Daily Score Blog

So Washington is facing a $6 billion budget shortfall, give or take. The state is looking at slashing funding for core services like public schools, higher education, and even public safety. The governor is calling the situation "truly ugly." Things are really pretty dire.

It seems like this would be a good time to close tax loopholes, especially when the loopholes are antiquated and preverse. So here's one: despite the fact that Washington levies a sales tax on pretty much everything, the state has a special tax-exemption loophole for pesticides and fertilizers. We're talking about roughly 2 billion pounds of fertilizers and maybe 37 million tons of pesticides that, for some reason, we don't tax. If we applied the same tax rate that we use for clothing and computers, toys and tacos, we'd be looking at $100 million over the budget cycle.

$100 million won't solve all our budget woes but that's a decent chunk of change for teachers, cops, and college tuition. Why on earth should we keep this loophole?

In an uncharacteristic fit of virtue I recently vowed to start eating better. Among other things, this means I'm stocking the freezer so that I don't get lured by the wealth of take-out in my 'hood.

In fact, I even bought a chest freezer so that I'd have a place to stash all food I'm making (and buying). Naturally, I did a bit of research before buying, but apparently not enough.

I have a feeling that if I lived in Canada I would have made a better choice. Both the US and Canada provide reasonably detailed product information to consumers but there's a big difference in context when it comes to understanding energy use and operating costs.

This New York Time Magazine article on green venture capital makes me simultaneously hopeful and nervous.

Kleiner Perkins is one of the giants of venture capital, having scored with some far-sighted early bets on high-tech firms such as Google.  Now, the firm is setting its sights on "green tech" -- technologies that can save energy, produce renewable power, or reduce pollution and emissions. 

Having such deep pockets turning their attention to clean energy seems like a very good thing.  And to my eyes, Kleiner seems to have gotten one important point right:  much of the technology we need to transform the energy system is already out there.   Says Kleiner elder statesman Bill Joy:

"Our overarching thesis...was that a lot of stuff had already been developed, but there were things that were not yet commercialized because thy had been frozen by the low price of oil.  The innovation had occurred, but they hadn't been deployed."

This is a point that greenies have been making for decades:  cleaner tech is already on the shelf, but structural impediments (including the subsidies we lavish on fossil fuels) have prevented them from taking off.  And it's wonderful to see that idea going mainstream.

Still, I do get a bit nervous about some of the energy technologies that the article touts as "green."

Well, knock me over with a feather:  the National Bureau of Economic Research declared today that the US is officially in a recession.

And in other shocking news, scientists announced that grass is green, the earth revolves around the sun, and four-year-olds like candy.

Seriously, though, there is one genuinely interesting fact in the announcement:  according to the best judgment of notable economists, the recession began last December.   That's right, the downward spiral has been underway for about a year, but it's taken until now for economists to confirm that there's actually a recession afoot. 

On the one hand, this could be seen as admirable restraint.  The nation's top economists patiently checked and double-checked all the data before they made their announcement. 

But on the other hand, it seems like a clear failure of economic measurement.  The beginnings of a serious economic crisis passed by with essentially no notice.  And by the time economists had enough data to confirm the trend, their findings were almost too obvious to be worth mentioning.

So why is it, exactly, that we continue to pay so much attention to the official declarations of boom and bust?

The Associated Press reports plans for a massive new green-collar federal stimulus package:

Obama has also embraced calls for a "green jobs" program that invests as much as $100 billion in projects to slash harmful emissions. This could include projects such as retrofitting buildings to make them more energy-efficient, upgrading the electrical grid and improving mass transit.

"It turns out that putting money into green technologies ... has a very large positive employment effect relative to tax cuts," said Robert Pollin, a University of Massachusetts-Amherst economist who has written extensively on what he calls the "green recovery."

"It's very efficient in terms of creating jobs for a given amount of spending, and it has the added benefit that the short-term effects are compatible with long-term needs in the economy," Pollin said.

Exactly as I’ve been saying!

On Monday morning, December 1, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. (Cascadia time), the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, will webcast a forum including some of the nation’s leading voices on green recovery. RSVP for the webcast.

Given the current economic crisis, now is the time to address climate change, not turn away from it. That's the majority view according to a new post-election poll results released earlier this month by Environmental Defense Fund.

It seems that voters have made the connection between economic concerns and energy stability. And they see that investing in clean energy can create millions of new jobs and help rebuild the economy. In other words, we want our stimulus served up green.

Significantly, solid numbers of respondents reported they'd be willing to pay higher home energy bills in order to cut oil imports and reduce pollution -- but only to a point. And a majority favored new regulations to promote environmental standards.

Dirty politics has a new meaning. In the 2008 elections, clean energy candidates prevailed over those who continue to cling to dirty fossil fuels.

A League of Conservation Voters election poll of battleground states, released today, shows that the policies of investing in wind and solar, requiring energy efficient appliances and raising fuel economy standards are widely supported by all sectors of the public - and clean energy was a major factor in this year's election outcomes. Obama beat McCain 51 - 45 percent in the 11 battleground states surveyed, and congressional Democrats won by a similar 50 - 46 percent. Across these battleground states, Democrats picked up a net of at least 13 seats in Congress, due in no small part to their support for clean energy proposals and by perceptions of Republicans as "friends of big oil" who have not supported alternative energy.

Four in five surveyed think there are real differences between the parties on energy policy, and voters believe Democrats have better ideas by a 10-point margin (46 - 36 percent).

Voters also support plans to invest in clean energy and energy efficiency, at much higher levels than proposals to increase offshore drilling and expand nuclear power.

• Seventy-six percent of voters strongly support investing in clean energy, 72 percent strongly support making fuel efficient appliances more affordable, and 70 percent strongly support raising the fuel efficiency standards on cars and making hybrids more affordable.
  
  
• Only 53 percent strongly support increasing domestic oil production and opening offshore areas for drilling.
  
  
• Just 36 percent strongly support investing in new nuclear power plants (Only 28 percent of women).

(click here to view larger version)

Let's say, just hypothetically, that Washington were facing a ginormous budget shortfall. And let's also say that the state had made an ambitious -- but mostly unfunded -- commitment to cleaning up Puget Sound. That would be a real pickle. But do you know what I'd do?

I'd levy a tax on the cruise industry, that's what.

Washington's cruise ships are only lightly regulated, sometimes to the detriment of the local marine environment. And cruise ships visiting Washington do not pay head taxes as they do in Alaska, which means that Washington is missing out on badly-needed revenue that can be used for environmental protection and oversight. Consider how they do it up north:

• Ketchikan levies a $7 per passenger tax on cruise ships that visit the port.
• Juneau levies a $8 per passenger tax.

By contrast, Seattle -- now the most popular point of departure in the Northwest -- levies nothing. But if the city were to to charge a comparable fee on the roughly 886,000 cruise passengers that left Seattle in 2008 it would have netted around $7 million. Granted, that's not going to fund the complete restoration of Puget Sound, but it might fully fund an important program or two -- the very sorts of programs on the chopping block of budgetary constraints.

But that's not the half of it. The state of Alaska also levies a $50 per passenger tax. What would happen if Washington did that?

More like this please. In Saturday's Oregonian, Paige Parker has a fabulous story on the profound equity implications of pedestrian-unfriendly communities.

More on the article in a second but first, a rant. Walkability is not just an amenity. Is it not a lifestyle accessory for the well-heeled. It is, for many people, an issue of basic social and economic justice. Zoning that segregates housing from retail -- and that reduces walkability and transit access -- has serious consequences for equity. So it's wonderful to see a newspaper article treat it that way.

Without the resources to own and operate a car, low-income families can face huge obstacles to meeting basic needs.

Low-income and minority families, prone to obesity and dietary-related diseases, are also more likely to live in communities where nutritious food is hard to come by, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports. These are otherwise known as "food deserts." Nationally, the typical low-income neighborhood has 30 percent fewer supermarkets than higher-income neighborhoods.

To illustrate the difficulty, Parker profiles a northeast Portland family who must spend several hours on transit, just to access an affordable grocery store. It's easy to think of this as little more than a big headache, but that's wrong-headed. It's a real economic hardship for those who can least afford it.

...the closest markets are convenience stores. They're sugar shacks of a kind, given their selection of cigarettes, beer and processed foods. At one, the produce section amounts to a few bruised tomatoes, limes and jalapenos. The other charges $4.89 for a gallon of milk, about $2 more than a regular supermarket.

Despite the excellent reasons to reject the GM bailout, consider this: a strings-attached investment that tweaked GM's production model could reap huge climate benefits -- perhaps bigger than anything else we do to autos in the near term. That's because the biggest opportunities in fuel economy are at the low end of the fleet, not in FutureCars.

Remember: you save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car. (The explanation is here and here.) For a company like GM that's based on building fuel-wasting behemoths this has huge implications. Seemingly minor tweaks can yield colossal returns. Let's take a look at some specific changes to the GM fleet:

• The Hummer H3 averages 15 mpg. Making an H3 that gets just 18 mpg would be the fuel-saving equivalent of turning the Prius into a 100 mpg hypercar.  
• The GMC Yukon Denali is even worse: it averages 14 mpg. Turning one of those tanks into a 20 mpg truck would save more fuel than turning two Toyota Tacomas (22 mpg) into two Honda Civics (29 mpg).
• The Chevy Trailblazer is worse yet: it averages 13 mpg. For every Trailblazer we made that got 22 mpg, we'd save as much fuel as we would by taking a Toyota Corolla (31 mpg) off the road entirely.
• Making a single Cadillac Escalade (14 mpg) get just 18 mpg would save more fuel than turning a 50 mpg car into a 500 mpg car.

Uncertain about the big automaker bailout? I give you KC Golden of Climate Solutions, in a Seattle P-I op-ed:

Saving GM under any circumstances is a hard swallow. This is the company whose Vice Chairman Bob Lutz says "global warming is a total crock of s - - -."

GM sent a posse of executives and lobbyists to Olympia to fight Washington's Clean Car Act in 2006, a law that will reduce climate pollution from new cars by 30 percent and save Washington consumers more than $2 billion in fuel costs.

And:

The market wants efficient cars; the engineers can produce them; the law requires them. But GM's lawyers and executives fight on for their right to commit commercial suicide and planetary ecocide, even as they descend on Congress, cup in hand.

Come again -- why should we dig deep to save a company that seems so resolutely determined to destroy itself, taking the economy and the planet down with it?

Go read the whole thing here.

Plus, if that's not enough GM reading, you can take a look at Thomas Friedman's latest, which also appears in the P-I today. It's excellent.

Brilliant.

That’s the word kept crossing my mind as I read this clearly-written report (pdf link) about the Puget Sound Regional Council's study on using road tolls to fight congestion.  The study found that a well-designed, comprehensive system of congestion-busting tolls could make a major dent in traffic backups in the Puget Sound.  It would also speed up transit, shorten commute times, and reduce gasoline consumption.

But much to its credit,  the report also identifies one critical question that may dominate any public debate over congestion pricing:  Can tolling be fair?

In October, the Center for American Progress released a report by economists at the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute called, “Green Recovery.” The report (definitely worth a close study) showed that a $100 billion green economic investment could create 2 million US jobs in two years -- not to mention the wonders it would do for breaking our dangerous fossil fuel addiction and cleaning up the climate.

A groovy new map on the CAP website illustrates how allocations to 34 states from this "green recovery program" would translate to net job creation and the dent this would make on each state’s unemployment rate (based on September 2008 unemployment figures). 

The CAP program proposes to boost public investment (and leverage private capital through loan guarantees) in six energy efficiency and renewable energy strategies: retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency; expanding mass transit and freight rail; constructing “smart” electrical grid transmission systems; wind power; solar power; and next-generation biofuels.

It would create 42,689 new jobs in Washington, reducing unemployment by 22.9 percent (from 5.3 to 4.1 percent).

In Oregon, 27,306 jobs would be created -- cutting unemployment by 23.7 percent.

Kevin Drum and Paul Krugman set it out.

Go read it.

I'm serious!