Daily Score Blog

In early 2008, state wildlife officials confirmed the presence of a younger female wolf in northeastern Oregon near the Eagle Cap Wilderness. A radio-tracking collar she'd been wearing since 2006 confirmed that she had migrated from a pack near Boise, Idaho. (She's pictured in the photo above -- an aerial shot taken by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. You can see a video of her here.)

Apparently, she's been doing well for herself in Oregon. Last week, ODFW captured excellent video footage of her in the rugged Imnaha region in the northeast corner of the state. She's now the alpha wolf in an unusually large pack of 10 animals, including what appears to be a large number of pups.

The return of wolves to Oregon seems to be happening at the same pace as their return to Washington, where wolves have now been confirmed in at least two separate locations.

Someone recently said “energy efficiencies aren’t low hanging fruit, they are the fruit lying on the ground.” Then why don’t people retrofit their homes? There are a lot of reasons, but one of them is finding the money to pay for efficiencies up front. While innovative financing tools (like my favorite bond financing) can help, they are only part of the solution.

An article in the New York Times this week called “A Stimulus That Could Save Money” traverses a well worn path in the discussion of energy efficiencies, asking the question “what will make people retrofit their homes?” The article doesn’t have any shockingly new ideas, but the discussion does surface the concept of Property Assessed Clean Energy financing—or  PACE. 

Now, sidestepping for a moment the obvious answer, “you can sell the energy efficient home for more money,” PACE is an interesting way of paying for the retrofits as part of regular property taxes. This is another version of “on bill” financing that puts the payments back on the owner’s property tax bill rather than on their utility bill.

This week, the Washington Toxics Coalition released a study that should raise the ire of pregnant women like me. Their findings in a nutshell: developing fetuses spend their first nine months in an environment that exposes them to a range known toxic chemicals. That environment? Their mothers’ bodies. That means my body.

The first-of-its kind study analyzed blood and urine samples from nine women in Washington, Oregon, and California during their second trimester of pregnancy, to test for 23 chemicals from five chemical groups. Their bodies were found to be contaminated with 13 of the 23 chemicals. “These chemicals can cause reproductive problems and cancer, disrupt hormonal systems such as the thyroid, and can impair brain development,” the study states.

So, why is my response ire and not panic? I guess I’m over the panic. During my pregnancy, I’ve been reading a lot about the toxics in my body and their potential effects on the fetus (and I'll be writing a lot more about this stuff in this blog series). I realize it’s too late for panic. Contrary to popular belief, my womb is not entirely my own.

By one measure of "food security," the new USDA hunger data released this week puts Oregon right in the middle of the pack. Its rate of food insecurity, is higher than the rest of the Northwest states, but only a little higher than the national average. Yet a closer look at the numbers reveals a more worrisome story.

Oregon's rate of "very low food security" is the second highest in the nation -- only Mississippi does worse -- and is far beyond than anything else in the Northwest. Getting enough to eat is a serious problem for 6.6 percent of Oregon households -- that's roughly 1 in every 15. Here's the official definition of very low food security:

The defining characteristic of very low food security is that, at times during the year, the food intake of household members is reduced and their normal eating patterns are disrupted because the household lacks money and other resources for food.

It's a very troubling figure, though it's consistent with what I remember seeing when I looked at these figures a few years back. (By contrast, the national rate of very low food security is only 4.6 percent -- though it's the highest in the 14 years since we've had consistent measurements. The rest of the Northwest states are clustered below the national average: Montana (4.4), Alaska (4.4), Washington (4.3), and Idaho (3.9).) It's also broadly consistent with Oregon's dire employment situation: the most recent federal figures put the state's unemployment at 11.5 percent, 6th highest in the nation and much higher than anything else in the Northwest.

Let's hope these new figures are enough to put a permanent end to the use of the incredibly grating neologism "funemployment."  

Technical note: the margin of error for some states' hunger rates is fairly high. It's 1.14 for the rate of "very low food security" in Oregon, meaning there's a 90 percent chance that the real rate of hunger in Oregon is between 5.46 and 7.74.

In spite of what you may have heard, Europe's carbon market is working beautifully. The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has been operational since 2005 and we're now getting a good look at how it functions. It turns out, it's a remarkable success story, both environmentally and economically.

Let's briefly review the major pieces of evidence.

1. European Environment Agency. A November 2009 report finds that the continent is well on its way to meeting its Kyoto targets thanks in large part to its cap-and-trade program. In fact, by 2007,14 countries had already exceeded their reduction goals, including the wealthy industrial giants of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. To wit:

EU‑wide policies are expected to contribute towards most of the planned emissions savings by the end of the period 2008–2012, in particular the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the promotion of renewable energy sources, policies targeting the energy performance of buildings and internal energy market policies. 

Here's a nickel summary from Joe Romm:

...the Europeans are poised to surpass their targets under the terms of the Protocol. It is no longer plausible for those who don’t want a U.S. cap-and-trade system to point to the European Trading System (ETS) as a failure. Quite the reverse.

...the EEA analysis concludes the EU-15 will not need to rely on offsets to meet their Kyoto target

(There's more good stuff at Treehugger.) Importantly, the reductions analyzed in the EEA report do not include the effects of the global economic downturn, which has unintentionally provided much steeper reductions.

2. The German Marshall Fund of the United States. A July 2009 report is a goldmine of valuable lessons from the European experience, but for now I'm going to focus just on the carbon market aspects.

Seattle's planned deep-bore tunnel could get even more contentious soon. As state engineers flesh out their early cost estimates, a comparable tunneling project has hit another snag. The Seattle Times reports:

The Brightwater sewage-treatment project, which is costing local ratepayers $1.8 billion, is delayed yet again because fixing a damaged tunnel-boring machine stuck deep underground will take months longer than originally thought.

This should be eye-catching because Brightwater's sewage tunnel construction uses a smaller-scale but very similar tunneling technology to what is planned for the tunnel under downtown Seattle. And the Brightwater tunneling project has encountered numerous problems.

Earlier this year, both machines working on the two "Central Tunnels" were damaged and await repairs underground. The one that was due to be operational by November is, apparently, in worse condition than originally believed. The other is not due to be fixed until December or early 2010.

So the project will be delayed further and the costs will continue to mount:

The delay likely will push completion of the project — originally scheduled for 2010 — into 2012, project manager Gunars Sreibers said Tuesday.

It isn't yet known how much repairs will cost and how much of the cost might be paid by the county, the contractor or the manufacturer of the damaged machines, but, Sreibers said, "We're in the tens of millions of dollars of money at issue."

If Seattle's deep-bore tunnel were to encounter similar problems, it could pose a serious risk for Seattle property taxpayers, who are designated by state legislation to pick up the tab for any cost overruns. The legality of that legislation has been much disputed, but at least one influential legislator has vowed to enforce the provision. (At best, the current funding legislation does not adequately clarify who pays for cost overruns, a potentially serious problem.)

Amplifying the worrisome lessons from Brightwater, the deep-bore tunnel project’s costs were first estimated when the project’s design was considered only 1 percent complete. (Today, the project is considered to be 5 percent designed, but the state has declined to release updated cost estimates until it is 15 percent designed.) None of this is good news, but the Brightwater experience is, unfortunately, consistent with the majority of major tunneling projects undertaken in the area, a topic I covered in a recent report for Sightline, "Cost Overruns For Seattle-area Tunneling Projects."

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.

A remarkably prescient photo from 1891:

No further comment needed, I think.

Hat tip to Nancy Hirsh. Image is used in accordance with the Washington State Historical Society's fair use policy.

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:

Eureka! I have discovered a huge new source of clean energy in Alaska that can create green jobs too. Well sort of.

I’m not the first to strike gold, but lately I’ve been describing the potential of energy efficiency like hitting the jackpot. Efficiency is a clean, domestic energy source that would add, in the next decade, $1.2 trillion dollars to the economy. The big numbers (like saving 9.1 Quadrillion BTUs in Two Minutes) get people’s attention. If the kind of economic impact we could gain from energy efficiencies was a natural resource buried in the ground, you can bet that every level of government would be trying to dig them up.

Did you know that in the United States we consume

• 60,000 plastic bags every five seconds?
• 106,000 aluminum cans every thirty seconds?
• two million plastic beverage bottles every five minutes?

Sounds like a lot. But sometimes big numbers are too abstract to fully fathom. We need ways to visualize them.

That's exactly what Seattle artist Chris Jordan does with his manipulated photographs depicting, well, stuff. Stuff in massive quantities--stuff in the quantities that we routinely produce, use, and toss it away.

It sounds cliche, but the result is that his photographs tiptoe a fine line between beautiful and grotesque. It's consumer waste displayed in gorgeous patterns of color and texture. It's pleasing to the eye. But the photos are jarring to the mind. This is consumption--wastefulness and pollution--spelled out in undeniable visual strokes. The trail of garbage we leave behind defines us, defines our culture.

Many of Jordan's images portray a specific quantity of something: 426,000 cell phones (the number retired every day); 2.3 million orange prison uniforms (the number of Americans incarcerated annually); 106,000 aluminum cans (the number used in the US every 30 seconds).

If you're in Seattle between now and January 3, 2010, you can see Jordan's large-scale photos in person, in all their haunting and sobering glory at the Pacific Science Center.

Photo courtesy: Chris Jordan and Pacific Science Center. Barbies, detail.

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!

With all the hand-wringing over the alleged risk of market manipulation in cap and trade, you'd almost forget that the United States already has a carbon cap and trade program up and running. But it does.

RGGI, a regional program among 10 Northeast states, has been auctioning permits, allowing trading on a secondary market, and even, in a way, encouraging trading in derivatives. And guess what's happened so far?

...we find no evidence of anticompetitive conduct. Participation by a large number of firms is an encouraging sign of competitiveness and efficiency in the secondary market.

That's according to a May 2009 report (pdf) by Potomac Economics, the designated market monitor tasked with keeping a close eye on RGGI's market function. It's the most recent analysis available and it's an encouraging sign. But really, it's no accident that RGGI has been successful so far. Administrators have prized transparency, regulation, and oversight in ways that can usefully inform federal cap-and-trade legislation. 

I draw three major lessons from the report.

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.

Editor's note: The following is a profile from Sightline's green-collar jobs primer. Read more about what makes a green-collar job and how we can create more in the Northwest.

Michael McCormick poured his first home foundation more than three decades ago. Since then, he’s built everything from starter houses to mansions to a transplanted English castle.

At 55, he understands the importance of keeping his skills up to date. So he went back to school five years ago to update his blueprint reading skills and knowledge of ever-changing building codes. The collapse of the Puget Sound housing market coincided with his graduation.

For nearly three years, McCormick has done whatever he could to pay the bills and advance his career: taking classes in construction management, doing odd remodeling jobs, building decks, even falling back on a former career cutting hair.

Then he heard a Presidential candidate named Barack Obama talk about green-collar jobs as a way to fix the country’s crumbling economy.