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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.

TV Weak

A week or so ago, we mentioned a recent study published in the journal Science (subscription only) about a new method for measuring happiness.  The study, by Nobel economist Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, attempted to quantify which activities are most enjoyable, and which ones people find least gratifying.  (Kahneman is a pioneer of "behavioral finance,"  a discipline that mixes economics with psychology in order to understand why people don’t always behave as classical economics predicts that they should.)

But when I got around to reading the original article, something seemed amiss:  the coverage of the study that I’d seen in the mainstream press didn’t really match the contents the article itself. 

Most newspapers emphasized a side point—that people were in a better mood when they watched TV than when they were caring for their kids.  Here’s a sampling of the headlines:

Feeling low? Send kids away, watch TV – San Francisco Chronicle
What Makes People Happy? TV, Study Says – New York Times
Study: TV alone more fun than watching kids – LA Daily News
Feeling of good cheer? Maybe it was the TV – International Herald Tribune

Now, there’s no question that the 909 Texas women studied in the article reported more positive feelings, and fewer negative ones, while watching TV than while taking care of their kids.  But it was a narrow margin.  On a scale of 1 to 6 in "positive affect", TV watching scored 4.19, taking care of kids 3.86.  In terms of positive affect, both were near the middle of the pack, not at polar extremes.

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Zoning for Creativity

Seattle developer James Potter makes a good point in an op-ed that appeared last week in the Daily Journal of Commerce (subscription required):

The existing Seattle Land Use Code was created in various stages from 1979 through the 1980s – and amended so many times that it is confusing and difficult to understand.

Current zoning codes in Seatte, epic in length and complexity, make it difficult for developers like Potter to develop dense multi-use neighborhoods in parts of the city designated "Urban Centers" under the Growth Management Act.

A new code would allow the creative architects and developers in our city to seek new ways to accomplish the goals of growth management. Design review and design guidelines would still be available to help projects fit in with the context of each center and create dialog with our neighborhoods.

Without this change to a new code, urban centers will continue to struggle with outdated codes that were created during a different era.

We agree. A byzantine legal structure can only hamper thoughtful and innovative development of dense, vibrant, and diverse urban neighborhoods.

Vancouver Charges for Trash by the Litre

I recently praised British Columbia’s product stewardship approach to solid waste. Well, the province is way behind the Northwest states on a more basic test: charging residents for trash collection in proportion to how much (nonrecyclable) trash they put out.

Well, Vancouver is finally doing what many cities in US Cascadia did a decade ago, as the Vancouver Sunreports. The new garbage-pricing scheme goes into effect in January. The Sun writes:

[Residents will] be asked to decide whether they want a 75-, 120-, 180-, 420- or 360-litre can for their garbage. Those who don’t tell the city what they want will get a 180-litre size, the closest to the current two-can standard for each house.

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Monitor Wizards

I’m as guilty as anyone, but I can no longer plead ignorance:  leaving your computer monitor on overnight can waste a lot of electricity, even if it’s a power-saving "Energy Star" model. 

I used to be in the habit of keeping my monitor in "sleep" mode overnight, thinking that I was using only the barest trickle of electricity.  But it turns out that it’s more than a trickle:  to earn an "Energy Star" label from the U.S. EPA, a computer monitor can use as much as 15 watts of energy in "light sleep" mode, and as much as 8 watts in "deep sleep," which kicks in after an extended period of inactivity. 

An 8 watt drain really adds up—over the course of a year, it’s like leaving a 100-watt bulb on for a month straight.  So if you want to be a real energy star, you ought to turn off that monitor.

Baby Step

Lost in the crush of work last week, I didn’t get a chance to post on this news:  EPA is finally getting around to taking regulatory action on the most troublesome forms of PBDEs—the toxic flame retardants that are showing up  up at alarming levels in people’s bodies.  (Shameless self promotion:  we found PBDEs in all 40 breastmilk samples we tested.)

Here’s the context:  about a year ago EPA announced an agreement with Great Lakes Chemical, the sole manufacturer of the "penta-BDE" and "octa-BDE" formulations of PBDEs, to voluntarily withdraw them from the market.  These two formulations are the ones that are most likely to be found in people’s bodies; and the penta form is known to be particularly toxic.  But despite that agreement, there was nothing at all to prevent another manufacturer from starting up production, or to stop importers from bringing the compounds into the U.S.

The new proposed rule would require anyone who wants to manufacture or import penta-BDEs or octa-BDEs to first notify the EPA of their intentions.  EPA has 90 days to decide whether to let them go forward with their plans.

In one way of looking at things, EPA’s proposal is comically weak.  PBDE levels in the U.S. are the highest in the world, and in some people may be approaching the levels that are believed to cause harm in laboratory animals.  And the compounds are chemically similar to PCBs, which are known to impair babies’ brain development.  There’s no reason in the world that the compounds shouldn’t just be banned outright. 

But weak as it is, anything that helps keep PBDEs from entering our kids’ bodies is a welcome step forward.

Free Parking

Here’s a nifty idea, via the San Francisco Chronicle:  smart parking lots that let you know when there’s a space available. 

Some train stations in the Bay Area’s rapid transit system are perpetually short of parking.  But at others, some parking spaces are open all day long.  So one underutilized station has installed a system that continuously monitors the number of parking spaces that are available, and advertises that information on a sign on a nearby highway.  If you’re stuck in traffic and see that there’s a free parking spot at the park-and-ride, you can hop off the highway and take the train instead—easing congestion and saving fuel all at once.  Nifty.

My point isn’t that this system should spread north—I just don’t know whether they’d be worth the cost here in the Pacific Northwest. For me, the lesson is simpler:   the falling cost and rising power of information technology lets us create entirely new kinds of solutions to everyday problems. 

Dead Weight?

How about this for a factoid:  roughly one in ten people who die in the U.S.in a given year would survive if they lived in Canada. 

This shouldn’t be too surprising, given the wide and growing health gap between the U.S. and its northern neighbor.  Canadians outlive Americans by about 2 years (a fact I never tire of pointing out).  Two years may seem like a trivial difference, but it’s not.  Canadian’s life expectancy is among the best in the world; but among developed nations, the U.S. is near the bottom of the barrel, trailing Cyprus and Costa Rica—places most Americans would need an atlas to locate—and is now just a little ahead of Cuba. 

The question is:  why?   Why is it that two two neighboring nations with similar ethnic, cultural, and economic traits should have such diverging paths when it comes to health?

Excess U.S. Deaths Relative to Canada by Cause of Death: Both Sexes, Whites, and Nonwhites, 1998

The U.S.-based Population Reference Bureau (see link above) found that nearly 70% of the excess deaths in America could be traced circulatory diseases, such as high blood pressure and heart attacks.  But after that, the story gets complicated.  Differences in tobacco use don’t explain much: historically, Canadians have smoked more than Americans.  High blood pressure is also more prevalent in Canada than the U.S.—and Canadians are less likely than Americans to know they have high blood pressure.  (So much for universal health care…) 

So the leading candidate for the health difference, according to the PRB, is obesity.  In 1998, more than a quarter of American men were obese, as were a third of American women; the corresponding figures in Canada were 13 and 11 percent, respectively.

But there’s been renewed controversy over just how bad obesity is for your health; previous estimates by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, that obesity and overweight cause 400,000 deaths a year in America are now believed to be too high.

So that leaves the health differences between the two nations a bit of a mystery.  There’s clearly something going on to account for the growing health gap.  But it’s not yet entirely clear what that something is.

California, Here We Come? IV

As expected, the auto industry just sued California over its clean-car standards, as the New York Times reports.

The industry argues that California’s greenhouse-gas emissions standards—which we’ve argued the Northwest should adopt as well—are actually just fuel-economy standards in disguise. And, the industry argues, the US federal government’s CAFE standards trump state authority over fuel economy, under the principle of preemption. Preemption basically says that if the feds regulate a specific activity, states shouldn’t do so in addition.

I’m no expert in the law, but I think the industry’s case is ludicrous. Rachel Chanin of New York University writes the legal brief on the myriad reasons why that’s true.

The simplest counterargument to the carmakers is this: Car manufacturers could meet the greenhouse-gas standard lots of ways besides improving fuel economy. For example, they could manufacture vehicles powered by electricity to meet the standard. They could manufacture vehicles fueled with ethanol. They could use biodiesel. They could use compressed natural gas. They could make hydrogen vehicles. Or they could reengineer vehicle air conditioners to prevent them from ever leaking climate-changing coolants.

Automakers could also improve the fuel-economy to meet the standard. But they don’t have to. So California’s greenhouse-gas standards are not fuel-economy standards in disguise.

Update, December 9: Automakers’ opposition hasn’t deterred Northwest leaders from supporting them. Yesterday, Washington’s Governor Gary Locke and legislative Democrats proposed that the state adopt California’s vehicle-emission standards.

Reaping What We Sow

Genetic pollution represents a hazard to human and ecosystem health that we don’t consider often enough. According to a Sacramento Bee article last week, Scotts—the Ohio-based lawn care company—was recently fined for allowing genetically altered seeds from test plots to scatter for miles in central Oregon. But the fine, $6,250—half of which was waived—is little more than a slap to the wrist of the giant company.

Earlier this year, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled (abstract only) that neighboring farmers can be held financially responsible for growing patented crops even when seeds blow unwelcomed into farmers’ fields. And just last month, the FDA circulated a draft policy that would weaken already insufficient federal oversight of new genetically altered products under development in fields just like the ones in central Oregon. (In this NY Times story, the FDA’s reliance on industry to self-monitor and report is further explored).

Like toxics that flow unregulated into our bodies, untested and potentially harmful genetic experiments shouldn’t be permitted to flow into our fields and food supply without a reasonable degree of certainty that they are safe to us, and to the natural ecology of which they will become a permanent part.