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It's a Gas, Gas, Gas

As the Cascadia Scorecard points out, Northwesterners are world-class energy consumers. Residents of the U.S. Northwest consume nearly as much energy, in the form of highway fuels and home and commercial electricity, as do Texans.

But leaving electricity aside, we don’t use all that much gasoline, at least compared to other parts of the U.S. Among the 50 states, Washington and Oregon rank 39th and 40th, respectively, in per capita gas consumption. (Idaho’s consumption is slightly above the U.S. average.)

And even more encouraging, Washington and Oregon are among just 7 states in which average gas consumption declined between 1990 and 2000. Rapidly urbanizing Nevada led the U.S., with a 55 gallon per person decline over the decade. (Again, Idaho bucked the Northwest trend, with an 8% increase in gas consumption per capita).

Oregon’s and Washington’s declines are almost certainly due to increased urbanization, not to improvements in auto fuel efficiency. And, even if encouraging, the declines are tiny, in the range of a few percentage points. Northwesterners still use half again as much gasoline as do residents of New York state, and about 3 times as much as Germans.

More Stuff

Fans of Sightline’s 1997 book Stuff (Sightline’s all-time bestseller) may enjoy Worldwatch’s knock-off: Good Stuff.

The China Syndrome

I often hear northwesterners say things like, “Well, unless China gets onboard [about climate change, endangered species, or whatever global environmental issue is in discussion], what we do here won’t really matter.” It’s becoming conventional wisdom that China is now the biggest factor in the global equation. Like most myths, this one has a truth at its center. But it’s also, well, a convenient rationalization for inaction—a point that came to mind when reading State of the World 2004 recently. I noticed that, sometime in the last five years, China appears to have overtaken Cascadia in the number of private cars. That’s impressive until you realize that the Chinese outnumber us northwesterners 84 times over.

Withering Heights

More evidence that health in the United States is lagging behind other industrial nations.

Burkhard Bilger in the New Yorker looks at the growing height disparities between the U.S. and Europe. Even after controlling for immigration and race, increases in height in America have flattened out: American children today can expect to grow to be about as tall as their parents. But elsewhere in the industrialized world, heights are still on the rise.

If height were the only issue here, this wouldn’t be particularly interesting. But as it turns out, average height is a great indicator of the overall health of a population. Like life expectancy, it’s an objective measure of health outcomes, not a measure of inputs (such as total spending on health care—in which the U.S. is by far the world leader). Height is a particularly sensitive indicator for children’s health, since disease and poor nutrition early in life can permanently stunt growth.

And contrary to intuition, most of the height difference among different nations or populations is due to health and nutrition, not genetics. Yes, tall parents do tend to have tall kids, but different populations don’t differ that much in height; as Bilger puts it, “If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives.”

So what to make of the poor performance of the U.S. in comparison with other countries? It’s actually consistent with other health data. A century ago, U.S. residents were probably the healthiest in the world. Today, the U.S. ranks about 26th in life expectancy, behind all industrial democracies but the Danes, behind Costa Rica and Cyprus, and just a bit ahead of Cuba. (One local example: British Columbians live two years longer than US northwesterners, and the gap is growing.) Deciphering the causes of the relative decline is no easy task. But the data certainly suggests that high GDP, or massive spending on health care, are no guarantees of a healthy society.

The Wedding Planner

President Bush’s plans to promote marriage, especially among poor young Americans, is likely doomed to failure, according to this article in the sociology journal Social Problems. (Thanks to PRB for the link.) Helping unmarried women to avoid unplanned pregnancies turns out to be a better way to promote marriage. Once they become mothers, unwed women have a dramatically lower chance of getting married, according to Isabell Sawhill of the Brookings Institution. Promoting marriage is a good idea, because declining marriage rates are a major cause of worsening child poverty rates in the United States, according to Sawhill.