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Orca Cam

It’s been months since we offered a web diversion in this blog. So, to follow up on the falcon-nest webcam we pointed out in May, here is an Orca cam off Vancouver Island. Check out a few of the video clips of highlights. The tapes from August 20, 2004 show the assembly of a superpod – a gathering of the clan from far and wide.

What’s interesting to me about these nature-focused webcams is that, compared with what we’re accustomed to observing through the media, nature cams are – well – boring. Nature is far less arresting, in cinematic terms, than nature shows, which distill hundreds of hours of footage down to the rare moments of excitement: hunts, migrations, fights. Nature’s pace is slow, even compared with the “slow news” trends of human development we discussed in Cascadia Scorecard 2004.

In his 1992 book The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben argues that the media have inured us to the subtlety and immediacy of real life.

I bet there are many other nature cams in Cascadia. Anyone have a favorite?

Coming Soon To A Website Near You!

Here’s a neat idea:  NuRide, a web-based service that makes it easier to find carpool matches—and actually gives incentives (such as gift cards) for people to use the service.  It hasn’t reached the Northwest yet, but you can sign up to be notified when it does.

According to Earth Share Washington’s Dave Manelski, who tipped us off about this, NuRide may get funding from state transportation agencies or other entities who want to track the number of cars that are being kept off the road—which could be useful if states move towards a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

My only caveat—in a crowded urban area, where the demand for rush-hour transportation tends to exceed the supply of road space, taking a car off the road may simply open up space for another drive-alone commuter.  So for every rush-hour commuter who switches to NuRide, you’re likely to see one other person shift from, say, taking the bus to driving their car.  The right measure for a cap-and-trade scheme is the total amount of fuel consumed per capita, not the number of hypothetical trips prevented.  The latter is just too slippery a measure.

The greater value in carpooling is that it can help prevent unnecessary spending on highway projects that are designed to accomadate more cars during rush hour.  So I’d be excited to see NuRide catch on.

Wholesale v. Retail

A number of western Washington electric utilities offer a "green power" program that lets consumers pay a little extra to fund eco-friendly generating projects, such as wind farms, here in the Northwest.  And last month’s Con.Web (a publication of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance) had some good news about green power enrollments:  a new advertising and marketing campaign exceeded expectations, signing up  4,300 new customers, versus a hoped-for target of 3,000.

This is obviously good news.  But it’s also sobering:  even after several years in which the option has been offered, and a successful marketing campaign that cost a third of a million dollars and featured TV advertising and free gourmet coffee as an incentive, a total of only 13,000 households in the Puget Sound region have signed up for green power.  That represents about one percent of the customer base of the three utilities that participated in the marketing campaign (Puget Sound Energy, Tacoma Power, and Snohomish County PUD)—about as much as their customer base grows in a year.

In the long run, marketing green power to consumers certainly helps.  And even though it’s expensive, the marketing efforts probably pay for themselves many times over—satisfied customers are likely to stay with the program, generating revenue for green power year after year. 

But I do wonder whether, in the perfect world, it would have been more effective to devote that money to marketing (ie., lobbying for) a renewable energy standard for state utilities.  Changing the rules under which power utilities operate would likely have a far more immediate and dramatic effect than signing up another third of a percentage point of people into a green power program. So this seems like yet another instance in which wholesale (i.e., one big change that affects the actions of a handful of utilities) is cheaper than retail (i.e., a bunch of little changes to consumer behavior).

Obviously, the utilities themselves may not be willing or able to put their money into lobbying.  But since, ultimately, it’s the green power customers themselves who pay for the marketing, it seems to me that they’d collectively do more to promote renewable energy by contributing to an organization that’s working to pass a broader utility reform.

Anybody have any opinions on this?

The Gonad Test

Joel Gallob, who writes for the Newport (Oregon) News-Times, has a fascinating columnon Tidepool.

It points out the awful time lag between how fishing is regulated and how fish populations change. There’s too much fishing when fish populations plummet and too little fishing when populations surge. And he suggests an ingenious mechanism-involving the gonads of female black rockfish-for synchronizing fishing with fish numbers. Check it out.

Updated 12/30/04: Joel writes for the Newport News-Times, not the nonexistent Newport News, as I wrote. My mistake.

Orcas as Canaries?

Orca numbers in Puget Sound are rebounding a bit, but the whales are still in danger, as today’s Seattle Post Intelligencer reports.

Looking at the oscillations in the PI’s chart (which doesn’t reproduce well when copied, so you’ll have to look at it here) is also a reminder that there’s a tremendous amount of variation in nature. That makes it hard to select indicators of ecosystem health that are very reliable gauges. Orca (and salmon) numbers, for example, change a lot even in undisturbed ecosystems. Discerning the hand of human impacts from the natural variability is hard.

They Might Be (Climate) Giants

Here’s a weblog that’s definitely worth taking a look at:  Real Climate, a collaboration by a group of preeminent climate scientists (including the University of Washington’s Eric Steig) to explain issues of climate and climate-change to non-scientists. (Tip of the hat to Brad deLong for pointing this one out.)

Of topical interest:  a discussion of Michael Chrichton’s new book, State of Fear, which is apparently as full of factual errors as it is of climate-change skepticism.  The comments from interested readers are just as interesting as the post itself.

Crazy Voting: American as Apple Pie

So a guy walks into a restaurant, and asks what kind of pies they have.  The waitress says they have apple and blueberry.  He orders a slice of apple pie. 

The waitress goes into the kitchen, then comes back out and and says, "Sir, the cook says we have cherry pie, too." 

"Well, in that case," says the diner, "I’ll take the blueberry."

That nerdy joke, attributed to Columbia philosophy professor Sidney Morgenbesser, was designed to illustrate an absurdity that we don’t want in a voting system.  The introduction of an irrelevant alternative (in the joke, the cherry pie) shouldn’t affect the outcome of our choice (blueberry vs. apple). 

With controversyheatingup in the vote recount Washington state governor’s race—just a handful of votes separates the two leading candidates, and a recount is underway—it’s useful to remember that our winner-takes-all voting system is every bit as mixed-up as that man in the restaurant.

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The Risk-Based Society

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine highlighted what is, to my mind, one of the most important economic insights to come out of the past year: even as our material wealth has grown over the past 30 years, our incomes have become less secure. More so than in the past, families find that a year of high income can be followed by a financial bust. Seen from above, “the economy” appears to be flowing along smoothly; but hidden beneath the surface is a growing turbulence in the economic fortunes of individual families.

And as this article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times points out, the problem is especially acute for the poor, whose incomes are more volatile, and for whom temporary financial setbacks can mean homelessness or worse.

Now, if people were comfortable with this kind of volatility, this wouldn’t really matter. But the evidence suggests that they’re not: for most of us, the threat of losing income looms larger than the prospect of a windfall. (This is a phenomenon explored by the so-called “prospect theory” developed by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky; Kahneman was mentioned in yesterday’s post on TV, kids and happiness.) So rising volatility in income may undermine people’s sense of economic security, even if, on average, they have more material wealth.

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Hybrid Disappointment?

A non-hybrid bus, Seattle

Today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer breaks what it seems to think is an important story: the diesel-electric hybrid buses King County Metro operates are burning a lot more fuel than anticipated. In fact, their fuel economy is no better than that of the older buses they are replacing.

This news is a little disappointing but ultimately doesn’t matter much. Here’s why, in a series of points that begin with the vehicle and zoom out to the cityscape.

1. Metro’s hybrid buses are performing well in other ways. In particular, they emit far fewer local air pollutants. In fact, a last-minute switch from Cummins to Caterpillar engines to get cleaner emissions probably explains the increased fuel use. Diesel buses contribute a far larger share of health-threatening local air pollutants (such as deadly fine particulates discussed in today’s Sacramento Bee) than of local fuel use (and the directly proportional emissions of climate-changing greenhouses gas carbon dioxide). For buses, burning cleaner matters more than burning less.

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In Oil Spills, Big Is Small and Small Is Big

All but one of the five points I wrote about the Dalco Passage oil spill also applies to the Unalaska spill now unfolding in the Aleutians. (Granted, the site of the spill is not in Cascadia, but the ship was carrying a cargo—and presumably fuel oil—from the Port of Tacoma. So it’s our spill, too.)

I’ll add a sixth point.

6. Catastrophic spills—ship on the rocks, black ooze in the water, dying birds on the beach—capture the TV cameras and headlines. But most of the oil we spill runs off the land, from roads, parking lots, and industrial sites.

In 2003, the National Research Council did an assessment of oil spills over recent years. Human-released oil reaching marine waters around North America has been 56 percent run off from land, the drips from our vehicles and machinery. Spills from big ships, whether tankers or freighters, has been around 10 percent. (A nice summary of the NRC report, which Google cannot find online, is Michael P. Vandenbergh, "From Smokestack to SUV: The Individual as Regulated Entity in the New Era of Environmental Law," Vanderbilt Law Review, 57:2, March 2004.)

The ecological impacts of chronic low-level exposure to petroleum are little understood, unlike the well-studied effects of bathing small patches of ocean and shore with oil. But lacing marine food chains with substances that are known poisons at high concentrations, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), sure seems like a bad idea to me. It’s another example of ignoring the precautionary principle.