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Like everyone else watching the stock market, I’m having that scary weightless feeling. It’s the same feeling I had when, as a kid, I took a dare to jump off a 55-foot cliff into Lake Chelan. Uh-oh, it’s a long way down. If there was ever a day to watch the market, it was today. (And tomorrow too, probably). But something always grates on me. We obsess over the volatilities of the stock...

People often ask me, “Is your family still car-less?” I myself am still car-less, but the family has changed. Amy and I have separated, undone our vows, and revised our coupledom into a parenting partnership. The divorce paperwork is underway. Don’t worry: I’m not going to regale you with the emotional tale. This isn’t that kind of blog. Instead, I’m going to do what the Daily Score does best: wonk...

Update: We now have all of Sightline’s Western Climate Initiative work compiled in one handy page. The Western Climate Initiative—North America’s biggest cap-and-trade system — just released its final proposal: here. This is historic stuff. The proposal leaves room for improvement — I’ll get to that in a minute — but let’s take note of where we are. This will be the first major climate policy to tackle all the principle sources of climate...

Sightline’s fall fund drive is on! For the next two weeks we’re asking our friends, readers (that’s you), and subscribers to make a financial contribution to support our work. It’s like an NPR pledge drive. After all, Sightline is pretty similar to NPR…we provide news and information, and we also depend on our readers to make it possible. Can you help? Please make a secure online gift here. Your gift...

Starting next year, Seattle will have a new 20 cent fee on grocery sacks. Portland is thinking about following suit. So is the Vancouver, BC region. But as the Seattle P-Ireported this morning, the American Chemistry Council (aka the plastics industry) has spent more than $180,000 to put Seattle’s measure before voters. Clearly, they want to kill these bag fees before they spread. So much so, in fact, that they dropped...

This just cheeses me off.  Yesterday, the US government released figures showing that GDP grew at an annualized pace of 3.3%.  The implicit message:  Yippee, we’re not in a recession! The press, of course, ate it up.  AP crowed:  “The U.S. economy grew in the spring at a 3.3 percent pace. The best gross domestic product results in nearly a year beat Wall Street’s expectations.”  The Voice of America’s headline trumpeted:...

This is the sixth in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative—the West’s regional cap-and-trade system. Although there is tremendous urgency to reducing climate pollution in the near-term, it can be time-consuming to fire up a cap and trade system. The Western Climate Initiative is no exception. Policymakers have to sort out a number of details—about scope, offsets, reporting protocols, allowance distribution, reduction...

This is the third in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative—the West’s regional cap-and-trade system. One of the core questions in cap and trade—really, for any regulatory system—is who, exactly, participates. Ideally, the program would include as many sources of climate pollution as possible without creating an administrative nightmare. (In fact, administrative simplicity is one of the main reasons...

Here’s the word from the US Department of Transportation: [Vehicle travel] on all public roads for May 2008 fell 3.7 percent as compared with May 2007 travel…marking a decline of 29.8 billion miles traveled in the first five months of 2008 than the same period a year earlier. This continues a seven-month trend that amounts to 40.5 billion fewer miles traveled between November 2007 and May 2008 than the same...

Last week, we got proof-positive that wild wolves are back in Washington. An animal that was struck and killed on a road in northeast Washington was genetically confirmed to be a wolf, not a wolf-dog hybrid. A good article in the Spokane Spokesman-Review provides some context: Numerous reports of wolves seen or photographed in remote parts of northeast Washington in recent years suggest the animals are dispersing from Idaho, Montana...