The Daily Score blog - Sightline Daily

A Double Dose of WorldChanging (Plus Sightline!)

Eric Hess — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:19:55

This Wednesday and Thursday night at Seattle Town Hall, WorldChanging's Alex Steffen will be speaking about "Building a Planet with a Future":

"The future is unfolding as far more dangerous and chaotic than we hoped... and more full of opportunity and reasons for optimism than we imagined. As we lead up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit, a new global consensus is emerging that problems like population, global health, poverty, urbanization, climate change and environmental decline are not separate issues, but symptoms of one giant planetary challenge. The answer to that challenge must be a new kind of prosperity, one that allows billions of people to achieve a better life without destroying the planet."

The first night's talk is entitled "A New Global Future," where Alex will talk about propelling out region into a Bright Green Future. The second night, "Seattle's Bright Green Moment," will take a look at best practices from around the world, and the obstacles that face Seattle.

Alex is a good friend of Sightline and the speech promises to be a good one. Plus, Sightline will be there tabling. It's only $5 per night, so stop by and say hi to Sightline and enjoy a great discussion of Seattle's sustainability movement.

More information at Seattle Town Hall's calendar, or by tickets for 11/11 and 11/12.

Where the Carbon Emissions Sidewalk Ends

Roger Valdez — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:53:08

More and more cities in our region—and in the world—are developing plans to reduce carbon emissions. Both Vancouver and Seattle have plans, and Portland just passed the latest version of their plan last week.

To me the importance of these moves lies more in the substance of the plans than in their passage. Portland’s plan is big (literally), with 93 specific actions on 70 printed pages. It’s worth highlighting its focus on the importance of pedestrian infrastructure to curb climate change. Portland’s plan weaves them together into a strategy that will pay off in more ways than one.

Take walking. The Portland Daily Journal of Commerce recently highlighted one neighborhood, Powellhurst-Gilbert, as a place where a higher incidence of obesity correlates with lack of sidewalks. The Northwest Health Foundation has given a grant to the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to further study the link and to work on improving pedestrian infrastructure, making it easier to walk rather than drive. This pushes the climate reduction agenda while at the same time promoting health.

In Portland, residents have shown strong interest in cultivating “20-minute complete neighborhoods”— places where residents can safely walk a relatively short distance from home to most of the destinations and services they use every day. Fundamentally, the 20-minute neighborhood concept is another way to talk about or describe walkable, bikable environments and vibrant, human-scale neighborhoods—in essence, complete neighborhood communities.

Click here for full size image.

So while Seattle also has a climate plan, their City Council , in contrast with Portland's, has been at work actually undoing a dedicated source of funding often called the “head tax” -- a small $25, annual tax charged to businesses for each employee that drives to work -- to support neighborhood bike and pedestrian infrastructure. But Seattle isn’t putting their money where their climate plan says it should.

Since motor vehicle emissions are the single largest source of climate pollution in Seattle, the City must do even more to provide climate friendly transportation choices such as public transit, biking and walking — and to encourage greater use of those alternatives.

The repeal of the “head tax” during Seattle’s budget deliberations this month will eliminate $4.5 million in dollars to promote walking over driving, a move that seems inconsistent with the City of Seattle’s ambitions to be a global leader in reducing emissions.

So the best way to judge a climate action plan may not be just by the bench marks it sets for the next 40 years, but where the shoe soles hit the pavement: where are dollars flowing today for long term pedestrian infrastructure?

Image derived from flickr user ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser, distributed under a Creative Commons license:http://www.flickr.com/photos/clickflashphotos/ / CC BY 2.0

Walk Score Adds Transit

Clark Williams-Derry — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:26:19

Walk Score, which has become the most widely-used measure of pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in North America, has added a new trick: they're now incorporating transit data into their walkability ratings. So in addition to stores, restaurants, parks, and the like, Walk Score now treats nearby bus stops and rail stations as key ingredients of a walkable neighborhood.

What makes this extra nifty is that Walk Score has already partnered with a bunch of national real estate websites to incorporate walkability rankings into real estate listings. So now, all those real estate sites will have data on transit access, too.

Sadly, Walk Score's new transit ranking only works in places where transit agencies have made their "transit feeds" -- the data on transit locations and schedules -- freely available to the public. So if you live and walk in Portland, OR, you're in luck. Same goes for a handful of smaller transit agencies around the Northwest -- Island and Jefferson counties in Washington, Tillamook County in OR, and Humboldt County California. But even though King County Metro and Vancouver, BC's Translink publish their transit data for Google's use, their transit feeds are kept private--so third parties like Walk Score can't get access to them.

So the good folks behind Walk Score have set up an online petition to ask local transit agencies to release their transit service data to the public. (I've signed the petition -- and if you care about walkability and transit, you should too!)

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user kworth30: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kworth30/ / CC BY 2.0]

Paul Krugman Versus Matt Taibbi

Eric de Place — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:29:40

I love reading Matt Taibbi. I mean, who else puts together a sentence like this?:

The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Funny and righteous at the same time. Good stuff. But in a piece he wrote for Rolling Stone this past July, he made some awfully curious -- and curiously unsupported -- allegations about carbon markets:

...if the Democratic Party that [Goldman-Sachs] gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Yikes. It's pretty scary stuff, but Taibbi doesn't elaborate. At all.

Which is frustrating.

It's frustrating because this is precisely the kind of thing you hear all the time from cap and trade critics. Taibbi's telling a big hairy ghost story here, but because he doesn't explain it we can't know whether to be spooked or just laugh it off. At minimum, somebody needs to explain how it is that a carbon-credit market will replicate the commodities market in ways that make it eligible for gaming by Goldman or others. And then someone needs to explain why that risk -- if it's even true -- is worse than the risk of failing to cap carbon.

That's where Paul Krugman comes in.

In his NYT blog, also this past July, Krugman penned what I thought was a terrific rhetorical response to this kind of thinking:

...there’s also, it seems, growing opposition to cap-and-trade from people who should be on the side of progress — but whose reaction is basically “Eek! Markets! Wall Street! Speculation! Bad!”

He explains:

Any time you have a market, there’s some opportunity for speculation... For example, the fact that wheat is traded means that there’s also a wheat futures market; and because wheat can be stored, futures prices affect spot prices.

So, should fear of speculation lead us to ban trading in wheat? Nobody would say that. Yes, sometimes speculators will get it wrong — but the advantages of having a wheat market vastly overshadow the possible harm that may sometimes come from speculation.

Now substitute “emission permits” for wheat. It’s exactly the same story.

Krugman goes on to address a couple of related concerns. A carbon market will not be like the Enron-manipulated energy markets for a couple of important reasons. And carbon speculation wouldn't replicate the 2008 commodities price surge because, according to Krugman, that price surge wasn't actually driven by speculation. But even if you think the prices were speculation-driven, Krugman points out that pretty much no one wants to shutter commodities markets.

Instead, the proper solution to market manipulation is market regulation, not banning markets. Toward that end, it should be comforting to see robust legislative programs for regulating carbon markets, such as the Feinstein-Snowe Carbon Market Oversight Act of 2009, which Lisa has already written about, not to mention the stringent regulatory provisions included in the Clean Energy Jobs Act, the primary cap-and-trade vehicle in the US Senate.

Not that there isn't more to do, perhaps. Carbon market oversight will be critical to the success of a cap-and-trade program. So rather than engaging in speculative market-bashing, I'm hoping that progressives will get to work on designing smart market regulations.

Will Patriotism Move Americans on Climate?

Anna Fahey — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:29:23

An interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday by Robert Dujarric (who heads the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies at Temple University) makes the case that Americans can be motivated to act on climate measures by rousing their sense of patriotism.

I've written before about the powerful terminology of war in this context. But this is a new take. Dujarric recommends taking aim at particular targets. Namely, the sinister foreign oil barons who are getting rich and powerful thanks to our oil addiction.

Is it an effective call to arms to remind Americans that the money we spend at gas pump and on our heating bills funds "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear and missile programs, enrich[es] Muammar Qaddafi (while he rants at the UN against the United States, and give[s] assistance to Vladimir Putin as he threatens American interests in the Caucasus and Central Europe?"

Should we start talking about climate policy as a move to "wage war to bankrupt oil tyrants?"

Here's Dujarric's argument:

Refocusing the climate debate would significantly increase the chances of success. If Americans start thinking about their dependence on oil as equivalent to providing assistance to Iran, Venezuela, and Libya, more citizens will be open to looking for and practicing alternatives.

The public needs to understand that global warming policy – and its attendant sacrifices – are less about protecting the polar bear, and more about protecting the American people from losing economic boosts to foes that thrive on our oil exports.

Obviously, this does not mean abandoning the environmental arguments. There are now millions of American voters who care passionately about them. But adding this patriotic angle will help convince others, who for one reason or another are currently unconcerned by global warming, that the government must do something to cut down oil consumption.

He has a point. Perhaps this is more powerful--and immediate--than climate advocates' attempts to connect clean energy investment to the Apollo Project, and thus garner the kind of fervent patriotic support that Kennedy did during the Space Race. That kind of framing hasn't hurt but it also hasn't taken off. (And I couldn't agree more about polar bears.)

As Climate Solution’s KC Golden, once said: “[Climate change] is our Pearl Harbor. It may lack the pop of a sneak attack but here it is, and we need to respond with every ounce of vision and determination we can muster.”

Maybe in the absence of that jarring sneak attack, as Dujarric suggests, we do need real-life "enemies" to rally against.

Climate leaders like John Kerry have certainly pumped up the national security frame as they've promoted climate and energy legislation in Congress recently: "climate change and our dependence on foreign oil are a threat to our national security. There’s nothing conservative about remaining indebted to hostile regimes for our energy." But Kerry didn't single out any particular "oil tyrants" for vilification.

I'm not convinced Dujarric's brand of patriotic message is the silver bullet--and he's more focused on individual action than collective support for smart energy policy.

But his strategy might work well teamed up with a couple other patriotic messages that I think are powerful: one that America's economic leadership is on the line--if we don't lead in clean energy and efficiency technology, we'll be left in the dust (or conversely, a more positive message that we stand before an enormous opportunity to lead the world in clean energy and green jobs); the other that those green jobs themselves are patriotic--paychecks with a purpose. These are jobs where construction workers and assembly-line manufacturers can count themselves among the country's heroes, protecting the economy and the climate while cutting families' energy costs.

Smart, Cheap Stormwater Fixes

Lisa Stiffler — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:21:58

Stormwater -- the rainwater that streams off roofs, parking lots, roads, and yards, carrying with it toxic pollutants -- poses a costly, intractable problem for governments and businesses. In Washington, efforts to control stormwater have cost its cities hundreds of millions of dollars.

The problem with stormwater comes from its massive volume, which floods homes and blasts through streams, flushing salmon eggs, gravel, and everything else out to sea. And it comes from the pollutants that are picked up by the torrents of rain along the way, including copper, oil and grease, and pesticides.

Stormwater presents a daunting challenge considering the Northwest's rapid pace of development, and the fact that residential areas have three-times the rate of runoff compared to forests and fields (see page 12). Polluted stormwater kills salmon returning to urban streams to spawn before they can lay their eggs. It forces the closure of acres of shellfish beds made unsafe for human consumption. The rush of water causes erosion and fills basements with muddy water.

The good news is we already know some of the best, cheapest solutions for controlling runoff. The bad news is the solutions aren't being widely used.

A smart strategy for coping with stormwater is to prevent it from forming in the first place, and an elegant way to do that is to keep it from ever hitting the ground. Turns out that pine and fir trees are rain sponges, catching between 19 and 25 percent of the rainfall, according to a study of conifers in the Western Cascades (Table 1 of this study). Trees also trap rain by sucking it out of the ground and into their branches, and their roots help it penetrate the soil. Combining all three routes of rain capture, conifers in our region can catch about one-third of the rainfall, depending on how hard it's coming down.

A few governments are wisely putting a value on trees in the name of stormwater controls to encourage developers to protect them. Portland offers tree credits as a way for landowners to meet part of their stormwater mitigation obligation. Seattle is for the first time including credits for trees in its stormwater manual update (see section 4.4.6), which is expected to be approved by the end of the month.

But clearly even with incentives to keep trees, stormwater will be created in the Northwest by the barrel-full. So the next best strategy is to keep pollutants out of the runoff. Otherwise the stormwater has to be captured and treated, and many of the pollutants are difficult and costly to remove.

One of the bad actors that's been getting a lot of attention in recent years is seemingly innocuous copper. You can hold a penny in your hand with no harm done, but when the dissolved metal gets into streams it can wreak havoc on a salmon's sense of smell -- and they use their noses to find food, mates, their spawning streams, and to avoid predators. Scientists at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle find that super low levels of copper -- levels that match what is found in nature -- deadens coho's response to an alarm pheromone that warns schoolmates that a predator is near.

So where does the copper come from? Research in the San Francisco Bay area found that the top two sources of human-caused copper pollution come from pesticides (42 percent) and brake pads on cars and trucks (36 percent). Some of the pesticides' copper gets trapped in the soil and plants, putting more of a focus on the brake pads copper that travels from roadways and the air to waterways.

Now California's Brake Pad Partnership, a nonprofit coalition of environmentalists, engineers, and auto reps, is working to get legislation passed that will get copper-containing brake pads off their roads. Their Q & A sheet gives a great explanation of how the copper is scraped off the pads when a car brakes, why it's used, and what the substitutes are (they include steel and iron). Here's the most important piece:

"Copper-free brake pads of all types are available and in common use. Because zero-copper products are currently used in many vehicles that meet federal vehicle safety standards, it appears that the presence of copper is not necessary for brake pads to function safely, providing that the friction material, in conjunction with the brake system, is suitably engineered for those vehicles."

The legislation to phase out copper brake pads was pushed back a year because of the recession, but will be taken up in the 2010 session. Given the availability of safer substitutes, it certainly seems like making the switch sooner than later -- and nationwide -- makes sense.

Stormwater flooding photo courtesy of Flickr user technokitten under the Creative Commons license.

Gaming Cap and Trade: Should We Worry?

Eric de Place — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:09:42

Worries about “gaming” or market manipulation sometimes crop up as an objection to cap and trade, often with reference to recent shenanigans in the financial markets. Some fear that a cap-and-trade system could be manipulated to artificially raise—or lower—permit prices to generate profits for a few at the expense of consumers. While distrust and concerns about scamming a carbon market are understandable, they’re not warranted.

To put some of these fears to rest, it’s informative to look at existing cap-and-trade programs. Neither of the two programs regulating greenhouse gases nor a third controlling acid rain pollutants has been corrupted by gaming or market manipulation.

The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was the world’s first cap-and-trade program restricting carbon dioxide releases when it started in 2005. The system has succeeded in creating a Europe-wide carbon market and trading program. There have been hiccups in the ETS, including an initial overallocation of allowances to polluters and some price volatility. Yet the problems are fixable and are already being addressed as the program evolves. The challenges are not attributable to a fundamental flaw in the policy or to lack of regulatory oversight. And the market has grown more robust as the number of traders has increased, making price manipulation difficult. Partly thanks to the ETS, the EU is on track to meet its emissions reduction obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), with a membership of 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, held its first auctions in September 2008. Additional auctions are scheduled. While still in its early days, RGGI appears to be off to a good start, with low permit prices and no evidence of gaming.

The US Acid Rain Program has a track record dating to 1995. The program regulating power plants has exceeded expectations, beating the SO2 emissions cap years ahead of schedule and costing only one-fourth of what was expected. After more than a decade, analysts have concluded that the SO2 cap-and-trade program has also been free of gaming.

In short, cap-and-trade programs are already up and running with no evidence of sinister manipulation. That’s no surprise to specialists who study markets.

The very nature of carbon permit markets makes them hard to game, unlike California’s “spot” electricity market, and not terribly prone to speculative bubbles, unlike real estate and subprime mortgages. Mortgages and pollution permits are very different commodities; a mortgage is a promise to pay a debt—a promise that a mortgage holder may not be able to keep—while a carbon permit is an allowance to emit fixed quantities of pollution. Carbon markets are not like “spot” power markets either, in part because electricity must be supplied immediately to consumers, while firms need permits to cover their emissions at most only once a year, eliminating the urgency to acquire them at any particular time.

In a poorly designed cap-and-trade program, traders might try to hoard permits and manipulate prices to harm consumers. Yet commonsense rules of the road can address the gravest concerns. To minimize price volatility, authorities can ensure transparency about prices and the number of permits available, both at auction and on secondary markets where permits are traded. Authorities can also restrict the share of permits that any single entity can hold, to perhaps a few percent of the total permits in circulation for any year.

Other particulars of market design also help. The larger the permit-trading market and the more linked it is with other cap-and-trade systems, the more stable prices will be. Making permits perpetually bankable also stabilizes prices. For example, a hydro-dependent utility can use banking to accumulate a cushion of permits for use in an unexpected December cold snap during a “low-water” year, when the utility must generate (or import) more coal-fired power. Opening auctions to all bidders with adequate financial reserves, conducting auctions frequently and early, and limiting the number of permits any one actor may hold—all these things will keep prices stable and prevent market manipulation.

There are also built-in disincentives for manipulation. The public doesn’t want it because it could raise power bills, and the market participants themselves, the polluting firms, don’t want to pay more to pollute. Both provide strong motivations for keeping the system honest. As with any policy, a cap-and-trade system’s success will ultimately depend on oversight and vigorous public institutions. But there is every reason to believe that a well-crafted and -regulated system for auctioning and trading carbon permits can function smoothly and cost-effectively.

This blog post comes directly from Sightline's Cap and Trade 101: A Federal Climate Policy Primer (pdf). Please see the full primer for more details, including endnotes that elaborate on some of the points above.

Have Cap-and-Trade Programs Been "Gamed"?

Eric de Place — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:29:30

I've got an emerging obsession: the risk of market manipulation in cap and trade programs. It's something you hear about all the time, at least in carbon policy circles, but the details about "gaming" always seem to be in very short supply. Still, it's something we should take a close look at because the alleged consequences are so severe.

So at the moment, I'm gearing up to read everything important that's been written on the subject. (If you know of good stuff, please send it my way.) In the meantime, I want to share this recent short brief written by economist Laurence DeWitt at Pace University.

He takes a look at how the RGGI carbon cap and trade system has fared:

So far there have been no discovered instances of even attempts to exercise market power--and there has been great vigilance in searching for such actions. In addition to the careful scrutiny of Potomac Economics, which serves as RGGI’s official market monitor, the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has already become active in monitoring and analyzing the exchange traded RGGI derivatives.

And a look at how the national SO2 and NOx cap and trade programs have gone:

It should also be noted that we have several decades of national experience with SO2 and NOx cap and trade programs with no indications of any significant effort, successful or otherwise, to manipulate the market. SO2 and NOx programs are relatively small markets—and thereby offer more potential for manipulation--so this experience to date is very relevant.

In fairness, DeWitt's piece is much too short to do justice to the subject matter. I plan to dig into the details further in the coming weeks, but I thought it provided a nice high-level expression of the basic facts of the case.

Oregon's Energy Policies Stimulate High Ranking

Roger Valdez — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:42:14

Over the last week there has been quite a bit of discussion in the media about the number of jobs created by stimulus dollars. Some argue the money is being wasted and others that the amount of money allocated were never enough in the first place. Paul Krugman suggested that “the really bad news is that “centrists” in Congress aren’t able or willing to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that we need a lot more federal spending on job creation.”

Either way, as I wrote in a post called Color of Money, a lot of money has been allocated and has yet to be spent. The facts seem to agree that moving funds (and allocations for bond and tax credit programs) out to local governments and into broader circulation is taking a long time.

But, when it comes to energy efficiency in general and stimulus funding in specific, the Northwest is getting high ratings. In their 2009 state ranking of local implementation of energy efficiency programs, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) ranks Oregon 3rd and Washington 7th among the top ten states for implementing energy efficiency policies.

This is the third edition of the ACEEE’s annual ranking of states’ implementation of energy efficiency policies. The ranking is based on 6 policy categories: (1) utility-sector and public benefits programs and policies; (2) transportation polices; (3) building energy codes; (4) combined heat and power; (5) state government initiatives; and (6) appliance efficiency standards. States are given points in each of the six policy areas combined and are ranked out of a possible 50 points.

How does the ACEEE rating help us better understand whether stimulus dollars are ultimately going to be effective in the Northwest with green jobs creation? There isn’t enough information to know for sure, but based on what we learned in our research for our Green Collar Jobs Primer: Realizing the Promise, stoking demand for energy efficiencies through increasing standards, creating incentives and strong coordination of efficiency work are all key ingredients of green job creation. Oregon ranks high for creating multiple programs that do all these things.

The ACEEE credits Oregon for having upped requirements for energy efficiency in state buildings, having an effective performance contracting program in place and for its two financial incentive programs, the Business and Residential Tax Credit, to incentivize energy efficiency. Oregon doesn’t have to re-invent the energy efficiency wheel and has programs already working that can be enhanced with stimulus funding.

Just last week ShoreBank Enterprises Cascadia received a $40 million allocation of New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) as part of the stimulus package. The NMTC is a program that incentivizes investment in low income communities with a 39 percent tax credit. The credit allows investors a discount on their federal taxes after 7 years and makes lending to non-profits and community based organizations more appealing by creating better returns on the initial investment. Credits from NMTC can be used to invest in clean energy projects, training facilities and renewable energy infrastructure.

ShoreBank Enterprises Cascadia has great experience in what they describe as their triple bottom line: positive economic, ecological, and social benefits through engaging in market-based approaches. They created a loan program to help rural households upgrade or replace leaky septic systems and they are the lead financial agency in Clean Energy Works, a Portland program I wrote about most recently in a post called Green Collar Jobs Start With Basic Skills.

ShoreBank will use NMTC resources to provide loans and equity-like investments in severely distressed communities, especially rural and Native American communities and they already have projects in the works in the renewable and energy efficiency sectors that will benefit from the allocation.

The collaboration by ShoreBank , the City of Portland and the State is a big part of the reason Oregon has enacted so many far reaching and effective energy policies and programs, earning them them such a high rating from the ACEEE. There is still a lot more money to be allocated and dispersed. But effective partnerships also mean that Oregon has real projects lined up to benefit from stimulus dollars, which should offset much of the recent criticism that the stimulus isn’t creating jobs.

It's the Salish Sea Now

Eric de Place — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:35:18

In a step forward for bioregional thinking, Washington has agreed to add a new name to the Northwest's official geographic lexicon: the Salish Sea. Following on the heels of British Columbia's endorsement, the term will now be used to refer to the collective inland waters of Puget Sound, Georgia Straight, and the Straight of Juan de Fuca.

It doesn't replace any of those names, but "Salish Sea" does provide an important addition to our understanding of Cascadia. Because the new term is firmly rooted in both history and ecology, it may help direct more attention to protecting the natural heritage of the region.

At Crosscut, Knute Berger has done a bang-up job covering the Salish Sea name-change. See here, here, here, and here.

Dogs Vs. SUVs

Clark Williams-Derry — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:12:03

Editor's note: Clark will be on NW Cable News tomorrow morning (Nov 3) around 8:30 to talk more about this issue.

You may have seen the meme circulating around the internet: some researchers from ~~Australia~~ New Zealand are claiming that owning a dog has as much impact on the planet as owning an SUV. I'll let New Scientist summarize their case:

[A] medium-sized dog...consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food...So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares...

Meanwhile, an SUV...driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser's eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares - less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

It's just the sort of counter-intuitive claim that gets lots of attention on the brave new internet era. So interesting! So science-y! So Twitter-able!

And yet, so false! Once you sniff around the numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that those researchers are barking up the wrong tree.

Let's get one thing out of the way: I'm not a dog owner. Much to my kids' dismay, I don't even want a pet. Nor do I own an SUV. So, in theory, I...er...don't have a dog in this fight. Still, this claim struck me as so wrong that it made the hair on my neck stand up. And I'd hate to have someone catch scent of this meme and conclude that buying an SUV is no big deal -- "It's not like I'm buying a dog or anything" -- if the real numbers don't support that conclusion. (That's the risk of bad information: it can lead us to make choices that are in stark conflict with our values.)

So let's paws for a moment, and see if this sleeping dog is actually a lie.

First, let's look at that SUV. The calculations behind the internet meme say that it's driven about 6,200 miles per year (10,000 km). And yet, according to the US Department of Energy, a real SUV in the US is driven an average of 13,700 miles annually. Already, the internet meme is off by a factor of roughly 2.2. I haven't checked whether the 10,000 km figure is reasonable for ~~Australia~~ New Zealand -- but it for the US, their mileage assumptions certainly skews the numbers in favor of SUVs, and against dogs.

And then there's the total energy estimates. The pet-pessimists estimate that an SUV (in their calculations, a 4.6 liter Toyota Land Cruiser driven about 6,200 miles) consumes 55.1 gigajoules of energy in both fuel and amortized manufacturing energy every year. That, too, is low. A Land Cruiser gets about 15.25 mpg in combined city/highway driving -- meaning that if it's driven 10,000 km, it consumes about 407 gallons of gas, or 53.6 gigajoules worth of energy. But once I add in the energy used to produce that gas, along with what's likely a low-ball estimate of the "embodied" energy from vehicle manufacturing, I get get about 74.9 gigajoules -- 44 percent more than the authors estimate. Yet again, they've low-balled the impacts of the SUV in a way that makes dogs look worse by comparison. (Here, I'm drawing from the data collection and calculations I did for our CO2-by-transportation-mode charts. And I'm looking only at energy, not at the additional climate and pollution impacts of emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks.)

So even before you start to look at dogs, the authors have underestimated the environmental impacts of SUVs by a factor of at least 3. And that's not including the indirect impacts of SUVs -- the parking spaces we build for them; the roads and bridges they drive on; the impacts of insurance and licensing operations; etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Then there's flip side: the authors' claims about the impact of feeding pets. The anti-doggists estimate it takes .84 hectares -- or about 2.1 acres of cropland -- to meet a a pooch's food needs for a year. There are a little over 70 million dogs in the US (the Humane Society says 74.8 million, the veterinarians say 72.1 million, and the pet food industry says 66.3 million, for an average of 71.1 dogs). So by the authors' estimates it must take about 150 million acres of US farmland to feed our dogs. In all, there are 440 million acres of cropland in the US -- suggesting that the equivalent of one-third of all US cropland is devoted to producing dog food.

We use the equivalent of a third of all US cropland to feed dogs? That's barking mad!

To see why it's wrong, you can look from the bottom up, at the foods that dogs eat. Or you can look from the top down, at the aggregate sales of dog food vs. the entire agricultural economy. I'll do both.

First from the bottom up: what, exactly, do dogs eat? The anti-pet-ites seem do a good job of calculating dogs' calorie requirements. Canines wolf down a lot of food: a mid-sized dog consumes roughly 30 calories per pound of body weight per day. (Smaller dogs eat as many as 40 calories per pound of body weight, while larger dogs eat as few as 20 calories per pound. Call it the yapping-to-napping spread.) I couldn't find the average weight of dogs in the US, but the median dog breed listed here has an adult weight of 47 pounds. If that's representative of US dogs, then the average dog will eat 1,410 calories today, give or take -- which, as I read it, is roughly what the authors' figures imply.

So the real problem with the authors' calculations isn't with their estimates of how much each pet eats. It's with this statement:

[A] medium-sized dog...consume[s] 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily

Strike that: most dogs DO NOT eat meat and cereals. With a few exceptions, they eat "meat" and "cereals." The "meat," in particular, tends to be byproducts -- things that people in the US simply won't eat, even in hot dogs. Here's one description of the ingredients in pet food:

The protein used in pet food comes from a variety of sources. When cattle, swine, chickens, lambs, or other animals are slaughtered, the choice cuts such as lean muscle tissue are trimmed away from the carcass for human consumption. However, about 50% of every food-producing animal does not get used in human foods. Whatever remains of the carcass -- bones, blood, intestines, lungs, ligaments, and almost all the other parts not generally consumed by humans -- is used in pet food, animal feed, and other products. These "other parts" are known as "by-products," "meat-and-bone-meal," or similar names on pet food labels.

Even the cereals dogs eat are often deemed unfit for human consumption. I'm not trying to gross you out here, or encourage you to feed choice cuts to your pooch. Instead, I think it's probably a good thing that dogs eat things that humans won't -- since otherwise they really would be eating people food, which really would increase their environmental impact. But since most dogs get their calories and protein from the waste products of people food, the idea that the environmental impact of dog food is additional to the impact of human food is simply wrong.

Of course, that's not to say that dog food has no environmental impact. Dog food, and meat byproducts generally, provide some financial contribution to the meat industry, and hence to the overall planetary impact of meat production. Dog food also also requires energy for processing, packaging, and transportation.

Yet when you look at pet food from a macro-economic perspective -- that is, from the top down, rather than the bottom up -- dog food is little more than a rounding error. Total retail food sales in the US topped $1.1 trillion in the US in 2008 (see table 36 from the USDA's Agricultural Outlook statistics.) But according to the pet food industry, retail dog food sales totaled just $11 billion in 2008. By that measure, dog food represents about one percent of the total food economy.

Looking more narrowly at the economics of meat byproducts, I found these USDA estimates of meat "price spreads", which show that meat byproducts are worth somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of the total value of livestock, depending on the year and the kind of animal. And obviously, dog food is only one of many uses of those byproducts -- there's also food for other pets, and a variety of industrial uses as well. So based on the economics, there's just no way to attribute much of the impact of agriculture on our dogs.

In short, whether you go by the macro-economics, or by the actual constituent parts of dog food, there's simply no principled way to say that the dog food has the same impact as human food. I'd be very surprised if ANY principled life-cycle assessment found that dog food has more than a small fraction of the overall environmental impact of US agriculture. My guess is that dog food accounts for a maximum of 5 percent of all US crop production, and possibly as little as 1 percent. That's a far cry from the one-third that the authors imply.

Of course, dogs have indirect environmental impacts, just as SUVs do: veterinarians, energy for heating and cooling, the food calories that humans use while walking their dogs, etc. I won't even try to tally them up, because there's no real point. Just looking at the numbers so far -- combining the underestimates of SUV impacts with the overestimates of dog food impacts -- the anti-doggites are off by a factor of at least 18, and probably more.

But because I'm doggedly persistent, I'll mention one final issue. The authors of the original meme estimate that:

One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year

I haven't looked at the original book, so I have no real idea what this means. A well-located solar power installation can produce roughly 10 times that much energy per acre per year. Perhaps it's got something to do with biofuels -- maybe the net annual production of corn ethanol per hectare, after accounting for the energy for fertilizer, tractor fuel, and distilling. Yet having run the numbers before, I've concluded that there's absolutely no way run the US SUV fleet -- roughly the size of our dog population -- on corn ethanol alone. There's just not enough cropland in the country to do it. But obviously, we power our fleet of dogs (and cats and people and horses, etc.--and even some cars) fairly easily with the cropland we've got.

Let's be clear -- I'm not claiming that we should ignore the environmental impact of dogs. That's one of reasons that I, personally, am reluctant to own one! But I think that making an empirical claim without doing solid research does a grave disservice to public discourse. Being wrong can have consequences -- including, potentially, encouraging people to make the wrong choices, even if their heart is in exactly the right place.

So I say to the folks who made the original claim: Bad Researchers! Fur Shame!!! And to the rest of you: let's consider the "dogs are worse than SUVs" meme debunked: buried in the back yard, put to sleep, and whatever other bad dog pun comes to mind.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mil, distributed under a Creative Commons license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/danw/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Get Your Wolf On

Eric de Place — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:33:15

Surely one of the most encouraging conservation stories in recent years has been the phenomenal revival of wild wolves in the Rockies. Less well-known is that wolves are also returning to Oregon and Washington. Their future on the West Coast, however, remains highly uncertain.

While Oregon and Washington are more politically progressive than the wolf strongholds in the Rockies -- Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming -- the truth is that there is not much reason to be optimistic for their prospects without good conservation policy. Toward that end, Oregon already has a wolf management plan in place, but Washington is just now drafting its own state plan.

Washington is considering four policy options for managing wolves. Somewhat bizarrely, the future of this endangered species -- which you might think would depend largely on science -- in fact depends greatly on public opinion. So if you're part of the public and you have an opinion, it might be a good to share your thoughts with your public officials.

Here are the remaining hearings:

Mon, Nov. 2, Seattle: REI flagship store, 222 Yale Ave N

Wed, Nov. 4, Mt. Vernon: 2300 Market St., Cottontree Inn Convention Center

Thu, Nov. 5, Sequim: 212 Blake Ave., Guy Cole Conv. Ctr., Carrie Blake Park

Mon, Nov. 9, Omak: 175 Rodeo Trail Road, Okanogan Co. Fairgrounds Agri-plex

Tue, Nov. 10, Wenatchee: 327 N. Wenatchee Ave., Chelan Co. PUD Auditorium

All hearings 6:30-9:00 p.m.

For background reading, here's Washington's draft wolf management plan; some excellent context from Conservation Northwest; and a first-rate website called Western Wolves. And if that's not enough, you can go read everything I've written about wolves in Washington. Have fun.

Photo by Gary Kramer, USFWS.

Think Tanks on TV

Eric Hess — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:59:54

Last night, TVW aired a one hour televised no-holds-barred fight to the death friendly discussion with five think tanks in Washington State. If you haven't guessed already, Sightline was one of them. Here's the half hour featuring Roger, along with representatives from the Evergreen Freedom Foundation and the Economic Opportunity Institute:

(Go here for the full video.)

The show grappled with questions like the role of government at the city, county, and state level; top issues for the 2010 legislative session; and how the state can deal with next year's budget shortfall.

As if you needed an excuse to watch TV on a Friday afternoon...

Nudges, Laundry, and Trash

Clark Williams-Derry — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:32:30

Wouldn't it be nice if there were painless and unobtrusive ways to promote a shift to sustainable behavior?

Well, there are. In fact, they're all around us, if you look for them.

You may have heard of the book Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, which describes tricks learned from behavioral economics -- the study of how real human beings, rather than the idealized, hyper-rational automata of traditional economic theory, make decisions. Nudge shows how subtle shifts in how choices are offered can make a big difference to the decisions people wind up making. For example, signing people up automatically for 401ks, and letting them opt out if they choose, can lead to massive increases in retirement savings -- even though a purely "rational" actor.sees no difference between that approach, and letting people voluntarily opt in.

Once you're aware of them, you can see examples of effective nudges all over the place. Take this look at laundry in the New York Times website. The article compiles suggestions for reducing laundry's environmental impact--and this nugget stuck out at me, about an experiment with the cards that hotels use to encourage guests to reuse towels.

[W]e conspired with the management of an upscale hotel to place one of four cards in its guestrooms. Three cards employed some version of the typical environmental appeal. A fourth card added (true) information that the majority of guests do reuse their towels when asked.

The outcome? Compared with the first three messages, the final message increased towel reuse by 34 percent. How easily we can be influenced to act by honest information about how those around us are acting.

There: actual data, showing that when we're reminded about the way our peers are behaving, we're more likely to do the same thing ourselves. Obviously, that sort of thing can be used to bad ends ("C'mon, Danny, everyone's doing it!!"). But wanting to fit in is a very human instinct, and a powerful motivator. And the numbers show that it's not hard to harness that instinct for good ends.

Then there's this set of mini-demonstrations of a similar principle: the importance of making the sustainable choice the fun choice. Of course, I hesitate to blog about this, since it's actually a viral ad campaign. (I won't say for whom.) But it's an interesting demonstration nonetheless that some simple changes to our environment -- turning stairs into piano keys, turning glass recycling into a midway game -- can encourage people to walk rather than ride the escalator, and to recycle their bottles rather than toss them away. (Of course, I've got to wonder how long the "fun-effect" would last: if every staircase were a piano, would we get sick of the music?)

In the same vein, this entertaining TED talk, "Life lessons from an ad man" has some similar -- if a bit over the top -- ideas for making sustainability fun and easy.

Anybody out there got other examples of sustainability nudges?

Image courtesy of Flickr user infrogmation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/infrogmation/ / CC BY 2.0

Wanted: Smart Workers for Smart Grid

Roger Valdez — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:20:18

Early this week, President Obama gave a speech touting the $3.4 billion in grants the federal government has awarded to local companies, utilities and cities working to improve the country’s aging and outmoded electric energy grid. The awards will support “smart grid” technology that enables easier and more effective transmission of electricity from one region to another. One of the recipients is Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative (PNGC), a Portland-based electric generation and transmission cooperative owned by 16 Northwest electric utilities. The grant will fund installation of “95,000 smart meters, substation equipment, and load management devices that will integrate electric cooperatives across four states using a central data collection software system hosted by PNGC.”

But will all the smart grid money create green collar jobs?

Unfortunately—and surprisingly considering unemployment rates—according to a recent report by the National Commission on Energy Policy, smart-grid investment will require trained workers who aren’t yet available in large numbers.

So, what is a smart grid and how do we build it? Here’s how Obama described the importance of developing smart grid technology:

To offer one analogy, just imagine what transportation was like in this country back in the 1920s and 1930s before the Interstate Highway System was built. It was a tangled maze of poorly maintained back roads that were rarely the fastest or the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. Fortunately, President Eisenhower made an investment that revolutionized the way we travel -- an investment that made our lives easier and our economy grow.

The highway example is a common one but probably not the best. And the term “smart grid” is in serious danger of becoming another empty buzzword. If you have the time, I highly recommend a presentation by Roger Levy of the Smart Grid Technical Advisory Project based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Levy gave the presentation at last month’s meeting of the Oregon Public Utility Commission.

Click here for a full size image.

Smart grid is really about integrating demand and supply from the on-off switch on your dishwasher all the way to the source of energy production. Our current energy grid wasn’t built for this kind of integration. If renewable energy is going to work as a replacement for more resource-intensive sources (coal, for example), there has to be a way to get that energy into the grid so consumers can reliably buy it. when it’s windy at one point of entry into the grid, windmill energy needs to be generated then supplied to another point on the grid where there is no wind. That means infrastructure—equipment and transmission wires—to get the energy to the market place.

Click here for full size image.

Rate design is also important. Rates need to be structured so that consumers are incentivized to use energy when it is less taxing on the overall system (when wind energy is abundant, for example), and to make improvements to their facilities and homes to improve efficiencies.

But who is going to build, operate, and maintain all this new infrastructure and technology to make the smart grid work? The Commission’s report found that about 30 to 40 percent of the electric power sector’s workforce will be eligible for retirement by 2013 and of those, 58,200 will be skilled craft workers, exactly the people who could build the smart grid.

The study further found that nationwide, smart grid technology will require an additional 90,000 workers. This is a huge green-collar job opportunity. But the barriers for training workers I described in my post, Green Collar Jobs Start With Basic Skills, are the same for the electric power sector; basic skills aren’t being integrated into technical training programs. The report cites “lack of math and science skills in the population” and “lack of career preparatory skills” as significant barriers to ensuring a ready workforce for the new green-collar army we’re going to need. This is further hampered by lack of portability of credentials and training certifications between different schools and training programs.

It’s not the worst problem you could have—people need jobs and the demand is being created. The question is one of coordination so that the work can get done and people can get back to work in our communities. To that end, the report recommends more or less what Oregon has started doing, getting important players—unions, educators, utilities—in the same room to start tackling these problems. Last session the Oregon legislature passed HB 3300 which tasked the State Workforce Investment Board to “leverage and align existing public workforce development programs and other public and private resources to the goal of recruiting, supporting, educating and training of targeted populations of workers.”

The good news is that the effort is getting started. It is likely that the biggest step toward capturing the efficiencies inherent in smart grid technology won’t depend on that technology at all, but on breaking down age-old barriers between basic education and workforce training.