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To mark the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, I’m trotting out some maps I made a while back. This one has states labelled with the names of countries that are their greenhouse gas equivalents. In other words, Oregon is responsible for the same level of climate emissions as Ireland; Wyoming is the greenhouse gas equivalent of Vietnam, and so on. Want to see the whole thing? Bigger versions are here. And here’s another slice...

Eric’s take on Jim Hansen’s opposition to cap and trade, below, is exactly right.  Hansen is a renowned NASA climate scientist.  But on climate policy, he’s just lost in space.  Now, I’m not going to call Hansen’s support for carbon taxes misguided.  Remember, we LIKE carbon taxes. We’ve given BC’s pathbreaking carbon tax lots of sloppy wet kisses over the years. Instead, what’s misguided is Hansen’s belief that cap and...

Danny Wesneat at the Seattle Times ($10 an hour with 2 kids? IRS pounces) has found a truly compelling story about poverty and how society and government often fail to understand and adequately measure poverty. Westneat writes about a  woman with two kids making ends meet in Seattle on $18,992 a year. Impossible, the IRS figured, given what it actually costs a family to live in the city. So they...

When world leaders get together in Copenhagen, Denmark, next week to discuss climate change, they will be addressing a concern that, as the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey finds, is widely shared throughout much of the world. And all eyes will be on Barack Obama. Around the world there are high hopes that he will “get the U.S. to take significant measures to control global climate change.” The Pew survey...

One salmon skitters across the water doing the “Jesus walk” before succumbing to a premature death. Another swims in dazed circles near the water’s surface then limply drifts downstream. Still another lies on its side, no longer swimming, mouth gaping open and shut and fins splayed out. All are the likely victims of stormwater pollution. The coho were captured in videos collected by the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, a Seattle...

You hear versions of it all the time from urban-skepticalfolks: that cities are losing their children. The implication usually seems to be that the little tykes are driven out by condos or light rail or whatever the outrage du jour is—and that the absence of children denotes some sickness at the heart of new urbanism. But here’s the thing: it’s not true. Or, at least it’s not true in the Northwest. Take a...

How are we doing? What issues are important to you? How could we do our job better? Once a year, we ask our readers to take a quick 10-15 minute survey about our work. We appreciate your feedback year ’round, but this survey plays a particularly important role in guiding our work for the upcoming year. Please take 10 minutes today and fill out our annual survey. We’ll even sweeten...

We’ve known for a long time that bisphenol-A (BPA) is bad for us. Study after study shows the ill-effects of this widely-used industrial chemical on our bodies—and in particular, on developing babies’ bodies. The list is pretty sobering: BPA’s been linked to breast cancer in women, brain damage in children, obesity, heart disease, diabetes… Two new studies add to the litany: One study suggests that BPA, may cause sexual dysfunction...

To our BC readers, we realize this Thanksgiving post comes a month late. But as those of us below the 49th parallel make our holiday shopping lists, a study on salmon shows that many of our mental maps about how we eat and buy food—organic vs. conventional, fresh vs. wild—are really too simple. The conclusion that’s grabbing headlines is that frozen salmon is generally better for the climate than fresh...

Contrary to claims that cap and trade is untested or uproven,  there are a half dozen or so operational cap-and-trade programs already functioning in the United States. Of these, the most significant are the Acid Rain Program and the NOx Budget Trading Program. Both have large vibrant trading markets, both have been extremely successful in achieving environmental aims, and neither has evidenced manipulation or gaming. The Acid Rain Program has...