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The Trials of Job

I feel like such a grump pointing this out, but this Seattle Timesarticle makes a big deal out of an irrelevancy.  And in the process, it misses a larger and more important point.

As the story notes, preliminary figures show that Washington state has nominally regained all of the jobs lost during the most recent statewide recession. From the start of the recession in December 2000, through the recession’s end in June 2003, the state lost 81,200 jobs. But since that trough the state has added 82,000 jobs.

In one way of looking at things, that amounts to more than a full recovery. Only it’s not. Over the same period—December 2000 through December 2004—the state added somewhere around 280,000 new residents. So reaching the same level of employment as at the start of the last recession means that we’re still significantly behind where we were…and that the article is celebrating an empty milestone.

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Unnatural Disasters

Just about every winter, coastal Cascadia gets slammed with a couple days like yesterday and today: flood days.

The worst flooding typically comes when heavy rains coincide with warm, subtropical air, which rapidly melts mountain snowpacks. That’s exactly what’s going on. This particular Pineapple Express, which the Canadians are calling Tropical Punch, started south of Japan and is now melting Cascadia’s headwaters and inundating its lowlands.

The drama is well told in the local media. Southwestern British Columbia has had the heaviest rains (as much as 8 inches) and the worst resulting landslides, as the Vancouver Sun reports here and especially here (subscription required for this article). Not too much better off is Western Washington, which has 12 rivers at or close to flood stage, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencernotes. Flooding is unusually widespread across western Washington, as the Seattle Timesreports.

The stories behind the drama—the slow news (pdf)–rarely gets told. To me, Tropical Punch has three "backstories."

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No Business Without Snow Business

The Seattle Timesstole my thunder this morning. Resentful about my skiing-less weekend and sweltering in the upper-50s on my (normally cold) morning run, I had planned to write about the terrible snowpack in the Cascades, particularly on Snoqualmie Pass. Snoqualmie has easily the thinnest base of snow in the last 10 years (and I bet in a very long time, if we could find the data to prove it).

The Times article documents the poor conditions at Washington’s ski areas. The hardest hit, however, is altitude-challenged Summit at Snoqualmie which technically "opened" on December 28, but has yet to actually open most of its runs outside of Alpental. The entire operation is shut down today, as it was yesterday. And with a paltry 30 inches of snow on the ground, the area could conceivably stay closed for a while longer. Even the Mount Baker Ski Area—which once received the heaviest snowfall ever recorded, anywhere—is staying shut for several days.

The ecological consequences of low snowpack are serious: drought, desiccated salmon runs, forest fires, and so on. The scant snow is also terrible for the state’s struggling economy: seasonal workers are being laid off or not finding sufficient work, and sales at ski areas and gear shops are anemic. And the indirect economic costs are even greater.

Climate change is the likely culprit for the crime that my skis have not emerged from the closet since last winter. But what can we do? Well, many of Washington’s ski areas have endorsed the National Ski Areas Association’s environmental charter, which encourages action on climate change. You can find a complete list of our green ski areas here–they deserve our patronage. If the snow ever returns, that is.

Judging Cascadia

Tomorrow President Bush begins his second term, during which he will almost certainly appoint at least one new justice to the Supreme Court, which has enjoyed the longest period of stability since the 1820s. And by coincidence today marks precisely a quarter-century since the death of Cascadia’s sole Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas. Not only was Douglas the longest serving justice in the court’s history, he was also perhaps the most environmentally concerned.

Douglas’ boyhood adventures in the Cascade Mountains blossomed into a lifelong love affair with the outdoors that he later described as having “a spiritual significance.” He counted among his friends, not only lawyers and politicos, but also ranchers, trappers, foresters, guides, and conservationists. Douglas wrote extensively about the landscapes and characters of Cascadia, leaving behind a roster of books with titles like Of Men and Mountains and A Wilderness Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately, Douglas’ non-judicial writing sometimes lapses into self-indulgence—a little like listening to an old hand spin yarns around the campfire. But luckily for newcomers to Douglas’ corpus, James M. O’Fallon, a professor of law at Oregon  State University, has recently compiled a good selection of Douglas’ writing in a new volume, aptly titled Nature’s Justice: Writings of William O. Douglas. It’s a great place to start. Or for a short biography, try this one at Historylink.org.

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Measure for Measure?

A development to watch: the supporters of Oregon’s Measure 37 (which we discussed earlier) are considering moving north, by introducing a similar ballot initiative in Washington.

In a nutshell, Measure 37 requires the government to compensate long-time landowners when regulations significantly reduce the value of a particular parcel of land. (Of course, no property owner has to refund money when a government action increases the value of land—but that’s a nuance that got lost in the debate.)

Nobody yet knows quite how the passage of Measure 37 in November is going to play out in Oregon, but it’s expected to make it far more complicated and expensive to enforce Oregon’s successful anti-sprawl policies. Which makes it very important to watchdog not only the implementation of Measure 37, but also attempts to export the idea to other parts of the U.S.

To Health in a Handbasket

From today’s Oregonian:  a rising share of the state’s residents has no health insurance.  For the first time in a decade, the percentage of uninsured Oregonians is now above the national average. As the article says…

"Studies have shown that uninsured people are less likely than others to get timely care—and more likely to die sooner.

Maybe that’s another trend to keep in mind when trying to predict how long we’ll live in decades to come.

Aging Gracelessly

To follow up on Alan’s previous Social Security post:  one thing that jumped out at me from the New York Times Magazinearticle on Social Security is how much our view of the long-term financial health of the program is dependent on shaky assumptions about future demographic and economic trends: immigration rates, wage increases, and the like.

Chief among the uncertainties is how long future seniors will live—which, of course, determines how long Social Security payments will continue after they retire. And, obviously, nobody can predict how future medical advances and social conditions will affect lifespans, especially towards the end of life.

Take, for example, Washington state. As of 2002, a Washington woman who survived to age 65 can expect to live to 85; men, to just over 82. And as the graph below shows, lifespan at age 65 has increased for both sexes over the last two decades, but the pace of increase has been twice as fast for men as for women.

Now, with lifespans, as with stocks, past performance is no guarantee of future results. A simple exercise demonstrates the point: if you simply extend the above trendlines to 2050 (about the time that the Social Security trust fund may run dry, under some assumptions), men who survive to age 65 will outlive women. That simply seems implausible, since it’s essentially unheard of today. Which makes it a pretty sure bet that past performance won’t continue indefinitely—either men’s gains will slacken, or women’s gains will accelerate (as they have in Japan).

What this all means is that the demographers and actuaries whose job it is to peer into the future are forced, more or less, to guess, not just about life expectancy but about a host of other trends. The guesses may be well-informed, but they’re still just guesses. But even tiny gaps between the guess and reality can add up to a big difference over time—big enough, for example, to be able to claim that a reasonably solvent program is actually on the verge of bankruptcy.

State of the Sound

Kudos to Washington’s Puget Sound Action Team (PSAT), which today released its State of the Sound 2004 report. The report contains 14 indicators of Puget Sound’s ecological health, including everything from fish populations to habitat loss to toxic contamination. PSAT’s work is encouraging, not because the findings point to flourishing ecosystems (they don’t), but because Cascadians now have good—and accessible—science to evaluate the health of at least one major ecosystem.

Monitoring ecosystems is devilishly difficult because ecosystem dynamics are so complex. Throw in the natural variability of weather and of species’ populations and you’ve got a recipe for confusion. So good science and long-term investigation are important when it comes to understanding ecological changes. That’s what PSAT offers: solid science to help set priorities.

And just what is the state of the Sound? It’s a mixed bag.

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Airbusted?

OK, so the last time I opened my mouth on the subject of airplanes’ energy appetites, I was off by a nautical mile.

This time, I’ve checked my work. See what I now think about the just-launched Airbus A380 in this article at National Geographic. Short version: it’s a fuel hog.

Look for a fuller discussion in Cascadia Scorecard 2005, which we’ll release in about a month.

UPDATE: Another interesting article on the A380 from Agence France-Press. The nut–

If Airbus’ business plan is right, "the number of air passengers will triple in the next 20 years."

Even if planes get bigger, there will still be a lot more of them in the skies in order to meet demand and this will cancel out the benefits in improved fuel efficiency [compared with the 747].

(Aging) Population Bomb? II

Roger Lowenstein’s article in this week’s New York Times Magazine effectively debunks the pervasive notion that the US Social Security system is headed for insolvency. (If I’m not mistaken, it’s the Medicare system that’s got problems ahead, not Social Security.)

The article makes a couple of points worth comment:

1. The argument that we need more babies in order to prop up Social Security is hooey. As Lowenstein writes, "though future generations of workers will have to support more retirees, they will also be having fewer children. In fact, according to the Social Security actuaries, the total ‘dependency’ burden (that is, the number of nonworking seniors and kids that each working-age adult will have to support) will remain lower than at its baby-boom peak." It’ll be no harder to support boomers in their retirement than it was to support them in their childhood. In fact, it’ll be easier, because we are so much richer now. (I made a similar point here.)

(An aside: the situation in Canada is worse, but not much worse. Canada is aging more rapidly than the United States because it had a bigger baby boom. But it also allows proportionately more immigration and, therefore, more working-age newcomers.)

2. Fixing the small projected problems in Social Security, which are far in the future, wouldn’t be too hard. Lowenstein’s favorite fix, which is also my own, is to gradually raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax. As it currently stands, the payroll tax is harshly regressive: it’s graduated in reverse, as discussed in our book Tax Shift (pdf, see page 19). Raising the income cap ameliorates this regressivity even while it pushes the prospect of default off the radar screen.