effects of posting nutritional information, one of the ways that many states and localities are trying to deal with the obesity epidemic. The assumption that providing consumers with better information leads them to smarter choices may be mistaken.

So if basic nutritional information isn’t enough on its own, maybe pricing is the way to go. One study reports that junk food taxes may be more effective than healthy food subsidies. The study rated different foods by “calorie for nutrient,” where healthy foods scored lower (providing more nutrients per calorie), and unhealthy foods higher (more empty calories and fewer nutrients). A group of volunteer mothers were given a sum of money and asked to do their shopping. Groups were first shown foods priced the same as nearby groceries; then, they were either shown the same foods where junk food prices had been inflated (by 12.5 or 25 percent) or healthy food prices had been reduced accordingly. The results?