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Update!—Location has been changed to a larger space. Please see below. *** Sightline Fellow Yoram Bauman is hosting the Northwest Carbon Pricing Conference. I’ll be speaking at it, but that’s not the main reason you should go. It’s going to be a good event because of what it’s not going to be: a line-up of the usual suspects. The speakers are a genuinely heterodox group of Northwest leaders who are...

John Horgan, a candidate to lead the BC New Democrats, is the first candidate for premier of BC to announce that he would expand the province’s best-in-the-world carbon tax shift. That’s good news. It’s also a relief to hear a New Democrat leadership candidate recant his prior opposition to the tax shift. In 2009, Dorgan followed the party’s cynical campaign strategy of carbon-tax demagoguery. It’s nice to see a mea...

According to this piece in the Vancouver Sun, British Columbia’s aspiring political leaders are mostly lining up in favor of an increase in the provincial minimum wage.  Which is perfectly reasonable: BC’s minimum wage hasn’t budged for almost a decade, and now stands far lower than that of any other Canadian province. (This fact sheet from the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives-BC has the details of BC’s minimum wage situation.) While...

Yesterday, Jen posted on getting the most bang for your buck in the produce section. By comparing the price-per-cup of various fruits and vegetables to their ANDI score, she arrived at a rough ranking of the best, cheapest sources to get your vitamins. (Note: neither of us is totally sold on the ANDI scoring method, but it at least provides some food for thought—pardon my pun.) She didn’t have time...

This morning, British Columbia’s Climate Minister John Yap and Washington’s Director of Ecology Ted Sturdevant signed a pair agreements on joint climate action. (Early media coverage here and here.) One agreement commits to mutually supporting efforts to move toward carbon neutral state/provincial governmental operations. The second agreement sets out a plan for working together to educate the public about climate impacts, particularly sea level rise, an area where BC and...

The mess being caused by polluted runoff in the Northwest isn’t letting up, and neither are supporters of a plan to pay for stormwater cleanup. Over a single rainy weekend this winter, Seattle Public Utilities got 700 calls about flooding and sent cleanup crews to 332 locations. In Port Angeles, the storm system was so overwhelmed after a December downpour that 15 million gallons of raw sewage and rainwater fouled...

This post originally appeared in the Daily Journal of Commerce’s blog SeattleScape. Let’s say you’re the mayor of a medium-sized city in Washington state —let’s call it Northlakeshoreline —and your city has a problem. The country’s economy is a mess, of course, and the closing of a large factory in your city hasn’t helped things locally. You’d like to be able to make some significant improvements in a part of...

Check out this map: Proposition 23—a cynical ploy by oil companies to gut California’s climate laws—got annihilated at the polls, losing by more than 22 points. But what’s really interesting is that voting “no” on Prop 23 was the single most popular thing on California’s ballot this year. It was defeated with more votes than were awarded to any other ballot initiative. And it was defeated with more votes than...

Sightline has heaped praise on BC’s carbon tax, just as you might expect from an office full of Canadaphiles. But there’s more to the story. While the province has led in some areas—namely, by putting a meaningful price on carbon emissions—it has fallen down in some other important ways. On that score, I highly recommend “BC’s Dishonesty on Climate Change,” by Mark Jaccard and Brad Griffin, which appeared in the...

Here’s a bit of interesting child-bearing news:  last year, and for the first time since 1930, 40-somethings in British Columbia were more likely to give birth than were teens. The chart to the right is drawn largely from data provided by the BC provincial statistics agency (see here for data since 1987).  And if you you look closely at the lower right, you’ll see that the pink line (teen birth...