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Timber Rush

Timber exports from BC, especially from the province’s interior and especially to the United States, are roaring, despite the punishing tariffs Washington, DC, has imposed on Canadian lumber in protest over provincial subsidies. Prices are up by half over last year, the Vancouver Sun reports. (Subscription required.)

What’s going on? The US home building industry had a booming spring, thanks to low interest rates and the expectation that they would rise sometime very soon. (As they’ve now done.) And thanks to the massive tax subsidy (download PDF, see page 40) that the US treasury gives to home buyers, in the form of the mortgage interest deduction. Also, Canada’s dollar is weak compared with the Euro, which is boosting Canada’s market share in Japan.

Expect to see faster clearcutting, when Sightline updates the BC forest indicator in the Cascadia Scorecard.

False Confidence

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich discusses an all-too-familiar trend: “consumer confidence” is rising among the well-off, but falling among families earning $50,000 per year or less. This is an example of an important and more general fact about many prevailing economic indicators: by lumping together the well-off and the poor, they conceal more than they reveal.

In the Northwest US, for example, “average” family incomes rose at a healthy clip from 1990 through early 2001. But that concealed two contrasting trends: family income for the top-earning fifth of households shot up by about $30,000, even as incomes for the bottom fifth stagnated or declined. (See our 2003 economic security report for more details.) So on average, we were all doing better—but only in the same way that, on average, Bill Gates and 39 paupers are all billionaires.

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Size Matters

Salon.com has a great article that discusses the environmental impacts of building larger and larger houses. Apparently, even super-efficient, high-tech houses that use the latest in “green” construction techniques use more energy than smaller but less efficient homes. For example, a 1998 Environmental Building News article found that…

a 1,500-square-foot home with low energy performance standards will use less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house with high energy performance standards.

And the long-term trends on house size are telling:

Fifty years ago, the average house size was 1,100 square feet, and the average household size was 4.2 people. Today, the average house size has increased to 2,150 square feet, while the average household size has declined to 2.3 people.

That means that, person for person, we have about three and a half times as much house as our grandparents did. To some extent, that’s a good thing, since older houses would probably feel cramped to many families today. But our love of elbow room carries an environmental toll: it means that our technology has to be three and a half times as efficient as our grandparents’ to provide the same level of comfort without increasing our energy consumption.

The trend towards ever-larger houses, packed with the latest in environmentally-friendly materials and super-efficient appliances, produces the most cogent line in the article:

“Give Americans sustainable technology, and we’ll super-size it beyond recognition.”

Pump It Up!

I always thought that heating with electricity was supposed to be a bad idea. Yes, electric resistance heaters—which operate like the element on an electric stove—are pretty efficient at turning electricity into heat. But turning fossil fuels into electricity is incredibly inefficient. In a typical coal-fired power plant, only about a third of the energy content of coal is actually turned into electricity; the rest is wasted. The newest types of gas-fired power plants are more efficient, but still waste about 45 percent of the energy content of the natural gas they burn. Then, transmitting electricity to your home wastes additional energy.

So all things considered, it makes far more environmental sense to heat your home with gas directly than it does to burn the gas to produce electricity, transport the electricity to your home, and then use it to power a baseboard electric heater.

But electric-powered heat pumps—which work sort of like refrigerators in reverse—are making me change my thinking about using electricity for home heating. Unlike resistance heaters, heat pumps don’t actually convert electricity into heat. Instead, they move heat from place to place, which is much more efficient: one kilowatt-hour of electricity in a heat pump may produce two to three kilowatt-hours of usable heat. (And no, this doesn’t actually defy the laws of physics: heat isn’t being created, it’s just being moved around.)

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You Don't Need a Weatherman, II

More thoughts on the same item.

Fires in the dry, inland Northwest are igniting as usual, near Washington’s Lake Chelan, for example. But such fires are commonplace; in fact, they maintain vigorous ecosystems.

Cascadia’s coastal rainforests, especially northern ones, are a different story. They’re not adapted to fire. On our coast, as in tropical rainforests, fire is a sign of something unnatural-most likely, global climate change.

North of Cascadia, in the interior of Alaska, anomalous fires have raged in recent weeks. The Anchorage Daily News blamed climate change for the fact that

The 2004 fire season is shaping up to be one of the most destructive and expensive in years. . . . Fires seem to be moving faster, burning hotter and threatening more people.

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You Don't Need a Weatherman…

Not to beat a dead horse about this, but the region’s weather is still weird. In British Columbia, forest fire dangers appear to be at a 400-year high. Says Reese Halter, founder of Global Forest Science:

“We are looking at a 400-year bonfire, and by that I mean massive, catastrophic stand-replacing fires . . . eight times larger than they had in the B.C. Interior last year.

It may now be true that the biggest threat to the region’s forests isn’t the chainsaw or the bulldozer, but the tailpipe and the smokestack. Even the aggressive logging that the region’s forests have undergone over the past 30 years may soon be considered a minor threat, compared with the massive ecosystem impacts wrought by climate change.

Smarter Gas Tax, II

Eric Pryne had more on electronic mileage charges for vehicles, as a substitute for gas taxes, in yesterday’s Seattle Times. The fundamental forces behind this trend-advances in engine and information technology-will ultimately transform how Cascadians pay to drive, as we’ve been pointing out since 1996. The ultimate potential of this shift is a set of related breakthroughs: pay-as-you-drive insurance, congestion pricing, pay-as-you-drive vehicle registration and taxes, and pollution taxes. Together, such changes could slash driving rates, save northwesterners gobs of money, strengthen our regional economy, and help clean the air.

What’s encouraging is that Cascadia is rapidly approaching real-world experience, if only on a pilot-project scale, with such electronic road-charging, both in Eugene and Seattle.

Wind, North and South

Provincial electric utility BC Hydro released its 20-year plan a few months ago, and The Tyee has a useful critique. BC’s energy use is somewhat more efficient than the Northwest states’. But there’s plenty of room for progress.

The plan calls for modest expansion in wind-power and other clean, renewables. But it also glances yearningly at coal and another mega-dam. The plan is far too cautious about renewables, according to Mark Jaccard, a professor at Simon Fraser University who is among BC’s most knowledgeable and innovative thinkers on energy issues.

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Brussels Sprouts

This article from the New York Times highlights one of the more interesting shifts in environmental policy-making over the past decade and a half. Europe used to import its environmental laws (and, to some extent, its environmental ethic) from the United States. But as environmental policymaking in Washington, DC has stagnated, Europe has taken the lead, particularly in preventing pollution and climate change.

Of particular interest is Europe’s new Reach program, which is the world’s clearest embodiment of the so-called Precautionary Principle—the idea that chemicals should be tested for safety before they’re widely used in industrial applications or consumer products. According to the abovementioned article, Reach…

would place the burden of proof of safety on the producers before its sale, rather than waiting for problems to spur regulation later. It would force American chemical companies to comply with the legislation in order to continue exporting to Europe – and raises the fear of similar legislation in the United States.

A precautionary approach would have required testing of flame retardants known as PBDEs, which are now found in every North American tested, and at levels 20 to 40 times as high in the US and Canada as in most European nations. PBDEs have been found to impair neurological functioning in mice and rats, even at very low levels.

Not surprisingly, US industries are trying to kill the Reach program, or at least narrow its scope. And US environmentalists are trying to keep that from happening. But what a shift: North American environmental policy is now being fought out in the corridors of power in…Brussels.

Fire and Rain

Wildfires keep proliferating in British Columbia. A week ago, there were 260 (more than double the record-setting number from the same date in 2003). Today, there are 444.

The Santa Rosa (California) Press Democrat, in the extreme south of Cascadia, ran a valuable summary today of that area’s freakish weather. Like the BC fires, Santa Rosa’s weather is more implication, but not proof, of climate change.

The gist:

The unusually dry fall, relatively short winter and warm, dry spring that just concluded could be a preview of years to come in Sonoma County if global warming unfolds as many predict.

The averages for the year, in temperature and precipitation, were about normal. But the averages conceal more extremes: more dry days and more gully washers, for example.