Daily Score Blog

Now that the Olympic Peninsula is teeming with vampires, it hardly seems unreasonable to reintroduce wolves back to the region.

I guess I'm not the only one who feels that way. The Peninsula Daily News reports that a public meeting last year was packed with wolf supporters:

SEQUIM - A crowd of North Olympic Peninsula residents told state Department of Fish and Wildlife officials that gray wolves belong in Washington state - maybe even on the Peninsula.

"I want a bumper sticker that says 'Wolves NOW,'" said Dennis Murray of Sequim, one of some 85 people who attended Fish and Wildlife's Tuesday night "public scoping meeting" in Sequim on the drafting of a gray wolf management plan for Washington.

This is surely an excellent sign, especially in light of the fact that it was largely public opposition that ended a reintroduction effort in the 1990s.

I don't have any public opinion research at my disposal, but I've been following this issue for a while it sure seems like something has changed. Maybe it's the fact that the Rocky Mountain wolf reintroduction was such a success, generating strong public support and netting real economic returns. And while there have certainly been conflicts with livestock owners, the fears of wolf-human conflicts have pretty well been put to rest now.

Wolves are present in large numbers in seven states (and in small numbers in many more) and the fact is that wolves simply don't harm people. In fact, anyone care to guess where the largest number of U.S. wolves live outside of Alaska?

As my poor co-workers are only too aware, I have an unholy fondness for potato chips. Few things give me more pleasure at lunchtime than scanning the blogosphere while crunching my way through a bag, dribbling little crumbs down into my keyboard.

Lovely? Oh, yes.

Among other things, it results in a keyboard that needs to be cleaned periodically. Yeck. But last year when I embarked on a little office spring cleaning, I made a shocking discovery: those little compressed chemical dusters (pictured above) are basically greenhouse gas bombs. In some cases, using up just a single canister is the climate equivalent of driving my Honda Civic from Seattle to New York City and then back to Chicago, even allowing for plenty of side trips.

Needless to say, I was apalled. I even briefly considered a mini crusade against the things.

I also ended up having several interesting conversations about the canisters. Two in particular stood out: one with an industry representative and another with an advocate from Australia. In case folks are interested, I'll share what I learned.

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).

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Picture courtesy of flickr user Salon de Maria, licensed under the Creative Commons.

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.

The US election is over, but that doesn't mean you have to stop voting!  The geek-hipsters (or is it hipster-geeks?) at Front Seat just launched a new website that lets you vote on priorities for the Obama administration's brand-new Office of Urban Policy. 

Users have submitted dozens of ideas -- everything from investing in rail, to changing zoning laws to promote walkable development, to reforming systemic pro-highway biases in federal transportation funding.  There are so many good ideas on the list, it's hard to choose just one -- so they actually give you 10 votes, which you can apportion among different ideas as you see fit.

Will the administration pay any attention?  Maybe a bit, if we're lucky; but the influence will depend on how many people actually vote.  Regardless, it's always fun to have your say and to see how other folks' priorities line up with your own.  Right now, rail investments are winning in a landslide.  But there are plenty of other worthy options on the table.

Front Seat is the outfit that created Walk Score -- a phenomenally useful website that lets you check out how pedestrian-friendly your neighborhood is.  And since you're wasting time anyway, you should also check out sister site that lets you have your say on technology priorities for the Obama administration.

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.

There were plenty of winners and losers in last week's election.  But perhaps the biggest loser of all was conventional wisdom.

Consider the national election.  As of late 2007, conventional wisdom asserted that Hillary Clinton had the Democratic nomination sewn up, and that McCain ought to pull the plug on his faltering, underfunded campaign. 

Conventional wisdom went 0-for-2 on that one. 

If anything, political prognosticators in Washington State fared even worse.  Consider the Puget Sound light rail vote. Time and again, political insiders billed the 2007 "Roads-and-Transit" package as the last, best hope for rail transit in greater Seattle.  The roads were considered crucial to the train's chances: there was simply no way, the wise ones intoned, that the electorate would approve a multi-billion dollar train system unless it was leavened with some road projects to lure suburban voters.  And if voters rejected the package in 2007, we were assured, the train would be dead for a decade; politicians would never put a tax increase on the ballot two years in a row, especially with an economic downturn on the horizon.

How'd the wisdom do?  0-for-4. 

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?

Go here.  Now.

Or maybe don't, if you don't want to get sucked into a vortex of clever map awesomeness.  And FYI, this has nothing to do with the Northwest, but nonetheless I can't stop playing with it.

[Hat tip, or possibly blame, to Sightline reader Callie Jordan.]