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Save Water, Drink Wine

Michael Scott, a scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington is warning farmers to brace for the impacts of climate change. Scott’s work is helpful because he quanitifies the damages that may be in the offing.

By studying climate models and the impacts of past droughts, Scott cautions that a warming trend of just 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit could precipitate crop losses of $92 to $163 million. Yakima Valley, Washington’s fruit basket and agricultural powerhouse, would receive 20 to 40 percent less water, a potentially catastrophic loss if farmers don’t start changing their practices.

One thing agriculturalists can do is switch from thirsty apple orchards to grapes and vineyards, which do well with less water.

Homeland Security

Paul Krugman burns hot today on the failings of the US government to secure the homeland. Many major American toxic and nuclear facilities, including some in Cascadia, are sitting ducks for sabotage.

We’ll add substantially to this story Thursday, when we release the Cascadia Scorecard 2005.

Krugman writes:

Consider, for example, the case of chemical plants.

Just days after 9/11, many analysts identified sites that store toxic chemicals as a major terror risk, and called for new safety rules. But as The New York Times reported last fall, "after the oil and chemical industries met with Karl Rove … the White House quietly blocked those efforts."

Nearly three and a half years after 9/11, those chemical plants are still unprotected.

Other major risks identified within days of the attack included the possibility of terrorist attacks on major ports or nuclear plants. But in the months after 9/11, the administration flatly refused to allocate the sums that members of the House and Senate from both parties thought necessary to secure these sites.

The Charity of Power

Oregon utilities are required to report how much they spend helping low-income households with their bills and, guess what, the giant, corporate, private power companies turn out to be more generous than the state’s legions of power coops and municipal power companies.

A proof of the superiority of the market? Well, no. The story is more complicated and holds a different lesson, as the NW Energy Coalition reports.

Oregon’s private utilities are required by law to spend roughly $5 of every $1,000 helping their poorest customers pay their power bills. I’m no fan of most subsidies to resource consumers, but I like this one. Low-income families spend a larger share of their money on energy than do other families, so rising energy prices hit them especially hard. I’d prefer a more generous system of low-income weatherization (aka, subsidized efficiency upgrades) than subsidies to energy consumption, but in practice, the bill-payer assistance programs are a good way to find families who need weatherization help.

Public utilities are exempt from the obligation to assist their low-income customers, but they pledged to the legislature that they’d match the privates or do better. After all, they declared, they were public organizations, accountable to local elected officials. They could be counted on to do the right thing.

Apparently, they had their fingers crossed. With the exceptions of Salem, Umatilla, and Ashland, every other public utility gave out less help—and often far less help—than the private utilities.

The real lesson isn’t that private companies are more charitable than public agencies. Rather, it’s that enforceable mechanisms (e.g., laws and contracts) that bind everyone to an agreed upon level of public-spiritedness work better than voluntarism.

Do You Know What You're Eating?

No. You don’t. (pdf)

Research from the USDA suggests that we are generally wrong—by quite a bit—about what we’re eating and how much. Researchers asked people to estimate how much food they eat in each nutritional category and then to keep records for 14 days of what they actually eat. There was a big gap.

Across age and gender, we underestimate the amount of grains we’re consuming and wildly overestimate the amount of fruit. (We think we’re eating about 2-1/2 times as much fruit as we actually are. And even the fruit we think we’re eating would not be sufficient to meet federal nutrition guidelines.) Generally speaking, we’re pretty accurate about how many veggies we get. We’re consuming about half as much dairy as we think we are. And we’re actually eating between 2/3 and 3/4 of the meat that we report.

The truth is, we eat about the right amount in the meat/protein/beans category. We eat a bit too much in the grains/cereal category. And we don’t get enough of anything else.

Oh, there is one other category that we get enough of: "fats, oils, and sweets." The USDA does not recommend an amount, it only warns us to "use sparingly," a warning that is apparently going unheeded. Women consume about 50 percent more than they say they do and men consume about double what they report. And both genders are reporting that they eat more "fats, oils, and sweets" than they should.

It could be that the first obstacle to good nutrition is simply getting people to accurately assess their eating habits. It’s awfully hard to combat obesity or encourage nine servings of fruits and veggies a day (the new federal guidelines for men) if we don’t even know what we’re eating in the first place. 

Article of the Week

Gumshoe botanist David B. Williams explores the Emerald City in search of its original ecology in a Seattle Weeklyfeature article. It’s a great environmental history lesson that deepens our knowledge of—and therefore our connection to—our place.

It's Not Easy Cleaning Green

Cleaning your house in a way that promotes a healthy, livable planet is not as easy as you might think. As an article in last week’s Boston Globe relates, the popular cleaner Simple Green, marketed to environmentally concerned consumers as a nontoxic, “safer alternative” to toxic cleaners, in fact contains the same toxic solvent found in conventional cleaning solutions like Formula 409 and Windex.

The US has credible national standards in place for labeling organic food and for rating the energy efficiency of appliances. But unlike Europe and Canada, who have government-sponsored criteria for green products, no such standards exist for household cleaning products, personal care products, or cosmetics. Hence, the words “natural,” “nontoxic,” and “environmentally preferable” end up meaning whatever the producer wants them to mean; in fact, for cleaning products, there is no requirement that ingredients even be listed on the label.

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Smells Like Teen Spirit

New numbers (see table A10, here) confirm that teen birth rates in Washington fell to a new low in 2003.  For the first time ever, Washington’s teen birth rate dropped below British Columbia’s!!!

That is, BC as of 1978.

As the chart below shows, the good news of the past decade—that teen births have been falling steadily in Washington (as they have in other Northwest states)–is tempered by the fact that they’re still remarkably high in comparison with our neighbors north of the 49th parallel, whose teen birthrates are more typical of the world’s developed nations. 

Fertility patterns are by no means uniform in the state.  In urban King County, for example, there were about 19 births for every 1,000 teenaged women—well below the state average (though more than half again as high as BC’s rate).  But this low rate is more than balanced out by the high birthrates in many poorer and more rural counties; Yakima County, for example, had a birthrate of 74 per 1,000 teens.  (There’ll be more on this in our Cascadia Scorecard release next week.)

But perhaps the most important thing that this chart shows is that slow, steady changes in birthrates have amounted to a slow-motion revolution in fertility.  Year to year, we might not notice how much patterns of childbearing are changing.  But over time, the percent-or-two per year changes are adding up to substantial delays in childbearing—and, in all likelihood, the lowest teen birthrates in the region’s history.

Walking the Walk

An article in today’s Vancouver Sun (subscription required) reports on a new study showing that, in neighborhoods that are designed to make walking convenient, people do, in fact, walk more.  To wit:

People who lived the most walkable neighborhoods were 2.4 times as likely to walk for 30 minutes or more than those who lived in the least walkable communities.

The study’s authors, led by UBC professor Lawrence Frank, defined walkable neighborhoods as having three core characteristics: they’re compact, so that distances between destinations are shorter; their street grids connect, so that it’s convenient to walk from place to place; and they have a good mixture of stores and homes, so that  people have places to walk to in their daily lives.  In such neighborhoods, people walk because it’s a convenient form of transportation, not simply because it’s good exercise.

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BC Gas, nee Hydro

BC Hydro does a fair number of things right. It has an impressive energy efficiency program and a commitment to global responsibility.

But today’s Vancouver Sun (subscription required) shows the other side of BC Hydro: it’s planning to build a large natural-gas fired power plant on Vancouver Island.

A better way to go would be expanded investment in efficiency, renewables, and "demand response."

Article of the Day, Yesterday

The sex–edhanky panky accelerates. A great column yesterday by Nicholas Kristof (who is, you’ll be pleased to know, a Cascadian from Oregon) tells the story: tripling the US federal budget for "abstinence-only" (aka, "ignorance-only") sexuality education.

The crux:

"abstinence only" is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There’s a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins – it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS."

And:

"Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers’ gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France."

In Cascadia, the disparity is equally stark. Teen birth rates in British Columbia are one third of those in Washington and Oregon, as we pointed out here.