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Best Foot Forward

Walking is supposed to be one of the healthiest activities around, but unfortunately, when you add cars into the mix, it can be lethal. The Surface Transportation Policy Project’s latest “Mean Streets” report finds that walking is the most dangerous mode of transportation, per mile, and is becoming more dangerous in some areas of the United States, particularly for certain segments of the population: African-Americans, for example, make up 19 percent of pedestrian deaths, even though they represent 12.7 percent of the total population.

And walking is declining as a form of transportation; the percentage of US commuters who walked to work decreased by 24.9 percent from 1990 to 2000.

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Happiness Is a Warm TV

A study using a new method to measure happiness (we’ve covered this field extensively, e.g. here) turned up some surprising findings, the New York Times and the NIH report. A team of psychologists and economists—led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton—used the so-called Day Reconstruction Method to study daily mood swings in 909 women from Texas. The women kept a diary of everything they did during the day, and then later rated how they felt during each activity.

Contrary to previous research on daily moods, the study found that the women rated TV-watching high on the list, ahead of shopping and talking on the phone, and ranked taking care of children low, below cooking and not far above housework.

Not surprisingly, commuting and spending time with one’s boss anchored the low end of the pleasurability scale. And sleep affected everything: a night of poor sleep could make an activity as joyless as commuting.

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California, Here We Come? III

Washington moved another step toward climate leadership, as legislation is drafted to sign on to California’s clean-car agenda. " The Seattle Timesreports.

If you’re mystified, follow our trail back, starting here.

Sex-ed Hanky Panky

Today’s Washington Post flags a Congressional study on the "facts" used in abstinence-only sex-ed classes. Among the doozies:

  • HIV can be spread by tears and sweat;
  • abortion leads to sterility as much as 10 percent of the time; and
  • touching a person’s genitals can result in pregnancy.

Among the actual factual facts that the abstinence-only folks don’t seem to have room for is that tactics like "virginity pledges" don’t work: "Nonpartisan researchers have been unable to document measurable benefits of the abstinence-only model."

Who Takes Out the Trash?

One important but little discussed difference between the Canadian and American parts of Cascadia is their different philosophies about trash. This difference has emerged in the last decade. And, sad to say, the Canadians have left the Americans in the dustbin, so to speak. British Columbia has adopted a far less regulatory, government-centered approach, even while they’ve made dramatic gains in waste reduction and recycling.

I’m talking here about “product stewardship” or “extended producer responsibility.” (We also wrote about it in This Place on Earth 2001.)

It springs from posing an unfamiliar question: Who’s responsible for products you buy when you’re done with them? In other words, who takes out the trash?

The customary answer to that question is, “You are.” But in practice, the answer has become, “local government.”

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Pass the Sardines

Research published in the journal Ecology Lettersand summarized by Cornelia Dean in the New York Times posits a fascinating link between sardine populations in the ocean and climate change in the atmosphere.

The nut:

. . . when sardines are plentiful they gobble up ocean phytoplankton, tiny plants that appear in vast numbers when ocean currents produce upwellings of deep water.

But when sardines are scarce [because of overfishing, for example], the phytoplankton survive uneaten, only to sink to the bottom, decompose and produce methane and hydrogen sulfide gas that rise to the surface in giant clouds.

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More Profits, Less Energy

A host of studies, along with years of Cascadian experience, show that the most promising-and environmentally sound-new “source” of energy is energy efficiency. But investments in efficiency are often beyond the reach, knowledge, or time horizon of residential consumers and businesses. Only the deep pockets that finance the energy infrastructure-especially electric and natural gas utilities-can seize the full potential of efficiency.

Some Northwest utilities, such as Seattle City Light, are aggressive in helping their customers save energy. But other utilities hold back, in part because they know that more-efficient consumers will buy less energy, possibly trimming company profits.

As Amory Lovins and his colleagues report in their recent book Winning the Oil Endgame natural gas and electricity commissions in most states regulate “in a way that rewards utilities for selling more energy and penalizes them for cutting customers’ bills.”

One conceptually elegant way to address this problem, long advocated by Ralph Cavanagh of the Natural Resources Defense Council, is to “decouple” utilities’ profits from their sales. Utilities aren’t like other companies. Their profits are dictated by state utility regulators, based on complicated formulas. “Decoupling” means writing those formulas to yield larger utility profits for every unit of energy they help their customers save.

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Fat Thursday

On the eve of the United States’ annual celebration of gluttony, some comforting news is trickling out of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:  being overweight may not be as bad for your health as had previously been reported.

It’s become common wisdom that obesity kills about 400,000 Americans each year, almost as many tobacco.  That figure is based on a study published by CDC researchers a few years ago. But an outcry by skeptical scientists and anti-tobacco advocates led to a re-analysis of the data.  The verdict:  CDC is admitting it made an error, and is working on developing a new way of estimating deaths from obesity.  But by some independent estimates, CDC overstated those risks by a factor of 4.

Which means, of course, that being obese or overweight is still bad for your health.  Even at the lower figure, obesity kills more than twice as many people each year as do automobile accidents.  And obesity rates are still at all-time highs, and appear to be rising, especially among young people.

But at a minimum, the news will make me a little less apprehensive as I tuck into seconds tomorrow.

Tax Waste, Not Wages

What do England and Cascadia have in common, besides the weather in November? People who like to talk about tax shifting!

Seriously, yesterday, the Rt Reverend James Jones, the bishop of Liverpool, editorialized in the Guardian for shifting taxes away from productive labor and toward natural resource extraction. He argued that this would not only create "more of a discipline on our use of original material," but also encourage more creative, productive use of labor to generate the highest value per unit of natural resource – effectively inverting the current labor-to-resource ratio. Translation: more good jobs and less waste.

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Lessons from "Lessons from Measure 37"

Watching reactions to passage of Measures 37-and my original post here (Lessons from Measure 37) -it seems the issue isn’t whether the glass if half-full or half-empty. It’s whether the glass has been shattered, never to hold water again.

Former Oregon Congressman Les AuCoin writes for High Country News’ Writers on the Range: “When Oregonians passed Measure 37 by a lopsided margin of 60 percent to 40 percent, they signaled that they had become a different people….they changed the ethos of a state that had for 30 years celebrated open spaces, greenways and livable communities over development.”

One response to my post took it to task as presenting a dangerous “veneer of reasonableness” that ignores the reality that “the sky is falling.” Further, “People who care about the most minimally responsible land use and environmental regulation really shouldn’t spout this kind of nonsense to make themselves sound moderate. Oregon’s land use laws aren’t (well, weren’t) draconian….”

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