Tmyers

Yesterday the Governor's climate bill, which calls for a "sustainable revolution," passed to much fanfare from the environmental community in Seattle. Today, that revolution is imperiled...and it is all the fault of an abandoned Denny's in Ballard.

Days after Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels declared that Seattle would become the "green building capital" of the country, Seattle has protected a decidedly un-green building. Most ironic is that the building was going to be demolished to make way for high-density housing, known as condominiums.

The Governor's Climate Advisory Team's Interim Report calls for such increased density, noting that "Variants on the smart growth concept exist, but many call for clustering living units with easy access (often walking distance) to shops, schools, and entertainment and recreational facilities..." Instead of building housing in the middle of Ballard, the City of Seattle has brazenly ignored the threat from climate change and taken steps that require more housing to be built outside the city requiring long commutes and more CO2 emissions.

Nobody said the revolution would be easy.

An "old saw" is a hackneyed or tired bit of wisdom that seems true but is really quite useless. One such old saw is the claim that we are destroying "old-growth forests" as a justification for policies of one sort or another.

Last week the green-building coordinator at the Department of Ecology, Rachael Jamison, used this justification to argue for using Forest Stewardship Council certified timber in green buildings. FSC was created by environmental activists to encourage companies to use more restrictive standards when harvesting. She says green buildings that use FSC can "stimulate the growth of a new market within Washington's timber industry."

Chief among the reasons to use FSC certified wood is, in her words, that harvests following its rules "Do not contribute to the destruction of old-growth forests." Whenever I see this claim, it is very clear to me that the person making the claim knows very little about forestry in Washington.

The understandable reason people express concern about old growth is that there is very little left. The creatures that rely on old growth forests have difficulty adapting to other types of forest habitat.

But applying the simple rules of supply and demand also says that when something is scarce, like old growth timber, it is also very expensive. A builder looking to use old growth for construction would be needlessly increasing their costs with little, if any, benefit in quality. In fact, there isn't a single major mill in Washington state that can even handle the large logs that come from such forests anymore.

I wanted to demonstrate how expensive it would be to use old growth as compared to standard timber. Currently, timber is selling at about $250 per thousand board feet. When I went to find out how much it would cost to use old growth, however, I hit a wall. I called two people who routinely sell timber in Washington state and neither of them even knew where I could get such information. We simply don't harvest old growth in Washington under FSC rules or any  other set of rules.

This isn't the first time we've taken Rachael Jamison to task for inaccurate claims. Relying on tired, old saws about old growth harvesting to justify policies demonstrates that they don't know much about the area they are looking to regulate and policies justified on that basis are likely to be costly and ineffective.

Global warming activists often refer to the scientific "consensus" on climate change as a justification for the costly government programs they advocate. The science, however, is still evolving, as is evidenced by this new study done by NOAA indicating that climate change may actually reduce the severity of hurricanes.

But even if there isn't a scientific consensus on the impacts of climate change, K.C. Golden of Climate Solutions and a member of the Governor's Climate Advisory Team cited another group whose testimony persuaded him when speaking to the State Senate last week.

"...our federal government has not stepped up and provided very satisfying answers to those questions. I was reminded as we just heard the companion bill in the House when I heard the voices of the [children] who came up insisting on solutions in a very clear voice, it isn't right that the federal government hasn't stepped up and offered solutions."

At the next legislative hearing on climate change, expect to see fewer NOAA scientists testifying and more children.

We sent in our comments on the Washington State Climate Advisory Team's draft recommendations today. We will post a link to the complete comments tomorrow.

One thing we did not comment on, but deserves attention are the CAT's comments about the impact on transportation projects on jobs. They argue that "Transit capital investment is a significant source of job creation. This analysis indicates that in the year following the investment 314 jobs are created for each $10 million invested in transit capital funding."

The Seattle Times, provides a different, refreshing, take today. Regarding the President's plan to offer $500 checks, they say "In fact, the economy is not a mechanism operated by the president. It is all of us, earning, spending, saving and investing. ... These problems are not going to be fixed with $500 checks. They will be fixed by people cutting their losses, replenishing their savings, adjusting their attitudes about risk and making better decisions."

While we can debate the merits of the stimulus package, it is nice that the Times states clearly who really makes a difference in the economy. In the short-term these checks may help, but it may add to the debt if government spending does not decline.

Similarly, spending money on transit to "create" jobs doesn't really do that. It simply takes money from people who might have invested more efficiently elsewhere and steers it to transit. Thus, the CAT and others who make these claims, count the jobs created but ignore the jobs lost elsewhere.

In this way, stimulus checks without spending reductions and government spending are similar. Both take money from people in the form of taxes and then put it back into the economy in the form of rebates or government spending. Rebates are better because they go where the economy needs it most (i.e. where demand is high) whereas government spending goes where politicians decide.

So, when the Climate Advisory Team or others make the claim that increased government spending will "create" jobs, we hope the Seattle Times will remind them that the economy is not operated by government, but by all of us earning, saving, spending and investing.

Reporting on yesterday's testimony of the Climate Advisory Team in Olympia, the Vancouver Columbian reports that when global warming hits, "A possibility that residents of the Evergreen State might one day need to seek refuge at 'public cooling centers' from heat waves like the one that took more than 30,000 lives in Europe in 2003."

Here, from Wikipedia, is a discussion of the causes of the deaths in France, which account for half of the total number and was hardest hit:

"The administration of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin laid the blame on: the 35-hour workweek, which affected the amount of time doctors could work; family practitioners vacationing in August (Many companies traditionally closed in August, so people had no choice about when to vacation. Family doctors were still in the habit of vacationing at the same time); families who had left their elderly behind without caring for them; The opposition as well as many of the editorials of the local press have blamed the administration. Many blamed Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei for failing to return from his vacation when the heat wave became serious, and his aides for blocking emergency measures in public hospitals (such as the recalling of physicians). A particularly vocal!
critic was Dr Patrick Pelloux, head of the union of emergency physicians, who blamed the Raffarin administration for ignoring warnings from health and emergency professionals and trying to minimize the crisis."

Temperatures reached 104 F. It is certainly clear that the French health system contributed seriously to the problem. But the implication is that some other cause was responsible for the death. Here (with the benefit of the letters R, S, T, L, N and A) is a hint about what politicians thousands of miles away are now blaming in order to justify an expensive and ineffective raft of regulations: _ L _ _ A L   _ A R _ _ N _.

Today the Senate Natural Resources, Ocean and Recreation committee met in Olympia to discuss the role timber harvesting played in causing the recent Chehalis floods. The Seattle Times wrote two stories in December making this link and now the legislature is looking at the issue. Three things stand out.

First, state climatologist Phil Mote testified about the amount of rain during the storm. Weyerhaeuser has rain gauges indicating more than 10 inches of rain in some areas. National Weather Service data indicated something similar. Mote countered that his data says it was more like 3 inches and it was not a "top three" rain event. Actually, he admitted, he only has limited data. The complete data won't come to him for a while because the volunteer monitors send the data to the National Climatic Data Center and then they send the data to him after a period of time. He also noted that the Centralia rain gauge had a tree over it which would decrease the amount of rain falling in the gauge and, therefore, was unreliable.

Thus he is unclear what the truth is. But, since he was there, he felt like drawing some conclusions. The amount of rain that fell during the storm, he argued, was unremarkable, therefore any impacts must be human caused, like diking or timber harvest.

Well, that isn't exactly true either. He did note that three of the highest rainfall totals in the area have occurred since 1990 and that rain events of 3-4 inches, like this one, were increasing. So the rainfall was higher than usual...and the cause is global warming.

So was this rainfall unusual? According to Phil Mote:

• No, the timber harvests caused the floods.
• Yes, global warming caused more rain and the floods.
• Or something.

Later came UW Geologist David Montgomery. He presented information about the unstable nature of the land in the area and showed modeling indicating that part of the timber harvest featured in the Seattle Times should not have been logged. He did not, however, overlay the photo with the actual location of the landslides with his modeling. He told me that he didn't get a chance to because he had only been invited two days prior and he had to rush to put the presentation together.

It appeared that at least one of the slides on the harvest was in an area his model indicated was suitable for logging (an area he identified as unsuitable was left unlogged, but a slide occurred anyway). If his model showed that the landslide occurred in an area acceptable for harvest, it would seem to be further testimony to the ferocity of the storm.

Most telling was his closing comment. He lamented the amount of harvesting and development, arguing that they caused landslides and flooding. Unfortunately, he said, these events don't happen often enough to force us to change our ways. Perhaps I am missing something here, but isn't the goal that these things don't happen very often? A lot of statistics were thrown around during the hearing, but this was the only indication of how often these slides occur, which is to say, not very often.

Lastly, it was interesting that the committee invited a UW climatologist, a UW geologist but not a UW forester or anyone from the UW College of Forest Resources. Perhaps they were invited but could not attend. It would have been nice to hear from the one department at the University who spend their whole time working on these very issues.