Don’t miss the latest from Bill McKibben on why Big Oil is clinging so fiercely to fossil fuels and fighting so hard against climate policy. It’s the money, of course:

“The giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.”

As McKibben puts it, “the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry.” But, “telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing.”

And more on Big Oil’s banner year from Center for American Progress. Higher prices, record profits, less oil. What else have oil companies been up to lately while the rest of us suffer through a crappy economic climate?

• They produced 4 percent less oil and “oil equivalent” in 2011 compared to 2010.
• They spent a total of $38 billion, or 28 percent, of their profits to repurchase their own stock.

• They are sitting on more than $58 billion in cash reserves as of the end of 2011.

• They spent $1.6 million on campaign contributions and $65.7 million on lobbying efforts.
• For every $1 spent on lobbying in Washington, the big five received $30 worth of tax breaks.

From the Agenda Project, the best email subject line I’ve seen—maybe ever: “271 Celibate Men.” The best-ever, most biting, hard-hitting (and shortest) email follows: “As you read this, 271 celibate men are doing everything they can to control the sex lives of American women. Who are these men?  And what do they really want?” And the linked post eviscerates.

Alan:

Dutch cycling infrastructure is nicely captured in this video from the new Dutch Cycling Embassy.

Cycling For Everyone from Dutch Cycling Embassy on Vimeo.

Cascadia could have the same, for a fraction of the cost of the highway megaprojects now on the drawing boards.

The Man Who Lived on His Bike is undoubtedly the most clever viral video of the season.

THE MAN WHO LIVED ON HIS BIKE from Guillaume Blanchet on Vimeo.

Clark:

My favorite Sightline Daily story of the week: Gernot Wagner argues that saving the planet depends more on effective policy than on personal virtue.

Read how fighting urban congestion can kill city streets. Also, a former mayor argues that congestion is like cholesterol: there’s a good kind and a bad kind.

Eric H:

Also from Sightline Daily’s news clippings: a good reminder that we should eat more mindfully.

Here’s a great photo series on Europe’s deep freeze.

Lastly, from the files of the absurd: In 1995, New Mexico voted on a bill requiring psychologists to dress as wizards.

Matthew_Hull, Morguefile.com

On some level, most of us are in the business of behavior change—whether we’re trying to lose a few pounds ourselves or whether we’re promoting energy efficiency. It goes without saying that habits are hard to break, even when someone has gone out of their way to make the better choice fairly easy.

Here at Sightline, our goal isn’t just to provide you with the most effective sustainability solutions; we also help you talk about them.

Toxic stormwater runoff is the perfect example: the problem is big, and solutions often require a fair amount of technical jargon to explain. The good news is that by talking about the issue in a way that gets at our shared values and highlights local success stories, we can engage more people in solutions.

For example, connecting the dots between pollution in our local waterways and the food and water our families use can be more effective than focusing only on vulnerable ecosystems.

Sightline has produced a short, three-minute video with five tips for talking about polluted stormwater. We hope you like it!

You can download the entire messaging memo.

wikipedia

Surely one of the more fascinating and unjustly overlooked characters in the Northwest’s pioneer history is George Washington Bush. He was, by some accounts, the first American to establish a permanent settlement in what is now Washington. He was, in a literal sense, a trail-blazer, a home-steader, and farmer. He was also black, and so became a pioneer against racial discrimination on the frontier.

Rather than submit to racially discriminatory laws passed in Missouri, he sold his farm there and headed west in 1844 in search of a freer country in Oregon, aiming to settle in the Rogue River Valley. A veteran of the War of 1812, Bush had actually already been to Oregon, having lived there as a mountain-man and traveling to the Pacific with a fur company some twenty years earlier. As a consequence of his considerable experience, he was asked to co-lead a party of five families, together with Michael T. Simmons.

When the Bush-Simmons party reached the Columbia River, however, they discovered that the Oregon Provisional Government had recently enacted a Black Exclusion Law. Faced with continued mistreatment as a second class citizen—including legally-sanctioned flogging if he settled in Oregon—Bush took his family north. The rest of the party, all of whom were apparently white, abandoned their plans in order to join Bush in forging a path to a site near present-day Tumwater, now known as Bush Prairie.

In the burgeoning south Puget Sound region, Bush became well regarded for his skill as a farmer, as well as his remarkably open-handed generosity. He was also known for his unusual comity with his Indian neighbors, providing medical treatment when epidemics occurred and teaching his family to speak the Nisqually language.

Yet the racial exclusion laws that had dogged him from Missouri to Oregon continued to plague him.

An 1846 treaty fixed the British-US border on the 49th parallel, which brought Bush’s farm, along with the rest of present-day Washington, under discriminatory US laws that has previously not applied north of the Columbia. (South of the Columbia, Oregon had been governed by a Joint Occupation agreement between Britain and the US until it became a US territory; it first enacted racial exclusion laws during the Joint Occupation period.) As a consequence, Bush did not have clear legal title to his land until after the Washington Territory was created in 1853.

Bush was sufficiently well-established and well-connected that the first territorial legislature unanimously passed a special resolution urging Congress to confirm the Bush family’s disputed title to their land, in spite of a federal law that prohibited it. (Technically, the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 did allow racially mixed men to own land, and since Bush was half-white he should have been eligible under the law. But his skin was apparently dark enough that the US Census classified him as a negro and therefore ineligible.) It is a measure of that era’s engrained prejudice that the legislature did not object to the discriminatory laws themselves, but rather asked for—and got, in 1855—a special loophole for Bush.

Bush operated one of the most successful and modern farms in the Puget Sound region until his death in 1863. His son, Owen Bush, became an influential member of the first Washington state legislature in 1889-90. Yet despite his extraordinary contributions to the Northwest’s settlement, George Washington Bush was never granted full citizenship and was never allowed to vote.

Notes: In writing this post, I relied heavily on several sources, including an excellent description by the US National Park Service; a pair of 2001 biographical pieces by Kit Oldman at Historylink.org, here and here; and a tribute by the Discovery Institute’s Bruce Chapman. (I actually helped research Chapman’s piece when I was an intern at Discovery while in college.) I also consulted this Wikipedia article, and Cecelia Goodnow’s 2002 account.

As happens so often with historical research, this exploration revealed dozens more tantalizing paths to explore. I’ll mention just two now: Bush’s father, Matthew Bush, and Michael Simmons. Here’s how the NPS article describes Matthew Bush:

Matthew Bush, had been an African American born in India, the life-long servant of an English merchant named Stevenson. Stevenson later settled in Philadelphia, where he owned several ships. Matthew Bush married an Irish maid of Stevenson’s, and together they cared for Stevenson in his declining years. Since Stevenson had no children, he left a substantial fortune to Matthew Bush.

Fascinating. It’s worth noting, by the way, that George Washington Bush was Matthew Bush’s only child, and he inherited enough from his father’s estate to be financially independent.

I’m also fascinated by Michael T. Simmons, to whom much credit is due. Variously described as an Irish immigrant or a white Kentuckian, it was apparently his initiative to share leadership with Bush on the trip west. When confronted with the discriminatory laws in Oregon, he set off into unsettled country with his friend, presumably at some risk to his family. Yet the two men apparently benefited one another a great deal. Bush, who was  wealthier, later provided financing for Simmons’s sawmill operation in the Tumwater area. Despite being illiterate or semi-literate, Simmons became an important player in early Washington. He was Olympia’s postmaster, a justice of the peace, and was well-connected to Washington’s political establishment, including the state’s first governor, Isaac Stevens. He used his influence to forestall the loss of Bush’s land until Congress passed an exemption. He is also credited with breaking with the governor to oppose bans on nonwhite land ownership in Washington; due in large measure to Simmons’ efforts, Washington did not adopt racial exclusionary laws.

The latest traffic figures from the Federal Highway Administration offer a small surprise: through November of 2011, year-to-date vehicle travel in the U.S. hit its lowest level since 2003.

As you may recall, traffic plummeted in 2008—back when the economy hit the skids, even as gas prices shot through the roof.  But most transportation analysts (including me) expected that traffic would resume its upward trajectory as the economy rebounded and population grew. Perhaps that will still happen, someday. But so far, the numbers tell a different story: appetite for car travel in the US appears to have flattened out.

For the Northwest, the federal numbers show a mix of trends. In all three states, traffic volumes remain above the trough of late 2008 and 2009. Yet all three states have experienced traffic declines for well over a year. Averaging traffic volumes over the past 12 months, Idaho’s traffic has fallen roughly where it was in mid-2007.  In Washington, it’s fallen to mid-2005 levels.  And in Oregon, federal numbers show that traffic volumes during 2011 remain about four percent lower than they were back in 2003 (where the federal data trail gets harder to follow).

I make no claims about the accuracy of the federal data series; they don’t always match up with the state figures, for example. But really, when it comes to traffic volumes, there is no such thing as a definitive number. Transportation officials always assemble traffic figures from a somewhat random sampling of data, so vehicle travel estimates always contain some statistical noise. Yet at this point, virtually all of the estimates point in the same direction: traffic volumes just aren’t rising the way that we thought they would just a few years back. In my mind, it’s high time that transportation planners took very careful note of what’s happening, and started factoring recent trends into their thinking about what might happen over the next few decades.

yewenyi, flickr

Those concerned about coal dust from export terminals in the Northwest might do well to cast an eye Down Under. Australia is currently the world’s leading coal exporter, and therefore provides an instructive lesson in the ways that transporting and handling of large volumes of coal can affect nearby communities.

Several places in Australia have experienced serious problems with coal dust from railways and export terminals. Here’s how the coal transport industry describes the problem:

Across Australia, dust from trains carrying coal and iron ore is a persistent problem. For residents next to a rail track in the Bowen Basin or Hunter Valley it can, on the worst days, mean dust obscuring windows, dirtying washing and penetrating homes…

And in another article, the same trade journal says:

Ever since trains have been used to transport coal, fugitive dust has been a source of complaints from communities near the rail lines.

Remember, that’s not the perspective of greens or community members. That’s the industry talking.

To be fair, though, that second article also alleges that mitigation measures have reduced coal dust problems by 50 to 90 percent along the particularly dust-plagued route from the Callide region coal mines to Gladstone, a major coal export region on Australia’s east coast.

Yet despite the improvements the shippers claim, coal dust is apparently still a serious problem in Gladstone.

The Queensland government admits that coal dust from trains exceeds air quality standards in the Gladstone area. Yet newspaper accounts paint a more startling picture.

Here’s the Gladstone Observer:

BLACK coal dust is back in Gladstone homes as coal supplies return back to normal at the Barney Point Coal Terminal.

For the past month Gladstone residents have been breathing a little easier and doing less cleaning as coal supplies dried up at Barney Point due to floodwaters inundating coal mines across Central Queensland.

No coal supplies for many residents has meant cleaner benches and window sills, however, coal production has ramped up over the past week with the opening of the Blackwater rail line and, as a consequence, so has the coal dust.

Gladstone local Paul Tooker told The Observer that after some weeks of no coal dust due to the flooding, coal dust returned in earnest last Monday.

“We have now returned to the situation where my wife has to wipe down all surfaces a number of times a day to remove the coal dust,” Mr Tooker said.

And here’s the Observer again, this time describing the costs of mitigating coal dust:

THE QUEENSLAND Government’s commitment to pour millions of dollars into combating dust emissions was music to the McDonalds’ ears.

Modifications to the ship loading facilities at the Auckland Point terminals will also be made as part of the project.

After years of controversy surrounding coal dust emissions, the Gladstone Marina residents said they were glad the people’s concerns were being recognised.

Earlier this year, the port vowed to invest more than $10 million to minimise the impact of dust emissions after a damning report into the issue.

Yet Gladstone is hardly the only place in Australia with coal dust problems. A few hundred miles to the northwest, the communities around Mackay have also been affected by coal export terminals. A conservation group there argues that:

Fine hazardous coal particulate dust already settles from the Hay Point and Dalrymple Bay ports over Mackay at least as far north as Blacks Beach, 26km to the northwest. That amount of fine dust could now almost double once the Dudgeon Point coal terminal is online.

And local newspaper accounts, like this one, confirm the story:

BETTY Hobbs, of Louisa Creek, has been fighting coal dust for most of the 33 years she has lived in the beachside hamlet.

But she has not just battled to clean off the regular build-up of grime on her windows and floors, Ms Hobbs has been fighting the source of the black dust, the nearby coal terminals.

There are many more stories of coal dust in Australia, but I think these provide at least a flavor of the problem there.

In the interest of fairness, I want to make something clear: I’m not suggesting that Australia’s worst coal dust problems would occur in exactly the same way at Northwest coal terminals. The two regions have different coals, climates, and would likely deploy different technologies. But I do think Australia’s experience underscores the legitimate concerns of nearby residents, particularly when considered in context with coal dust problems closer to home at ports in southern British Columbia, northern British Columbia, and Alaska.

Thanks for Kathy Washienko for research assistance.

Kevin Dooley, Flickr

Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means. Big Chem knows that politics can be business by other means. You’ve got to hand it to them: they’ve used politics with astounding effectiveness to secure their bottom line. The result is literally toxic for the rest of us.

The chemical industry spent nearly $5 million a year over the past five years on lobbying and campaign contributions in California. That’s a lot of money for one industry and one state. On the other hand, it’s a pittance, considering the payback: by defending an obscure and ineffective fire-safety regulation, the industry extends its North American stronghold in a market worth billions of dollar of sales each year. That’s one of the best returns-on-investment imaginable.

(If you’re familiar with this saga, skip this paragraph. If you’re just tuning in, here’s a quick catch-up: California’s flammability standard is a scientifically discredited rule that requires all foam furniture sold in the state to withstand 12 seconds exposed to a candle flame. Because of the scale of California’s market, the rule effectively governs North America’s furniture industry. The cheap way to pass the 12-second test is to blend flame retardant chemicals into foam. The retardants include all manner of health-harming compounds, which leak out of furniture and into our homes, our bodies, and our natural environments. Ostensibly, these chemicals are put into furniture to protect us from fire, but 35 years of fire safety science shows they don’t do their job. Still, policymakers have defended the rule, most recently by a vote of eight to one in a California senate committee. Last time, we deconstructed the illogical and unscientific testimony of the chemical industry’s star witness. So what’s the real reason policymakers refuse to change the rule? We fear the answer is simple: money.)

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig writes in his new book on money in politics Republic, Lost:

The great threat to our republic today…is the economy of influence now transparent to all, which has normalized a process that draws our democracy away from the will of the people….We have created an engine of influence that seeks not some particular strand of political or economic ideology, whether Marx or Hayek. We have created instead an engine of influence that seeks simply to make those most connected rich.

The engine of influence is purring along in California, and the annual legislative battle over California’s flammability standard is a case study in making those most connected rich. According to an investigative report by Environmental Health News, the chemical industry spent at least $23.2 million to lobby California officials and donate to campaigns from 2007 through 2011. This number only includes payments from top flame retardant manufacturers, their trade groups, and their lobbyists. It does not include at least $742,000 in campaign contributions from lesser players in the flame retardant manufacturing industry such as Chevron, Dow, Exxon, and Occidental. It also only includes payments if lobbying groups explicitly listed flame retardants, as opposed to other Big Chem causes, on disclosure forms.

In 2003, California passed the nation’s first law banning two particularly dangerous flame retardants. Then-Governor Gray Davis said California had to act quickly to control the toxic chemicals because the US federal government had failed to do so. Nine years later, Washington, DC, still has not adopted either comprehensive chemical safety reform or a better furniture flammability standard.

And California? After the 2003 bans, no new laws regulating flame retardants passed. Sacramento considered five:

• In 2007, a bill that outlawed a third flame retardant failed on the assembly floor.
• In 2008, a bill that prohibited many flame retardants survived the assembly but died on the senate floor. (Over the three months the California legislature was considering the 2008 bill, the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s leading advocacy group, spent at least $4.6 million on lobbying.)
• In 2009, a bill that exempted children’s products from being treated with toxic flame retardants passed the senate but stalled in an assembly committee.
• In 2010, a bill that placed flame retardants under the regulatory control of California’s Green Chemistry Initiative failed in the senate.
• In 2011, a bill that offered manufacturers an alternative flammability standard to the 12-second rule—one which reflects the best fire science and does not favor use of flame retardants—failed in a senate committee, eight to one.

Why the change of heart, Golden State? When the chemical industry saw its profits come under regulatory pressure in 2003, it dramatically increased its lobbying in Sacramento, according to Environmental Health News. Albemarle, Israel Chemicals, Chemtura, and Tosoh are the principal manufacturers of flame retardants used to satisfy the 12-second rule. As the threat of regulations loomed, these companies hired the public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller, which over the years has served as apologist for  foreign military juntas and those responsible for the Bhopal Disaster and the Blackwater fiasco.

Burson-Marsteller has also made a name for itself by creating and managing astroturf groups, defined in Campaigns & Elections magazine as corporate grassroots groups that involve “the instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them.” Journalist and author William Greider simply calls faux-grassroots groups “democracy for hire.” Burson-Marsteller has created astroturf groups for the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries.

After the 2003 bans in California, Burson-Marsteller organized the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum and Citizens for Fire Safety Institute, the PR arm and astroturf group of the flame retardant superfecta. Since 2007, Burson-Marsteller has spent at least $6.6 million on behalf of the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, while Citizens for Fire Safety spent at least $2.2 million on “other payments to influence.”

According to EHN’s report, Senator Mark Leno, author of four of the failed bills, says he goes office to office to make the case for amending or repealing the dangerous flammability standard. “And almost without exception, as I’m leaving my colleague’s office, there’s a lobbyist for the chemical industry in the waiting room to go in to get the last word. And, of course, there’s a dozen of them and one of me.”

In 2011, Leno championed a bill that offered manufacturers a superior flammability standard. As it languished in committee, the chemical industry and its proxies bought influence. Senators Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana), Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro), Bill Emmerson (R-Riverside), Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-Chino), Curren Price (D-Los Angeles), Juan Vargas (D-San Diego), Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Hills), and Mark Wyland (R-Escondido) considered the bill. All but Corbett voted against it—casting a vote for more toxic chemicals with no fire safety benefits.

Between 2007 and 2011, the eight committee members who blocked the bill received more than $100,500 of Big Chem money. Representatives McLeod and Hernandez have the dubious honor of being among the top five recipients over that period, raking in $26,294 and $24,900, respectively. The chemical industry spent an average of $8,000 each on the remaining six ‘no’ votes.

Just what sort of profits is the chemical industry protecting? Although they don’t report on profits by product line, Albemarle, Israel Chemicals, Chemtura, and Tosoh saw record earnings in 2011. Albemarle grew revenue by 21% over 2010 to $2.9 billion. Through the third quarter last year, Israel Chemicals delivered $1.1 billion net profit to shareholders. In 2011, Chemtura boasted it continued “the trend of strong year-over-year improvement.” Tosoh announced its consolidated net sales from the 2011 fiscal year were up 8.9% to $8.2 billion. Flame retardants represent a fraction of their profits, but Ceresana Research published a market research study in July 2011 on projected demand for flame retardants. Things look rosy for the $4.6 billion industry; global revenues are expected to reach $5.8 billion by 2018.

As Professor Lessig notes, the great threat to the US republic is transparent to all and drawing democracy away from the will of the people. In California, the engine of influence is fueled by manufacturers of toxic flame retardants. Dr. Arlene Blum, UC Berkeley chemist and executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute, calls flame retardants the asbestos of our time. We needn’t make a false choice between toxic-free homes and fire safety. Indeed, we can have both, but we must reverse the influence of a tsunami of toxic political money first. We may have to tell Big Chem to do business by business means, not political ones.

Valerie Pacino is a Sightline Intern, a Master of Public Health student, and a frustrated couch potato.

Eric dP:

My top recommendation this week is the Boston Globe’s first-rate photo essay on the global coal industry.

I got some laughs from Local Brew’s comedy series. (The snowmadgeddon piece is the best one.)

And with a tip o’ the hat to former Sightline intern Matt Schoellhamer, I note that NBA superstar Lebron James could bring some high-wattage star power to bike commuting. As Matt points out, given the right incentives, even a highly recognizable man, worth something like $120 million, will ride his bike 40 minutes to work once in a while.

Nicole:

Much of the national conversation I’ve heard around our economic health revolves around arguments about shortsighted theory, or the woes of cities and states that are just now buckling under hefty budget cuts and deficits. Louis Ferleger reminds us that, lo, many communities in the United States have been in decline, even for the past 20 years. It’s a solid article that goes into the numbers, limits of the research, implications for the future and, of course, possible solutions for restoring America’s dead zones.

Alan:

Adam Gopnik takes an initially unsettling but ultimately hopeful look at mass incarceration in the United States. The United States’ criminal justice system now ensnares more people than did Stalin’s Gulag, and for black men who lack a highschool diploma, prison is the dominant institution in life. The scale of barbarity conducted in our names is sickening. That’s the unsettling part. The hopeful part is that both Left and Right appear to be mistaken in their assumption that the solutions to crime are deep and structural. Solutions appear to be modest interventions that make crime less convenient to commit. One upshot of this argument is that we should decriminalize marijuana, re-empower judges to use their judgment, and let a lot of people out of prison.

Purely for your aesthetic enjoyment, there’s this little instructional video on how the Dutch ride double on their bikes.

Anna:

Yes! Magazine brings us 7 tools to shut down the “corporatocracy.” Here are a couple spoilers: We can get our governments to quit banking with Bank of America and Chase, and start our own state banks—14 states, including California and Washington, are considering such a move. And…Call for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United, corporate personhood, and the unfounded notion that money is the same thing as speech. So far, Los Angeles, New York City, and about 50 other towns and cities have already done so.

Ruy Teixeira of Center for American Progress looks at a just-released poll showing that Americans think wealthy citizens should pay their fair share.

They can say what they want about “Obamacare” but there’s some reform on the horizon that looks awfully good to me. For one thing, how about the end of health insurance companies entirely by 2020? (I say good riddance!) And in their place, “accountable care organizations” that, as this NYT “opinionator” predicts, will effectively shift the focus of medicine away from simply treating sickness (and making astronomical profits for insurance companies) and toward prevention and actually keeping people healthy—not to mention getting their medical visits covered (instead of dodging payments and forcing people to forgo necessary care).

Clark:

Researchers look at the psychology (and evolution) of disgust. There’s a welter of new data on disgust, since it’s “easier to elicit in an ethical manner than anger or fear. You don’t have to insult someone or make anyone afraid for his or her life — a bad smell will do the trick.” Interestingly, some research suggests that political conservatives are more prone to sensations of disgust, particularly around sex, than political liberals. And as with any emerging field of research, disgust has spawned a host of conflicting theories and taxonomies: there are either three, seven, or nine different categories of disgust reactions, depending on who you believe.

Infographic: Can Twitter help create smarter traffic routes?  Some genius has used geotagged tweets to show the movement of people through New York, San Francisco, and LA.  It shows a virtual “desire path” through the cities — the routes they actually take, rather than the ones that city planners intended them to.

And in case you hadn’t heard about desire paths (I hadn’t), here’s Wikipedia:

A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand…

…The path of Interstate 95 between the cities of Boston and Providence in the USA is said to have originated as a desire line in the form of a trail followed by 17th century Native Americans, which subsequently became a primitive turnpike and eventually a superhighway.

Eric H

I’ve been following the Susan G. Komen debacle closely, not just because of the implications for women’s basic health care, but as an amazing case study in social media failure. After days of silence and one-note replies to the issue, Komen reversed the decision to strip Planned Parenthood of grant funding—but not in time to stop some serious damage to its brand.

Eric Jaffe, over at Atlantic Cities, sums up new research on the gender imbalance of transit planning.

Finally, here’s a beautiful time lapse video of Yosemite:

Gracey, Morguefile.com.

My motivations for resolving to buy nothing new in 2012 are numerous, but chief among them is the desire to save money. It’s a point I want to stress because saving money appeals to just about everybody.

Unlike cutting costs, though, efforts to live more sustainably have the potential to alienate some people. And while I hope my ‘year of nothing new’ will cut my family’s climate impact, I fear experiments like mine can be easily dismissed or derided as just that much more predictable, tree-hugging pretentiousness.

I’d like to avoid that stereotype here. Because saving money is everybody’s thing—and in many cases, the money-saving choice happens to be climate-friendly too.

(The stereotype is tough to shirk; I’ve already been the butt of plenty of jokes from within my liberal Seattle milieu about going without toilet paper for a year—no pun intended. And, for the record I’m not giving it up.)

For now, I’m going to focus on the money—noting where climate-friendly is a happy accident.

One month in, the ‘no-new’ experiment is making me more conscious about where all my money goes—if not toward new stuff, where else? So, articles about how Americans spend (or waste) money are catching my eye.

Commutes, Lattes, & Lunches

Turns out there are some big costs associated with working Americans’ daily grind (sorry for another pun there).

Did you know that those of us who buy coffee regularly on workdays (half the workforce) shell out more than $20 a week on it—or around $1,000 a year?

Those of us who buy lunch on work days rather than making it at home (two thirds of Americans) spend an average of $37 a week—or nearly $2,000 a year. (Younger professionals (18-34) spend even more—$44.78 per week!)

All this according to Accounting Principals’ latest Workonomix survey (pdf).

Getting to work, of course, drains our pocketbooks too.

Time Magazine‘s Moneyland looks at gasoline and car costs.  “In 2011, the average household spent $4,155 on gasoline. That’s an all-time high, as was the year’s average price for a gallon of regular: $3.53. A 2011 AAA study (pdf) estimates that, after accounting for insurance, gas, depreciation, and other expenses, the average car that’s driven 15,000 miles per year costs $8,776 annually.”

I haven’t figured out a way to give up “new” fuel entirely, but the good news is that cheaper ways to commute—transit, carpool, bike, walk, tele-commute—are usually easier on the climate than the expensive single occupancy car commute.

Coffee and lunch aren’t necessarily the worst carbon hogs, at least in the scheme of things. It depends a lot on what you eat for lunch—beef and dairy are big carbon producers—and how the food is packaged. Likewise, it’s the milk we put in coffee that creates the significant climate-warming emissions. (And, coffee production takes other environmental tolls.) No big surprise that meat-heavy lunch options as well as the fancy coffee drinks with lots of milk are usually more expensive.

I’m not giving up coffee anytime soon nor lunch, but the lesson here is that our food and beverage choices do matter, just as our transportation choices do—to our pocketbook and for protecting the climate.

Unnecessary Splurges?

The Workonomix survey also found that, like me, lots of working Americans yearn to save money this year. The top goals are paying down credit card debt (43%), bringing lunch to work instead of buying it (35%), and cutting down on non-essential shopping (33%).

The key word here is “non-essential.” Time Magazine Moneyland uncovers some surprising places where Americans really splurge, sometimes because there’s no choice, but often quite unnecessarily:

Christmas: “The average American shopper spent a bit over $700 on holiday gifts and purchases. The average rich American, mind you, dropped closer to $2,300 on gifts during the 2011 holidays.”

I love Christmas, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like it’s become overly commercialized. In my book, less stuff doesn’t equal less joy, but it does equal less carbon, less clutter, and less waste.

Pets: “According to the American Pet Products Association, the average dog owner spends $1,542 annually [on their pet], while the average cat owner spends $1,183.” Last year, Americans planned to spend $300 million to dress pets up for Halloween. (Total spending on Halloween—for pets and people—is estimated at $7 billion.)

On climate—what can I say? If you insist on stripping your dog or cat of his last shreds of dignity, make a costume from stuff you already own!

Cell Phones: “According to one recent estimate, the average cell phone costs $605.95 annually. That’s the total for recurring monthly charges, taxes, overages, and such, and that doesn’t include the cost of the phone itself. And that’s for an average cell phone, not a smartphone. The costs related to using an iPhone can easily top $1,900 per year.”

There’s an awesome series in The Guardian on the carbon footprint of everyday stuff. Newspaper, cup of coffee, your mortgage, a banana, The World Cup…and using a cell phone. Interestingly, “the footprint of your mobile phone use is overwhelmingly determined by the simple question of how often you use it.” It turns out the energy required to transmit your calls across the network is about three times that of the manufacturing and phone operating electricity put together.

Electricity: Rates have simply gone up. But in addition, due at least in part to the rise in gadget use—as well as rising house sizes and increased number of outlets in homes (and in spite of more efficient appliances), “the average US household paid $1,419 for electricity in 2010, up about $300 from five years prior.”

We don’t have the option of using NO electricity, but we can certainly cut waste. The good news here is that home energy upgrades—both big and small—that cut our electricity waste are big money savers and big carbon cutters. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently said that insulation, caulking and weather stripping upgrades make a real difference during hard times, lowering energy bills. “On average,” he said, “families save more than $400 on their heating and cooling bills alone during the first year after a home is weatherized.”

Considering that the United States’ 114 million households and more than 4.7 million commercial buildings consume more energy than the transportation or industry sectors, accounting for nearly 40 percent of total U.S. energy use (pdf),  simple, low-tech fixes that make our homes cozier and cheaper to live in also represent huge potential for cutting climate-warming emissions (and a chance to create local jobs in the bargain).

Shoes: “Estimates for what the average woman (no numbers for men) spends on shoes range from $370 per year ($16,410 over 67 years), up to $25,000 over a lifetime.”

Like Christmas and pets, I like shoes—a lot. But I’m not buying any new ones this year. And with shoes, the chief carbon culprit isn’t shipping or anything like that. It’s leather. Cows are a huge source of emissions.

Finally, a CNN Money News list of the top avoidable ways Americans waste their money. The surprises here: People pay a lot of unnecessary ATM fees (around $500/year). We buy gym memberships and Woot or Groupon-type “daily deals” and then never use them (By one estimate, 20% of all “online daily deals” go unused. That’s a whopping $532 million wasted a year!!). We eat out a lot ($2,400/year), and some of us smoke a lot of cigarettes (Americans spend $80 billion on cigarettes per year—an average smoker spends $280/month). We are prone to “impulse buys”—online and via TV (the infomercial industry brings in a whopping $400 billion a year.)

The carbon footprints of these “wasteful” expenses vary. It takes lots of energy to make stuff. Some kinds of food and drink are energy hogs. Services are usually less energy intensive.

Of course, waste is often subjective. I personally believe money spent on cigarettes, or most impulse buys is a waste (and I’ve wasted my share on unused gym memberships and Groupons too), but I think a nice meal out is money well spent. Since becoming a parent, it’s also worth it to me to buy healthy, safe food—organic when I can—even though it’s often more expensive.

Everybody’s different.

The takeaway: It’s in our prioritizing that we can shift toward more thrifty living and more sustainable spending too.

Prioritize & “Conservo”

Prioritizing to save money is WAY easier than prioritizing to cut carbon impacts. As TerraPass points out, “Calculating carbon emissions is complicated business, and it turns out that environmental impacts are spread widely throughout our integrated economy, often hiding in unexpected places. One of the reasons that putting a price on carbon remains an important policy goal is that it’s otherwise quite hard to know what part of the problem to attack. When carbon carries a price, the issue suddenly becomes a lot more tractable.”

So, my point here is not that everyone should start religiously tracking their emissions or that they should feel bad when they buy their dog a new toy or get themselves a new pair of shoes. My point is that saving dough often means cutting carbon too.

A price on carbon would help us prioritize what to buy. In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal puts it best: “The easiest way to cut carbon emissions may be to buy less of a product.”

At the risk of ending on a note that sounds a bit like the environmentalist stereotype I’m trying to avoid, I will say that one beautiful thing about the idea of saving money and cutting waste is that it may be an important place where conservatives and conservationists line up together behind their shared Latin root: conservo, to save, keep, hold, guard, protect.

* There are differing estimates of the costs of commuting. A Bundle.com report from 2010, for example, estimated that the most expensive US commutes were only $700 or $800 for gas and auto expenses annually.

In the months since, a bill has emerged in Olympia, championed by State Representative Cindy Ryu and a host of co-sponsors. On Monday, the state house voted unanimously to pass the bill. King5 did a segment on it, featuring Sightline’s Alan Durning:

Next up, the bill faces the state senate, where a similar bill got caught in a committee last year. Let’s hope good sense prevails this year.