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The Thin Green Line: 2017 in Review
1. Don’t call it a comeback Despite President Trump’s promise to revive the coal industry, the US coal market is still shrinking. And the industry can’t look to exports to save it. November 2017 saw 20 nations and regions pledge to cease using coal for power generation by 2030, launching the Powering Past Coal Alliance at the United Nations climate change conference in Bonn. (We were especially pleased to see...Read more » -
Coal Exports: The Russian Connection
Just a few days ago the news media buzzed over the revelations that the US Secretary of Commerce had concealed his business ties to Vladimir Putin. And many press accounts prominently mentioned a name I’d heard before: Gennady Timchenko, a Putin crony and former co-CEO of a multinational commodity trading firm. I’m hardly a Kremlinologist, so how on earth had I heard of Timchenko? From researching something surprisingly close to...Read more » -
Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act Has Become A Bane To Sustainable Urban Development
Designed to meet the rigorous Living Building Challenge, Seattle’s Bullitt Center is one of the greenest office buildings on the planet. But that didn’t stop antagonists from hijacking Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) to stall its construction. Why? Because they didn’t like that it would provide no off-street parking and that its rooftop solar panels would block views and cast shadows. Washington enacted SEPA—a sweeping package of environmental rules—in...Read more » -
Failure for Final Coal Export Project
The Thin Green Line all started in 2010 with a coal export proposal at Longview, Washington, on the Columbia River. Backed by an unscrupulous Australian company, the Millennium Bulk project would have shipped by rail and then vessel a staggering 44 million tons of coal per year to markets in Asia. Today, the Washington Department of Ecology denied permits for the project, citing unavoidable harms in nine environmental areas that...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 9/22/17
Kelsey If crafty tank escapes, high intelligence, and coconut shell armor aren’t enough to make you love octopuses: scientists have identified a second octopus community off the coast of Australia. I had the pleasure of seeing one of my favorite bands, Fleet Foxes, perform last week at The Paramount in Seattle. Riding the post-concert-high of experiencing truly amazing live music, I went on a googling spree of the band, which...Read more » -
Yes, You Can Build Your Way to Affordable Housing
“You can’t build your way out of a housing affordability problem.” That’s conventional wisdom. I hear it all the time: Prosperous, growing, tech-rich cities from Seattle to the Bay Area and from Austin to Boston are all gripped by soaring rents and home prices. But what if you can build your way to affordable housing? What if, in fact, building is the only path to affordable housing? What if cities...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 9/1/17
Aven Trying to find the silver linings of some very dark clouds this week, as Harvey leaves an entire region devastated while toxins from Houston’s two dozen Superfund sites leach out to sea. Perhaps rising gas prices from the loss of one third of US oil refining capacity will spur more people to ditch their cars, or at least ditch their gas guzzlers for something more efficient? Meanwhile, although 44...Read more » -
Weekend Reading 8/11/17
Aven This week, I found this story about a community successfully living without fossil fuels to be both heartening and inspiring, especially as my own family embarks on the process of acquiring our own little plot to try our hand at urban homesteading. Also inspiring but less heartening is this story about the large carnivore researcher at WSU who has been silenced and punished by school administrators and state lawmakers...Read more » -
Stop Blaming Foreign Home Buyers
Cascadia’s northernmost major city, Vancouver, BC, has emerged as an international poster child for home prices driven sky-high by affluent foreign buyers. Today in Seattle many fear the same scenario. Yet a review of the evidence reveals the poster version of Vancouver’s housing story is too simple, and it hardly applies at all to Seattle. And unfortunately, hyping the myth of foreign speculators distracts public debate from the more fundamental...Read more » -
Why Has BC’s LNG Industry Stalled?
On Thursday the British Columbia Legislature will take a vote that portends nothing but bad news and headaches for the province’s floundering liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry. With that vote, the BC Liberals—a party that wholeheartedly supported LNG development, going so far as to put LNG exports at the center of the party’s economic platform—will likely lose their grip on power for the first time since 2001. The new government will...Read more »