Daily Score Blog

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.

Last Saturday, two stories about green jobs caught my eye. One was in the Washington Post and the other in the Seattle Times.  The Post article was a hand-wringing affair about the failure of energy efficiency efforts funded by stimulus dollars to create any of the promised green jobs. The Times article was a bit more positive, reporting about a training program I wrote about in a post titled Labor Sees Green Job Opportunity. The Times piece highlighted the first graduates of the program, created by the Laborers' International Union of North America (LiUNA) to train weatherization workers. But the Times piece also asked the crucial question of one of the graduates, “will you be able to get a job?”

The graduate, Ahmalik Claiborne, answered, "I'm sure I can get a job . . . We are at the start of something good." Not everyone is so optimistic. But it is important for our region’s problem solvers not to give in to pessimism. The fact is, our region is ahead of the rest of the country and getting green jobs right is better than getting them right now.

Early this week, President Obama gave a speech touting the $3.4 billion in grants the federal government has awarded to local companies, utilities and cities working to improve the country’s aging and outmoded electric energy grid. The awards will support “smart grid” technology that enables easier and more effective transmission of electricity from one region to another. One of the recipients is Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative (PNGC), a Portland-based electric generation and transmission cooperative owned by 16 Northwest electric utilities. The grant will fund installation of “95,000 smart meters, substation equipment, and load management devices that will integrate electric cooperatives across four states using a central data collection software system hosted by PNGC.”

But will all the smart grid money create green collar jobs?

Unfortunately—and surprisingly considering unemployment rates—according to a recent report by the National Commission on Energy Policy, smart-grid investment will require trained workers who aren’t yet available in large numbers.

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.

If you didn’t know what blackmail is, David Letterman has probably made you familiar with it by now. Blackmail can be criminal or it can be something as simple as a kid a grocery store saying “if you don’t buy me cookies I’ll scream.”  But what about when business or industry uses the threat of lost jobs to persuade legislators to support or oppose legislation? We’ve heard this kind of thing before; “if this legislation passes, thousands of jobs will be lost.”

In doing some ongoing research on green collar jobs (check our primer) I discovered a new book, Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities by Brian Mayer. The intro of the book is online and worth a read. In it he takes on the topic of “job blackmail.” The term caught my eye. Mayer, citing an earlier study of the beneficial economic impacts of environmental legislation, defines job blackmail as:

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.

Size is one of those things that can be measured but is still very subjective. A child might think their teacher is tall, even though he’s only 5 feet 6 inches, while Manute Bol might think someone who stands 6’6: is short. The size of back yard cottages or laneway housing can determine their acceptance or rejection in single family neighborhoods—but, again, size is in the eye of the beholder.

Height, bulk, and scale of buildings can make or break a project or proposal. But, when does a building get too tall or too bulky? When does a house become a McMansion? What factor decides whether my neighbor and I can agree on a house that’s just right? What size is right depends on who you talk to.

So, to help us decide the right size for new housing options, the most important questions to ask focus on the outcomes we want—for families, neighborhoods, the environment.

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:

A report released last year from the Livable Seattle Movement declared that Seattle’s existing zoning is more than enough—three times more—than we need to accommodate expected growth. Phew! What a relief. And here we thought the Seattle region would have to undergo some painful, politically-rending rezones in order to sop up all the new people—as many as 106,000 households—arriving in the next decade. And, by extension, it would also mean we don’t need the backyard cottages being proposed by the City of Seattle.

But does this conclusion pass the “red face” test? Nope—faces are red. Or at least they should be. Why? Because their data is suspect and it doesn’t take into account any kind of community objections or other unforeseen obstacles even when the existing code allows development.

Chuck Wolfe over at Crosscut posted a really useful rundown of planning ideas for Seattle’s next mayor. Among other things, Wolfe urges Seattle’s next leader to consider bigger and bolder ideas when considering land use. The biggest and boldest idea is scrapping traditional zoning in favor of innovation and flexibility.

Growth can bring advantages with it—walkable neighborhoods, aggregated demand for transit, less impact on the climate and environment. So, some of us might be saying “amen” to many of the ideas Wolfe puts forward, including the idea touted by Dan Bertolet: to create an  Office of Sustainable Urbanism. An OSU could be the place where the big ideas and reality meet.

All of the kids returning to school this week brings to mind those classic school essays along the lines of "What I did this summer" and "What does democracy mean to me?" Should the kiddies be confronted with a new twist on the latter -- "What will climate change mean to me?" -- they'll find help from a new tool released recently by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Mississippi.

Climate Wizard provides predicted temperatures and rainfall worldwide for 2050 and 2100 based on best-, medium-, and worst-case scenarios of carbon dioxide emissions and global warming (the non-US data is only available for 2050 at present). You can zoom in for a closer look on regions and states you're most interested in. 

We’ve talked about it before. Americans are plagued by an obesity epidemic and trying to find smart ways to improve health. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shares the results of The Measures Project, an attempt to review all the recent science on community-based strategies to reduce obesity. The report is an important starting point for establishing land use as a kind of preventative medicine—a way to build healthier communities. This makes a lot more sense than treating people once they are already sick because it also improves quality of life and cuts costs.

Some of the findings are familiar to a study I wrote about before. But one of the key recommendations validates one of Sightline’s very favorite solutions of all time—the idea that mixing up the way communities use their land could be a very important way to improve health outcomes.

The report acknowledges that advocates of compact communities haven’t been able to really link up the science of health with the science of things like economics and land use and how they might work together to prevent illness and disease.