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Who’s to blame for climate change? The author of a study published in Environment and Urbanization take on the role of detective trying to find who is releasing the emissions creating climate change. Their hope is to clear cities as the prime suspect. After comparing existing inventories of emissions at the national and city level the author concludes that cities aren’t to blame.  The study compares findings from 11 different...

Every year about this time, I open my mailbox to find the course catalogue from the North Cascades Institute. And every year, a little piece of me dies when I begin reading about the things that, in all likelihood, I won’t be doing. I won’t be watching the night sky in the high desert. I won’t be learning about local food by touring Skagit Valley farms. And I won’t  be reading Jack Kerouac at a mountaintop fire...

If you want to lose weight, move closer to your food: A new study from the University of British Columbia shows people who live within a kilometre of a grocery store are half as likely to be overweight, compared to those living in neighbourhoods without grocery stores. But the study’s author, the esteemed Larry Frank, notes that grocery stores are only part of the story. “It’s a marker for other...

It seems like every major Northwest city has one: a big costly road-expansion project. Seattle has the 520 floating bridge replacement (estimated at maybe $6 billion); Portland has the Columbia River Crossing (pegged at around $4 billion); and Vancouver has the Port Mann Bridge ($3.1 billion). Each city is talking about steep price tags for dubious projects. These are projects that are likely to increase sprawl and driving—and that may...

Over the last couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the state of climate policy in the Northwest. Washington’s citizen-backed renewable energy standard is in jeopardy and neither Oregon nor Washington appears close to implementing the Western Climate Initiative. Even British Columbia’s pioneering carbon tax is taking fire. Freak out! Everybody panic! Or not. If you take a sober look at regional climate policy, you’ll see that...

This is cool—the city of Seattle is expanding the option for homeowners to build “backyard cottages.” It’s a nifty idea, for lots of reasons.  For some homeowners, the little homes provide a source of rental income.  For others, they offer an opportunity to have family live nearby, but with a bit of independence.  For renters, they provide some sorely needed options for affordable housing.  They’re unobtrusive—which means that they don’t...

CBO said it, Dave Roberts and Matt Yglesias said it, and I’ll say it too: If we establish a carbon cap, giving away free carbon permits to big carbon emitters will hurt the middle class and poor at the expense of the well-off. The chart below, from the Congressional Budget Office, shows the effects fairly clearly… The the bars to the left show what happens under a “Cap-and-Cashback” carbon policy—i.e.,...

Update 7/8/09: The second podcast in this series on putting a price on carbon is available. This year’s Cascadia Scorecard shows that the Northwest is falling short when it comes to curbing energy use. Our region’s slow to non-existent progress on reigning in energy consumption reveals the need to dramatically change the way we consume energy. This problem has led many to look for the next technological “silver bullet” that...

Update: A version of this post appeared in Crosscut on May 6, 2009. In a surprise move yesterday afternoon, Washington’s governor Gregoire signed into law a package of spending commitments for the federal stimulus dollars for transportation. Among the roughly $340 million in spending is about $71 million for freeway widening projects—and these are mystifying, to say the least. The $71 million will be used to add general purpose lanes along I-405...

Weird.  Back in 2007, the Puget Sound Regional Council reported that drive-alone car trips fellas a share of total travel between 1999 and 2006.  Over the same period, PSRC found, the share of trips taken in carpools and other high-occupancy vehicles stayed about the same. But just last month, they reported the reverse: from 1999 through 2006,  drive-alone car trips stayed flat, as a share of all trips, while carpooling...