Daily Score Blog

British Columbia's recent carbon tax made waves in the US. (Sightline's written about it here, here, and here.) But it's not terribly popular in BC, as economist Marc Lee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives explains:

While there are plenty of good reasons why the Liberals should get beaten up at the polls, one of the key reasons for the change is the carbon tax, due to an aggressive (if questionable) campaign by the NDP and poor communications by the government.

In some public opinion work I’ve seen, two messages about BC’s carbon tax come out loud and clear. The first is that revenue neutrality is a bust — people may be willing to live with a new tax on carbon but think that giving the money back is a dumb idea; they would rather have revenues spent on public transit or anything else that would reinforce climate action. Second, they want tough action on industry.

Quick aside for American readers who may not follow Canadian politics: the Liberals are the right-of-center party that is currently in power in BC; they're the ones responsible for the provincial carbon tax. The NDP -- the New Democratic Party -- is the left-of-center opposition party, which has criticized the carbon tax. And yes, you heard that correctly: the right is proposing a carbon tax and the left is attacking it.

Confusingly, although the BC Liberals and the federal Canadian Liberals are different parties with different orientations and platforms, their fates may be wedded in the next election -- because the national party has also proposed a carbon tax. At the federal level, however, the Canadian Liberals are the opposition party; the national government is controlled by the Conservative Party.

Got that? Okay, so here's what Canada's carbon taxes may mean for the rest of North America...

The headline says it all:  Fire retardant chemicals found in toddlers' blood.

Scientists are concerned that the chemicals cause brain damage in animals and may cause hyperactivity in children, says Jimmy Roberts, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on environmental health, who was not involved with the study. Doctors also are concerned that the chemicals affect the reproductive organs and hormone systems. A Danish study in 2007 found that boys whose mothers had high levels of fire retardants in their breast milk were more likely to have undescended testicles.

These are the same chemicals that we found in high levels in the breastmilk of Northwestern moms.  The worst forms have been banned in the US for several years, but one form is still in widespread use -- and apparently we may still be importing some of the worst kinds from overseas.  Even more troubling, there's still tons of these persistent flame retardants in people's homes, particularly in furniture foams that are gradually degrading.  And as they degrade, the flame retardants get into dust -- which toddlers & nursing moms then inhale.  It's a contamination problem that will likely affect our homes and workplaces for years.

The whole episode is a cautionary tale:  once you let a toxic genie out of the bottle, it's awfully hard to get it back in.

At a glance, this San Francisco Chronicle article is a bit difficult to parse, but it points to exactly the reason why I've been ranting about lousy oil price forecasts churned out by federal US agencies (see here, here, and here). To wit:

The Environmental Protection Agency says another arm of the Bush administration may be lowballing the economic benefits of increasing fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.

...the EPA said in comments filed with the Transportation Department that the department would have been better off using higher estimates for future gasoline prices when it proposed increasing the average fuel economy of all vehicles to 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015.

The proposed fuel economy increase was based in part on estimates that gas would range from $2.04 a gallon to $3.37 a gallon, averaging $2.42 a gallon in 2016.

So, basically, when gasoline costs more than estimated, we end up with lowball savings from higher mileage standards. (Higher standards means burning less fuel and hence spending less money.) Those lowball estimates make it seem unimportant to upgrade the standards. And when we don't upgrade the standards, then we waste money -- and we send more carbon in the atmosphere too.

Needless to say, gasoline currently costs more than the Transportation Department is estimating, as it has for much of 2008. And sure, it's perfectly possible that prices will go back down over the next 8 years -- predicting prices is tricky -- but it's maybe worth noting that the futures market doesn't think so. In other words, folks who have some skin in the game -- who make or lose money based on what oil prices do -- think that prices are headed gradually up between now and 2016. It seems it's only the government analysts who think gasoline will drop to $2.42.   

The really frustrating thing is that almost no one benefits from crappy price forecasts. Consumers lose, businesses lose, the environment loses -- and even oil companies lose.

Oh wait, check that. Oil companies don't lose at all: they make a killing when we burn more fuel than makes economic sense.

Just saying.

Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon:

The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent.

What's really great is that you can zoom in so close that you can clearly see the bulldozed logging roads, a line of "leave trees," and a striated green that I'm guessing is first season re-growth of vegetation. See::

I'll bet some tech-savvy map-genius type could collate enough Googe Map images together to do a systematic analysis of clearcutting. I could imagine starting in just one region -- perhaps a single Oregon county -- or expanding the analysis to include a large swath of the Pacific Northwest or even North America.

Why am I so fascinated by this?

We're heading into Labor Day Weekend. That means hiking for a lot folks, so I'm reprising some of the ways that Northwesterners can hit the trail without a car. In my two prior posts on this subject, commenters have offered some terrific advice from around the region and beyond.

First up, a place of honor for Andrew Engleson over at Washington Trails Association. He's on the verge of creating a new blog genre: Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail Without a Car (that's the 2,600-mile trail from Mexico to Canada); Hiking the Wonderland Trail Without a Car (that's the 93-mile loop around Mount Rainier); and Biking To a Hike. More please!

Speaking of biking to a hike, the central Puget Sound region is blessed with some pretty good hiking in the Cascade foothills, including the big parks of Cougar Mountain, Tiger Mountain, and Rattlesnake Ridge. These are all more-or-less accessible via bus or by bicycle (check out King County's terrific new regional bike map). I'm not saying it's a snap to get to these places sans vehicle, just that it's possible if you're committed.

Of course if you're truly hardcore, Rick Dubrow points out that you'll want to check out the Self-Propelled Outdoor Club, described here in an article with some ideas for the Vancouver, BC region.

And while we're on Vancouver, my favorite car-free hiking suggestion comes from Michael Newton who writes:

Vancouver's north shore has loads of hiking that's accessible by transit. We've got the advantage of having nothing but wilderness north of the city; if you skirt by Whistler, you could probably head north all the way to the Arctic Ocean without hitting another town! Cypress and Seymour Provincial parks, Lynn Canyon and Lynn Headwaters regional parks, not to mention numerous smaller parks and of course, the Grouse Grind.

You see, that is what I'm talking about. Arctic Ocean or bust! Who's with me?

This just cheeses me off. 

Yesterday, the US government released figures showing that GDP grew at an annualized pace of 3.3%.  The implicit message:  Yippee, we're not in a recession!

The press, of course, ate it up.   AP crowed:  "The U.S. economy grew in the spring at a 3.3 percent pace. The best gross domestic product results in nearly a year beat Wall Street's expectations."  The Voice of America's headline trumpeted: "US Economy Growing at Faster Rate Than Predicted."  Even the Canadian press got into the act:  "US economy shows vigour in Q2."

But today, the other shoe dropped.  Even though GDP was up last quarter, personal income declined in July.  Apparently it was the largest drop in three years.  So just one day after the press hypes a good news story about how "the economy" is growing, we find out that people are actually poorer!!  Talk about whiplash.

There are so many lessons in this little episode...

World Wildlife Fund has a helpful 8-page position statement that outlines the key features of the European Union's cap and trade program (called the Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETS for short.) It does a nice job of hitting on the central mistakes that Europe has made: over-allocation; windfall profits to polluters; and a rickety offsets program.

Unfortunately, the document is not really written for beginners. But folks need more access to good information about Europe's carbon trading program, and I haven't encountered many other good concise descriptions of the ETS. If readers know of any, please let me know.

Idaho feels the fuel price pinch:

Idaho fuel tax revenue declined for the first time in six years, as drivers faced with $4 per gallon gasoline shunned their cars ...

Suzanne Schaefer, a lobbyist for the Idaho Petroleum Marketers & Convenience Store Association, "I even spotted a hybrid in Soda Springs. That's not natural."

Based on state data, Idaho gas consumption fell over 6% in the first part of 2008, compared with the comparable period in the previous year. After accounting for population growth, it's a decline of well over 8 percent per person in a single year. That's a big deal.  If current trends continue for the rest of the year, Idaho residents will use less gasoline per capita in 2008 than in any year since 1963.

Washington's trends are in the same direction, though not quite as dramatic.  Total gas consumption is down a percent or two this year, even as population has risen.  Measured per person, Washington's gas consumption has fallen 13 percent since 1999, and are as low as they've been since 1967.

More reason to think that, when it comes to conservation, people pay more attention to prices than to moralizing.

Via Yglesias, here's a very intriguing article arguing that cost-benefit analysis doesn't actually make much sense for some environmental issues. (It's authored by by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling.)

I'm not sure I'm persuaded by every element in their argument but, it does makes some extremely important points. For example, on the much-debated subject of "discounting":

Second, the use of discounting systematically and improperly downgrades the importance of environmental regulation. While discounting makes sense in comparing alternative financial investments, it cannot reasonably be used to make a choice between preventing harms to present generations and preventing similar harms to future generations. Nor can discounting reasonably be used even to make a choice between harms to the current generation; choosing between preventing an automobile fatality and a cancer death does not turn on prevailing rates of return on financial investments. In addition, discounting tends to trivialize long-term environmental risks, minimizing the very real threat our society faces from potential catastrophes and irreversible environmental harms, such as those posed by global warming and nuclear waste.

If you're into environmental economics, it really is worth a look.

More like this please. It's pretty well known that official measures of poverty are inaccurate relics. Among other problems, they do things like this:

For the federal government, the concept of poverty is simple. If a typical family of four earns less than $21,100 a year, they're poor. If a single working woman makes less than $10,787, she's in poverty. It doesn't matter whether these people live in Omaha, Neb., where the average apartment rents for $600 a month, or in New York City, where a similar apartment costs $1,600 a month.

Conventional poverty measurements systematically discriminate against places with a high cost of living -- and that usually means cities. So it's encouraging to see New York seize the initiative to develop a more realistic assessment.

As the Christian Science Monitor reports:

New York's new poverty measurement takes into account rent, utility fees, food costs, clothing costs, and also includes other benefits for low-income families and individuals like Section 8 housing vouchers and food stamps. The change is expected to boost the city's poverty rate from 19 percent to 23 percent. That would mean 30,000 more people would qualify for assistance programs.

That's exactly as it should be. We need a more accurate accounting of the true costs (as well as the available benefits) of living in cities.

Forget the showdown between the United States and China, the real battle was between the Bahamas and Iceland.

Certainy nobody reported the Olympics that way, but isn't there something unfair about tallying medals without regard to population? China's athletes, drawn from a pool of 1.3 billion people, match up against American athletes from a pool about one-quarter as big. Though of course we Americans love to lionize our athletic prowess -- measured in total medals won -- against nations only a fraction of our size.

I mean, is it really fair to compare the medal count between, say, 300 million Americans and 30 million Canadians? Not hardly. In fact, the Olympics exemplify our tendency to measure the wrong thing.

When you factor in population, places like Germany and Great Britain don't matter nearly so much as places like Armenia and Mongolia. Or consider Jamaica, which boasts only 2.7 million souls but still managed to bring home 11 medals, including 6 golds. That means Jamaicans netted more than 4 medals for every million residents. None of the big powerhouse countries came even close to that mark. The United States, by contrast, captured only a single medal for every 3 million citizens.

I couldn't help myself. I crunched the per capita numbers for every country that won an Olympic medal in Beijing. Here are the top 20:

Who would have guessed that this is the roster of champions? (As it turns out, my colleague Clark would have. He reminds me that he wrote a post on this very subject four years ago! Sure, the topic isn't exactly relevant to this blog, it's just one of those measurement issues that tend to drive us a little bonkers.)

Below the jump, the full standings (and more complete data) for every country that won a medal. Also, some caveats.

It’s summer after all, and we all have some spare reading time. With almost 30 posts that may be new to you, there’s enough material to fritter away at least a day. Check out posts that are still as fresh and poignant as ever (entire series here):

• Troubles and triumphs with backyard renovations.

• To be local or to be organic? That is the question.

• Why 100 MPG wonder cars don’t matter much.

• Unspamming snail mail.

I'm a bit late on this, but it's still worth mentioning. Via the NY Times:

Traffic deaths in the United States declined last year, reaching the lowest level in more than a decade, the government reported Thursday. Some 41,059 people were killed in highway crashes, down by more than 1,600 from 2006. It was the fewest number of highway deaths in a year since 1994, when 40,716 people were killed.

You can't attribute the entirety of the decline to reduced driving: law enforcement and vehicle safety both play important roles. But driving less and slower driving matter a lot too. So while I've complained that the recent gas price spike is mostly bad news, this definitely qualified as a silver lining:

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said the sluggish economy was likely a factor in the declines. He predicted that the combination of a slowing economy and gas prices approaching $4 a gallon throughout the U.S. could lead to further reductions in highway deaths in 2008. Many states have reported double-digit drops in fatalities during the first part of this year.

Nice to hear.

But still: does anyone else find it appalling that more than 40,000 people die on American roads every year? Every time I see these figures, I'm shocked.

A single year of driving yields 10 times as many American dead as five years of war in Iraq.

This is the eighth in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative -- the West's regional cap-and-trade system. (Much to readers' delight, this is the last installment I'm planning to write.)

You can't talk about regional cap and trade very long before someone brings up the subject of pre-emption. What happens if the federal government creates a national cap and trade program? Would the regional programs disappear? And if so, why bother working on them?

First, let's get one thing straight: no one knows what will happen.

Seriously. No one has any idea. And that includes me.

No matter how confidently anybody expresses an opinion on pre-emption, you can rest assured that it's just speculation. And that uncertainty is precisely why it's so important to work on regional programs like WCI: regional cap and trade is what we've got. There's simply no guarantee we'll have a federal alternative soon.

Sure, we know that a new president will be elected in November. But while both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposals for a national cap and trade program, it is hardly a foregone conclusion that a serious policy will emerge intact in the near future. Here are a few ways that things could play out:

I'm always fascinated by the "1 percent solutions" to energy. It seems to me that in order to address both climate change and fossil fuel dependence, we'll need a few big structural changes, but we'll also need a lot of 1 percent solutions -- and maybe a bunch of quarter-percent solutions too. And the advantage of the 1 percent solutions is that they're often exceedingly easy; and so cheap that they actually put money in your pocket.

So I enjoyed Cindy Skrzycki's column this morning on low rolling resistance tires:

A study by the National Academies of Science in 2006 concluded it was feasible to reduce rolling resistance by 10 percent. This would increase the fuel economy of vehicles by 1 percent to 2 percent, saving up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel annually. Michelin said that over the past 15 years its energy-saving tires have reduced fuel consumption worldwide by about 2.38 billion gallons, compared with conventional tires.

Easy, right? The problem is, there's very little opportunity for consumers to evaluate the fuel-efficiency of tires (as Clark once discovered). Not only is there no rating system in place, but a national standard has actually been banned by Congress since 1996.

No kidding:

The congressional ban, first passed in 1996, said there could be no federal rule adding to existing grading standards that would require a certain level of fuel efficiency.

A 1998 Senate report explained that the prohibition covered "any rulemaking which would require that passenger car tires be labeled to indicate their low rolling resistance, or fuel-economy characteristics."

That's very helpful. Thanks, Congress.

Luckily, there's good news just around the corner. Congress has shifted gears and is now demanding a consumer-information program in place by next year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should have a rule in place by the end of 2009, though it's not clear when consumers will actually see the information in a standardized way.