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More Vacations, Less GDP


In this article, David Francis of the Christian Science Monitor does a decent job of poking holes in a recent study that shows European nations lag the United States in gross domestic product. Here are a few examples he cites of why GDP is a poor indicator of societal performance.

– Defense budget: In 2004, the US GDP will be boosted by close to $800 billion spent on defense. (“Counting just the military’s budget, the US spends nearly the same amount on defense as the rest of the world combined.”)

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Lead, School Reform, and the Precautionary Principle

Today’s headlines trumpet that the Seattle Public Schools have “severe” lead contamination in their drinking water. The Seattle Post Intelligencer summarizes:

Of the 88 schools for which the [school] district has released results, 70 include at least one [drinking] fountain with water showing lead levels above the standard of 20 parts per billion set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. At 19 schools, more than half the fountains tested exceeded the limit.

Curious, I checked the lead levels for the Salmon Bay School, where my wife is a substitute teacher, and each of my three children has attended. Sure enough: there are high levels of lead in many of drinking fountains, including the ones in the day care, the kitchen, and the nurse’s office.

Fortunately, for as long as my kids have gone there, a volunteer from the parents’ group (my friend Armin) has trucked in bottled water for the classrooms. A few kids may drink from the fountains, but most don’t. Still, the principle is disturbing: a place in which school drinking fountains pump out water laced with neurotoxins is a place not yet acting on its core values.

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Visualize "Fast" News

In Cascadia Scorecard 2004, we argued that our region is bombarded by news of the dramatic: wildfire and war, scandal and celebrity, stock market gains and losses. But this “fast” news ignores the slow-changing trends that determine our future.

Newsmap has created a continuously updated visual map of the fast news. Each headline’s size reflects the number of media outlets running the story at the moment, according to Google news. It’s an impressive technical feat—and a revealing indicator of what the media regard as important.

Ready to Pop

The state of Washington just released new population estimates for 2004. The verdict: the state’s population grew by 1.1 percent over the previous year, adding 69,500 new residents. And state forecasters are predicting that, with the economy picking up steam in recent months, next year’s population growth will be even faster.

There are two ways to look at this news. First, in historic terms, it’s not that high a percentage growth rate. Since 1900, Washington state has averaged 2.4 percent annual growth, which was more than twice as fast as last year’s rate. That long-term pace has been torrid enough to double the state’s population every 29 years, on average.

But another way to look at it is this: a 1.1 percent increase, though slower than we’ve experienced in the recent past, is still runaway growth. At that pace, the population of Washington state will double, to 12.3 million, by the time today’s preschoolers reach retirement age. Sustained over the long term, this pace of growth would massively increase the human population of our place—making it virtually unrecognizable within a generation or two.

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Rail . . . uh . . . Road?

The board of the greater Vancouver transportation authority, TransLink, will vote for a third time today on whether to build a rail rapid transit line from Vancouver to the airport and on to Richmond (dubbed the RAV line), as the CBC reports. Six weeks ago, the board shocked the region by rejecting RAV, despite big piles of money offered by the federal and provincial governments and by the airport authority.

The province, eager to get an airport train installed before the 2010 Winter Olympics, then promised to cover any cost overruns. The board revoted, but still rejected the offer: the plan was still a boondoggle, a majority said.

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Displace On Earth

Many people hope that hydrogen, generated cleanly by harnessing the power of the sun and wind, may someday displace gasoline as the main automotive fuel.

But a new study from the Seattle-based Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment argues that if the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then generating hydrogen for fuel-cell powered cars isn’t a particularly smart investment, at least not in the near-term.

Yes, burning gasoline is responsible for a lot of climate-warming emissions. But coal, the main source of electricity in the United States, is far worse. On net, using solar and wind power to offset generation from coal-fired power plants would be two and a half times as effective in reducing climate-warming emissions as using clean energy to generate hydrogen for fuel cell cars.

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Vancouver, Texas


The most recent city to be inspired by Vancouver, BC’s smart-growth success is none other than Fort Worth, as the Star-Telegram reported last week (registration required). The fast-growing Texas city is using Vancouver, particularly its waterfront development, as the model for a grand plan to transform its downtown, its river, and boost the city’s quality of life “for the next century.”

Early on, the idea—which includes rerouting part of the Trinity River and adding a lake and canals—was dubbed Fantasy Island. Now, with the latest proposal (presented by Vancouver architect Bing Thom), the Star-Telegram is waxing ecstatic:

“Vancouver may have its mountains and ocean. What nature has denied us, we’re compensating for with bold thinking, modern engineering and plenty of gumption.”

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Oh . . . Canada?

This post is for American Cascadians. It explains the Canadian elections.

Canada has a parliamentary system of government: whichever party wins the most seats gets to run the government, choose the prime minister, form the cabinet, introduce the budget, and so on. The short synopsis of yesterday’s elections is: little changed. The same center-left party—the Liberals—retained power in Ottawa.

But a better-informed summary would be that Canada shifted to the right. The Liberals, plagued by a scandal concerning the abuse of funds, lost their majority-government status. Instead, they will form a minority government, as the Globe and Mail explains. And they’ll only have their way on the issues with the help of their left-hand peers, the labor-aligned New Democrats. The New Democrats doubled their small caucus in parliament, partially recovering from huge setbacks they suffered in 2000. They may, or may not, play nice with the Liberals. And even if they do, the Liberals will have to find a few more votes, perhaps from the nationalist Quebec party.

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Burning Down the…Forest?

BC is experiencing rampant wildfires right now. From the Vancouver Sun:

Nearly 50 new forest fires started on Wednesday, bringing the total to 260 wildfire burning around the province.Last year at this time there were 101 fires, in what turned out to be the worst year ever.

We’ve known for a while that conditions in BC are ripe for wildfires. The connection between global climate change and the region’s odd weather in recent years is, of course, uncertain and difficult to prove. But where there’s smoke…

Dim Bulbs?

Compact fluorescent bulbs provide all the lighting that incandescent bulbs do, for about a quarter the electricity—which makes them very exciting to energy efficiency advocates. According to the US Energy Information Administration, switching all household bulbs that are on for more than 4 hours a day from incandescent to compact fluorescent would reduce residential lighting demand by more than a third.

That would definitely be a step in the right direction. But in the big picture, it is still only a tiny step.

The same study says that lighting accounts for less than a tenth of the electricity used in people’s homes. (Collectively, refrigeration, cooling, cooking, laundry, and other major appliances use much more juice than do lights.) So 35% of less than a tenth is about 3%—that is, a major shift to CFLs would reduce residential electricity demand by about 3 parts in 100.

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