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We’ve been watching the Mountain Pine Beetle for a while as it’s feasted upon the pine forests of British Columbia, infecting nearly 710 million cubic meters of the “1.35 billion cubic meters of saleable pine in the province (CBC News).” It is difficult to imagine that a beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, can cause so much damage.  Then again, when that beetle has over a trillion friends,...

The New York Times has some moderately disturbing—if unsurprising—news about the widening health gap between rich and poor in the US. New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades… In 1980-82 … people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most...

Briefly noted:  some anecdotal evidence that truckers are responding to rising fuel prices by slowing down. Coast-to-coast trucker Lorraine Dawson says fellow drivers used to call her “Lead Foot Lorraine.” But with diesel fuel around $4 a gallon, she and other big-rig drivers have backed off their accelerators to conserve fuel…. Dawson said she’s cut her speed by five to 10 miles per hour to save money for her company....

British Columbia will exempt car sharing from car-rental tax—a decision announced in the same provincial budget that introduced the world’s most comprehensive carbon tax shift. Washington, however, will not. Discussion in Olympiaon the issue stalled this year. So Washington car-share members are still paying double taxes: sales tax and car-rental tax. It’s disappointing, considering that the legislature passed a law requiring steep reductions in both greenhouse gas emissions and driving...

Via Oregon Public Broadcasting, a story that could warm even Oscar’s heart.  Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been dumpster-diving into the data (pdf link) and concluded that the future of home-grown biofuels could be a bunch of garbage.  Literally. You see, there’s a steady stream of solid waste coming out of the Northwest’s cities and suburbs. And right now, municipalities pay quite a bit to dispose of...

The gist: Drew Westen has said, “Wherever you’re heading, ideas provide the roadmap, but emotions provide the fuel.” In his acclaimed new book, The Political Brain, Westen shows, through careful scientific observation, that emotion is one of the most potent sources of motivation that drives human behavior (there’s a reason they share their Latin root). “[The brain] is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures,...

Folks in the Seattle area are riding the bus and light rail in record numbers, according to a new study by the American Public Transportation Association, a pro-transit group. The city saw the highest increase in bus usage of any U.S. city this year. Read the study here. So what’s new about your daily NW news service? Take a look. We have a new scannable front page of the most...

British Columbia’s bombshell announcement of a carbon tax shift last month made me want some context. Here’s a rundown of other carbon taxes elsewhere in the world. As I noted, none of them is as consistent and comprehensive as BC’s, though some do have higher tax rates. In most cases, these levies came in tax shifts that reduced payroll taxes, business taxes, or other energy taxes. BC’s starts at Cdn$10...

If you’ve made your way here from Tidepool or the Daily Score blog, you’ve noticed some big changes. Yep, Sightline’s news service and blog have moved in together—onto this site, which we’ve been working on for a while now! You can read more about it in this letter from editor Kristin Kolb. We’ll let you in on more of the fabulous new features later, but here are a couple of...

About a year ago, I was cautiously bullish on British supermarket giant Tesco‘s pledge to start putting carbon labels on its food. But I think that their progress so far—which I’ll get to in a minute—suggests an important lesson about the policy risks of treating a fuzzy exercise as if it were completely reliable. Tesco’s idea was that the chain and its suppliers would pay for objective, comprehensive reviews of...