Search Results
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New Analysis Proves Kalama Methanol Project is a Climate Disaster
If built, the Kalama methanol project would unleash a tsunami of fracking to supply all the gas the facility needs to make methanol.Read more » -
Alaska Finances: A Cautionary Tale
For those looking to understand the risks of hitching an economy to fossil fuels—and for those trying to determine how to manage a transition away from dirty energy—it’s instructive to examine the fiscal meltdown happening in Alaska in 2020.Read more » -
Things I Hope Never Come Back After the Pandemic #3: The Hegemony of Fossil Fuels
Sightline Institute executive director Alan Durning on the fossil fuel industry’s flagging hegemony and the impacts of #COVID-19: “Their economic power is crumbling. How soon will their political power follow?”Read more » -
Fossil Fuel Risk Bonding
It might seem logical that polluters would be expected pay for the damage they cause, but that is not always the case. Too often taxpayers are the ones who foot the bill for an accident while the company that caused it attempts to shirk responsibility by declaring bankruptcy or stalling with litigation.Read more » -
How Anchorage Ran A Safe, Smooth Pandemic Election
Anchorage’s Vote By Mail system protected voters’ health during the COVID-19 pandemic and kept turnout high.Read more » -
How the Market Collapse is Impacting Northwest Fossil Fuel Companies
Global markets are in a steep week-and-half long slide, with major US indices plummeting during some of the worst sell-offs in history. Fossil fuel companies felt the greatest financial pain when two shocks hit almost simultaneously: worldwide fears of the coronavirus leading to reduced consumer demand and a price war between major oil-producing countries. It is too early to say what any of this will mean for the Northwest’s fossil...Read more » -
Eliminate the Senate!
Editor’s note, 2/24/20: Last summer, we wrote about a handful of Oregon Republicans leaving the statehouse—and the state—to thwart progress on climate change legislation. On Monday, they did it again. As one observer tweeted, “11 people representing just 36 percent of Oregonians are holding the legislature hostage.” We barely had time to file this one away. So, here again are a handful of suggestions from our research director for democracy...Read more » -
One of North America’s Boldest Housing Initiatives Has Reached Its End: Did It Work?
Last time, I mapped the political battleground of metropolitan housing shortages. This time, I draw lessons from an attempt to unleash abundant housing by assembling a different coalition. In the summer of 2015, long before the US national media noticed that something called the YIMBY movement had been born, before Minneapolis’s bold move allowing triplexes in its tree-lined neighborhoods of detached houses with yards and driveways, and before US presidential...Read more » -
Know Thine NIMBY
Last time, I documented the consistent US pattern of housing lockdown—the cessation of homebuilding in most metropolitan areas’ residential zones, especially single-detached ones, which yields both auto-dependent, climate-polluting sprawl and expensive housing. This time, I dissect the political reasons for lockdown. Residential lockdown—the near absence of new homebuilding in existing neighborhoods—is the norm across most of the metropolitan landscape of North America. It’s the norm even though control over homebuilding...Read more » -
Zombie Scooters Are Coming!
Imagine hordes of unused, electric e-scooters stirring in the middle of the night, twitching their camera-studded handlebars side to side. Then slowly, methodically, they roll along sidewalks with their headlamps aglow. The silent scooters pause at each cross-walk and, with two twists, assess the street for signs of life. Inexorably, they make their way, mile after mile, until they reach the object of their quest and begin an unfamiliar, mechanistic...Read more »