Daily Score Blog

To our BC readers, we realize this Thanksgiving post comes a month late. But as those of us below the 49th parallel make our holiday shopping lists, a study on salmon shows that many of our mental maps about how we eat and buy food—organic vs. conventional, fresh vs. wild—are really too simple.

The conclusion that’s grabbing headlines is that frozen salmon is generally better for the climate than fresh salmon. The authors of the study found that fresh salmon tends to be shipped around the globe in airplanes—consuming prodigious amounts of fuel per pound of fish.  Salmon that’s flash-frozen at sea can go by slower but more efficient rail or container ship.  In the end, they calculate that frozen salmon releases less carbon on its journey form the ocean to the typical plate, marking an apparent exception to the rule that frozen foods consume more energy than fresh.

But before you swear off fresh salmon for fish sticks, there's more you need to know.  Early results of the ongoing salmon life cycle assessment being done by the Portland-based Ecotrust, Dalhousie University in Canada and the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology are pretty nuanced:

Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying about simple metrics such as “food miles,” the study finds that the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.

What farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat, and ocean acidification.

Unfortunately for anyone standing in front of the fish counter, all of those details do matter. And so does geography. For those of us in the Northwest, the simple eat-frozen-over-fresh rule may not hold:  if you’re eating fresh salmon right off a boat near where the fish was caught, the total emissions may be far lower than for a frozen fillet that made a long trip to the fish counter or grocery freezer. 

Sheesh, that's a lot to keep track of.

Whether or not your Thanksgiving plans require a trip over rivers or through woods, Mapquest has a new little tool to help you figure out what it's going to cost you in gasoline. 

When you use the site to get driving directions, it now prompts you to calculate your fuel cost based on your vehicle's estimated miles per gallon and using local gas prices. It's not crazy accurate, but at least gives you a ballpark idea.

When I used it recently to calculate the cost of a quick trip from my house in north Seattle to a spot just south of the Interstate-90 bridge's west end -- a round trip of about 28 miles -- I was surprised at the price in petrol. My car's a Camry hybrid and pretty efficient but it was still going to cost me about $2.60 for this one drive, and that was assuming possibly better mileage than I'd get in traffic (I figured it was about 30 mpg). If my mom was to make the same trip in her smallish SUV, she'd burn through about $4.30, which -- call me cheap -- starts to feel like real money (sorry mom, I'm really not picking on you, and I can't wait for your pie on Thursday!). 

Contrary to claims that cap and trade is untested or uproven, there are a half dozen or so operational cap-and-trade programs already functioning in the United States. Of these, the most significant are the Acid Rain Program and the NOx Budget Trading Program. Both have large vibrant trading markets, both have been extremely successful in achieving environmental aims, and neither has evidenced manipulation or gaming.

The Acid Rain Program has been administered by the US Environmental Protection Agency since 1995. It includes a cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide (SO2) -- and all evidence suggests that the program has functioned exceedingly well. In fact, the program achieved steep emissions reductions at lower-than-expected costs. 

The lion's share of the success in SO2 reduction can be attributed to the market-based cap-and-trade program. According to a 2007 article in Electricity Journal:

As part of its compliance strategy a regulated source may engage in allowance trading—buying or selling surplus allowances. Because of the cap, there is no need for EPA to review each transaction thereby reducing the time, transaction costs, and administrative costs to trade allowances. Parties to a trade can enter the transactions online using EPA’s information system, allowing trades to be processed in less than one day; competition and market liquidity have driven down the costs of private transactions to less than 0.1 percent of the cost of an allowance, and administering transactions of millions of allowances each year requires less than one full-time employee at EPA.

In other words, cap and trade was able to deliver environmental improvement at a low cost. And it did so quickly.

Now, here's a Dutch treat:  last week, the Netherlands became the first country to adopt a tax-by-the-kilometer system to pay for roads, bridges, and other car-oriented infrastructure.  As far as I can tell, it's not a tax increase, but rather a tax shift:  the government will reduce taxes on car sales, slashing vehicle purchase prices by about a quarter, and replace the lost revenue by charging drivers a few cents per kilometer.  Each car will have a GPS system that tracks driving habits; and the fees will be fine-tuned to account for a vehicle's size (heavy trucks pay more), fuel consumption (efficient cars pay less) and even congestion impacts (rush hour drivers will pay a premium).

I'm trying to find out more about the program, but since I don't speak Hollandaise (or whatever) I'm having a hard time tracking down the details.  But it sounds similar to the distance-based tax that's been tested in Oregon as an alternative to the gas tax, and also like a full-scale implementation of the Traffic Choices study that the Puget Sound Regional Council did a few years back. By switching from an "all-you-can-drive" to a "pay-as-you-drive" system, the Dutch government says they'll trim CO2 emissions by 10 percent while unclogging traffic. (And I thought the Dutch actually liked clogs.)

To me, it totally makes sense switching from point-of-sale taxes to a pay-as-you-drive system would reduce driving.  After all, I'm likely to gorge myself at an all-you-can eat buffet, but I eat more reasonably when I pay a la carte. So here's hoping that the Dutch are on to something:  if they work out the technical kinks, this could be a great model for for fighting congestion and reducing fuel consumption in our part of the world, too.

Remember the good old days when you could self-righteously point to spewing smoke stacks and foul outfalls as the big polluters? These days, when it comes to Puget Sound's water pollution, we've met the enemy and he is us.

For the majority of contaminants sullying the Sound, they're getting there via stormwater. Stormwater is the rain that streams from roads, parking lots, roofs, highways, and some landscapes washing toxic chemicals along with it.

Stormwater flowing from the developed landscape is the No. 1 source for lead and petroleum products getting into the Sound. Runoff contributes 35 times more mercury to Puget Sound than industrial polluters, according to estimates from a Department of Ecology study. A follow-up report estimates that stormwater is dumping 134 metric tons of copper into the Sound each year -- that's the weight of more than 53 million pennies (copper can prove deadly to salmon by deadening their sense of smell, which is used for finding food and mates and avoiding predators). 

How can a little rain wreak so much havoc?!

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.