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Hm. Just days after my post on the global warming impacts of highway widening, BC premier Gordon Campbell comes along to prove why this issue is so ripe. From a Vancouver Sun article on the premier’s otherwise quite nifty global warming policy: Campbell…continued to defend the Gateway project, which will twin the Port Mann bridge, saying that it will reduce emissions and make room for rapid-bus services along the highway....

Meet Justin our new research intern. He recently moved to Capitol Hill, in Seattle, from Corvallis, Oregon, where he got a Master’s Degree studying the effects of climate change on forest productivity, and where he tried to spend as much time outdoors as possible.  There has already been a mess of state climate legislation passed in Cascadia during 2007. But who has the time to make sense of all those...

As Kristin notes below, Vancouver Sun let Candadian eco-guru David Suzuki guest-edit an issue today. There’s lots of good stuff in there, but I think my favorite article in the day’s paper was this interview with UBC prof. Bill Rees—perhaps because his point of view reinforces my own biases: “It’s very difficult for a person living in a North American city to have a sound lifestyle, because the context in...

A couple of notable news stories BC got lost in the shuffle of a busy week. First up, there’s this news from the Vancouver Sun: apparently, some regional planners are taking a skeptical look at the so-called Gateway Program, which would expand the highway system in the lower mainland. According to UBC professor William Rees, the project will foster low-density suburban development—an increasingly dicey prospect in an era of rising...

How much of a pay cut would you be willing to accept to take a more satisfying job? Via Kevin Drum, I see that UBC professors John Helliwell and Haifang Huang have tried to put a number on how much different kinds of job satisfaction are worth in cold, hard cash. The results (cribbed from this summary at MSNBC): Increased trust in your employer is worth a 36 percent pay...

The best post-mortem of Tuesday’s BC provincial election in at The Tyee.

Oh well:  it seems that BC voters narrowly rejected the Single Transferable Vote on yesterday’s ballot.  I guess I wasn’t persuasive enough. Update:  Seth Zuckerman points out that STV isn’t dead yet: 57% of voters favored the system, and BC Premier Gordon Campbell says he’s interested in bringing the issue to a vote in the legislature.

You can’t walk down the street anymore without seeing folks chatting on their cell phones. Wireless phones are everywhere and have dramatically altered our public spaces, filling them with unprecedented levels of noise, as one columnist has remarked. They’re also filling something else: our desk drawers and landfills. An estimated 500 million unused models are floating around, with about 130 million more added every year. This is disturbing news considering...

An article in today’s Vancouver Sun (subscription required) reports on a new study showing that, in neighborhoods that are designed to make walking convenient, people do, in fact, walk more.  To wit: People who lived the most walkable neighborhoods were 2.4 times as likely to walk for 30 minutes or more than those who lived in the least walkable communities. The study’s authors, led by UBC professor Lawrence Frank, defined...

This post is for American Cascadians. It explains the Canadian elections. Canada has a parliamentary system of government: whichever party wins the most seats gets to run the government, choose the prime minister, form the cabinet, introduce the budget, and so on. The short synopsis of yesterday’s elections is: little changed. The same center-left party—the Liberals—retained power in Ottawa. But a better-informed summary would be that Canada shifted to the...