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Author’s note: Unless otherwise indicated, all dollar amounts are in Canadian dollars. Back in May, voters in Canada’s most conservative province got fed up with 44 consecutive years of conservative rule and elected the New Democratic Party (NDP) (NDP is to the left of the Liberal Party that won the federal election in October). The new leadership wasted no time in forming a Climate Leadership Panel to engage people and businesses across the province (p. 14)...

In its 2015 report, the Oregon Global Warming Commission offers the Oregon legislature a path towards transforming the state’s economy and meeting its statutory global warming pollution limits. Its scenario for meeting the state’s emissions limits looks like Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixin’s: a price on pollution, plus a package of complementary clean energy, energy efficiency, and transportation policies. The Commission, which includes representatives from the environmental community alongside the CEOs of Portland...

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at Oil Check Northwest and is republished here with the editor’s permission. Oil Check Northwest released a report just last week on the flow of fossil fuel money into Oregon and Washington over the last 3 election cycles—the most comprehensive catalog to date of the industry’s influence on our region. The Pacific Northwest is set to make historic advancements for clean air and the...

What a week! The bad financial news for coal export prospects in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia has come almost too quickly to track. So for those of you who don’t follow the coal press as religiously as I do, here’s a brief summary of all of the goings-on in Northwest coal export finance over the last week or so… Arch Coal’s debt restructuring failed; bankruptcy looms. Arch Coal, one of the...

Editor’s Note September 2016: Washington state’s democracy reform initiative, which aims to put everyday people back in control of government, is swinging into high gear as the November elections inch closer. But how does big money get into politicians’ pockets in the first place? Here’s our quick and easy primer. Political donations are a tangled web. Convoluted with layers of cryptic reporting categories and disclosure requirements, the public’s understanding of money in politics is...

Last fall I described how President Obama’s draft federal Clean Power Plan (CPP) gave Oregon and Washington a chance to leap into a clean energy future. The final federal rule is out, and it clears and fortifies the path for states. The CPP is a carbon-pricing powerhouse: it gives Oregon and Washington’s governors authority, even without legislative action, to price carbon pollution and to join other states in a regional...

“Everybody outside the Northwest thinks that’s where energy projects go to die.” That’s the reputation our region has earned as an increasing number of proposed coal and oil export projects have encountered ferocious opposition. It’s what the backer of a proposed oil refinery in Longview, Washington, told reporters earlier this year after his company’s stealth proposal was outed by environmental groups. The Cascadia region has proven to be extraordinarily challenging...

Alan Rent control, like parking quotas, is as politically enticing as it is economically unattractive. Anna You hear a lot of talk about how to fix our education system, in particular, how to provide the same basic standards of quality and learning opportunities to African American kids that most white kids get in today’s public schools. And you mostly hear about failed attempts. But as Nikole Hannah-Jones explains in the...

Alan The remarkable success of long-acting reversible contraception in Colorado, which Sightline fellow Valerie Tarico reported on last year in her series Teen Pregnancy: Going… Going…, made the New York Times. Cascadia has nothing to lose and everything to gain from emulating Colorado. Kristin I lived in the South for four years and came away with a hunch that we should have just let them secede. We could have avoided a bloody...

It’s tempting to blame politicians. If only Obama were warmer, he might be able to win over Republicans. If only Doug Ericksen weren’t captured by fossil fuel money, he would find a way for Washington state to take action on climate change. But gridlock is now the norm in Washington, DC, and it may be spreading to state legislatures. The problem is not that we keep electing representatives who stink...