A new study by the Audubon Society says that a third of the 300-odd bird species in Washington are in decline, and 16 are in immediate danger of extinction.
And marbled murrelets, according to another study, are on the road to eradication from most US rainforest.
Across Cascadia overall, more than 130 species of plants and animals are officially listed by governments as threatened or endangered. Yet perhaps ten times that number are in peril, according to lists assembled by field biologists.
Read this Seattle PI article on the weather:
An unusually dry spring has melted snowpack in Washington’s mountains and throughout the West at a troubling rate, causing heightened concern for drought conditions and forest fire danger.
Now re-read this Seattle PI article on climate change published in November. In a list of expected impacts associated with thinner snowpacks, it says:
Reduced summer water supplies. Increasingly destructive wildfires.
No single dry month can ever be tied to changing global climate. That’d be like blaming a poor grade on a particular test at school on levels of lead in school drinking water. Climate change, like pollution, operates on long-term averages, not random variations.
But we should not be surprised.
I think Bill McKibben gets this just right.
The new global warming-themed movie, The Day After Tomorrow, is basically harmless summer entertainment. The sudden natural disasters it posits as a result of global warming, while not completely impossible, are at the very outer reaches of plausibility.
But far more likely is that climate trends will play themselves out over a few centuries, rather than a few weeks—a timescale that, if portrayed on the big screen, wouldn’t fill many theater seats.
The movie may bring attention to climate issues, which is a good thing. But there is also a subtle danger that it will raise the bar too high, creating an expectation that climate change will be be dramatic, sudden, and incontrovertible. The short-term trends are likely to be none of those. If the risks of climate change teaches us anything, it’s that we need to pay just as much attention to the slow, steady changes—the ones that seem unimportant day to day, or even year to year, but that fundamentally shape our lives over the course of generations. That’s a perspective that’s not reinforced by disaster-flick pacing.
New cars and light trucks sold in the United States last year were heavier, on average, than in any year since 1976. And that doesn’t even count Hummers, Ford Excursions, and other uber-SUVs that are too large to qualify as light trucks. Like its human form, vehicular obesity is boosting death rates.
An excellent New York Times article today points out that
Traffic deaths in the United States rose to 43,220 last year, the most since 1990. Before the S.U.V. boom, the country had the world’s lowest highway death rate, taking miles driven into account, but it now ranks behind at least eight other developed nations, including Canada, Australia, Britain and Sweden. Lower rates of seat belt use and other factors play a part, but much of the difference stems from the composition of the national vehicle fleet, researchers say.
An excellent article in today’s Seattle Times documents the sundry carrots and sticks that businesses use to reduce solo driving.
Few things are less sexy but more powerful than parking—a point Sightline has been making for some time. (This op-ed ticked off Rush Limbaugh, despite the fact that our argument—that parking should be deregulated—comes straight from the free-market playbook.)
The federal tax code should stop subsidizing parking and local governments should strike mandatory parking from building and zoning codes.
The Austin, Texas, American-Statesman is running an important series of stories on American politics. The trend it reveals appears to be unfolding in Cascadia, too.
The rub: American politics is more polarized than ever because Americans have spent the last three decades sorting themselves geographically by their political leanings. Counties, not just states, have split between red and blue.
BC baby boomers are proportionately an even larger group than their age-mates south of the 49th parallel. And the oldest of them, born in 1946, are just two years away from their 60th birthdays.
Look at this fascinating graphic from Statistics Canada: it’s a century-long animation of the province’s population by year of age. (See other provinces here.) In the image below, you can see the 2001 age structure of the BC population.
The boomers are the prominent bulge in the middle years—what demographers call the “pig in the python.” The mini bulge beneath them are the members of the generation of children born to the baby boom. This group is called the “echo boom” or the “boomlet”. The skinny part between them—the “birth dearth” generation—are currently in their peak childbearing years, hence the relative paucity of births we’re currently experiencing.
Christopher Arkills, a key aide to King County Councilman Dwight Pelz wrote a rejoinder to my post on rail. His critique and my full response are here.
But here’s the crux:
Christopher: You build mass transit, not to get folks out of their cars today, but to influence land use patterns over the next 20, 30, 50 years. . . . You tout BRT [bus-rapid transit], HOV, vanpools, and carpools as cost effective solutions. And they are valuable at getting cars off the roads now. But they do NOTHING to stimulate transit dependent development that will allow people to live in dense livable neighborhoods without using a car. Developers simply wont invest in BRT related projects because they lack the permanence of rail.
Were these points true, it would shift the costs and benefits substantially in favor of rail. And I used to believe them to be true. But over the past few years, I’ve been reading empirical analyses of the question. (The best single source, by a pair of avowed advocates for rail financed by the BART in San Francisco, is Transit Villages in the 21st Century by Michael Bernick and Robert Cervero.) And the balance of evidence is that rail does not automatically yield dense, walkable neighborhoods, at least in the North America.
Pay-as-you-drive auto insurance (PAYD) is among the most promising innovations for resolving the transportation problems that plague the Northwest. It also makes sense actuarially. But although consumer interest in PAYD is high, insurance companies-who are understandably a little risk-averse-have been slow to give it a try.
On that front, here’s a promising step: GMAC and OnStar-a satellite navigation system installed in many GM cars-have teamed up to offer mileage-based insurance discounts to OnStar subscribers. Participants may save from 5 to 40 percent annually on insurance, depending on the miles they drive. The program is currently are available in four states: Arizona, Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. But if it’s successful, it will expand to more. For more information, go here.
In addition, Maryland and Connecticut-which sees PAYD as a promising measure for reducing greenhouse gas emissions-are inching toward the kind of incentives that Oregon passed last year.
A new study by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance suggests that newer commercial buildings use more energy than older ones. Also see this summaray on Con.Web.
This jars with my intuition. The commercial sector sector (office buildings and stores) has been growing quickly in the Northwest: the share of jobs in service industries has risen, at the expense of industry and resource extraction jobs. But despite these increases in commercial sector jobs, commercial energy consumption per capita has remained roughly flat in the Northwest states for decades.
