Daily Score Blog

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."

If you've driven by a gas station recently, you've probably noticed that gas prices are tumbling.  What you may realize is that the prices of some food commodities -- corn in particular -- are falling at about the same pace.  Take a look at the image below, which I've borrowed from tradingcharts.com, a veritable treasure trove of commodity price data. 

Clearly, price movements in the two commodities have been quite comparable, particularly over the last two years.  But experts are of different minds about why they've followed such similar trajectories.

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.

A few weeks ago, Canadian resident Rachel Perks sent me an email puzzler. Why is it that apparently identical cars -- same make, model, engine size, specs, etc. -- are advertised with drastically better fuel economy in Canada than in the United States? 

To see what I mean, compare the official government fuel ratings in the US versus Canada. Or take my car as an example. It's a 2003 Honda Civic with a 5-speed manual transmission and a 1.7 litre VTEC engine. The US Environmental Protection Agency says I should expect 27 mpg in the city and 35 mpg on the highway. Natural Resources Canada, however, says 38 mpg city and 48 mpg highway. What's going on? [Quick technical aside: Canadian car sellers use both litres per kilometre (a vastly superior formulation) and also miles per gallon (the terribly misleading measurement we use in the States).]

As it turns out, the greater part of the explanation is mundane -- just a translation error really. Canadians use imperial gallons and Americans use US gallons. An imperial gallon is 20 percent larger than a US gallon, so a Canadian vehicle needs fewer "gallons" to travel the same distance. Problem solved, right?

Actually, no. The volumetric conversion accounts for much of the difference, but not nearly all of it. As it turns out, Canadian fuel efficiency ratings are almost certainly misleading and inflated.

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?

Like a lot of people, I've been reading obsessively through election postmortems, fascinated by the inside stories on the national campaigns.  And for some reason, this tidbit at Newsweek on Obama's debate preparations stuck out at me:

When he was preparing for [the debates] during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “…I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

Amen to that. 

Of course, changing light bulbs is a great thing to do at the personal level.  By some accounts, lighting accounts for a fifth of all electricity consumption in the US, and the simple step of screwing in a different kind of light bulb can help make a real dent in household consumption.

But to make the profound and fundamental progress we really need, our political discourse has to stop treating energy and climate issues as simply matters of lifestyle choice and personal responsibility.  Instead, it has to start treating them as systemic problems with systemic (and largely political) solutions.  The boring details of energy efficiency standards, carbon pricing, investments in R&D and renewable power: these are the things that will make or break our energy future.  Greening consumer behavior -- however laudable -- is of secondary importance.

According to this account, Obama clearly gets that -- which is a very good thing.

[Photo credit:  Flickr user Not Quite A Photographr.]

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.

You know I hate to editorialize, but this judicial decision is just awful:

A federal judge dealt a blow on Friday to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s efforts to improve air quality in the city, blocking a rule that all new taxis must meet stringent fuel efficiency standards. The rule, which was scheduled to take effect on Saturday, would have made it mandatory for most cabs to be hybrid gas-and-electric vehicles by 2012.

Unfortunately, this is a story for the Northwest too. The city of Seattle will almost certainly run afoul of the same ruling because the city has been leading the charge to green its taxi fleet by requiring higher efficiency standards from the cabs it licenses. (I've written about it here and here.) In fact, efficient taxis are a key part of the city's plan to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Why can't cities decide what how much their local taxi fleets pollute? Here's why:

The judge, Paul A. Crotty, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, issued an injunction to stop the city from enforcing the rule because, he said in a written order, the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in a key legal argument —that only the federal government has the right, under existing laws, to set fuel efficiency standards.

Not only are the feds the least common denominator -- they get to be the only common denominator. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes it exceedingly difficult for local governments to showcase the climate leadership that's lately been bubbling up from all over.

Now if only there were some chance we'd get new federal leadership soon...

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, gas prices have fallen back from the phenomenal highs of last summer.  The immediate cause has been the economic crisis. When credit markets seized up, some companies that wanted to buy oil simply couldn't get the cash.  And perhaps more importantly, the economic slowdown has decreased projections for oil demand.  Markets that seemed tight are now looser than they've been in a while.

But those changes are just on the demand side.  On the supply side, though, little has changed.  If anything, the outlook for oil supplies is somewhat more pessimistic than it was a few years back.  Take a look, for example, at this recent survey of petroleum geologists (pdf link), that was conducted at a recent professional convention and reported in the journal of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists.  Three out of five petroleum geologists surveyed believed that global oil production would "peak" within 10 years.  See below:

 

Whatever our transportation foibles -- and we have plenty of them -- Northwest cites are not exactly in the Texas League of transportation planning. A ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday inaugurated a big new freeway in the Houston area. I mean it's almost comically big:

Opponents of the project have noted its extreme size — 18 lanes, counting toll and frontage lanes from Texas 6 to Washington, and more lanes at entrances and exits. The widening uprooted numerous businesses along the route and took two streets in the city of Spring Valley. Opponents also say the widening will increase emissions and noise and contribute to suburban sprawl.

Yikes -- 18 lanes wide and it's 23 miles long. In fairness, 4 of those 18 lanes will operate as 2-person HOV lanes for a few hours each day. And some of the lanes will be subject to variable tolls that should ease congestion. But that's not exactly progressive planning. I mean, check out Congressman Culberson's position:

Culberson, whose ability to get federal dollars was crucial to the widening project, pledged not to give up a single freeway lane for Metro rail.

I don't know about you, but I'm sure glad to see my tax dollars put to good use. And although the project cost $2.8 billion, that's probably just the down payment.

The economic crisis continues unabated (scroll down to the shocking international list of October stock market losses). New voices keep speaking up.

The case for new federal stimulus spending keeps getting stronger: Robert Reich explains the macroeconomics.

Tom Friedman argues that the economic crisis should not be the end of green. Instead, green should be the way we end the economic crisis:

I recently mentioned funding green-collar jobs programs that are authorized but not yet financed.

Another good way to stimulate the clean-energy economy fast with federal funding is through targeted tax incentives. In fact, Congress has already done so.

We already described the new tax benefit for employers of bike commuters. What other green stimulus went into the $700 billion economic stabilization package for the financial sector? I found summaries here, here, here, here, and here.

Highlights:

This trend may not be fully reflected at the gas pump yet, but the cost of oil is plummeting right along with the stock market.  Starting in mid-summer oil prices slumped a bit, then slumped some more...and then regained a bit of ground.  But just about when the economic news started looking especially dismal, the price of oil cratered -- falling from over $120 to under $70 in less than a month.  (The chart is courtesy of the ever-helpful wtrg.com.)

Uber-blogger Kevin Drum thinks we may be witnessing the deflation of an oil price bubble -- a bubble that, like the real estate market, was fueled more by speculation than by the fundamentals of supply and demand.

I think it's a legitimate theory. When prices were at their peak, speculation in the oil markets really was far more common than people realized. Investors, rather than refiners and manufacturers with a genuine need to purchase oil, held over four-fifths of all oil futures contracts earlier this year. As prospects in housing and finance dimmed, some investors probably saw green in "black gold" (Ok, that was weird) and pumped some money into commodity markets -- pushing up prices to unnatural heights.

Still, I don't think that speculation is the whole story.  Market fundamentals played a role too -- creating price volatility that's as much a problem for consumers as for energy companies.